Swiss National Bank's $168.01B US Equity Book Shows How a Central Bank Buys America's Mega-Caps

Swiss National Bank ended Q4 2025 with a reported $168.01B US equity portfolio and a 68.00 WhaleScore. On the surface, the filing looks like another giant technology-heavy 13F. The more interesting read is structural: this is what happens when a central bank owns US equities as part of a reserve-management machine rather than a hedge fund playbook.

The official SNB reserve-allocation page says equities represented 25% of foreign exchange reserves at the end of Q4 2025, while the annual financial statements show CHF 759.2B of foreign currency investments. The bank's own asset-management FAQ makes the key point explicit: equities are managed on a broadly diversified, market-neutral, passive basis. That matters because investors often misread the SNB's SEC 13F filing as an active signal when it is usually closer to an index mirror.

TL;DR

• Swiss National Bank disclosed $168.01B in 13F assets for Q4 2025, down from $172.35B in Q3 2025 but still well above $141.58B in Q1 2025.
• The top three reported holdings were NVDA at $12.42B, AAPL at $11.06B, and MSFT at $9.36B.
• The top ten positions accounted for 40.27% of the disclosed portfolio, leaving 59.73% spread across more than two thousand other names.
• The filing is best read as a window into how a reserve manager gets US equity exposure, not as a concentrated macro bet on a handful of stocks.

Chart: the US mega-cap core

The disclosed book is large, but it is not especially idiosyncratic. The heaviest weights sit in the same names that dominate broad global equity benchmarks: NVIDIA, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet Class A, Broadcom, Alphabet Class C, Meta, Tesla, and Eli Lilly. That is exactly the pattern you would expect from a passive allocator with a very large balance sheet.

Q4 2025 filing snapshot

What did Swiss National Bank buy in Q4 2025?

The canonical brief for this article tags the top ten disclosed lines as new positions in the comparison set, including NVDA, AAPL, MSFT, AMZN, GOOGL, AVGO, GOOG, META, TSLA, and LLY. I would be careful about reading that mechanically as a sudden discretionary lurch into US tech. The official SNB documentation points the other way: the bank says it replicates broad market indices, does not engage in stock picking, and seeks market-neutral exposure. In other words, the better interpretation is that the filing captures the scale of the US equity sleeve, not a classic manager-style expression of conviction.

AUM trend: still elevated after the 2025 rebound

The history is useful because it shows two things at once. First, the Q4 print was slightly softer quarter over quarter, falling from $172.35B to $168.01B. Second, the broader 2025 arc was still powerful: the book climbed from $141.58B in Q1 2025 to a high of $172.35B in Q3 before easing into year-end. That profile looks more like market movement inside a large passive allocation than a sudden overhaul of reserve policy.

How a central bank ends up owning Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft

The SNB's own policy framework explains the logic. On its Q4 2025 allocation page, the bank says foreign exchange reserves were split 39% EUR, 37% USD, 7% JPY, 6% GBP, 3% CAD, and 8% other currencies. Equities were 25% of reserves. In its asset-management FAQ, the SNB says it invests passively, replicates broad markets, avoids stock picking, and does not invest in Swiss-company equities. It also says it does not exercise voting rights in the United States. Those details make the 13F easier to interpret: this is a reserve-allocation byproduct, not an activist or fundamental-equity signal.

Concentration check: big names, but still broad diversification

The top three names make up 21.29% of the filing, and the top ten reach 40.27%. That is substantial, but it is still lower-conviction than what you would expect from a concentrated hedge fund. The remaining 59.73% sits in 2,301 other disclosed positions. My read: the portfolio is concentrated in the same way that the public equity market itself is concentrated. The SNB is owning the market's center of gravity, not trying to outsmart it.

So what should investors take away?

If you are screening 13Fs for alpha signals, Swiss National Bank belongs in a separate bucket. The filing is still useful. It tells you where the market-cap weighted core of global equities sits, how much of that exposure is flowing through a central-bank reserve portfolio, and which US mega-caps dominate that passive sleeve. But it is a weaker read-through for company-specific conviction than a discretionary manager filing.

That is why the most important insight from the Q4 2025 report is not simply that the SNB owns a lot of NVIDIA or Apple. It is that a central bank with a giant reserve book can end up looking like one of the biggest holders of America's largest stocks without behaving like a traditional stock picker at all.

Source links and further reading

• SEC EDGAR: Swiss National Bank filings
• SNB: Foreign exchange reserves and Swiss franc bond investments
• SNB: Questions and answers on asset management
• SNB: Annual financial statements and profit

FAQ

Below are the questions readers are most likely to ask when they see a central bank show up in the 13F data.