Recommendation for my portfolio

Investing / Portfolios
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First of all, I’m new to this forum. I found it a couple of days ago and have been addicted to reading it to increase my knowledge. Thank you all for the great information available here.

Unfortunately, I also realized that I’ve been making quite a few “mistakes.” (big and small)

My situation is this:
I’m a 32-year-old Swiss citizen, with no wife or kids. I don’t have a finance background.
My goal is to let my investments compound until close to retirement age.

I’m thinking of investing heavily over the next few years and then, from age 40+, working only part-time maybe 80%, and from 50+ around 60%. Something like Coast FIRE or Barista FIRE. That would mean I wouldn’t contribute much after, let’s say, age 45 and would work mainly to cover my expenses. Naturally, things could change depending on health or family situation.

I started investing about six years ago after coming across some American finfluencers and realizing the power of compounding. I started with ZKB and later switched to IBKR after seeing the fees. My portfolio is skewed toward the U.S. because most of my information came from U.S. YouTubers.

So my portfolio currently looks like this. I will change it in the future, but I wanted some input from you guys first:

  • VOO (S&P 500): 130k USD

  • VWRL (Vanguard FTSE All-World): 80k CHF

  • EIMI (Emerging Markets): 38k USD

  • VT (Total World): 25k USD

  • IUSC (S&P 500 hedged CHF): 14k CHF

  • TQQQ (Nasdaq leveraged): 13k USD

  • 3A Frankly (95% Stocks): 25k CHF

Context: I started with VOO as my main position years back. TQQQ was something I bought when the market tanked due to the tariffs. I’ve started selling that position and have been adding the gains to VT and VOO. EIMI is included because of the theory that a 70% World / 30% Emerging split is ideal. I bought it a few years ago but haven’t added to it since.

My current recurring investments are as follows:

  • 800 USD weekly in VT (2 × 400 USD)

  • 2,000 CHF monthly in IUSC

  • 1,500 CHF monthly in VWRL

My thinking was that the fees to buy VT are negligible, so buying it twice a week might help capture volatility better. However, after looking into it more, I think this thought process is flawed, and that buying once a week—or even monthly—should be sufficient in the long run.

After reading various posts, I’m considering consolidating everything into VT, while maybe keeping some EIMI exposure and some CHF in IUSC from VWRL. I understand that currency hedging is generally not recommended, but the CHF is so strong compared to basically every other currency.

I’m also expecting the U.S. to continue outperforming the rest of the world. They host most of the major AI companies, and AI will likely play a significant role in the coming decades. I understand that this is speculative and that I could very well be wrong. That’s why I’m planning to consolidate mostly into VT. My recurring investments would then shift to VT, with some allocation to IUSC.

Another major issue I’ve realized concerns taxes. So far, I’ve simply uploaded my tax reporting file from IBKR into eTax(ZHprivateTax), and they only considered my overall “wealth” and applied wealth tax (Vermögenssteuer). I’ve never reported individual positions, nor have I declared any dividends, and I was never asked about them. Maybe my portfolio wasn’t big enough to justify a second look?

I’m thinking of either calling my Gemeinde or writing them an email so I can properly pay taxes on the dividends from past years. Consolidating into one or two ETFs and buying monthly should also make tax filing easier in the future, right? As I understand from other posts, VT would also yield more than VWRL after withholding taxes.

Another thing I’ve been contemplating is potentially moving part of my investments to Swissquote or Saxo after reaching, let’s say, 500k. Is diversifying across brokerage firms recommended, or would it be better to keep everything with IBKR? One idea would be to keep half with IBKR (and continue buying through IBKR) and hold the other 50% with a different brokerage, just to somewhat limit the risk of having everything in one place.

I would be glad to receive any feedback, recommendations, or tips on how I should move forward. I understand that there are many topics here to pick apart. I’m also aware that I should have informed myself more before I started investing, but here we are.:sweat_smile: I hope to learn and grow on my journey ahead. Thanks for reading up to this point!

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Welcome!

I recommend that. Btw, hedged products on stocks do not make sense. The first quater of this year is probably one of the few times, where ETF-hedging made sense. But on longterm, there is a worser performance than with the original underlying.

I’m also just using the final number and adding the report - but in comparison to you, I am declaring the dividends, since I want some money back :slight_smile:
Probably, you have to self-report yourself for that mistake. Self-reporting is only possible once a lifetime without any penalty taxes on top.

