I’m new to the forum. I’m Zahlenspieler, 23, just started my Master’s in Finance at the University of Basel. Recently I built a small, non-commercial research site about the Swiss financial system: noelwalpert.com. No ads, no affiliate links, every number linked to its source. It’s in German for now. I’m not a developer, so I build it with Claude Code, while the research and data collection are my own.
Two analyses I’m most curious about your thoughts on:
Pension funds 2021 to 2025: I went through the annual reports of 25 large Swiss pension funds. Over five years, the median fund earned 20.0 % on its investments but credited only 13.4 % interest to active members. Credited interest ranged from 7.4 % to 29.5 %.
All 24 cantonal banks 2021 to 2025: Their mortgage books grew by 25.1 %, compared to 15.1 % for all Swiss banks, and the cantons received CHF 7.1 bn from their banks over these five years (not counting taxes). Efficiency varies a lot: cost income ratios range from 43.7 % to 67.3 %.
There are also a few calculators (fees, pillar 3a) and SNB indicators on the site.
Honestly, any input is welcome: what you think of it, what’s missing, what I could/should analyse next, tips on how to make it more useful, or recommendations for where else to share it. And if you spot a wrong number, please tell me, that’s the most valuable feedback of all.
This includes, but is not limited to: linking to your own content (blog, podcast, youtube channel, social media, etc.), recommending any product or app you are involved with, use of referral codes or affiliate links, or mention of any other product or article, whether monetized or not, that you have interest in seeing succeed.
Note this rule is relaxed within the monthly “Wednesday Self Promotion” thread (every last Wednesday of the month).
Thanks for pointing that out, my bad, I’m new here and missed that rule. Mods, feel free to remove or close this topic. I’ll share it in the Wednesday Self Promotion thread instead.
Hi PP, thanks a lot for the welcome and the honest feedback!
Good point on the Gmail address. I’ll set up an address on my own domain, that definitely looks better, gotta fix that
On my identity: yes, that’s on purpose. A lot of the ideas come from discussions with professors at uni and people in the field that I talk with occasinally, and I’m happy to put my name on the work and stand behind every number. If something is wrong, people should know who to tell.
On the goal: honestly, I just really enjoy digging into this kind of data and building something around it. Going through the annual reports, figuring out how to compare them fairly and then turning that into something people can use is a great way for me to practice and learn alongside my studies because I sometime struggle with certain topics, that I dont really apply to anything but just learn slides until the exams haha. I have no intention to make money with the site, so there are no ads, no affiliate links or anything like that. What I try to do differently is to link every single value to the document and page it comes from, so anyone can check it if interested.
In the light of this forum, we are most interested in broker and pillar 3a account comparisons. I wonder if you have a solid process to update the figures annually?
Didn’t know pension funds with Leistungsprimat (defined benefit system = pension based on last salary) still exist (CPEV, CPEG). I wonder if they calculate the longevity risk correctly or if it will be the Vaud and Geneva tax payers paying the bill eventually.
Something that would interest me personally is the long-term performance (100+ years) of stocks in CHF or Swiss stocks indices in general. Most FIRE resources are USD and S&P500-oriented. And most time series are too short with regards to the big crisis (1929).
Thanks, and fair question! You’re right about the website part, I mentioned it in my post: I’m not a developer, so part of the code and a lot of the design come from Claude Code or from a software developer who makes suggestions on how to implement more neatly. Fair point on the font too, maybe I should pick something less typical, its not a top priority atm because the website is more thought as a personal website where I can upload my projects for people to read when interested.
The research itself is a different story though. Which funds and banks to include, how to define things so they’re actually comparable (for example how to treat funds where the interest differs per pension plan), going through the reports and checking the numbers is my part, of course I also ask a prof or AI whether that even makes sense or look it up somewhere. That’s also why every value links to the exact page in the original report, so nobody has to trust me or an AI and can just check it.
Updates planned: the broker and 3a templates are linked to the providers’ published price lists and I review them every six months, next time in April. The 3a contribution limits get checked every autumn. The pension fund data is updated once a year in summer, when the new annual reports are out. The SNB figures update automatically because I can extract the data straight from them once they are out. Behind the calculators there’s a set of tests and an independent recalculation, so if a number changes in a way it shouldn’t, I notice. It’s still a manual review in the end, so if you ever spot an outdated fee, please tell me.
CPEV and CPEG: as far as I understand it, they are only partially funded (75.9 % and 78.6 % at the end of 2025) and rely on the state guarantee, so yes, if things go wrong it’s ultimately the canton that stands behind them. Partially funded public schemes have to reach a funding ratio of 80 % by 2052 under federal law. Whether their longevity assumptions are realistic would be an interesting analysis on its own, I’ll put it on my list, that might be interesting.
Long term Swiss stock returns: great idea, and I agree most resources are very US focused. As far as I know, Pictet publishes a study on Swiss stocks and bonds going back to 1926, which would include 1929. I’d have to check whether I’m allowed to use the data, but a CHF based long term view is definitely something I’d like to build. Turns out getting the data and being allowed to publish an analysis is the hardest part of it all
It could influence perception. People could bring up these topics to the people working in one‘s pension fund comitee in the company. Most people have no idea that this exists and that there are such differences.
Maybe there could be a long term shift of funds getting better and people benefiting from it.
Sure, but that’s kind of missing the point of what I’m doing. I’m a master student, not trying to tell anyone which broker to pick. For me it’s mostly practice: collecting data properly, checking it, documenting the method and making it readable. Whether it’s fees, pension funds or banks, the work behind it is pretty much the same.
And the honest constraint is data. There’s a lot that would be interesting, but very little that’s public and that you’re actually allowed to publish. So I take what’s available and try to do it properly.
If you know of a good public dataset that nobody has really looked at, I’m all ears.
or taking influence in the Pillar 2 provider chosen by the employer.
But i learned also my 2cts: changed employer ans HR assured me they have a really great solution for pillar 2, they changed recently and new one is supposed to be much better. Turns out ir was a crappy Axa solution, very low % of salary insured for death etc and only minimum by law return. But for HR the solution was great because a broker was between axa and themselfe taking care of all the open questions etc..
My learning: always ask for detailed documentation of pillar 2, dont trust HR knowledge in this topic
(moved away after 1 year for other reasons mainly)
I am enclined to say you are right, but I would beg to differ that for some people, it can be really difficult on a structural level (not out of lazyness).
However a direct comparison would help bring transparency into the jungle and actually give arguments on how good/bad one solution is.
Nope there is none to my knowledge and it is actually part of the problem. So thank you for your service.
Yeah, that’s the frustrating part. Most of the data exists somewhere, it’s just scattered across annual reports and pdf’s that nobody puts together.
So that’s basically my workaround: if the dataset doesn’t exist, I build it from the original documents (if I can find them of course). For the pension funds that meant going through all the annual reports one by one, same for the cantonal banks. Slow, but at least every number can be traced back to a page.
I also put the cleaned data out as CSV with all sources, so if someone wants to do their own analysis they don’t have to start from zero again
Next one I want to try is takeover premiums on the swiss market. Every public tender offer comes with a prospectus that states how much above the share price the buyer is paying, but I haven’t seen anyone collect them all in one place, so maybe I can get a hold of that.
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