Spain’s stock market is in the hands of foreign funds: these are the real owners of the Ibex 35 | Economy and Business

They are not in Madrid’s elegant Paseo de la Castellana, nor in Barcelona’s imposing Avinguda Diagonal, and certainly not in the stately villas of Neguri in the Basque province of Vizcaya. The true owners of the Spanish stock market are now located elsewhere. For example, at 50 Hudson Yards in Manhattan, where BlackRock, the investment fund colossus, has its new headquarters. Another major shareholder has its headquarters at 100 Vanguard Boulevard in Malvern, Pennsylvania: it is Vanguard, the undisputed king of so‑called passive investing. The third major hub is located in Europe, on the bourgeois Bankplassen in Oslo, the operational center of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, whose strategy is to turn North Sea oil into financial wealth for its citizens. These three investment behemoths alone hold stakes worth €113.7 billion in Madrid’s Plaza de la Lealtad, home of the national stock exchange, la Bolsa.The Spanish stock market is increasingly less Spanish in a double sense. On the one hand, a large share of listed companies’ revenues are generated abroad. In 2025, for example, international markets accounted for 65% of the revenue of groups included in the Ibex 35. On the other hand, international investors occupy a growing share of listed companies’ capital. Last October, BME, the operator of the Spanish stock exchange—also owned by a foreign group, in this case the Swiss operator SIX—published its latest ownership report with data at the close of fiscal year 2024. That report certified that 48.7% of the national market’s shares were held by foreign investors, a percentage that rises above 60% if measured by market value or market capitalization.“The greater participation of international investors is a trend also seen in other European Union countries. However, in Spain the process has been even more pronounced because of the relative decline of household presence in the stock market. In 1998, amid privatizations, households accounted for 35% of share ownership; today their weight is below 16%,” says Mariana Longobardo, director of BME’s Research Service.With the internationalization of its shareholder base, the national exchange has aligned itself with the main markets in Europe. In the United Kingdom, 58.8% of the London Stock Exchange was held by foreign owners, according to 2024 data, the latest published by the Office for National Statistics. In the case of the CAC 40, France’s main stock index, and according to 2024 data provided by the Bank of France, nonresident investors already control 50% of the shares.“The greater weight of foreign investors poses some challenges, but it is also a positive sign,” reflects Juan M. Prieto, founder and chairman of Corporance, the country’s first national proxy advisor for institutional investor meetings. “These funds tend to have more developed corporate governance practices; additionally, they do much more trading, which improves market liquidity. Moreover, their presence has meant a greater flow of money to Spanish companies and a clear channel of financing for them,” Prieto argues.A striking reversalThe ownership structure of Spanish shares — see chart — has undergone a profound transformation in recent decades. When the Ibex 35 launched on January 14, 1992, no one could have imagined that this index — composed of the 35 most liquid Spanish stocks, with a name that is an acronym of the words ‘Iberian Index’ and whose genesis was entirely technical, serving as the underlying for trading derivative products— would come to be so dominantly controlled by foreign investors.In 1992, the year of the Barcelona Olympic Games and the Seville World Expo, foreign funds controlled only 30.6% of the Spanish market, followed by domestic households (24.4%), the state (16.6%), banks and savings banks (15.6%), nonfinancial Spanish companies (7.7%), and domestic fund and pension managers (5%). With the latest available data the situation has turned dramatically: international funds now control 48.7% of the shares; the weight of households has fallen sharply to just 15.8% of the total; the state’s stake has also deflated (4.1%) as have those of banks and savings banks (4%); the domestic collective investment industry has remained almost unchanged (5.8%); while the weight of nonfinancial companies has risen noticeably to 21.6% of the total — this category includes, among others, family holdings such as Amancio Ortega’s stake in Inditex, the Del Pino family in Ferrovial, the Entrecanales family in Acciona, or the Botín family in Banco Santander, among others.“It is difficult to put up barriers and try to reduce foreign investment or approve certain regulatory constraints. Besides, that would produce a very harmful effect of investor flight,” reflects Javier Zapata, currently secretary general of Emisores Españoles, but with extensive capital markets experience as deputy secretary of the Madrid Stock Exchange and a member of the advisory committee of the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV). “Where more focus is required is on strengthening Spanish institutional investment (pension funds, insurers, investment funds) to rebalance the shareholder structure by increasing the Spanish presence,” Zapata adds.Under the last Socialist governments led by Felipe González and, above all, when the conservative Popular Party (PP) was in power under José María Aznar, the privatization of public companies accelerated. That process gave rise to the phenomenon known in the 1990s as ‘popular capitalism.’ Many Spanish households took their first steps in the stock market with retail tranches of initial public offerings (IPOs) of public corporate securities. However, the end of privatizations, the bursting of the dot‑com bubble in the early 2000s and, above all, the impact of the financial crisis effectively reduced retail investors’ appetite for equities.After the fiasco of Bankia’s IPO in July 2011, it is possible to count on the fingers of one hand (and still have fingers left over) the companies that reserve shares for Spanish retail investors in their IPOs. Banks themselves stopped being interested in selling shares through their networks, first because they were competing with their own products and, second, because of the reputational risk of having angry clients if an IPO went wrong. “The scarcity of retail tranches in placements partly explains the decline of household presence in an exchange increasingly dominated by professional foreign hands. That situation should be reversed through regulation. The stock market’s rise in recent years [this week the Ibex 35 passed 19,000 points for the first time, a 214% gain from the pandemic lows] has not been enough to disperse a shareholder structure highly concentrated in foreign funds,” says Longobardo.With the aim of bringing households back to the stock market, the government, the CNMV and part of the Spanish financial industry are pushing to carry out the so‑called ‘single account,’ that is, the creation of an individual savings account similar to the Swedish or British model. The sector, despite banks’ reluctance, believes it could channel citizens’ savings towards markets with limited risk and a specific tax treatment. The Ministry of Economy is already working on its design and has submitted a variety of formal and fiscal aspects for public consultation.The banks’ U‑turnParallel to the retreat of small savers from the stock market, there has been a decline of industrial portfolios. In the banking model of the 1980s it was very common for the country’s main banks to have a holding company with stakes in listed industrial firms. The play was clear: have captive clients (companies) to provide products and services to at attractive prices and, at the same time, benefit from a recurring flow of money in the form of dividends. Savings banks also joined this scheme, although in their case there were clear political interests in investing in the capital of companies headquartered in the areas where they had influence. Banks’ industrial portfolios began to decay with their international expansion: they needed liquidity to grow abroad and had to sell assets. Then, regulatory changes came along that made on‑balance‑sheet equity consume more capital resources, and bankers finally let go. In the case of the savings banks, the end of their participations was more abrupt. With the financial crisis, which revealed practices of poor governance, they were up to their necks in liquidity problems and divestments accelerated.As if in a zero‑sum game, the power that households and financial institutions lost in the stock market was gained by foreign investors. Their arrival took place in several phases, as Prieto recalls: “The first major milestone took place in 1986. The year Spain joined the EU was also the year of the liberalization of foreign investment. Subsequently, privatizations and joining the euro attracted the interest of large funds. Another key factor was the arrival of foreign brokers to the Spanish market. Morgan Stanley acquired AB Asesores and Merrill Lynch bought FG Inversiones, the brokerage firm of Francisco González (who later became president of BBVA). These intermediaries quickly realized that the big business in equity intermediation lay with foreign investors and they encouraged their arrival.”At the start of the 21st century, the seed had been sown and its fruit has kept growing. The latest share ownership data show that, as of March 31, 2025, there were 8,634 investment funds holding stakes in Ibex 35 companies. Their origin spans the five continents, although European institutional investors (6,108 funds) and U.S. investors (2,161) stand out. “It is a sign of confidence in the maturity of the Spanish market as one of the most advanced,” Zapata reflects. “However, it is true that the presence of international funds implies the loss of national control of many companies that thus become subject to global strategies, which can affect them during global crises or simply when those funds rebalance their portfolios,” warns this capital markets veteran, who also underscores that there is “less national influence in strategic sectors.”BlackRockThe largest owner of Spanish shares is BlackRock. The fund manager founded by Rob Kapito and Larry Fink in 1988 is today a financial giant managing assets worldwide valued at $14 trillion. In Spain, the U.S. firm, according to the latest official figures, has €94 billion in investments (€59 billion in equities, €20 billion in government debt, €12 billion in corporate loans and €3 billion in unlisted assets). There is no Ibex 35 company where its tentacles do not reach. It is, for example, the largest shareholder in Banco Santander (6.86% of capital) and BBVA (7.16%), holds 7.17% of Repsol and controls 5.99% of Telefónica, among other major stakes.Another major player on the Spanish stock exchange is Vanguard. The asset manager founded by John Bogle in 1975 has grown exponentially in the past decade on the back of the boom in passive funds and exchange‑traded funds (ETFs), which basically replicate index composition and therefore charge lower fees than so‑called active funds. Vanguard, which manages $12 trillion worldwide, opened a commercial office in Madrid less than a year ago. On the national exchange it stands out for its stakes in Banco Santander (6.1%), Iberdrola (4.75%), BBVA (4.91%) and Repsol (4.13%).Sovereign wealth funds, typically funded by surpluses from commodity‑rich countries, have also gained prominence in recent years. The main investor of this type is Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, notable not only for its size—$2.2 trillion—but also for its ethical criteria—it has a committee that excludes companies that do not meet its requirements. In Spain, the Norwegians hold shares in almost all Ibex companies, although they rarely exceed the 3% threshold in any individual security.Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition



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