The Bank of Korea's American filing shows a gold position it did not have three months earlier, and every equity fund beside it was cut by about a fifth

Three months earlier there was no gold in it.

The Bank of Korea's Form 13F-HR for the quarter ended 30 June, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on 12 August, lists four holdings worth $3,886,312,588. One of them is 679,765 shares of the SPDR Gold Trust, valued at $250,411,831. The filing for the quarter ended 31 March, submitted in May, lists three holdings and no gold at all.

What moved

The three funds that were already there are all smaller.

The bank held 2,268,111 shares of the iShares Core S&P 500 ETF at the end of March and 1,752,811 at the end of June, a cut of 515,300 shares, or 22.7 percent. Its Vanguard S&P 500 ETF position went from 2,479,662 shares to 1,923,442, down 556,220, or 22.4 percent. The iShares Core MSCI International holding fell from 14,003,997 shares to 11,259,397, down 2,744,600, or 19.6 percent.

Neither filing gives a reason for any of it. What the two documents establish is the position at two dates, three months apart, and nothing about the trades in between.

The reported total fell by $247,276,255 over the quarter, from $4,133,588,843 to $3,886,312,588, even though the implied per-share value of each equity fund rose. Divide value by shares and the iShares S&P 500 holding is marked at $653.21 a share in March and $748.89 in June. Gold is marked at $368.38.

What a 13F is, and is not

This is not the reserve portfolio, and reading it as one would overstate the story by two orders of magnitude.

A Form 13F covers United States listed equity securities over which a manager exercises investment discretion. Government bonds, deposits, and everything else a central bank holds are outside it. The Korea Herald, citing the bank, puts total foreign exchange reserves at $427.36bn at the end of June, which makes the entire 13F table under one percent of the whole.

The same report puts the bank's gold at 104.4 tonnes worth $4.79bn, or 1.1 percent of reserves, and says the holding has not been added to since a run of purchases between 2011 and 2013.

Metal, and a claim on metal

The trust share is a different instrument from a bar.

Physical gold held for the Bank of Korea sits at the Bank of England, according to The Korea Herald, which also reports that the bank has arranged a framework for buying domestically produced gold and storing it through the Korea Securities Depository. Jung Hee-sup, director general of the bank's Reserve Management Group, told the paper the arrangement diversifies both the purchasing channel and the storage location.

None of that is in the filing. The filing says one thing, in a table, and it says it exactly: at the close of business on 30 June the Bank of Korea held 679,765 shares of a gold trust, and three months earlier it held none.