May 20, 2025

Nicolai Tangen: There's no protection from uncertainty

Nicolai Tangen

"You have a warm war, and you have a cold war, and you have a tech war, and you have a trade war. You have a lot of fragmentation. It’s negative because it impacts economic growth and potentially inflation. So there’s potential for this being very negative. [But] You can’t really hedge against that scenario. The way we operate is just by being very long-term and diversified."

— Nicolai Tangen

Nicolai Tangen, in this quote, gives a concise summary of the global risks all investors face in 2025. The warm war is in Ukraine, and the cold war, tech war, and trade war are all between the U.S. and China. He concludes there is not much investors can do but diversify and think long term.

But Tangen has more to lose than the rest of us: about $1.8 trillion at last count. He manages the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, Norway’s oil-funded Government Pension Fund Global.

Tangen holds in his portfolio an average 1.3% stake in every listed company in the world. About 70% of the money is invested in equities, 28% in fixed income, 2% in unlisted real estate, and half a percent in unlisted renewable energy infrastructure.

While most of the fund's assets are run like a passive index fund, Tangen and his team can also make captain's calls with a small share of the total.

While Tangen says he has met Warren Buffett only once and briefly, his investment strategy is similarly focused on value and the long term. Like Buffett, Tangen believes quality companies tend to exceed expectations, while poorly performing ones are more likely to get hit by nasty surprises.

Tangen trains his 700-person team in being comfortable buying or selling when everyone else is doing the opposite. He sold the big American tech stocks in 2024 when their valuations were at an AI-inflated height. (The Magnificent 7 Index has since fallen 14%.)

Tangen was appointed for a second five-year term at the oil fund in April 2025. There is a ticker on the fund's website, so you can watch its value go up and down in real time.

The Life of Nicolai Tangen

When Tangen took over the oil fund in 2020, he was a London-based hedge fund manager running AKO Capital, which he had founded in 2005. Earlier, he spent some five years at another hedge fund, Egerton Capital.

But Tangen is more interesting than this sounds. In fact, he is a polymath with wide-ranging interests. He studied interrogation techniques and Russian in an elite course at the Norwegian Armed Forces’ School of Intelligence and Security.

And he holds three Master's degrees: in the History of Art from Courtauld Institute of Art, in Social Psychology from London School of Economics, and in finance from Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tangen grew up in Kristiansand. His hometown is Norway's most southern city and just across the Skagerrak from Denmark, which is a stretch of water between the North and the Baltic Seas.

Today, a refurbished, 38-meter-tall grain silo on the city's harbor is a museum called Kunstsilo. It's where Tangen has donated his collection of more than 5,000 Nordic Modernist works

The FT reports him collecting plastic bottles from soccer (football) matches for the 35-cent recycling deposits. When he got a job at a local bank at age 16, he dreamt of one day investing in the stock market.

Tangen made considerable sacrifices to take on his role. He had to give up his multi-billion hedge fund and pay $6.7 million in wealth taxes just to move home to Norway and accept the job. He receives an annual salary of $720,000, which is not nothing. Yet, it pales in comparison to the $674 million personal net worth he had accumulated.

The Life of Nicolai Tangen

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