Turkey wealth fund buys stocks to stem market rout

Turkey’s sovereign wealth fund bought stocks on Thursday to support the country’s equity market as authorities worked to contain fallout from a crash in the fund-management industry, Bloomberg reported.

The Turkish Wealth Fund bought shares through an exchange-traded vehicle run by state-owned brokerage Ziraat Portfoy to lift the Borsa Istanbul 30 Index, which tracks the country’s 30 largest listed companies. 

The fund may continue intervening if volatility becomes extreme, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Exchange-traded funds tracking Turkish banks and the BIST 30 Index drew 4.05 billion liras ($83 million) of inflows on Thursday, the most since April 2025. Banking shares rose 8.9%.

The intervention followed a week of turmoil after several high-profile investment funds said they could not meet investor redemption requests. 

The strains had been building since August, when regulators tightened rules on funds with concentrated holdings in companies with limited free floats, forcing some managers to unwind positions.

The capital-markets regulator ordered 131 investment funds liquidated and blocked trading in funds run by seven asset managers after investors withdrew as much as $1 billion from Turkish funds in a single day. The central bank also raised repo funding to 300 billion liras and increased banks’ interbank borrowing limits tenfold.

A spokesperson for the Turkish Wealth Fund did not immediately respond to a request for comment.