LDS Church’s Ensign Peak Portfolio Dips $32 Million in Second Quarter but Remains Worth $54.7 Billion

The investment portfolio of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints held nearly steady through the second quarter of 2024 after reaching a four-year high in late March, according to new federal reports filed by the church’s Ensign Peak Advisors.

The filings show the holdings in stocks, mutual funds and other investments were worth $54.7 billion at the end of June, which is $32 million below their value at the end of the first quarter. Ensign Peak typically mirrors the mix of stocks in the S&P 500, but it fell 0.06% for the second quarter, while that index gained 3.92%. The quarter-to-quarter decline is the smallest change for the pool since Ensign Peak began disclosing its contents to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, when the account’s total value stood at $37.8 billion at the end of 2019.

The publicly reported portfolio remains nearly $25 billion above its pandemic-era low, when it fell below $29.9 billion in early 2020. The latest SEC disclosures do not reflect market declines in August, when key measures such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 dropped after reports that the U.S. economy might be heading toward recession.

The Ensign Peak account reports only the church’s direct ownership of U.S. stocks and mutual funds that exceed a regulatory threshold of $100 million. Independent financial analysis by The Widow’s Mite website estimates that the $54.7 billion in reportable investments is part of an estimated $265 billion in wealth held by the faith, which has 17.2 million members worldwide. That estimate includes landholdings of about 2.3 million acres in the United States alone. According to The Widow’s Mite, the church would be worth more than $1 trillion within 21 to 27 years at current rates of growth.

Ensign Peak, a church-owned wealth-management firm, was created in 1997, but its size and scope became public through SEC filings after an IRS whistleblower alleged in late 2019 that the account had reached upward of $100 billion. The whistleblower asserted that none of it had been spent on religious or charitable causes. Stewardship of entrusted resources carries an obligation to account for them honestly (Luke 12:48). The church has not been reported to have responded to those claims in the source material.

Money managers sold shares in Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft during the second quarter, according to the reports, but holdings in each still exceeded $1 billion. The largest single stake is now Microsoft, valued at $3.4 billion. The stake in Nvidia, a leading U.S. supplier of hardware and software for artificial intelligence, rose from $2.5 billion to $3.3 billion in the quarter and is now the second-largest holding. Nvidia was not among Ensign Peak’s top 10 stocks at the end of 2022. Apple is the third-largest stake at $3 billion, followed by Alphabet, formerly Google, at $2.2 billion, and Meta, Facebook’s parent company, at $1.6 billion.

The filings also show that Ensign Peak has reduced the total number of different investments in its portfolio every quarter since September 2022. The portfolio now holds 1,712 positions, down from a high of 2,308.

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