I personally recommend that, check out the fees of Saxo Bank. Another idea could be continueing with VT on IBKR (US-etf and only 15% WHT) and using VWRL (IE-etf) with Saxo.

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I can share what I do in this regard. I have a PF account with all my Swiss shares (NOVN, ROG,NESN, ZURN, BION, HBMN, Holcim and Amrize) and the ETF’s VWRL and EIMI. With the quarterly dividend from VWRL in USD I buy EIMI or some more VWRL with the CHF dividends from the shares to use up the trading credit that I get from the 18CHF fees.

That represents more or less 40% of my wealth, the remaining 60% are at IBKR in VT and some satellite stocks (handpicked with a bad performance :zany_face: ). only at IBKR I buy regularly. I also see that VWRL and VT are more or less equal in value even if that is not the best from a performance perspective. This setup gives me peace of mind even if it’s not ideal from several perspective (fee’s, not ideal ETF selection, lower wealth at IBKR impacting the possibility to obtain margin, etc.).

All the best and welcome to the forum.

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Similar here, but mostly VT on both brokers. Depending on amount you can either buy directly from the dividends on PF or it’s cheaper to transfer back to IB and buy there.

Even quarterly or twice a year won’t matter in the end (5-10y). What matters is to be disciplined and always buy according to plan (don’t delay because you feel like it’s too expensive, etc.), basically you’d don’t want to expose yourself to thinking about the market when you’re buying.

You do realize that hedging costs you the differential of interest rate, right? (so 4% per year for USD).

It would but for smaller amounts it won’t matter as much (e.g. if your tax rate is closer to 15% than to 40%). Plus anyway we’re talking about low 0.x% per year, it’s good to optimize but make sure you optimized the rest first.

Having gone through this journey (overweight EM, split ETF, etc.), I think the simpler the setup is (1-2 ETF max, little chance for making personal judgement on allocation) the better.

When EM was underperforming for many years, it’s really hard to stay the course for example (and see your portfolio underperform VT). With a single ETF portfolio you don’t even get the chance to compare :slight_smile:

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Can you have VT also at PF? I thought that in this case you would have 30% tax on it?

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You can try to write them a note in the 2025 declaration. Telleing that you realised some mistake and ask for corrections. It is very much possible that they correct you outside of the self-reporting mechanism. This way you‘ll your „out of jail“ card . If they dont do it, no harm done either, they will count it as self reporting.

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You can, there’s supplemental withholding (R-US + DA-1) vs. IB (only DA-1) but you get it back a year later similarly.

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Thank you very much. I’m thinking of using the strategy of holding VT in IBKR and VWRL on Saxo or Swissquote. I haven’t checked the fees for either recently yet.

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I wasn’t even aware that there is a one-time self-reporting mechanism,:sweat_smile: but I will definitely try to keep that in my back pocket and mention the issue in a note with my tax declaration first.:folded_hands: Thank you.

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Yes, I think I’m going to reduce my recurring investments to buying monthly for the same total amount. That way, it will also be easier for tax reporting if they want to see all my positions.

I don’t understand this part. Since it’s a hedged ETF, it should go up and down similarly to the underlying ETF, right? The difference being that it is regularly (I think monthly) hedged into CHF? Is the 4% referring to holding cash in USD compared to holding cash in CHF? To be honest, I’m not quite sure how hedging works. I only started buying it this year after seeing USD devaluing against CHF and feeling I had to do something.

That’s the ultimate goal, I think. That way I don’t have to second-guess myself and can just continue on my path forward. I have another question: PF was mentioned as a broker. Is that PostFinance? Thank you very much :folded_hands: I’ve already learned a lot and now have more clarity moving forward.:+1:

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If you want to hedge some USD, you lock in a price for the exchange rate in the future. But this has a cost, and the cost is the differential of interest rate (CHF ~0%, USD ~3.5%).

So as an exemple, if everything is fixed (FX rate and interest rate), the return of your hedged version will be 3.5% below the unhedged one (return minus cost of hedging).

That leads us to interest rate parity (check wikipedia) which expects USD to devalue by the interest rate differential over a large amount of time, so that any arbitrage disappears. (so especially for volatile assets like equity, removing FX volatility doesn’t increase return significantly).

There’s bunch of caveats but that’s the idea.

Yes, that’s Postfinance (they use swissquote as underlying platform with slightly cheaper custody fee, plus the assets count to make the banking package free)

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