My background + suggestions on pillar 3a & personal investing

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Hi all Mustachians!
I am new to this forum (and forums in general), but recently I’ve been a heavy reader of your posts. Through your effort and passion for sharing knowledge, doubts, insights and considerations I have been able to answer most of my questions on Investing in general.
I just want to truly thank all the community here, and I hope there is chance for me to contribute as well from now on.

My story
I am 28y-old. After my studies in CH (2013-2018) and during them I had 2 main interships in MNCs, and currently fully employed indet-period, with nice prospectives for the future career. I am into mgmt for a MNC in machinery equipment. Gross ca.90’000, residence TI canton.

My pillar 3a + personal investments story
I am now approaching the topic for the 1st time in my life and to start with, I spent the last 2 weeks learning (overview level) finance.

from all the materials I’ve been reading, I am planning to start a pillar 3a and investments within the end of the year.

My idea is to:

  • 1st WORKFLOW
    Start asap 5 separate 3a accounts with possibly 5 separate providers (Finpension, Viac, (other 3 best currently? )).
    I have theoretically 37 years ahead. No plans so far to buy property in the future, in a couple of years I’ll investigate the topic. Mandatory for me is to be able to switch provider as a better provider offer (and opportunity-cost-wise) joins the market; invest the full tax deductible amount (currently permit B, in 2023 permit C, current expected tax return CHF1400); reinvest the tax return each year in private investments (talk about this later).

  • 2nd WORKFLOW
    Apart from the CHF6883 for pillar 3a, I’d like to put at work another ca. CHF24’000/year + yearly 3a tax refund with a broker. I realistically plan to open this workflow from ca. Jan 2022. This won’t be trading. This would ideally be a strategy of mid-term investments with a cost-averaging of ca.24K yearly budget to allocate with flexibility if, when and how strategically worth it.

*First questions: do these previous points turned up your noses? Anything you would consider already wrong/improvable? *

Second question: having 5 different providers would allow me to start fully split. I know that in the future I can merge 2 accounts, but never split. That’s why… Further more, if today I would have providers A, B, C, D, E (being A most competitive and E least competitive) and tomorrow the new provider F is the most competitive in the market, I would transfer the account with E into F provider, keeping the others untouched. Is this generally a good idea?
Instead, if I would open 5 portfolios with Finpension only and 2/5/10/20 years from now the provider “F” is better, then I would be forced to either move all of them to F or to stay with Finpension. Is that correct or I missed something?

  • Products considerations:
    For pillar 3a, I would prefer to stay with proposed solutions rather than customize portfolios (unless you guys know that they are really under-performing/under-optimised solutions).
    I read a lot on the Finpension and Viac 100ish solutions and I find them attractive.
    I am unsure on whether 100ish or 80ish solutions would be my favourite ones. I have influences from my father (long time investor) about preferring the 80ish (with ca. 20% on bonds), but I don’t know. Looking for your thoughts here.

Finally, again I’ve been given from my father 3 funds name suggested.
They are:
Wellington Global Quality Growth Fund USD Class S Accumulating Unhedged
Isin: LU0629158030
CPR Invest - Global Disruptive Opportunities Class A EUR Acc
Isin: LU1530899142
Morgan Stanley Investment Funds - Emerging Leaders Equity Fund A
Isin: LU0815263628

If I would private investing (IB/Degiro/etc.) in products as similar to them as possible (or even on them directly), what standard/customized strategies with pillar 3a should I follow in order not to double invest on the same securities? I would not like to increase overall strategy risk just by using different money workflows that rely on 100% same products… I hope I’m being clear.

My target:
If my pillar 3a accounts overall in 37 years would perform an avg. yearly price return of ca. 7 (%) I would be satisfied (I mean…if more absolutely better :slight_smile: )
Thinking long-term, what would you consider a fairly confident idea of yearly%return?

Thank you all for your contributions, comments, answers and questions to me that I will gladly reply to give more clarity.
I look forward to you guys.
Cheers
Lupeter

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Hi LuPeter and welcome!

Others are more qualified than I am so I’ll let them answer your questions. I’ll just just throw in a quick 2 cents:

The third would be Frankly. They all have advantages and disadvantages. Since you can change your 3a provider without much hassle (for a small fee), you can make a choice and change later if necessary.

You can move only one account to another provider and keep the 4 other accounts with Finpension, so choosing multiple providers only provides the advantages of having access to different strategies/rebalancing dates/fee structures and protecting your assets from potential major fraud/messing up by your provider. The chance for that to happen and you not getting your assets back are very, very slim but risk assessment is a personal thing.

