Meine Erfahrungen mit VIAC und der Kontoauflösung / My Experiences with VIAC and Closing the Account

Banks, Insurances & Third Pillar
22

I am not suggesting that it would have saved the loss.
I am just suggesting that it would have been clear how much money would be moved

Right now OP is of opinion that ViAC should have informed them before selling assets. Such a situation wouldn’t occur if stocks were sold before triggering a move

The point here is that account in Viac is nothing different than any other account. The only difference is who is taking action to sell the assets and at what moment.

If investor would first sell assets & then trigger a move then they are moving cash. If they first trigger a move then they are dependent on timing of application processing

I would rather own my decision and timing

23

You instructed them to sell, and they sold. If you want someone to discuss your decisions with you and be able to overrule you when they deem it beneficial, you should have chosen a firm that offers wealth management mandates.

Suck it up, learn from it, and leave it behind you. As far as mistakes go, this one was pretty mild.

3 Likes
24

I understand this is an unwelcome surprise.
But would you have complained, if due to market volatility, you would have received CHF 42,400?

2 Likes
25

I’m still a bit surprised at the responses here*. I can see the point of a trading day, especially after reading Poolg and Netting. In the long term, that makes sense. But on the other hand, it’s like placing a market order, but it would be executed at a random time in the next ~6 hours (“in the morning of the trading day”) but if the market falls you can’t cancel even though the trade has not yet been executed. In my head I still think it makes sense for automatic rebalancing, but not for account closing. When closing or change to 100% money, I would accept the fees and place an immediate market order or a limit order. However, this does not seem to be available anywhere.

*I’m a beginner, maybe that’s why.

26

Because the cost to do it for one person would be more than what this guy ‘lost’.

27

A fee of CHF 1,700 for a CHF 40,700 Trade? That sounds high to me.

28

Take a budget of 1700 and see how far you get to hire someone to create the processes and procedures to allow this and ensure all the things are done correctly, manage the risk and ensure nothing goes wrong.

The budget wouldn’t even cover the cost of the initial internal meeting to discuss it.

1 Like
29

You’re a product manager in your job, aren’t you? :laughing:

1 Like
30

I’ve seen enough corporate bureaucracy to have witnessed seemingly simple tasks become impossible or expensive.

I (reluctantly) once had to authorize a $3,000 budget for a consultant to write a zero on a form and mail it out because our internal processes couldn’t manage this simple procedure (and BTW, this is an ongoing annually recurring compliance requirement).

Now that I think of it, I should have kept tabs on all these nonsense jobs and awarded them to myself when I quit to have a nice little retirement income…

1 Like
31

b2t

I agree to everything that has been said.
By the way: 300 CHF of the 1’700 CHF difference was the fee for the account closure (in case of WEF it’s not free).

What I do find slightly odd is that there was a 3.4% loss (40’700 to 39’300 CHF) between 31.7. and 6.8., while the by far biggest security of the Global 20 Strategy, SBI weighted at 67%, was up almost 3%. Yes stocks went down during that period, but you would think it shouldn’t have had such a “big” impact on the portfolio performance.

32

Maybe part of it was in something volatile like bitcoin?

33

S&P500 lost 10%, CHF went up 2.5% vs USD over that period. I think you can choose not to have bunds in your strategy so OP might not have had that fund in his portfolio ? Without the exact pieces in the portfolio it’s difficult to make the maths…

Coming back to the exit strategy when I transferred my 3A from UBS to Viac it took a month and I was lucky that the market increased during that time… At least with Viac you can execute the sale over several weeks easily to reduce market volatility.

1 Like
34

If you want to fully understand the loss you’d need to post the situation of your portfolio in the last reporting before the sale so we can do the maths based on funds reported liquidation values. Also in the sale they must have mentioned how many pieces they sold and when the sale occurred. Then we’d be able to understand whether the difference makes sense or not.

If you still have access to your VIAC account you should be able to generate a report as of 31.07 on demand and it will show you the number of pieces / prices for each line of the portfolio.

2 Likes
35

Das Problem ist, dass Du Dir nicht bewusst warst dass VIAC immer nur am Dienstag handelt. Du hast zwar am 31. Juli gekündigt, VIAC handelte jedoch erst am 6. August. Somit hat VIAC deine Kündigung erst am 6. August verarbeitet und die Gewinne welche Du per 31. Juli sahst waren (noch nicht realisierte) Buchgewinne - die sich dann bis zum 6. August teilweise wieder aufgelöst haben.

