World’s largest sovereign wealth fund loses $34 billion as all asset classes fall in third quarter

Norway’s $1.4 trillion sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest, on Tuesday reported losses of 2.1% in the third quarter, as all asset classes fell in value.

The so-called Government Pension Fund Global returned a loss of 374 billion Norwegian kroner ($34 billion) in the third quarter, citing a weaker three-month period, compared to the first half of the year.

The results were still 0.17 percentage points stronger than the return on the fund’s benchmark index. The fund last reported a quarterly loss one year ago.

It comes at a time when the market remains weighed down by longer-term concerns about the broader economic environment.

“The stock market saw a weaker quarter compared to the two previous quarters,” Trond Grande, deputy chief executive of Norges Bank Investment Management, said in a statement. “It was particularly the tech, industrials and consumer discretionary sectors which contributed negatively to the return,” he added.

Norway’s gigantic sovereign wealth fund was established in the 1990s to invest the surplus revenues of the country’s oil and gas sector. To date, the fund has put money in more than 9,200 companies in 70 countries around the world.

The fund reported a quarterly loss of 3.3% on its investments in unlisted real estate, while the third-quarter loss on its renewable energy infrastructure investments came in at 2.4%.

At the end of the third quarter, equities made up 70.6% of the fund’s investments, a slight drop from three months earlier.