Saudi SWF pours $4.7bn into State Street ETFs

Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, poured nearly $4.7bn into three State Street Global Advisors exchange traded funds during the second quarter.

PIF has built positions of $1.6bn in the $2.3bn Real Estate Select Sector SPDR, $1.9bn in the $12bn Utilities Select Sector SPDR and $1.2bn in the $3.3bn Materials Select Sector SPDR, disclosures show. 

The stakes were assembled between the end of March and the end of June, and mean the Saudi fund has joined other government investors such as the US Federal Reserve in deciding to pump assets into ETFs.

This article was previously published by Ignites, a title owned by the FT Group.

PIF’s portfolio declaration to the Securities and Exchange Commission does not appear to include holdings in any other ETFs. The SSGA positions rank as the fund’s biggest, behind its $2.3bn stake in Uber.

PIF is thought to have been among investors that bought PNC’s $14bn stake in BlackRock during PNC’s divestment sale in May.

The Fed’s Covid-19 investment facility has meanwhile boosted its ETF investments to $8.7bn as of July 31, according to the central bank’s disclosures. That’s up from less than $8bn a month earlier.

iShares remains the biggest beneficiary of the Fed’s investing. Its ETFs account for $4.3bn, or 49.3 per cent, of the Fed’s total. That proportion is essentially unchanged from a month earlier.

State Street’s ETFs have garnered about $1.4bn of the Fed’s ETF investments.

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