Norway's sovereign wealth fund posted a record $184 billion profit and everyone is acting like the Norwegians did something. They didn't. They stuck money in an index. The market went up. A golden retriever with a Vanguard account could have done this.
The fund is worth $2.34 trillion now. That's $430,000 per Norwegian citizen. They could have spent it on something cool. Instead they gave it to a committee that owns shares in 7,000 companies across 60 countries because apparently owning 6,999 companies wasn't diversified enough.
Here's the part where I'm supposed to get excited: they revealed a SpaceX stake for the first time. Norway owns a piece of a rocket company. Thrilling. You know what else they own? Probably a widget manufacturer in Denmark and a shoelace distributor in Peru and seventeen different banks that all do the same f*cking thing.
Retail traders saw this headline and immediately started Googling "how to start sovereign wealth fund." Bad news. You needed to have found oil in the North Sea in 1969. You didn't. You were busy being unborn or poor or American.
The fund returned 7.9% last year. The S&P 500 returned 23.3%. But sure, let's write headlines about the brilliant Norwegians and their expertly managed pile of oil money that underperformed holding SPY.
They've been doing this for decades. Buy everything. Hold everything. Never sell. It's the investing equivalent of breathing. And yet financial media treats this like breaking news every single quarter because apparently we've all agreed to pretend that passive investing is interesting when a government does it.
Your barista has a better cost basis than the Norwegian Oil Fund and she doesn't get a press release about it.
Photo by Sven Piper on Unsplash
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