Hello together
My situation: I am 20 years young and a student. I live in Hotel Mama and don’t have any major expenses.
Thanks to my military service, civilian service, work in the retail trade and other small jobs, I have already saved up CHF 60,000.
I have been studying the subject of investing intensively and have already gained some initial experience. I have already used Interactive Brokers, Degiro and Yuh.
My strategy is to invest money that I won’t need for the next 15 years in a global ETF. At the moment it looks like this:
CHF 20,000 in the bank for later expenses such as a car, rental flat, etc.
CHF 5,000 is invested in tangible assets (diversification)
CHF 10,000 is already invested in a global ETF.
CHF 15,000 still needs to be invested in a global ETF.
And I still work 20% in retail (about CHF 800 per month)
Now my dilemma:
I know that Interactive Brokers is unbeatable in terms of fees, provided I invest in the VT. However, I am unsure whether it is ideal to invest in an ETF in USD. If the USD depreciates sharply or the USD is replaced as the main currency in the ETF, will there be no loss of return compared to an ETF in CHF?
How do you handle this?
First of all - congrats on a fantastic start to your financial independence!
You are probably quite lonely among your peers, working on it so early.
Just also make sure to enjoy your twenties and spend some of it. 
No worries, the currency of the ETF is irrelevant in the long term (and currency-hedging stocks is mostly just an additional cost).
First of all congrats for your achievement !
Regarding the subject above, there is a good Wiki post from @Helix which you may want to have a look at.
Great achievement!
Which retail pays 800 CHF per day (or week at 20%)?
Please excuse me, of course that’s not true. @zrher
I will correct this in a moment. It should be month instead of week. It is a normal student job at a retailer. But it would be nice to have a salary like that as a student 
I work at ‘Otto’s’ in sales as an hourly wage earner (gross wage just under CHF 25/hour)
At ‘Coop’ you would have an hourly wage of just under CHF 28/hour.
How do I know that? I have two colleagues who work at Coop as students.
Thank you for your kind words @dbu , I appreciate that.
And don’t worry, I’m really enjoying my 20s, but without neglecting my health 
Thank you for your reply! Then I invest in the VT without any worries. 
Thank you for your helpful reply with the link @weirded !
I will have a look at the article right away with pleasure.
Have a nice one 
Regarding currency dilemma think about it as if you had 1 million CHF and you wanted to buy a company in US.
Let’s assume CHF / USD is 1.2
Company in US offers you a price of 1.2 million USD or 1 Million CHF whichever currency you like
Now you have two options
- you exchange CHF to USD and pay 1.2 Mill USD
- You pay 1 Mill CHF
In both cases, following is same
- the company is still in US
- what you paid for the company was 1 million CHF
- When you invest in foreign companies. You always take a risk that their earnings are in USD. This means if CHF appreciates against USD, your returns would be negatively impacted but this has nothing to do with which currency you used to buy the company. This is inherent risk of foreign investments
Investing in VT is like exchanging CHF to USD and then buying ETF in USD. That’s all
If there was an ETF called VTCH (where trading currency was CHF), you underlying investments would be exactly the same.
In summary , focus on following
- buy ETF with low TER
- But ETF in currency which is easiest for you to get.
- If you use low cost brokers with low forex fees, you don’t lose much while exchanging currencies
- For IBKR, it doesn’t really matter much if ETF is in USd , EUR or CHF. The forex fees are low
- For Swissquote, I would normally prefer CHF denominated ETfs because the forex fees on Swissquote is high
Thank you for your illustrative example, which helped me a lot.
I will definitely opt for IBKR.
Have a nice day! 
While currency risk is a real risk to keep in mind when making investment decisions (e.g. @dbu described the fact that with global and diversified long-term stock investing you might not need to worry about it) I want to highlight that the problem you described (whether to buy a stock or ETF in CHF or USD) is not the currency risk: (currency hedged instruments aside) what currency you use to buy a stock/ETF does not matter in terms of returns because you are buying the same thing. It would be the same as deciding on whether to buy a car in USD or CHF in the hope that the car will appreciate in value when a specific currency goes up: there can’t be a difference between two scenarios as the underlying asset is the same thing.
What matters for the currency risk is what currency the business of the companies you are buying is tied to, and that is much harder to quantify (e.g. if you just buy Lindt stock you won’t be fully protected from the risk of non-CHF currencies fluctuations: it’s a big international company and its returns will depend also on other currencies).
So focus mainly on what you are buying and not which currency you use to do it.
To nitpick, the currency that you use to buy does matter, but only for minor things such as:
- transaction costs to convert between currencies
- a certain currency might imply a different exchange for the same instrument and a different exchange might mean different spread, thus less advantageous prices when you buy/sell
Welcome
By the way. If you ever fees like you need to reduce your currency exposure. Read a bit about hedged currency ETFs. They are not a panacea but they do exist
For now - just chill and forget about your portfolio after you have invested
Thank you for your answer and illustration.
I absolutely agree with you, especially the last point regarding spread costs should not be neglected.
If I compare the spreads for ETFs on the SIX in CHF and the spreads for ETFs with US domicile, additional costs of 10-20 centimes can arise on the SIX per investment of CHF 200 (about 0.1%).
Amazing. I’ve been there (in retail) 15 years ago and it seems to be still the same salary. They somehow manage to avoid inflation on the student workers salaries. Not on the products they’re selling, of course.
Hmm strange. That’s not possible. I only received a pay rise this year as a result of the inflation adjustment (Otto’s).