Is Hargreaves Lansdown past its peak? The past 18 months should have been glory days for investment platform providers and, in some ways, they were. Even setting aside the “meme stock” craze, the chance to make money from rollercoaster markets led to a trading frenzy among existing and new customers.
Hargreaves cashed in. It gained £8.7 billion in net new inflows last year, the first time that it had vaulted beyond the £8 billion level in a single financial year, pushing assets under administration up by almost a third.
But higher expectations are easier to frustrate. The 8 per cent rise in adjusted operating profits for the last financial year missed consensus forecasts in the City as activity started to die down and operating costs
