Sweden’s AP2 has beaten its larger peers in the country’s national pensions buffer fund system on investment returns, posting a 9.6% gain after costs for the first half of 2026 – in a period when all three remaining buffer funds were hard at work implementing a major reform.
Gothenburg-based AP2, which took over the smaller private-equity specialist buffer fund AP6 at the beginning of this year, said the return was driven mainly by listed equities, with its exposure to listed emerging markets equities returning 51% in the period.
Real assets, however, “continued to develop weakly and affected the portfolio by a total of -0.2% during the first half”, AP2 said, adding that this included a write-down of its previous holding in troubled Swedish green steel firm Stegra by SEK330m (€29.5m) compared with its acquisition value.
AP2’s total fund capital was stated at SEK550.5bn at the end of June – including the AP6 assets that have been taken into AP2’s portfolio, but not the SEK52.5bn of AP6 assets held in a transition portfolio.
Even including that portfolio, AP2 is now the smallest of the three buffer funds by some distance, with AP3 and AP4 in Stockholm reporting assets under management of SEK891bn and SEK885.5bn respectively at the end of June.
AP3 and AP4 have split the assets of the now defunct AP1 as part of the buffer fund reform.
Reporting a 7.6% return for the first half, Staffan Hansén, AP3’s CEO, said: “AP3 has navigated financial markets successfully during the period, once again demonstrating the value of an active and disciplined investment strategy.
“The consolidation of the buffer funds at the turn of the year proceeded smoothly, and the assets transferred from AP1 have been successfully integrated into the fund’s investment structure,” he noted.
AP4 posted a 6.8% return for the first half, saying all asset classes had a positive return but global equities had produced the biggest gain.
“The weakening of the Swedish krona meant that AP4’s open currency exposure made a positive contribution to the return,” the fund said in its interim report on Friday.
Niklas Ekvall, AP4’s CEO, said market developments had been characterised “by the capricious, transactional way in which the US administration conducts politics, with the US and Israel’s war of aggression against Iran the major factor”.
In Sweden’s occupational pensions sector, the biggest fund Alecta reported a 5.8% return for its defined contribution product Alecta Optimal Pension, with the defined benefit scheme – which makes up the bulk of Alecta’s now SEK1.46trn under management – improving its consolidation level to 168% from 161% 12 months earlier.
Alecta said its equities portfolio returned 8.5% in the six-month period, outpacing the fixed income and alternatives portfolios, which gained 1.6% and 1.8%, respectively.
Among alternative assets, real estate and infrastructure “benefited from stable demand despite higher financing costs”, Alecta said, and private equity developed more weakly due to continued low transaction activity.
In an update on its controversial holding in Swedish residential firm Heimstaden Bostad, Alecta said its value had fallen by 0.6% in the period to amount to SEK41.9bn at the end of June.
In Denmark, statutory pension fund ATP reported a 14.5% first-half return on its investment portfolio – the leveraged return-seeking portfolio that sits alongside the statutory pension fund’s much larger hedging portfolios and its smaller market return portfolio.
According to the interim report published this morning, the return beat the 10.5% 10-year average return for the investment portfolio, which consists of ATP’s bonus potential, with the largest gains having been produced by listed international equities and inflation-linked instruments.
However, government and mortgage bonds, particularly US and Asian government bonds, ended the six-month period with losses, ATP stated.
“ATP’s equity returns were boosted significantly by the portfolio’s relatively high exposure to emerging markets and Asia, which achieved high returns in the first half of 2026 – somewhat higher than both European and US equity indices,” the now DKK721bn pension fund said.
Danish equities, on the other hand, had had a difficult half-year, it added.
Elsewhere in Denmark, labour-market pension provider PFA, Denmark’s largest pension fund overall with DKK805bn in customer funds at the end of June, reported an 8.3% return in the first half for a typical customer with medium risk and 15 years to retirement.
PFA said that despite a turbulent year with continued geopolitical tensions and volatile financial markets, the global economy and large companies had performed well overall in the first six months of the year.
“This has created a tailwind in the financial markets and resulted in good and competitive investment returns for PFA’s customers,” it said.