Grundsätzlich ist das so alles korrekt, VIAC deklariert klar, dass sie nur am Dienstag handeln. Nun hattest einfach allerdings Pech, da Aktien vom 31. Juli bis zum 6. August stark gesunken sind. Somit hast Du einen Verlust realisiert, welchen Du nicht erwartet hast.

Rückblickend stellt sich für mich die Frage, ob für Dich 20% Aktienanteil angemessen waren oder nicht. Ggf. bist Du ein Kunde, welcher mit einer reinen Kontolösung besser aufgehoben ist - dies da Du die Schwankungen von Aktien resp. deren Risiko (noch) nicht kennst.

Was hättest Du anderst machen können: Hättest Du die Strategie zuerst auf Cash gestellt, und erst dann gekündigt - so hättest du genau das gleiche Resultat erreicht. Dies es seie denn, du hättest die Strategie schon 1, 2 Wochen früher auf Cash gestellt. Der Unterschied ist dem Glück geschuldet. Solange Du in der Periode vom 31. Juli bis ca. zum 20 August Deine Strategie auf ca. 20% Aktien gelassen hättest (oder der Verkauf schon vor dem 31. Juli gehandelt worden wäre) - so lange wäre nichts passiert. In dieser Zeit sind die Märkte einfach kurzfristig eingebrochen und das war Pech…

to the community: Not every investor is made for a very high equity allocation; and clearly not for 100% shares as many here treat like the holly grail

6 Likes
36

It’s not a fee, it’s misleading and unfair (to VIAC) to describe it as such. It’s not even a cost, it’s just unlucky market timing.

This unlucky market timing highlights a point which is very rarely discussed properly and in any depth in most places - even here, though this forum is among the best I’ve seen - we talk a lot about entry and the journey but not nearly enough about exit.

I suspect it’s because in most investment fora people are early/mid journey, and focus their energy in saving and studying their investments, their risk tolerance etc. When I started I thought “I won’t bother thinking about exiting because there’s too much ground to cover, once I’m close I’ll figure it out”, however that’s not ideal, I believe one must prepare a handful of realistic scenarios to have a game plan at least “t[ime of event] - 6 months”, even 12 months.

6 Likes
37

The volatility/transaction is unavoidable. If you really want to mitigate the risk, you might be able to use some derivatives to lock in value at the time you want.

You’re really only exposed to a few days between when you sell and when you get the money to be able to re-invest back into the market.

38

We talk about an investor that uses 20% of shares, we don’t talk about a pro investor that deals with derivatives. That comment doesn’t help.

1 Like
39

In average, its better for the investor when trading only takes place once a week but not immediately once VIAC received your sales order. Reason beeing is that every sales order attracts some cost. Be it currency exchange cost or simply cost to exit the fund. The worst example (CS MSCI Emerging Markets) is in the range of 1.5%+. If VIAC now waits until next Tuesday, it can probably net your sale with someone who wants to invest. Meaning both avoid cost (for the sale and the buy). This is probably an important reason why VIAC will never sell immediately but always just e.g. on Tuesdays. Clearly, the above example is a case where Averages don’t work and another processing was better - but this is an exception case.

To be honest, I would do something else if I was VIAC. I would by default only show / updated Prices every Tuesday (so that People don’t even see the value they had on Wednesday). This probably behind an “i know what volatility is” trigger or only for bespoke strategies so that only people that know what they are doing see the value their portfolio had on Wednesdays et all…

40

Well, it worked out better for the person buying…

41

Immediate execution wouldn’t even be possible with (mutual) index funds as used by VIAC. Fund subscription/redemption does not (directly) involve a stock exchange and is possible only once a day (with a fund-specific cut-off time for the order).

Daily instead of weekly would be possible but there would always be some delay. And if your termination on the 31st of July was after the cut-off time, the earliest possible redemption would have been on 2nd of August as the 1st of August is a holiday, and by then the stock market already had some losses.

When I transferred 3a accounts in the past, I transferred each of my 5 accounts separately to reduce the impact of market volatility.

2 Likes