Quarterly information on the CNB’s international reserves

The CNB publishes data on the market value of actively managed international reserves portfolios in the quarterly report on the CNB’s international reserves. Owing to different methodologies and subsequent revisions to the official data, these data usually differ slightly from the total size of the international reserves (presented, for example, in the data series of international reserves and in the structure of international reserves).

The strategic allocation of actively managed portfolios, which represent almost 99% of the international reserves, is a result of the CNB’s internal decision-making processes. For these purposes, their size and performance are calculated on the basis of market revaluation. The rest of the reserves are made up of claims on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in special drawing rights (SDR) and non-marketable gold held by the CNB.

The CNB’s international reserves were formally divided into the liquidity and investment tranches in 2017.

  • The liquidity tranche is denominated only in the main reserve currencies (the euro and the dollar). It contains highly liquid instruments of the highest credit quality with a short maturity of up to one year (deposits with central banks, repo operations, T-bills, etc.), which, if necessary, can easily be converted into money without any major risk of capital losses.
  • The aim of the investment tranche is to take advantage of a longer investment horizon to attain higher returns. The investment tranche also includes the equity portfolio which accounts for 20% of the tranche (owing to market developments, this figure actually fluctuates within a narrow range around 20%).

More information on the division of the international reserves into tranches is available in the CNB’s Annual Reports, on the CNB vlog and in other articles.

Since 2021, the quarterly reports have been published at 10 a.m. on the date of the publication of the balance of the CNB’s foreign exchange transactions as of the end of the previous quarter.