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In the financial world, even the smallest mistakes can have enormous consequences… even more so in an era like ours, dominated by technological automation. And if not, tell the Norwegian Sovereign Fund, which recently faced a loss of around 98 million Norwegian krone (86 million euros) due to… a slip in an Excel document.
The Norwegian Sovereign Fund (an autonomous public body that invests the Scandinavian country’s oil profits to finance its pension system) is known for being one of the largest deposits of wealth in the world: Its assets amount to about 1.5 trillion dollars.
The error
As reported by the Financial Times, an employee (identified only by his first name, ‘Simon’) made a manual error when entering data into an Excel spreadsheet that was used to calculate the fund’s benchmark. Instead of using the correct date (November 1), Simon mistakenly entered the date December 1.
This error in the date affected the composition of the benchmark index that dictates the ideal investment portfolio From the bottom. When the benchmark is calculated incorrectly, investment decisions made based on those calculations can cause the fund to lose money… as happened in this case.
And, due to the error in the date, The incorrect calculation caused the fund to allocate more weight than it should to US government bonds. in its investment portfolio, compared to other bonds or sovereign debts worldwide.
When a fund moves so much money, that even a deviation of just 0.7 basis points in the return has million-dollar consequences
Once the problem is identified (several months later, when they realized the accounts didn’t add up)the error was corrected, but the financial consequences were already significant: what happened forced previously reported profits to be adjusted from 118 billion Norwegian crowns to 117 billion.
The reactions
Patrick du Plessis, the fund’s risk monitoring manager (and therefore also indirectly responsible for what happened), explains that he felt “physically sick” when they explained to him what had happened.
But almost as surprising as this error is the institutional reaction to it by Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), the fund’s managing entity. Far from hunting for a scapegoatthe fund’s management opted for a constructive response…
Neither Simon nor Patrick du Plessis were fired. Nicolai Tangen, CEO of the fund, He opted instead to send them a reassuring email.:
These things happen! We run complex operations and what surprises me most is that historically we have had very few if any incidents like this. You are both super professionals and have contributed significantly to the success of NBIM. Don’t let this ruin your weekend. Onward and upward!
Possibly, your weekend wasn’t great, despite everything.
