Introduction + ETF strategy advice needed before putting big money in ETFs

I see another option if you need cash down the road. Instead of investing, you could make a voluntary contribution to your pension fund (provided you have a gap there). This will save you income tax, freeze your money for 3 years and can be withdrawn to purchase your future primary residency.

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Hi, I reached the maximum answer limit yesterday, sorry for the late reply.

Thanks, I will have a look at that, I actually stumbled a couple of times during my research over “Momentum” but didn’t know what it is. Sounds like something that would fit :-). Bitcoin I did years ago, still have some K, but nothing really I would do again, maybe too old now but you never know :-).

Now starting to move money from Liechtenstein to CH and then to IB :+1:
3A paperwork stuff I will postpone to next week, maybe the Viac loss will go to 0 until then :grinning: (currently minus 500). Robos also next week, they did perform pretty good so nothing to regret.

Hi, that’s a good point. I actually didn’t want to put it as a lump sum to IB, but for other reasons. I like your suggestion better. Monthly recurring + once a month or bi-weekly 5 to 10k.

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Hi, you mean the 2nd pillar, right? I heard about that, but never really looked at that. I thought 3A ist the best tax improvement. Currently I pay about 700/month in 2nd pillar. Also I thought, that I can only use 3A for real estate.
I shortly checked and know now that I’m wrong, thanks. Because I’m already 50, I could only request the full amount for another 6 weeks :-), but I don’t have the final redidence, yet. I did not find out so I have to dig deeper. The official website gives a 404 Error.
Also the tax advantages are not clear to me, I need to research as well. The question is, if this is a better advantage than putting it in VT, also I would need to consider the tax topic when I request the money.

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The withdrawable amount should still be sizeable, even after 50. It’s not that a trap door suddenly opens… :smiley:

Whatever you contribute to pillar 2 is fully deductible from your income. Some people have huge gaps and could be paying tens of thousand francs while saving 10-20% of it in taxes. So it is a matter of comparing a one-time benefit of 10-20% with long-term revenues on and short-term risk of VT ETF-Investment.

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Got it, so I have to weigh up and of course inform myself. I’m not married, so it is important for me, that my partner gets the money when I die. With 3A this is not a problem, but I’m like 95% sure, that I also have such a document from Axa for my 2nd pillar.

I see a risk, that I can’t use 2 + 3a for my plan. As long as I don’t live in the house, it is actually not allowed to use it when buying. On the other hand, I have used 3A already twice for the same thing and no one questioned it. But there is a risk that someone really looks into it when I request it again.

Difficult decision, 50k to 2nd pillar with the mentioned risk or to VT :thinking:
I somehow need to be able to see the diffences in numbers, so that I can make a decission. What would you do :-)?

The way I chase higher returns by taking bigger risks is through leverage. To me, it’s the most “reliable” way to do it, though the risk profile is different than pure stocks because of the addition of the risk of liquidation and the drag induced by ongoing costs.

If the fun of comparing the returns of two different assets and number crunching is part of the thought process, I would actually think that small cap value might be a good candidate (so AVUV (US small cap value) and/or AVDV (international (ex US) small cap value) wouldn’t be a bad choice), provided you stay with it for the very long run (30+ years). The graph in this post is, in my opinion, pretty self explanatory of the past behavior of small cap value stocks vs the global market: When do we reach the bottom of the dip? (2022-24 Edition) - #663 by Wolverine

Thanks for the graph, that’s a looooong time period :-). Not sure if I would have that long breath, but I don’t think so.

Let me ask you a question, given your experience with art sales:

How do you estimate the value of the artworks you wish to sell? Do you call in a professional for an estimate? Do you use a specialized platform and if so, could you share this information?

Hi, the estimation for me comes from experience, sales in the past and the market like invaluable, liveauctioneers…
Auction houses like these are listing their items there because they have a lot of customers and they get often higher prices than putting it on their small website. Organizing an auction is also not that easy.
And there are auction houses who will give you an idea, also there are online platforms with experts giving a rough estimate. I never had to use those, but I would assume that it works not bad.

Not sure if it was meant seriously, but I have checked leveraged ETFs and find them pretty interesting. Unfortunately I see a problem regarding the taxes.
I don’t unterstand all 5 criterias that qualifies someone as a professional, but if 1 meet only one of them, it is already enough.
The holding period for leveraged ETFs seems usually shorter than 6 months, so I can’t/shouldn’t buy them so that they don’t threat me as a professionell :frowning:

For the criteria it doesn’t matter how long the fund holds the underlying securities, what matters is how long you hold the fund.

There are several topics here in the forum regarding the professional investor status, it’s very rare that someone gets classified as a professional investor. I and many others here “broke” some of these rules and nobody has been classified as professional investor.

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Ok, back in the game :-). Thank you!

Hi, just wanted to give some Update after 6 weeks. I started with DCA (4 x 5k until now). I tried to buy when it is low, but of course this doesn’t always work out :slight_smile:
Currently I’m about 270 CHF in the red, but sometimes it was already the same in “+”. I don’t worry, but it would be good to have something like a stable green, but I have patience and will keep putting like 5k every 2 weeks into the account until everything is in the account. In the beginning the CHF/USD rate was like 0.03 better, but I read and understood, that this is not really a problem.

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Hi, probably a stupid question, but maybe it makes sense. I started to buy VT in August last year, after that I bought some other ETFs, too and put more and more money into the portfolio. Currently it is about 80k CHF.

The profits I made are mostly gone since Friday due to the Israel conflict etc. Does it make sense now to sell before I actually loose money and buy again later?

Thanks

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Who’s to say it won’t go back up to higher levels than before 10 minutes after you sell everything?

I would only consider selling if I was 100% certain that VT will never go back to the levels where it was previously, and I can’t know that. If anything, it might be a good time to buy more at a discount.

Sometimes the market goes up, sometimes it goes down. In the long run it will even out.

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No.

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Prudent advice would be to do nothing. Because that normally is best thing to do.

The question is how do you convince yourself to do that.

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VT I would keep, still 1670 USD profit. I was unspecific in my post, sorry for that. I have other ETFs like SMH where I’m about to go below 0 and some where the ETFs already dropped below 0. Basically the ones which I bought this year. SCHG and SMH I made like 500 CHF each but it is gone now. I’m also holding XHB, AVUV and AVDV.

For the non VT ETFs I paid 45k USD and the current value is 44.6k USD.

My thought was if it would be a good idea to sell them before I loose money and then buy again once the market has recovered from the current news.

You can try but you most likely wouldn’t be able to time your moves perfectly.

Perhaps you should take some time to think and review if your non-VT investment’s should even be in your portfolio. It seems you are not really convinced about these investments long term and maybe only wanted to trade.

What exactly is your plan ?

  1. World equity exposure (VT, VWRL etc)
  2. Factor based equity exposure (small cap value, value, momentum, etc)
  3. Theme based equities (like semi conductors)
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