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Comment by Angostura | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t that a rather odd announcement?

If I was thinking of selling a huge amount of shares, I’m not sure I would announce I was considering selling and drive the price down.

What was their thinking here?

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Perhaps it was that they are a national fund accountable to their parliament and the people of Norway, who have a legitimate say in their investment strategy, and the only way that can reasonably be expressed and debated is in public. In any case this strategy change wouldn’t be agreed in much less than a year, and would be executed over at least 2 to 3 years, so any short term impact on share prices isn’t really material.

It's such a big decision that it has to be debated and decided upon by Parliament, so it can't stay secret.

Yes, as I understand it the petroleum found does very little active management, but instead have a mandate to hold stock based on the FTSE Global All Cap Index.

Changing the mandate require approval by the parliament.

It does do active management in some asset classes. E.g. real estate purchases and the like. It also does buy or divest shares based on various other consideration, such as ethical rules. But you're right that they're investing according to a mandate set by government so they're limited in what they can do.

They are a democratic government, so their policy and decision making should be open. Thought has nothing to do with it, however, they make the announcement today, some investors freak out and sell, and a bunch of others get a bargain. Meanwhile, each year, oil consumption continues to increase by 1.5 million barrels of oil a day.

Then Norway begins to diversify their holdings over many years as they probably should have done already, but now at a fair price because everyone now knows this is going to happen, so it is "priced in".

This story is the exact reason why most everyone should ignore this financial news nonsense. This is an opportunity to buy oil companies at a discount, but this story makes it sound as though it is time to start selling off petroleum stocks. It is also a reminder that your portfolio needs to be diversified, you don't know what is going to happen tomorrow.

It is almost as if they hope the price goes down so they can actually buy more. Then if their share purchases increases share price, maybe selling later to please policy makers whilst still making money...

As this seems just at a discussion level still, it still would have to pass through several levels of parliament debates etc, it is not really an announcement of policy, more just possible ideas made by someone associated with the fund.

Though as they have already been ordered to divest from tar sand and armaments companies it does seem possible from an ethical stand point. Slightly hypocritical though.

It does makes sense in spreading out future risk, divesting from oil & gas, but honestly not something they have to rush into for quite a few decades.

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