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What looks like good value among the UK's investment managers and stockbrokers?

The table below lists all of the Financial Services on the FTSE main list and the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) whose market capitalization exceeds £50m, and we can see it's one of the most populated sectors, mainly thanks to a large number of companies listed on AIM.

Many of those are probably companies that many people won't have heard of, or invested in -- but there are some pretty well-known ones too.

At the top end of the list we have giants like the £4bn asset manager Schroders, which manages more than £160bn on behalf of retail and private investors, running investment funds and catering individually to institutions and wealthy individuals. Schroders' profits took an inevitable tumble during the recession, but they're recovering nicely.

At the other end of the scale, the sector is also home to one of the UK's smaller banking operations, Arbuthnot Banking Group, which engages in retail banking (mainly for the wealthier end of the population) and investment banking. At just £62m, it's tiny compared to the FTSE-100 big banks, but it's offering a dividend yield of around 5.5% and has strong forecasts for the next two years.

We also, of course, have the London Stock Exchange itself, the company that maintains the FTSE and AIM listings, and applies its own regulations upon companies listing on its various indexes. The LSE has been around for more than 200 years, and without it, and the world's other stock exchanges, we wouldn't have share investing as we know it.

Amongst the stockbrokers listed in the index, one which has seen its share price perk up lately is Hargreaves Lansdown -- anyone buying at under £2 a couple of years ago would have seen their money double. The prospective P/E for 2011 is over 20, but even at that rating, it still looks to be on for dividends of around 3.5% this year and 5% next year.

That's just a very small handful plucked out of the list, and there are many more well-known names. It's also a sector Maynard Paton, who runs our Champion Shares PRO newsletter service, sees as particularly fertile investing ground. Indeed, a number of the companies listed above are on his watch list. Companies in this industry often have very scalable business models, meaning they can grow quickly without having to invest large amounts of new capital.

If you have any favourites in the sector, please do tell us about them below.

Previous Sector Analyses

• A Grand Tour Of The Retail Sector
• High Flyers And Big Guns
• A Powerful Sector

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