Investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown was forced to knock a number of investment companies off its books as trading began after the New Year, as they failed to comply with a new piece of regulation.
The catchily named Packaged Retail and Insurance-based Investment Products (Priips) regulation, which came into force on 1 January 2018, forces all investment companies to produce a Key Information Document (Kid). Designed to help retail investors better understand the risks of various products, these have to be consumer-friendly.
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But today Hargreaves Lansdown revealed it had removed 296 investment trusts from its service, after they failed to produce a Kid in time for the deadline.
It said 200 of these were predominantly US-based, and would likely not attempt to meet the new documentation standards.
But the remaining 96 were Europe-domiciled. Hargreaves Lansdown said it expected the “vast majority” of these to have the appropriate documentation in place shortly, meaning they would be back on the platform “very soon”.
Some of the UK investment trusts which have been temporarily removed include the Blue Planet Investment Trust, the Dunedin Enterprise Investment Trust and the Oryx International Growth Fund.
The US trusts which were not Priips-compliant, and are no longer offered by Hargreaves Lansdown, include Morgan Stanley China, the Central Fund of Canada, and the Aberdeen Indonesia Fund Income.
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