Alpian - New Private Banking Fintech in Switzerland

To be honest the bank is really expensive plus the app is still very young and miss a lot of things. Personally I don’t like it. I don’t see the point of this neobank regarding Yuh Neon or Radicant.

has anyone tried investing with Managed by Alpian option. I have some money there and i feel they are doing well vs market, so it takes care of all the extra fees which they ask for as the returns are good i.e. 13% since last year in a fully diversified portfolio.

I only see marketing. They have “proven track record” and instead of that proof, they want you to just “open account now”.

Drop some actual data. What did they hold? The market? The market also did similarly well. Net return (after all fees)?

The proven track record needs the same, but for all years of that claimed record.

That is not available? Probably banking on gullible marks. The whole operation, as is my impression.

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Their logo is superior to flowbank’s, I give them that. But they lost me with the hipster twins from their ad.

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0.75% fee plus 0.25% TER, so a total of 1% per year vs. <0.1% p.a. for a world ETF that will outperform (before fees!) actively managed funds with a probability of 99.9%? You decide.

FYI - If you are a client of Groupe Mutuel, you can get a welcome bonus of CHF 200 + 1 year without “banking fees” (whatever that means). Full terms and conditions available here.

You can get the promotional code by logging in to your Groupe Mutuel online portal.

Note: I am obviously not benefitting personally in any ways from this. I merely post it here if anyone would like to give a try to Alpian.

I think if these private banks are mainly selling asset allocation services. In terms of regional equity allocation and also asset class allocation. In addition they also change these allocation design based on economic conditions.

They might outperform or maybe they don’t. But this kind of service might be relevant for some investors.

If investors are seeking to buy a world market weighted equity exposure then there is no point of using such service. But I don’t think this is the point of these services in first place.

I just don’t get how such services can cost around 1% per year on top of everything.

I mean, I understand the use for people that are actually incapable to do it themselves (brain damage, mental development issues, dementia). But for any remotely significant amount of assets, say 100’000 CHF, don’t you think you could spend a 1000 CHF in working hours per year to learn yourself what is going on?

And that is only cash in hand for not needing such services. Additionally you will become more resistant to scams, and get an idea where you are going financially.

And of course for very high net worth there are possible optimizations which are actually difficult, dangerous, or impossible to pull off alone, or without specialist knowledge. But at such amounts knowing yourself how to make your capital productive becomes the only skill making any financial difference. And also, why give someone 1% of everything when you can hire them for less?

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I agree with you. I feel people should learn about basics of personal finance because it’s very useful in long term.

But I would like to say two things

  1. Average person is not very financial savvy. This forum is much advanced than a typical person
  2. Asset allocation decisions are not very simple. They need understanding of lot of things and personal risk tolerance. And the timing of changes in asset allocation is often marketed as a holy grail of investing

For #2 often investors might assume that portfolio managers in private banking are more informed to make such decisions. There might be an assumption that such decisions will outperform but the question is always - what’s the benchmark for multi asset dynamic allocation strategies ?

Is it 60-40 , Ray Dalio portfolio or something else :slight_smile:

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You don’t need to be Warren Buffet to learn that you can buy and hold broadly diversified assets at low cost.

I tend to believe that you can not buy alpha. On average, you will always only get, what you can generate yourself. Maybe by finding or doing the same for cheaper, maybe by knowing more and avoiding risks whilst taking chances, maybe by having different requirements and capabilities than others, etc. Everything else will get erased by inflowing capital filling strategy capacity, or blurred by inefficient mimicry absorbing the capital, or thrown off by cyclical performance chasing, etc.

A low hanging fruit is learning to do simple buy-and-hold yourself. Does the precise allocation really matter that much? Whatever sensible combination you buy, you get a guaranteed 1% alpha per year. That leaves room for a lot of error. Much of it already compensated by lower risk for less return and vice versa.

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My wife haven’t a clue and she is not interested in investments at all. 95% of her girlfriends as well.
I’m glad she delegate this decision to me rather than a third party but most people will prefer delegation.
IMO, this is a very bad behaviour when this kind of decision could impact your retirement plan and your last part of your life for 20+ years.

I am not advocating for not doing self learning and self help. I don’t work with banks on these things because I like to learn and it’s fun for me

I am just saying I understand there is a market for that because not everyone is interested.

Some people are happy with 5% return versus 6% and that’s it. They don’t care if 1% could have been saved or not. They just care that 5% was made.

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It veers a bit off topic, but I sometimes wonder how much would be possible if we continuously strived for taking better decisions. If we invested our money instead of leasing for a big car, run an extra lap instead of going home, learn and train a key skill instead of drowning time with empty entertainment. Those appear to be superior decisions in a superior strategy. But it seem to be very hard to follow through for many, me included, even though we consciously know. What compels us to do good enough, however bad that may be? I just doesn’t make much sense.

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I believe the fact that only few people do those things make them valuable/interesting/learned/heathier and hence those who do that reap benefits versus others

For example -: if everyone was running a lap , then the person running the lap isn’t special. In that case person running 10 laps was special.

I often heard an example that if someone invested the money (in Apple stock) they used to buy iPhone everytime it was launched, they would have much more in bank. However if everyone did that then Apple would be worth nothing because no one was buying it :slight_smile:

In the same way, people who invest in stocks have better returns than people who don’t . But if everyone invested in stocks then nobody would have good returns.

Same is true for index funds. It works because there are still a lot of active investors or active funds doing hard work to find the right price to value a company. If there were no active investors, there wouldn’t be any index investing :slight_smile:

Simply put -: efficiency is considered superior because inefficiency exists. Brightness is appreciated because there is darkness to remind us

But we should always remember there is a cost of every action we take. We often see the success of a person but we don’t know what they paid to get there. In corporate world often senior executives sacrifice their health and family life. In sports it’s not uncommon to sacrifice childhood. What’s the cost of that?

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They also would have no phone. They probably would have bought another brand and that stock (or private equity) would have done well. If everybody did it, we may have other stocks running higher, like consumer staples instead of tech. Overall, there’d probably be more money in the stock market, with other stocks doing better, and core products being more expensive because that’s where consumption and pricing power would be.

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Transaction in CHF, EUR, USD, GBP = Free
Transactions in any other eligible currency = Visa exchange rate

Is that real?

If I have like 1’000 CHF and want to purchase something in euro, would the transaction (FX- currency) be free of cost ? Not like neon which used Mastercard exchange rate?

I think this just means that if you have a USD balance and pay with USD there is no additional cost, I mean why should it cost anything… For conversion I think this applies:

I agree with you, I had indeed read this tab. But it seemed strange to me, because they also boast of being cheaper than their competitor (neon, yuh, revolut).

Hi,
I think you should have a look at Radicant for that. It seems they really have 0% fees.

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