Investors pour more than £1bn into fund set up by Hargreaves Lansdown billionaire Peter Hargreaves
Investors have poured more than £1billion into the fund set up by Hargreaves Lansdown billionaire Peter Hargreaves.
The Brexiteer tycoon’s Blue Whale fund has hit £1.1billion assets under management, up from £700million in March, after a flurry of support from its investors, who number 50,000.
Support: About half the investors are individuals using platforms such as Hargreaves Lansdown and AJ Bell
Turnover from fees rose to £4.6 million in the year to March, up from £1.7million the year before, company documents show. Profits of £2.49million were split between majority shareholder Hargreaves and co-founder Stephen Yiu.
Hargreaves, founder of FTSE 100 fund supermarket Hargreaves Lansdown, owns a fifth of the fund, which he seeded with £25million, though his family investments have since risen to about £200million.
Blue Whale Growth Fund focuses on US stocks, which make up 72.5 per cent of its 27 holdings – the largest being tech firms Nvidia and Microsoft – with nearly a fifth invested in European firms.
About half the investors are individuals using platforms such as Hargreaves Lansdown and AJ Bell. The remainder are wealth managers.
Hargreaves, 75, launched the fund four years ago. He stepped down from Hargreaves Lansdown in 2015 but retains a 20 per cent stake worth about £1.2billion.
Yiu said US companies had grown fast and are ‘far more profitable, with margins at 45 per cent on average compared with 30 per cent in the UK’.