Oh boy, how have we been lucky. So the oil was found in one of the last drills in 1969. And forward thinking politicians, they acted such that the Norwegian people were the ones that benefited, and not only over generations, but the generations to come. And in 1990, only six years prior to the first inflow, the Norwegian Parliament adopted an act that established the Norwegian government petroleum, which was called at that time. It was only six years prior to the first inflow. So the timing was quite excellent.
So when the money started to flow in, the organization was just set up, ready to invest. And since then, our goal has been to maximize or give the highest possible return for the moderate risk so that the fund can endure. Just five billion corona has been added in the fund since the beginning. That is the flow of money that has been saved from the revenues from the wheat and sale of oil and gas reduction. But most of the fund is returned. Since the first inflow in 1996, the fund has had a return of 14,000 billion corona, including the currency effect of 3,000 billion. So the return accounts for 75% of the value of the fund, including the currency. That is fascinating.
And to protect the Norwegian mainland economy, the fund is only invested outside Norway. So the investments are divided between North America, Europe and Asia, or say, primarily. 72% of the fund is invested in equities. 26% in fixed income and 2% in real estate. We have an automatic rule that makes us sell down or reduce equities after a stock market increase and buy equities after a decline to keep the equity pollution at around 70%. Most of the fixed income assets are made in developed markets with a large percentage in treasury bonds issued in euros, dollars, pounds and yen.
The fund also invests in close to 900 properties in several global cities. So we invest in offices, retail and logistics sectors in London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. And the fund is also invested in almost 9,000 companies in, I think it's 71 countries. All listed equities. So on average, the fund owns 1.5% of all listed companies. That makes the fund one of the world's largest single owners of companies, which is also quite fascinating. The equity management is based on two main strategies, a market exposure and securities selection based on fundamental research. And these strategies enable us to sort of achieve the exposure to the broad equity market expressed in the equity benchmark, while at the same time increased return based on company analysis.
The security and the selection is done both by internal managers and extal managers. The internal managers that are based in Oslo, London, New York and Singapore and organized in global sector teams, focuses in developed markets, primarily large caps. And then we arrive at the fund park, investing with extal managers. So we use extal managers in segments and markets where we believe they will generate excess return. In emerging markets and small caps in Asia, all of them are in country focused with, and they're based in the country where they're managing money. And we have managers in Jakarta focusing on Indonesia, in Mumbai focusing on India, in Sao Paulo focusing on Brazil, in Tokyo and so focusing on Japan's small cap and Korea's small cap, etc.
In Europe and in Europe it's a bit more mixed with both locally based country focused small cap managers and also some regional managers and sector managers. The thing is that we look for specialists that know a few areas very well. So we have today 110 managers in 50 different cities across the world. So we strongly believe in the information advantage of being on the ground. Because the managers we seek to find, they build portfolios grounded in their extensive local knowledge and research. They maintain regular communication with the companies in the portfolios by frequently visiting them on sites and not in conferences. So our aim is to generate excess return. As I've been there last year, we have generated 1.8% annualized excess return off the fees since beginning, that is 90 billion corona off the fees. And over time, we have only paid 0.3% in fees. So that is 80% of excess return is kept by end-bin. We also believe that the external managers will reduce the risk of over investments by avoiding certain companies with problematic business models and weak corporate governance in these markets. And these markets or these managers, they operate in markets with higher exposure to ease G-risk.
So our focus on these issues is integrated in the selection and monitoring. For example, before they are selected, and once a year after that, we send and bin expectations to the managers and discuss the issues with them. To ensure that the managers invest with their focus on ease G-risk, they understand what is important to us and that they have that in mind when they are investing on behalf of us. So the local managers, they have actually avoided 75% of the companies in their local benchmarks. Ours strategy has evolved over time with both the expansion of the fence universe, the fence size, the changes in the market environment. But our approach has always been dynamic. And the statements we have chosen to focus on, they have changed while all focus areas have been phased out. From regional managers in the United States, sector managers in 2000, small kept with focus in 2001, emerging markets in 2005. Regional managers and sector managers have phased out in 2010. But are entering again these days in a somewhat different shape and form.
So in general, we perform mandates in market segments where gathering information is difficult. And there's a great deal of uncertainty that may be better assessed through additional research. So we expect changes to continue going forward as we know there will be changes in opportunities. What does not change the law is that all our mandates are equity only. They are based on deep fundamental research. And they are all on segregated accounts. That is, they are trading on our book in our name. And there's several reasons for why we do that. First, we see at all times what they buy and sell. So we know the risk of each of the portfolios, the holdings in each of the portfolios changes over each of them and the combination. The second is that we can terminate the account at any time. First, it's just to cut the trading authorization that they've given them. When we do that, we do the same thing notice to safeguard the assets. The third is that the investment universe is defined by us. And since this is an account in our name, if something happens to the manager, anything, there is absolutely no doubt who owns the assets because they are trading on our book.
