Mustachian portfolios

You’re losing money with it at crazy rate from holding (Weighted Average Yield To Maturity: -0.62%), fund expenses (-0.15%), taxes (assuming 35% tax * 2% distribution yield: -0.70%) and transaction costs. The only way you’d make any money out of it is if yields would drop down a lot more and that’s not exactly happening for good last half a year (SNB, Bloomberg).

There’s no reason for retail investors to buy any of these negative yielding abominations. You can just hold the cash in a savings account at 0% and still be covered by the government up to 100k per bank. Once you start running out of banks you could trust your money to, then it might make some sense to do it, to put the trust into government. Otherwise it’s just a rather expensive bet on interest rates going down.

You might have bought it from an exchange which quoted it to you in GBP, but don’t fool yourself: it’s not really tied to GBP in any way and only has 28% of UK companies in it. And also it seems to have already some 10% in Switzerland, overlapping somewhat with your SLI position (e.g Nestle Novartis Roche make up 7% and 26% in each).

If you’re certain that you want to buy in 3-5 years and have a high tax burden, I’d rather put the money for downpayment into pillar 2 and 3. Tax savings is guaranteed income (albeit one time only) and easily blows away other investment alternatives for such a short term, despite abysmal interest rates.

But if you’d rather stay heavily in equities for this period, then I’d at least cut out EM and small caps, these casinos will tank faster than the market in a downturn, they are rather low on defensive sectors. Maybe also consider low volatility themed funds instead of capitalization weighted.

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