Swiss National Bank’s Monetary Racket, US Stock Holdings & the Wild Ride of its Own Shares
We’ll also look at its garbage pile at the bottom. These folks don’t even pretend to be stock pickers. They buy and let it stick till it falls off on its own.
The Swiss National Bank, which filed its disclosure of US stock holdings today with the SEC, has figured out the best money racket of all times. It works because currency speculators are eagerly gobbling up Swiss francs. In January 2015, the SNB started to print Swiss francs ostensibly to depress the value of the CHF, a tiny currency with huge global demand. It then began selling those francs for dollars, euros, and other currencies to buy securities denominated in those currencies. This monetary racket only works as long as there is endless global demand for the tiny currency.
The SNB doesn’t disclose its holdings of securities. But in the US, it has to disclose its holdings of US-traded stocks via a quarterly 13F filing with the SEC. So we know what US-traded stocks it owns, but this is just a slice of the securities it owns globally.
In its 13F filing today, the SNB revealed that it held 2,520 US-traded stocks and American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) of foreign companies at the end of the third quarter, of about 3,500 stocks traded in the US. The value of these holdings rose 1.5% during the third quarter to a record of $94.1 billion.
Its portfolio is loaded up with the FANGMAN stocks – Facebook, Amazon, Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Netflix – with Apple and Microsoft as its largest positions. It also holds a number of ADRs, including ADRs of Chinese companies, such was Weibo, Alibaba (16th largest holding), Baozun, ZTO Express Cayman, and Huazhu Group.
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