You may have seen the movie or read the book, Monoball. Movie with Brad Pitt as Bill Bean, who is building a team of babes, both players for O'Killney. They can't compete on salary. So they must do the selection process differently. So they are constructing a team of baseball players and we are constructing a portfolio of managers. And like Bill Bean, we seek to have different selection process. For example, we don't ask for a minute to look at historic performance, but on the actual portfolio. So we hire managers because we believe they expected research or expected performance would be good, not that they have good performance in the future, in the history. And historic performance may hide certain factors. For example, when a good performance was driven by certain analysts who used to work in the team. And furthermore, we need a long history to figure out whether all performance is driven by skilled O'K. And very frequently, we don't have such history. And second, there's not an investment committee in BIM that decides which man should be awarded a mandate. But an individual performance manager. And BIM, or we have said that employing external managers is an investment decision. And investment decisions should not be made in groups settings. So we are eight people in the team selecting managers. And each of us in the team are for the full managers who are responsible for selection and termination within each over area and is measured on the performance generated. So we have huge debates in the team.
We have one dedicated decision maker for each mandate. And third is that we don't use consultants to assist us. Several of them have in-depth knowledge of several managers, but we are in a different position than many of the other clients. So we have decided to dig deep of ourselves to know every aspect of the manager's portfolio, philosophy and the interaction in the team. So because we are striving to create a portfolio of different portfolio managers that fit well together with different focus and different investment universities. So what do we do? We follow quite a structured selection process. It starts with a short question there to potential managers with questions on the organization, the team, the assets and the full portfolio with actual weights back through time for different quarters. We also include a question on who they see as the main competitors. This information is used to get a better insight into additional managers. So based on that, we have a huge dataset with potential managers and can do different analysis on the actual portfolios, the changes, when and what they've been buying, and the differences between each one. This leads to a short list of managers, often around 10, that you can meet on site.
And those selected for the second and third round, they get a more extensive question there with the questions on operation and compliance, etc. But we often meet the team three to four times before selection. And several of them are screened out during these meetings, while new managers are found and included in the search. Between each time of these meetings, doing a lot more analysis on the changes in the portfolio, potential changes in the team, this is repeated continuously to make sure that you have at all times invested with a potential or with a right potential managers. We usually meet the managers three to four times before selection and one per quarter after they are selected. In this meeting, we discussed the portfolio, individual companies, when they met the management of the companies, where they missed it, what they talked about, which ESG issues they discussed, what is priced into the company, why they have a different view from the risk of the market on both companies that they are invested in and the companies they have decided to stay out of.
All the meetings with these managers are conducted on site. We never meet any managers in our offices. And there are several reasons for that. First is that sort of we prefer the manager to focus on the investments and the portfolio, not traveling around the world to meet us. The second is that by seeing them on site, we can meet the whole team, which of course is impossible if you drive them to Norway. And the third is that when meeting the managers in the country, we don't only meet the ones that we have, but we meet all the existing and also the potential managers. So we can compare their view on markets and companies. So that gives us a very good understanding of the managers' different views, who thinks differently than the rest, who are early or late to investment ideas, who are engaged in hurting, etc.
When looking for managers in a certain market, we look for a good investment company and a good portfolio manager within the company. So our experience is that excess return is tied to individuals, and they need an organization they can thrive. So we have found that the smaller, privately owned organizations more often have a higher excess return than the larger ones. And the larger ones are owned by financial institutions. I think there are several reasons for that. More often, they have better alignment of interest between the portfolio managers, the analysts and the sales customers. And they have a compensation structure that sort of reflects and strengthens this alignment. We have heard of it more seen that the privately owned organizations, they are better at attracting, retaining and growing talent, so the teams are more stable. And we find more frequently focused on asset gathering rather than excess return in some of the larger organizations with different departments linked to different parts of the financial industry. Our experience is that personal responsibility and personal accountability leads to more diligent analysis of the PMs. And they have an ownership to the final investment decision. So we avoid investment teams with rigid investment committees and look for organizations where we can find clear and individual-based decision-making process.
