Investor confidence has plummeted this month triggered by turmoil around President Tump’s tariffs.

Hargreaves Lansdown reported a 35% drop in confidence in North American markets and a 28% drop in the UK.

Confidence in UK economic growth also dropped significantly, falling 43% among HL clients.

Global Emerging Markets and Asia saw falls in confidence of 28% and 23% respectively, with China introducing retaliatory tariffs. Japan also saw a fall of 20%.

Europe saw a fall of just 15% - the best of a terrible bunch, said HL.

Victoria Hasler, head of fund research at Hargreaves Lansdown, said: “In what has been an incredibly volatile time for both markets and politics, investor confidence has tumbled.

“The first week of April saw President Trump introduce tariffs across virtually all its trading partners and pretty much all goods. The extent and level of tariffs imposed sent shockwaves through markets and our survey shows that investors lost confidence in droves.

“While Trump later announced a 90-day rollback on the tariffs, this came too late to be reflected in our data and, regardless, has done little to calm investors.”

She said the 35% drop in confidence in North American markets was prompted by fears of increased inflation and as decreased growth started to bite. “Investors chose to avoid the volatility of both the US’s president and its market.”

Ms Hasler said the proportion of investors rating the political situation as “important” or “very important” when considering which investments to buy is now higher than any other factor, although the economic outlook is a close second. “This makes sense given the events of the past few weeks.”

In terms of sales, the firm said US and Global tracker funds remained popular, while investors preferred to stick to the familiar stalwarts of the investment trust world.

Ms Hasler said: “In such difficult times our data shows that passive investment funds are still the most popular choice, with only one actively managed fund, Artemis Income, making it into the top ten most bought funds. The list is still dominated by US and global funds, but a European tracker has crept in at number nine and a UK tracker at number eight.”

She said in terms of investment trusts, it seems that investors are still keen to take advantage of discounts to hunt out some bargains.

• The Investor Confidence Index is compiled by surveying HL clients on a monthly basis. This month’s survey was open 1-8 April.