I prefer to invest in the big beasts like XOM. I’m still keeping away from exploration for now.
Wow, seems Liberty was cheap in pre-market. Opening plus 20%, total +38%. But all in one month and my minimum holding period is 6 months (adhering to Kreisschreiben 36). Anything can happen in the next 5 months…
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I am not one to talk because I follow rules and regulations religiously, but I have noticed you often refer to this rule, while the forum wisdom suggests that tax officials take a holistic and pragmatic view of anyone’s trades, and non-professional traders won’t ever be accidentally be considered professional! That said, it’s probably different for you since you have FIREd. Dunno, you know best for you - I don’t doubt that!
Greek it up!
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Yes, that is why I have two strategies. XOM probably would make it into the divi strategy.
I heard from a good source that they start looking closer when the estate rises one million in a year. If all is from tax-free capital gains, only the rules of the Kreisschreiben may save you. This is Kanton Zurich, every Kanton, even every Steuerkommissär, will handle it differently. That was the original reason for Kreisschreiben 36, to give us investors some legal certainty.
I was checked for it last year. I did send in all the documents they asked for, mainly the complete trading records. Haven’t heard anything, so I suppose I’m OK.
Addendum: just checked the egovbox, 2024 is definitive now. What a relief.
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I don’t see how the state could legally argue that building your own ETF and doing the trades yourself is different to holding an ETF where the trades are essentially outsourced to the company building the ETF.
Volume and holding period are easily broken by normal investors. If you are FIREd you also automatically break rule three so it boils down to not use options or margin loans.
- They do exactly that in most countries that have a capital gain tax. You trade - tax. ETF trades - no tax.
- There is no logic in taxes. Not even law. The new tax regime that has you pay for interest received but doesn’t let you deduct interest paid is probably against laws or constitution.
- The rules of the Kreisschreiben are just to make sure you won’t be taxed if all are adhered. If not, the person, Steuerkommissär, decides and you have to spend a lot of money (your lawyers and the lawyers of the taxman which ultimately you pay too) to challenge that.
- In theory a stock ETF that does not hold its stocks for 6 months would break the Kreisschreiben rules.
Sometimes I think taxes should just be like a lottery, to be paid in advance. I think the idea is from the underground economist.
Not exactly. I spend less than my taxable income from dividends and now AHV, so I adhere to that rule. I hope when I’m 100 and need the money for paying myself for caretaking they don’t define me as professional trader…
I probably would leave Switzerland in that case. I don’t spend too much time here anyhow. But then not having to adhere to the rules would make me take on more risk as I would change my strategies to only realize gains up to the same amount there are losses. The money I take out would be on credit, like all the rich do. I would probably pay even less taxes as I would not need to invest in dividend stocks any longer.
Soo.. I did an experiment with CHDVD and chatgpt and this is what I got:
Basically you can buy CHDVD. Not sure about Financials, since the NA is because ChatGpt says it doesn’t make sense to calculate on them.
They are in order of weight, maybe the only change is to weight them according to their dividend (not smart?).
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Thanks, interesting. But AI???
Financials are more complicated, as their trading good is money. You have to remove or add some things. Shit, now I helped the AI to learn something. It is not that it doesn’t make sense to calculate them, it makes a lot of sense. It is just that the AI doesn’t know how to do it and the numbers may be difficult to come by if you don’t have a standardised data set like EDGAR.
No doubt there are good companies outside of U.S. But I would never touch Swiss companies because of the 35% dividend withholding tax, I think 15% in the U.S. is already way too much. Why do I have to give an interest free loan to the taxman?
There are more than enough companies for me in the biggest market in the world. The risk is not higher as most of those companies make their money around the world.
BTW: I would never trust an AI with financial research, NEVER! I may have them made me some love poem but any serious question (like: on festival X does El Drogas act on Friday or Saturday?) is just answered with bullshit. And if you ask twice you get two different bullshit answers. I suppose that is how AI works for now, we serve them as teacher, they tell us bullshit and learn from our reaction.
I cannot use a ETF directly because of several of my rules. The buy low sell high part with market dividends and adding to cheaper stocks only and the crash recovery part make a lot of the good performance, I don’t get that in an ETF.
Also seems CHDVD did not perform very well, even if you include the CHF/USD difference:
For some reasons Swiss investors LOVE these underperforming flat lines.
I am a Swiss investor. But as a contrarian I have a negative home bias. 
Ehm, you get it back as far as I understand? Goofy had FASTgraphed CHDVD, seems like the top 5 (out of 20) holdings looked good, which is a good thing given they cover about 70% of the ETF
Yes, usually in October, after 10-22 months. An interest free credit to the tax lady.
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At least it’s performing better than a savings account 
Can’t you just withhold a bit of your tax payment in anticipation?
They have the money already, it is deducted from the dividend.
The interest starts in October, after 10-22 months of them taking out the withholding tax. You don’t have to pay the rest of your tax until October, then the interest flows in both directions.
I used AI just to know how to calculate it. The rest is just python + yahoo finance. No way I’ll trust it to generate the table. I can post the code but last time I got 0 views so I just posted the results here.
What I find interesting is that I have a list of company that seems to follow your rules, but now I have no idea how you would theoretically buy them.
One missing rule is that you don’t pick too much companies from the same industry. Then?
You might go after the higher dividend? CLN vs HOLN , higher dividend vs lower debt?
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I described the complete method including money and position management early in this thread.
It is 4% per position initial, no more than 20% of the same sector. I sort the candidates by dividend yield. As I am lazy I usually take the Dow Jones U.S. Dividend 100 Index as starting point.
BTW: I only use the numbers in EDGAR, yahoo finance has too many errors. Sometimes they mix up currencies in calculating their numbers, sometimes I have absolutely no idea how they get to their numbers.
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But then CLN has only a high dividend payout compared to HOLN because it’s share price has been decreasing quite a bit since 2-3 years. So there must be a filtering process before taking the dividend yield as comparison.
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