Hargreaves Lansdown says 80 percent of retail trade orders are 'buy'

LONDON (Reuters) - Fund supermarket Hargreaves Lansdown said on Friday that retail investors were using a sharp sell-off in asset prices at the open, after Britain's vote to leave the European Union, to buy back into the market.

Eighty percent of trade orders taken through its online share-trading platform, Vantage, were 'buy' orders, Senior Analyst Laith Khalaf said, up from around 60 percent on a normal trading day.

"There was a big dip at the open, but it's staged a recovery since then," Khalaf said. "People have been sitting on their hands, waiting for the vote to get out of the way before doing anything."

At 1244 GMT, Britain's FTSE 100 was down 3.8 percent at 6098.2 points, after earlier touching 5,788.74 points.

After upping dealing staff numbers in anticipation of increased demand, Khalaf said the firm's operations were bearing up well, although there had been market-wide issues in getting prices on certain stocks from market-makers.

While asset managers were among the hardest hit in early morning trade given the market falls and concern investors may look to pull money from their funds, Khalaf said Hargreaves had yet to see any demand to redeem investments.

"I don't think we can say there will definitely be fund outflows from this. There may even be inflows."

(Reporting by Simon Jessop; editing by Carolyn Cohn)