Speaking of the one I know:

My take is that, for VIAC at least, the Global 80 and Global 100 solutions are pretty similar. I’d go for a custom 80% stocks 20% cash solution if that was my intent, cutting the worst year to -33.07% for a CAGR of 4.01% from 2007 to 2020 (incl.).

Other results may apply to other providers.

For a worldwide, diversified allocation 100% in stocks with low fees and no taxes, in CHF, 5% p.a., nominal. The future doesn’t need to look like the past but the USD has really lost value against the CHF these last decades.

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Welcome here!

I will just touch on a few things without being comprehensive.

The idea of having multiple pillar 3a accounts is in the future, when a staggered draw-down helps lowering taxes for you. So for now it does not make sense to have an elaborate scheme. Open 1-2 accounts with your preferred provider(s) and start investing.

Your father’s tipps look old-school active fund management to me, probably with sizeable annual management fees and no better performance than the passivly managed ETFs the Mustachians love so much. Compare the them to return data @Wolverine has provided.

In direct contradiction to what I have just said, when going for stable setups, sometimes a higher pricetag ensure stability. Free or cheap services will not necessarily be good for you on the long run. There is a minimum price to everything and if you as a customer don’t have to pay it, someone else will. And it might not be in the customer’s best interest (selling marketing data, lending out stocks, selling flow to broker, being exposed to online extortion, keeping dividends, etc.). This refers to securities trading services, fund managers, pension fund providers, etc.

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Not really…

Roughly speaking, the fund seems to have returned a bit more than 300% over the last 10 years - double of what an investment in VT would have returned (a bit more than 150%).

And I don’t think risk or volatility will be much higher, if anything, since (as the name indicates) there’s a high degree of similarity to the Quality criteria / indices we’ve discussed previously.

His/her father seems to have done his homework on that one.

The others are a bit harder to compare due to lack of a longer track record, but I quite like the Emerging Markets Leader Fund’s holdings (and it has outperformed broader EM indices as well).

Both certainly do not seem like funds that have merely been lucky on very risky bets.

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@Wolverine @dom.swiss @San_Francisco thank you all for welcoming me and replying that quickly!
I hope other forum members will join the discussion to feed it even more. Though, you’re already helping me:

Thank you I will then go on for a easier approach: Finpension/Viac only, possibly 4 accounts.
One question here: is rebalancing a setting I can interact with? It is still unclear to me if it is automatic/manual, switchable on/off, etc. In addition, pros and cons of it overall?

@San_Francisco

thanks for your contribution about the comparisons. I am far far away to be fully grasping some financial topics and I am slowly but steadily getting up to speed. That is why I’d tend to wait until 2022 at least before starting with my “2nd Workflow”.

Focusing on what I’d like to start asap, even if considering current market heights… :face_with_monocle: :confused: …

What would be a strong suggestion of Finpension account strategy?
Hypothesis:
2 accounts, as much automated as possible (max I would allow is some initial settings effort in case the suggestion is a custom allocation and custom rebalancing setup). I would not allow the effort of analyzing each month and modifying the strategy/settings everytime.

What would be a strong suggestion of Viac account strategy?
Hypothesis:
2 accounts, as much automated as possible (all details as for Finpension hypothesis above).

Many thanks Mustachians!
Cheers,

Lupeter

P.S.

I’m a boy :boy:t3:

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If I could time warp myself back to your age and time in career, biggest lesson: invest 2k per month into 100% equities, « pay yourself first », and keep investing through market high or low (especially low). With your investment horizon you can afford the risk of equities. Diversification into bonds will come naturally as you get older via Swiss 2nd pillar system or [edit or property if you buy a house]

Everything else is a detail, however:

-suggest to only open 1 3rd pillar account now and open another one in a few years. Avoids complexity of small standing orders and leaves max flexibility to open accounts at new providers in the future

-go for an all world ETF unless you have a conviction why another strategy is going to do better

-Wellington fund looks interesting, but reading their literature their strategy seems a bit less clear than Fundsmith where I invest (separate thread on Fundsmith)

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Your father wanted you to have World Quality.

So… let’s get you World Quality, shouldn’t we?

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I also have my Finpension invested 100% in the MSCI world quality fund - but didn’t want to bring LuPeter into the debate that may follow whether that will outperform MSCI world!

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