Markets

PIF’s US portfolio weathers ‘Liberation Day’ storm

May 2, 2025, 4:44 PM

Coffee chain Starbucks is among the biggest losers in the PIF US portfolio, falling $105 million

PIF US portfolio worth $27bn
Big gain in Uber’s value
Losses on Lucid and more

It has been a month since President Trump’s “Liberation Day” and a near tripling in US tariffs on imports to their highest in more than a century, after which global financial markets plunged.

Overall, however, Saudi Arabia’s $940 billion Public Investment Fund (PIF) has not come out of it too badly. So far, anyway.

On paper, it has probably made some sizeable gains – and several big losses – in its US equities portfolio during one of the most turbulent months for the markets since the Covid pandemic and 2008 financial crisis.

US listed companies fell sharply after April 2 but most have since rebounded after Trump redirected most of his tariff focus onto China.

PIF – the world’s sixth largest sovereign wealth fund by assets – submits quarterly regulatory filings that detail its holdings in listed US companies, the most recent being for the three months ending December 31. At that time, the fund held $26.8 billion of US stocks and call options.

The same portfolio would be worth $27.1 billion as of May 1, up $362 million versus the start of the year, according to AGBI calculations.

This 1.4 percent increase is largely thanks to a 34 percent – or $1.5 billion – rise in the value of its Uber stake and a $583 million gain on its holdings in Take-Two Interactive Software.

Its remaining portfolio, however, is largely in the red.

PIF, which is the main driving force at the heart of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 economic transformation and social development strategy, is unlikely to have maintained the exact shareholdings that it held at the end of 2024.

But these estimates are nonetheless useful to show where the fund would have made paper gains and losses had it done so. Losers outnumber gainers 36 to 25.

PIF did not respond to requests for comment.

Both the S&P 500 index and the Dow Jones Industrial Average slid to 11-month lows in April and are now down 5.1 and 4.5 percent respectively this year.

Excluding a five-figure investment in Allurion Technologies Inc, PIF owned shares in 26 listed US companies and call options in 35 on December 31. These were worth $19.3 billion and $7.5 billion respectively on that date, its filing shows.

The fund held both stocks and call options in some companies including Meta Technologies – formerly Facebook – and Amazon.

Call options give the right to buy a stock at a certain price and are a bet that the price will increase. PIF’s ownership of extensive call options on December 31 suggests it was relatively bullish on US equities as 2025 began.

PIF valued the call options at the companies’ exact closing share prices on that date, implying the options’ strike prices were about the same as the market price of the underlying stocks. This is known as at-the-money.

The strike price is the fixed price at which the holder of an option can buy the underlying stock regardless of its actual share price.

At the market close on May 1 the stocks in these call options were worth $6.8 billion, down $760 million – or 10 percent – on their December 31 valuation.

The biggest paper losses were Salesforce (-$159 million, or -19 percent), PayPal (-$147 million, or -23 percent), and Starbucks ($105 million, or -10 percent). On its call options, losers outnumber gainers 21 to 14.

Within the PIF’s US stocks portfolio, Lucid Motors was again the worst performer in valuation terms, the fund’s stake falling a further $868 million to $4.5 billion.

As a strategic investor in Lucid, PIF is likely to have kept its shareholding unchanged in the company. This peaked in value at $38.6 billion in late 2021 following Lucid’s share flotation but has since plunged nearly 90 percent.

Other major paper losses include engine maker Cummins (-$88 million), while in percentage terms the biggest fallers were Ballard Power System (-26 percent), FedEx (-25 percent) and fuel cell manufacturer Bloom Energy (-24 percent). Overall, stocks losers outnumber gainers 15 to 11.

All this said, PIF exceeded its end-2024 target of assets under management by more than $60 billion, according to a Saudi government report last month detailing progress in the country’s Vision 2030 strategy.

PIF AUM were 7 percent above its $880 billion target for year-end and its 2030 target was raised $800 billion to almost $2.7 trillion.

There is time but the markets will need to recover for that to happen.