Advice needed on Portfolio/ investment expert

What’s your goal with your investments? FIRE? Regular retirement? Any short term goal we should be aware of (real estate, consequential travel, expensive training/ceremony, other)?

What is your expense level? Are the 160K you earn enough to support the three of you? Are the parameters of your partner’s break defined or is the door kept open for longer than just a few months’ break, and potentially a full stop of work?

I’m asking because you seem to put some important emphasis on your losses, which drives me to think that properly assessing your risk tolerance may bring good benefits as you may be invested too agressively as of now.

I like the “need”, “ability” and “willingness” to take risk framework for that:

The need to take risk is your need for returns on capital. If you both keep working with your salaries, your need for risk is probably zero given the Swiss social system. If you have defined financial goals and/or target a lifestyle above what you can currently afford, then you have a need for risk which it would be helpful to quantify, or at least roughly evaluate.

The ability to take risk is your abilty to go through a deep and prolonged downturn with peace of mind. Elements that may interfer can be related to your actual financial wellbeing (potential loss/reduction of income, untimely illness/disability/death (insurance can help with that), increased expenses due, for example, to more children or need for financial help by family members or very close friends, etc.) or they can be related to your psychological ability to stay the course and keep following your investing plan even though your assets are deeply underwater. 2022 was pretty tame in comparison to what can happen in very deep drawdowns happening in times of crisis when the world seems to be about to break.

The willingness to take risk can be visualized as your temperament or lust for risk. Do you properly visualize that even on the long term, stocks can register losses and are you at peace with that? Do you go further and actually enjoy the thrill of having your assets at risk?

It’s pretty hard to give hopefully not harmful advice without knowing your circumstances better.

Edit: after reading your opening message a few more times, it seems to me (though I may be wrong) that you value outcome over strategy. The P2P part looks particularly telling as you have stopped investing in the solution that gave you bad returns but have kept the one that gives you healthy ones, while they’re both probably just as risky and luck may have been a dominating factor in the outcomes you are experiencing.

Successful investing in risky assets requires a big amount of trust in the strategy even when the outcomes are very lackluster.

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