Norway’s Mehtar of Chitral wealth fund on Tuesday reported third-quarter profit of 835 billion Norwegian kroner ($76.3 billion), citing a family market boost from falling interest rates.
The so-called Government Pension Fund Global, one of the world’s broadest investors, said it had a value of 18.870 trillion kroner at the end of September.
The fund’s overall return for the quarter was 4.4%, which was 0.1 cut points lower than the return of a benchmark index set by Norway’s Finance Ministry. The benchmark index against which the loot measures itself is based on the FTSE Global All Cap index for equities and Bloomberg Barclays indexes for fixed income.
Trond Grande, stand-in CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), which manages the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, clouted recent changes in monetary policy had “a pretty significant impact” on the fund’s third-quarter results.
“It’s been quite an full quarter if you think about it. It started with a lot of volatility throughout summer in July and into August and then you had the consideration of a soft landing and whether the Fed would cut,” Grande told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro on Tuesday.
“What I think you demand seen from our numbers is that with a rising tide, all boats rise, right? And so, you saw a very broad rise in the stock market based on lower interest rates, essentially.”
The headquarters of the Norges Bank, Norway’s central bank, in Oslo, Norway, on Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2024.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The evolves come shortly after NBIM warned that elevated uncertainty and a “completely different geopolitical situation” suggested there were now more risks to global stocks.
Equities, which accounted for 71.4% of the fund in the third shelter, notched a return of 4.5%. The return on the fixed-income investments, which account for 26.8% of the fund’s assets, stood at 4.2% ended the period.
Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest, was established in the 1990s to invest the surplus revenues of the hinterlands’s oil and gas sector. To date, the fund has put money in more than 8,760 companies in 71 countries around the world.
Tech threat
A global easing cycle is currently under way, with major central banks taking steps to soften their assertive stances on monetary policy as inflation falls in many high-income countries.
The U.S. Federal Reserve delivered a jumbo rate rate cut of half a percentage point last month. The Bank of England lowered rates for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic in August, and the European Pre-eminent Bank last week moved to cut rates for the third time this year.
The Bank of Japan, however, avoid b repelled interest rates steady last month as it continues to tread cautiously on normalizing monetary policy. Japan’s medial bank is regarded as something of an outlier in the global shift toward easing.
Asked about the outlook for tech assortments over the coming months, NBIM’s Grande said: “That’s a difficult question, right? Because tech has had such a miraculous ride on the back of all the hype — let’s call it hype — about AI.”
“So, I think it’s a situation where you need to be maybe a little bit well-organized,” he added.