Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) bought shares in Alphabet, Zoom Video, and Microsoft this week as part of a wider pick of U.S. stocks, bringing the market value of the sovereign wealth fund’s investment portfolio to about $40.8 billion at the end of the second quarter, Reuters reports.
The PIF, with $620 billion in assets, also added to positions it held in Facebook Inc. owner Meta Platforms Inc., PayPal Holdings Inc. and Electronic Arts Inc. in the second quarter, according to a SEC 13F filing by the PIF, a quarterly report that is required to be filed by all institutional investment managers with at least $100 million in assets under management.
The acquisitions show that the PIF, as the fund is known, is doubling down on its bet on technology investments despite a rout in valuations this year.
As Bloomberg notes, The PIF’s most recent buying spree “echoes the fund’s strategy in early 2020 when it spent billions snapping up stakes in US firms whose valuations had been battered by the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. It then sold many of those stakes when markets rebounded.”
One of those stakes it acquired at low prices during the pandemic included LiveNation, the event and concert organizer, which hit low prices during the pandemic shutdown.
The PIF also bought 6.3 million shares in Starbucks, and added other stocks including Adobe Systems, Advanced Micro Devices, Salesforce, Home Depot, Costco, Freeport-McMoRan, Datadog, and NextEra Energy, Reuters reports.
