Date of publishing: 2021-11-01.
I was looking for a way to invest in "Norden", Nordic countries. Being a customer of the bank/broker Nordnet, I can choose from four cheap index funds for Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. These funds have a 0.30 % total annual cost in Nordnet (only for Nordnet customers). Out of curiosity, I researched the KLP AksjeNorden Indeks mutual fund offered by KLP to see how it compared. This fund has been part of my monthly savings for a while, but I did not do proper research until tonight, and I'm now sharing the results.
The cost listed on their site is 0.18 %, while the cost at Nordnet is 0.41 %. It looks like the Nordnet fee is 0.23 %. Low cost, so this is acceptable for me, although competition is currently stiff.
I wondered if this would be an easy way to target the nordic countries. The fund has a respectable 4-star Morningstar rating. Upon checking the KIID, key information, I found that the index was VINXBNOKNI. You can see some of the companies that are in the VINXBNOKNI index here (external link to a website that I have no affiliation with, first hit in my search engine). I also found the index on Yahoo Finance, but data is missing! Link here in case it gets populated later.
After looking around for a while, I finally found all the holdings here at this Morningstar link. When I visited this link later I got Norwegian text. To be friendly to English-speaking people I tried to add "&LanguageId=en-US" to the link - and it worked! Here is a link that should give English text.
The largest holdings (all are displayed in the last link in the paragraph above):
The fund is exposed to currency fluctuations in the currencies DKK (Danish krone), EUR (Euro) and SEK (Swedish krona). The fund itself is in NOK, Norwegian krone. This makes it less attractive for international investors, of course. I do, however, speculate that NOK will strengthen itself over the coming years against "most" currencies, but don't take my word for it! I am not a fortune teller. But I believe Norway has enough of an opportunity, and the resources, to overcome the oil dependency gradually - and find new ways of making a living.
Click here for a Morningstar "investment report" I found by navigating klp.no and then tweaking the link on Morningstar to get English text.
Looking at the biggest holdings in the fund, the sector distribution and the top regions, I am able to determine that as per 2021-10-31, Finland represents about 15-16 % of the investments, presumably being "the euro zone" in the overview. Excluding Great Britain and the USA, about 83 % is seemingly divided between Denmark, Norway and Sweden. I break it down into exact numbers below.
Norway is modestly represented with about 9 %. Equinor is currently the largest Norwegian holding at 1.53 %. Realizing this, getting Nordnet Indeksfond Norge in addition to KLP AksjeNorden Indeks, if you have faith in us oily Norwegians, is a good option.
Personally, I have gone with Alfred Berg Indeks Classic instead of Nordnet Indeksfond Norge lately, to target somewhat broader, as I predict the OBX (25 largest companies in OSEBX) will amount to less of the (relative) growth than the relatively small, but - as far as I know - growing, part outside the 25 giants.
The Oslo Stock Exchange has traditionally been dominated by a few large companies and some "peanut companies", but I think this will change as Norway adapts to a future with less reliance on oil. And as far as I can tell, it is already happening. I expect innovation from my fellow countryfolk. I think the Norwegian stock market has a lot to go on still.
Here are a few images for a convenient overview of the fund, available in the Nordnet bank/broker for all customers. Norwegian text!
As for historical development (that we know is no absolute indicator of the future), we can see that it is up 26 % in the last year, 82 % in the last 3 years, and 341 % in the last 10 years. The fund has been around since 1999-03-16.
Looking at annualized (trailing) returns, the results are respectable for the last decade (but aren't they always now with QE). 15 % for the last 10 years, annualized, meaning repeated (on average) every year for 10 years, as I interpret the concept (pardon any misconception on my part!).
Pasting the table from the Morningstar link of holdings into a file and processing it with some code, I see there are 171 companies/instruments in the fund. And the total value is, as of November 2021, 5.765 billion NOK. I omitted the two bottom entries in the table with a "0"/zero value.
PS /> $klpcsv.count
171
PS /> "{0:N2} NOK" -f ($klpcsv |
measure-object -sum -prop MarketValueNOKNumerical).sum
5,765,419,921.00 NOK
Using some other code, I could break it down into countries:
PS /> $klpcsv |
group-object -Property country |
Sort-Object -desc count
Count Name Group
----- ---- -----
90 Sweden {@{Name=Atlas Copco AB B ; Sector
28 Finland {@{Name=Nordea Bank Abp ; Sector
27 Norway {@{Name=Equinor ASA ; Sector
22 Denmark {@{Name=Novo Nordisk A/S Class B
1 Iceland {@{Name=Marel hf ; Sector
1 Switzerland {@{Name=ABB Ltd ; Sector
1 United Kingdom {@{Name=AstraZeneca PLC ; Se
1 United States {@{Name=Millicom International Cellular SA SDR
Using some slightly more sophisticated code, I can easily break it down into how much is invested in which country:
PS /> $klpcsv |
group-object -Property country |
>> Sort-Object -desc count | foreach {
>> [pscustomobject]@{ Count = $_.Count
Country = $_.Name; Sum = "{0:N0}" -f (
$tempsum = ($_.group |
Measure-Object -Sum -Property MarketValueNOKNumerical).Sum
); "%" = "{0:N2}" -f ($tempsum/$totalinvestedamount*100) } }
Count Country Sum %
----- ------- --- -
90 Sweden 2,577,529,143 44.71
28 Finland 908,203,290 15.75
27 Norway 539,064,073 9.35
22 Denmark 1,605,502,017 27.85
1 Iceland 13,868,693 0.24
1 Switzerland 47,646,703 0.83
1 United Kingdom 62,698,054 1.09
1 United States 10,907,948 0.19
As we can clearly see, Sweden is dominant, then come the Danes, Finns, and finally us Norwegians. But the number of companies for Denmark, Finland and Norway is similar. Sweden has more companies represented than the rest of the nordic countries combined.
I realized the task of breaking down the data in the fund could be automated. Easily broken since it is based on parsing HTML with regex, as all developers know is a terrible wrong-doing, but it works for now. I am offering this script for sale (10 USD or 89 NOK). If interested, you can read more about it here (using a computer/PC/desktop rather than a mobile phone is recommended, at least a tablet).
My conclusion is that this is an acceptable fund to include in my monthly savings/investments. It's up to you to judge for yourself.
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