The overconfidence in group settings with lack of quality and seeking anonymity that should be avoided in investment decisions. It is very important that the portfolio manager has a strong team around him or her to give input on the stocks to buy and the stocks that he or she should have sold. In general, just give them a hard time. Such that they can help him or her to avoid anchoring bias, loss aversion bias and other behavioral traps. For example, one of our managers in Japan, they have a war room where views from the team are flushed out and opinions are expressed independently of seniority. Which of course is very different from the Japanese culture.
In general, we seek to identify that the investment culture is supported at all levels through sitting down with each analyst, preferably at their desk. And we prefer being an early investor. So we are searching for boutiques. And given that we don't look at track record, we can look for good teams and good portfolio managers elsewhere than many of the other allocators out there. And we often find hungry teams focused on showing the world or a large potential client that they will succeed. Given the long-term commitment with the managers that we select, we have time to grow with them.
At first, it requires quite deep diligence into why they have started the business. And their passion for investing compared to the work building and organization. And the team, let's give them a right input and tough discussions. The types of decision-makers or portfolio managers we have chosen to invest with, they are quite diverse. There are some common characteristics among RPMs. They need to have a creative and distinct view of the world where they seek different data, different interpretations and can put the numbers into context.
It's essential to be curious, challenge, conventional wisdom, inquisitive and humble. And they need to be willing to always look for new information and willing to change one's mind. So one of our peers was sitting on the road counting cars for a week before investing in a tall road. Another one was sitting in a wheelchair traveling around the world to make up its own view. So in general, they need to find information through their own analysis of market and companies. And at the same time, accept that changing market and dynamics may lead to disruption.
The only information which I away from is inside information. I once met a PM with the Gold Clubs in the office claiming that the best information that he got was the one on one's with the CEOs on Goldscotch. That is one of the shortest meetings I ever had. The external managers apply huge analytical capacity on a limited number of equities. They seek to identify companies with attractive valuation and sort of positive ESG progress. And these convictions should be reflected in the portfolio. So we seek for concentrated portfolios.
We believe we have selected the best portfolio manager in that specific field. And we expect them to take high market risk to outperform. Although the group that ILEED is responsible for the selection, termination and ongoing return and risk, there are many more of us in aiming that are involved in monitoring. So we have governance, compliance, internal legal advisors, risk management and measurement operations, the internal and external auditors who regularly go through all of routines. But focusing more on what we do, given that all over mandates are on a segregated account, we have access to all holdings and changes in the portfolio daily through our database.
So we have built several monitoring tools on this data that is crucial in monitoring each of the managers. Tools and performance, risk, trading, holding. For example, in this tool, it's just the trading analyzer. We follow the managers buying and selling a specific stock in combination with performance and broke estimates. This is put into context or over discussions with the managers to evaluate whether they are executing the strategies and strategies. Is the PM a follower? When is he or she increasing the position? Are they utilizing market volatility to trade the position?
Are they willing to be able to revisit the investment thesis and change the portfolio? Staled portfolios are red flag and something that we would investigate further. Because market demand must change quite drastically and we expect all managers to adjust their portfolios. Furthermore, this database is stretching back to 1998, which gives us a huge data set on when and how they end the perform or outperform. How we should think about combining managers, increase funding, terminate the mandates, etc. Our focus is to optimize a portfolio of managers based on knowledge of the portfolio, the regular meetings with the managers and the analysis of the portfolios.
The aim is to maximize expect return per dollar fee. An additional manager may bring excess performance but also may bring us closer to index portfolio, which is just an expensive way of doing it. We manage the portfolio quite actively. On average, we have 14 new and 10 terminations every year. 40% of the terminations are due to significant changes around the portfolio manager, that he or she is leaving, expanding the coverage, etc. 40% is due to the wrong selection from us or that we are less convinced about their excess performance going forward for some reason. 20% is due to a shifting strategy, getting out of the sector managers, all the regional managers, etc.
The shortest we have had is two weeks. That was the performance that left right after we had signed the agreement. The longest is a UK small gap mandate that we had since 2001. On average, we hold the mandate for a bit of four years. Average holding of today's mandate is about between 6 and 7. We use experts in selected market segments, utilizing deep, fundamental research. We prefer small and privately owned organizations. We prefer single PMs versus team-run portfolios or investment committees. We meet the whole organization on site.
We look for some specific characteristics with the portfolio manager and the team. And they have quite a thorough monitoring process.
我们寻找投资组合经理和团队的一些特定特点。而且他们有一个相当全面的监控流程。
We have a lot of information about the market. We have a lot of information about the market. We have a lot of information about the market. We have a lot of information about the market. We have a lot of information about the market.
我们掌握了很多关于市场的信息。
We have a lot of information about the market. We have a lot of information about the market. We have a lot of information about the market.