From Top 1000 Funds, February 3:
Dutch pension funds face tech reckoning, warns central bank
The Netherlands Central Bank, DNB, recently warned Dutch pension funds, insurers and investment institutions of the risk inherent in their large allocation to tech stocks. The regulator estimates institutional investors have doubled their equity investments in technology companies over the past five years, with invested capital amounting to €200 billion, over half of which (€95 billion) is invested in the Magnificent Seven.
“The value of tech stocks depends heavily on uncertain future profits, and there are growing doubts about whether these will materialise. Stock prices can also be strongly influenced by monetary policy interest rates. In addition, tech stocks are highly sensitive to factors such as geopolitical fragmentation, innovation, new regulation and antitrust cases,” warned the bank.
Against the backdrop of increasingly shrill warnings that the AI bubble could burst and puncture tech valuations, DNB warned of the risk to the country’s pension funds. At the end of July 2025, Dutch pension funds specifically had invested more than €150 billion ($177 billion) in tech companies, representing almost 43 per cent of their portfolios of listed shares and 8 per cent of their total balance sheet....
....MUCH MORE
We didn't hear any such complaints about over-concentration in VOC back in the day did we?
February 2012 - The World's First Stock Exchange (and first bear raid, first dividend, first equity derivatives...)
‘This little game could bring in more money than contracting charter parties for ships bound for England’, wrote Rodrigo Dias Henriques to Manuel Levy Duarte on 1 November 1691.1 Dias Henriques was referring to the ‘game’ of trading shares of the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC, founded 1602) and its derivatives* on the Amsterdam securities market.A marvelous piece of scholarship from the University of Amsterdam.
VOC=Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie "United East India Company" was created two years after the British East India Company....
The first dividends were not paid for seven years but once they started...
...Shareholders could collect their first dividend in April 1610: 75% of the nominalvalue of their share in mace.39 In November of that same year, another 50% in pepper was distributed, together with 7.5% in cash – the latter distribution was only for those shareholders who had also collected the pepper. In March 1612, a distribution of 30% in nutmeg followed.40 Shareholders who had collected all dividends in kind had received a total of 162.5% of the nominal value of their shares, but the market value of the spices proved to be significantly lower. Shareholders complained that the distributed dividends had a market value of only 125%41; the sudden abundance of spices on the market had brought the prices down....These guys were not believers in the Modigliani-Miller Dividend Irrelevance Theorem,
If I remember correctly the company averaged 18% per year in dividends on the original subscription price over the first 110 years of its existence.
That number sticks in my head because the greatest U.S. bull market averaged 18% per year for 18 years, 1982-2000.
I know it's an Apples and Mangosteens comparison but it gives an indication of what a wealth machine the VOC was.
Here's some financial reporting Dutch Masters style:
$64.98 (+$13.84) (+27.1%) Shares in the spice purveyor soared on word that the three sturdy galleons dispatched two years afore had been sighted off the coast of Cape Verde, returning from their dangerous voyage to the exotic Orient with their casks brimful of redolent cinnamon, cardamom, and mysteriously intoxicating curried powder.Okay, that's actually America's Finest News Source.
The analysis in The Confusion of Confusions : Between Speculation and Eschatology is a good introduction.
Related:
Behavioral Finance at The World's First Stock Exchange
"Mokyr: 'How Europe became so rich":
Because Dutch is the language of love?
No?
Then I give up. How did Europe become so rich?
