Norges Bank: The World’s Largest Sovereign Wealth Fund

This week we’ll take a look at the portfolio of Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), which manages the long-term revenues of Norway’s oil and gas resources. The Government Pension Fund Global, as the pool of capital is formally known, was set up by Norway’s parliament in 1990 to manage the revenues from the oil fields discovered in the North Sea in 1969, and the first money was deposited into the fund in 1996. The fund was initially invested entirely in government bonds before NBIM was created in 1998 to manage the capital and converted roughly 40% of the portfolio into equities.

The fund was valued at approximately NOK21.3 trillion ($2.1 trillion) as of year-end 2025 and has grown meaningfully in recent years, largely fueled by returns on its investments:

At $2.1 trillion, NBIM is one of the largest asset allocators in the world. To put it into context, the combined AUM of the 700+ US endowments that OWL tracks is only ~$1 trillion.

NBIM is led by CEO Nicolai Tangen, who joined the company in September 2020. Tangen previously founded AKO Capital after working at Egerton Capital.

Tangen’s educational background includes time at The University of Bergen, The Norwegian School of Economics, the Wharton School of Business, the Courtauld Institute of Art, and he most recently earned a master’s degree in social psychology from the London School of Economics. Earlier he also studied Russian at the Norwegian Armed Forces’ School of Intelligence and Security, where he was also trained in interrogation and translation.

NBIM’s investment portfolio is led by three people – CIO of Market Strategies Malin Norberg, and Co-CIOs of Active Strategies Pedro Furtado Reis and Daniel Balthasar. All three have been at NBIM for at least 15 years.

NBIM employs roughly 700 people across its offices in Oslo, London, New York, and Singapore, and its head of machine learning and AI Stian Kirkeberg recently told Reuters that around half of its workforce currently uses AI tools built in-house using Claude.

Kirkeberg says that while NBIM employees currently only use AI tools to gather information to make informed decisions, the fund will eventually allow AI to autonomously make limited investment decisions, though still with human supervision.

"The principle is that we make better human decisions by getting AI to analyze it for us," he told Reuters. "At some stage, we're going to trust that the agent can make some of the decisions and we just monitor what it does.”

Tangen has also been quoted in the past saying that investment firms that don’t adopt AI into their strategies are “complete morons,” though he admitted to Reuters that NBIM is not under the same pressure as high-frequency traders.

NBIM invests across equities, fixed income, unlisted real estate, and unlisted renewable energy infrastructure. The majority of the fund’s value is in equities, holding shares of roughly 7,200 companies. On average, it holds 1.5% of all listed companies, making it the world’s largest single investor, according to its website. Its largest individual stock holding is NVIDIA, where it owns a position currently worth $57 billion.

NBIM has slightly outperformed the benchmark index set by the Ministry of Finance by 0.24% since 1998:

NBIM does not invest in private equity or venture capital. In 2023, NBIM assessed whether the fund should start investing in unlisted equities (e.g., private equity and venture capital). At the time, Tangen noted that “transparency has increased a lot. All the big comparable funds are fairly heavily invested in this segment.” In 2024, the finance ministry declined the request and said it would further study the matter. According to news reports, similar requests had been made in 2018 and 2019 with similar outcomes.

Much of NBIM’s portfolio is managed internally, but 5% of the portfolio (~$100 billion) is allocated to external managers via separate accounts, currently spread across 103 relationships. All managers have a fundamental investment strategy. Per NBIM’s website:

“We award investment mandates in markets and segments where in-depth knowledge of companies, local business conditions and market developments are crucial to making well-informed investment decisions. The mandates typically cover investments in emerging markets and small-capitalization companies in developed markets. With few exceptions, these are single-country mandates where the portfolio manager is based locally in the same country as the mandate.”

NBIM’s current mandate guidelines can be found below:

Across those mandates, NBIM invests in both long-standing and emerging managers (including pre-launch). It is also worth noting that NBIM only recently added long/short equity investors to its manager roster.

In 2025, NBIM global head of external strategies Erik Hilde told the Financial Times that the fund was “currently evaluating long-short strategies in Europe and US,” and that “the marketplace is changing,” in regard to both the number of and the assets managed by those managers.

NBIM takes an active approach to its external managers, as evidenced by the 383 mandates it has funded and 275 mandates it has terminated since 1998, according to its website.

In Friday’s newsletter, users received a list of a select group of NBIM’s managers, and an overview of the managers it has added and dropped from its portfolio since 2023. One of NBIM’s most recent manager additions is Park Presidio Capital, a long-biased hedge fund based in San Francisco. Park Presidio was founded in 2013 by Lee Hicks and Jan Koerner after the pair served together as managing directors at Farallon from 2006 to 2013.

Park Presidio currently manages $1.65 billion (as of March 2026) with 13 disclosed positions across several sectors:

In its 13-year history Park Presidio has disclosed positions in 82 companies, with annual turnover trending down over time, according to OWL estimates:

Park Presidio’s largest disclosed position is in JB Hunt Transport Services, which OWL estimates has generated an 83% return and resulted in a profit of $164 million. The company is Park Presidio’s longest-held disclosed position, and was initially disclosed in Q1 2015.

Park Presidio has actively traded JB Hunt since it first disclosed the position over 10 years ago. The chart below details its activity over the past five years, showing 11 quarters with net buying and 8 with net sales.

OWL is an intelligence platform built for allocators, by allocators. Leading endowments, foundations, and family offices use the system to find, monitor, and connect with thousands of fund managers globally. OWL's analytics engine has collected over one billion data points from 65 countries. We make it easy for allocators to find and track information about the managers they care about – not just positions but also performance analytics, people data, business information, and details about the manager investments of other allocators.

Returns represent the return on invested capital of publicly disclosed long positions, as calculated by OWL. Actual returns may vary based on a number of factors, including (but not limited to) undisclosed positions, short exposure, non-equity holdings, cash holdings, and lagged disclosure of positions.

This newsletter and the material on the Old Well Labs platform are for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice or a recommendation of any particular security, manager, or strategy. Certain investment managers, funds, or limited partners (“LPs”) referenced herein may be current or prospective clients of Old Well Labs, and Old Well Labs may have business relationships with such parties. Accordingly, references to any manager, fund, or LP should not be construed as an endorsement, recommendation, or solicitation. Old Well Labs shall not be liable for any investment gain or loss that may occur from the use of this material. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or used in any publication without express written permission from Old Well Labs.