Mr Hargreaves has about 90 per cent of his total wealth in equities, a sum of more than £2bn. The bulk of this is accounted for by his stake in the Hargreaves Lansdown business he co-founded. Last year he teamed up with the fund manager Stephen Yiu to launch the Blue Whale Growth fund, a global equity mandate.
Mr Hargreaves invested £25m of his own money into the fund at launch. It was in a communication with investors in this fund that Mr Hargreaves outlined his view.
Mr Hargreaves said: “Stock markets feast on doom and gloom. They are more obsessed with anguish than positive economic indicators.
"However, optimistically it is often stated that ‘markets climb a wall of worry’. When things look bleak on many fronts the one thing you can be sure of is that the price of markets are reflecting the uncertainty.
"I put my money where my mouth is – in excess of 90 per cent of my wealth is invested in the stock market and I plan to add to this on an ongoing basis.”
The Blue Whale Growth fund has returned 15 per cent this year to 19 June, compared with 3 per cent for the average fund in the IA Global sector in the same time period.
As FTAdviser has previously reported, Mr Hargreaves does not see the UK’s exit from the European Union as a reason to be negative on equity markets.
He said many investors are wary of the impact of the rising oil price on equities and that this has contributed to worry, but he said the oil price will not this time, as it has done in the past, contribute to a decline in the global economy and stock markets.
A higher oil price is typically seen as negative for global growth because oil is used to transport consumer goods, so if the oil price rises, those goods become less affordable, and people buy less, this leads to a reduction in the manufacture and sale of those goods and so unemployment rises, which perpetuates a further decline in the level of demand in the economy, creating a vicious circle.
"Today, as is often the case, there are a host of causes for concern, but to the forefront is the oil price. Some pundits are unnecessarily obsessed with its fluctuations," Mr Hargreaves said.
