Operational failures on the Hargreaves Lansdown trading platform left some investors tens of thousands of pounds in debt as a technical glitch duplicated trades on the platform.
Hargreaves’ website and app — along with other retail platforms — suffered problems on Monday, as they experienced record trading.
One Hargreaves investor said she found her Isa account more than £150,000 in debt when she attempted to execute a trade that duplicated multiple times, purchasing shares with money that did not exist in her account. Trying to unwind the trade incurred an additional debt of more than £1,000 in trading and exchange fees. Hargreaves did not return calls for help until the following day, she said.
“It was really traumatic and stressful and frustrating,” the investor said. “It adds to the whole feeling of mistrust with the platforms, you begin to understand why some people just keep it under the mattress.”
Trade duplication affected several thousands of trades, Hargreaves said. Many investors were also unable to log in to their accounts and instead took to the phones, leading to long wait times.
“It’s something that shouldn’t be possible,” another investor said. When he sold off a position that duplicated, he was left with a balance of -7000 shares. “I have an invoice for every single false trade that they put through and executed. I sold 7,000 shares I did not have. Hargreaves executed trades that did not exist.”
Hargreaves, which is the UK’s largest retail investment platform, said: “The issue we had is the sheer weight of the volume of people”. The platform acknowledged the operational difficulties and duplicate trades, and added that Monday was “our busiest day ever”.
It said it intended to put every investor affected by duplication back in the position they would have been in had they been able to execute their intended trade successfully.
The platform added: “They will enjoy that price rise. Or fall.”
The process of unwinding the backlog of faulty trades is complex for the online platform, as each duplicated trade must be adjusted manually.
Other platforms also encountered problems linked to the record trading among retail investors. Listed brokerage AJ Bell also said Monday was one of the platform’s busiest days for trading, and its online platform experienced outages.