It’s not the fund itself, it’s the broker. How are you going to buy this Swisscanto fund? For small amounts, the transaction fees would kill all performance.
I was thinking to check if this Swisscanto fund is available on Swissquote …. Normally there are some flat fee funds there
Why a disadvantage? It’s pretty standard for those funds.
One nice thing about this fund is that it looks like the taxable income is fairly low: https://ictax.admin.ch/extern/en.html#/security/3283146/20231231 (unlike the pictet funds)
edit: though that might be an oversight, since the Avantis fund is managed by LO and all of the LO funds have a more usual 1% income reported in ictax.
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Really? Well, I have thought about the costs of hedging and higher nominal rates, which seems to be not the case, though.
They usually go for low interests bonds.
I am an Interactive Brokers client holding CHF and yielding 0 at the moment and came across the Ticker “CHFO” (Exchange Traded Product on CHF Overnight Rate listed in Switzerland). Reading into the details, the ETP costs 0.10% p.a. while CHF Overnight Saron Rate is at 1.45% p.a. - that means 1.35% p.a. yield after costs so certainly much better than earning nothing on my IB account (obviously I face costs buying the instrument and there is also 0.02% spread on the instrument). Am I missing anything else?
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One question is how this is going to be taxed (it’s not on ictax), it might be favorable if it’s a purely synthetic product. (we might not know until next year, since the fund hasn’t had 1y yet)
Also I assume the biggest risk if counterparty risk (I have no idea how it’s implemented compared to an MMFs that have physical holdings).
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seems no preferential tax from what I saw: "For Swiss income tax purposes the Product is subject to the so-called pure difference taxation (“reine Differenzbesteuerung”). i.e. you buy at say CHF 100 and sell it at CHF 101.30, then you have to pay taxes on CHF 1.30 price difference I reckon (am not a tax expert though).
In terms of counterparty risk it seems to be a fully collateralized setup with SIX Group behind (according to Wiki “SIX is a key financial market infrastructure company in Switzerland.”), so seems reputable but happy to hear your thoughts
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Just read a bit (https://www.six-group.com/dam/download/securities-services/securities-finance/tri-party-collateral-management/six-factsheet-tcm-structured-products.pdf), I think what it means is that SIX manages the collateral computation and holds it, it doesn’t mean the risk is transferred to SIX tho (afaict)
SIX SIS Ltd calculates the collateral requirement (multiple times a day), before collateral for a specific TCM secured structured product is moved and blocked in the TCM account and notifies the collateral provider in case of additional collateral requirements. SIX SIS Ltd will notify the collateral agent in case of a realization event.
I guess given the underlying, risks are kinda small?
That’s interesting since you only pay tax when you sell (unlike many financial products) and could defer taxation by many years.
(also means you need to keep track of the cost basis)
interesting aspect with the deferral of taxes into the future. didnt thought about that one. makes it even more appealing in that case. plus buying it via Interactive Brokers should circumvent any stamp duties so makes it worth from a transaction cost standpoint.
Did you ever find an attractive solution here? I am also looking to invest around 100k CHF in a short-term, low-risk, low duration CHF fund that will act as a secondary emergency fund. I would like it to be in IBKR as well.
I have about half of my emergency funds at IBKR in a CHF money market fund. You can buy the Swisscanto (LU) Money Market fund, share class FT on IBKR. In the fixed price tier the trading cost is currently 4.86 CHF (I thought it should be exactly 5CHF) for buying and selling each time. The FT class has costs of 0.14% so you can currently expect slightly above 1.3% return with current interest rates.
Finding the fund on IBKR is a bit tricky. Best is to use its symbol which on IBKR is the ISIN without country code and last number: 014124942
You will also need to have trading permissions for mutual funds. Alternatively you can also find the fund on the mutual fund search tool but that is also not straightforward.
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Also called the “Valor” 
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No, that would be too easy. Valor of that fund is 1363887. IBKRs „symbol“ is build like a CUSIP even though it is obviously not one.
Isn’t this fund pretty tax inefficient for Swiss residents (compared to e.g. the Pictet CH funds, which are domiciled in Switzerland)? According to the LU / CH double taxation agreement, interest is taxed at 10% and I think the fund cannot reclaim this. They seem to hold many bonds with a very low interest rate (probably for that reason), but at some point this will probably no longer work, as they were emitted when interest rates were very low.
Right now this is having a much lower tax rate than pictet, it’s easy to switch if that changes.
(still kinda annoyed by being taxed by more than I earned in pictet MMF )
Interest payment of Swiss bonds are only taxed in Luxemburg not in Switzerland and vice versa.I have read into the tax treaty, see article 11 of it. However, 11.2 then again mentions 10% is possible but is quite vague. The swisscanto material also didn’t help. Neither in their reports nor in their marketing material do they mention tax. They just say they pay tax if applicable and they report only interest received net of tax but not if any tax has actually been paid.
By the way Swisscanto has a same fund CH domicile. What is preferred for Swiss residents LU or CH domicile ?
The CH based funds cannot be bought on IBKR though. It has same benchmark but slightly different strategy. The CH based fund, unlike the LU fund, did not have a tranche open for private investors. They only opened this in 2022.
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