Swiss Small/Mid Cap ETFs

Investing / Portfolios
1

In an effort to diversify my portfolio, I am strongly contemplating investing in an ETF covering Swiss small and/or mid cap companies.

In theory, this should be quite easy through the SPI Extra

However, in practice I did not find many ETFs that suit my purposes. Here are a few I found:

UBS ETF (CH) SPI® Mid (CHF) A-dis

Seems like a default option for my purposes, covers 80 titles, TER at 0.25% is quite attractive.

iShares SMIM® ETF (CH)
https://www.ishares.com/ch/individual/en/products/261155/ishares-smim-ch-fund

Less depth, only 30 titles. TER at 0.45% is higher than the UBS alternative. Prima vista, less attractive to me.

CSIF (CH) Equity Switzerland Small & Mid Cap

The black horse among the three. This one has been mentioned in here before and even made it into the forum’s recommendations list, but I frankly still do not fully understand this type of instrument. It’s not an ETF, it has fixed spreads, the fees are unclear however (it says 0%, but I find that hard to believe). Anyone has got experience with this one? Maybe @nugget who wrote about it before?

What do you think? Any other ETFs/Funds to mention?

2

The CS one, CH0110869143, I bought/own via Finpension 3a.
It’s a fund only for pension products AFAIK, hence the ZB & “for qualified investors” top right, and it would be interesting to know if anyone owns it outside of a pension product.

Here’s what Finpension says about a fund compared to an ETF.
"Indexfunds
Like ETFs, index funds are passive investment instruments. However, index funds have two major advantages over ETFs:
Withholding taxes on foreign dividends and interest income can be reclaimed thanks to an investor group control system.
There are no stamp duties on the purchase and sale of the funds (0.075 % each saved for Swiss ETFs and 0.15 % each for foreign ETFs)."

Disadvantage is certainly the spread defined by CS and not the market.

3

There is also a UBS SMIM version:

Only a little smaller (920 vs. 1’200mCHF) but much cheaper (0.27%) than the one from BlackRock - but still only 30 titles though…

4

There is a traditional index fund at CS that tracks SPI Extra.

To my knowledge, there is no ETF.

5

That’s exactly the ETF I have for my home bias. I keep around 10% of by asset allocation in this ETF and I have so far happy with it. I bought it on DEGIRO as the fees are low there. If I remember correctly @_MP also uses this ETF in his portfolio.

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6

You are right, I linked the institutional product. However, they have the same product for private investors as well (CH0222624659). It comes with a TER of 0.18%.

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That’s the one I meant, right.

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Is there any difference with the UBS one above except the TER?

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How would you choose your home bias ETF? I see you focus on small & mid cap (e.g., with the SMIM), although there are only 30 companies in, so not very diversified. For example, CHSPI focuses on large cap but is more diversified and has a TER of 0.1%. Wouldn’t be a better option?

10

It is more broad, covering 80 titles outside the SMI

I specifically look for something that gives me exposure to stocks outside the SMI. Most SMI titles are already covered in my World ETFs or especially heavily in my 3a VIAC Global 100.

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12

Hello everyone,

Even if this is a bit of an old post, I’ve been reconsidering again the CH ETF:

UBS ETF (CH) SMIM (CHF) A-dis (CH0111762537)

The problem I find is the fees… According to “gemini”, for 5000 CHF of stock:

IBKR Total Fees**:** CHF 10.00 + CHF 3.75 = CHF 13.75

Degiro Total Trading Fees: CHF 5.00 + CHF 1.00 = CHF 6.00+2.45 = CHF 8.45

!

Even for a 50K CHF amount:

IBKR CHF 50 + CHF 37.50 = CHF 87.50

Degiro CHF 6 + CHF 37.50 = CHF 43.50

Every single trade :exploding_head:

Does anyone here can confirm this?

I remember buying this stock once in the past and the fee I got for just buying 1 or 2 stocks was 5CHF. I stopped it.

Then you have to add the TER etc, even if it’s decent at 0.25%.

Thanks for your inputs.

Best regards,

13

Complete nonsense by that AI.

You pay just the comission fee for any size of trade essentially.

So just the ~4CHF for any amount of stock you buy on SIX exchange at IBKR.

Which is a lot for 1 stock, but not a lot for 100.

I would also not buy SMIM, that‘s only 30 mid cap stocks, which is not a lot. At least buy SPMCHA, that are 80 mid caps. A lot more diversified, same cost.

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14

I think AI was confused by issuing commission, which is does not apply if you buy ETF at a stocks exchange.

For securities traded at SIX (AES), the IB commission in tiered pricing model is 0.05%, AFAIR.

You can also use Preview function to check the commission before you trade at IB.

15

Hey @Tony1337 , @Dr.PI

Thanks for your reply!

I’ll give it a try then for a bit more than 1-2 stocks XD

Regarding the CH ETF I found so far:

  • SPMCHA has ~ 614.94M fund volume with 80 companies mid-cap
  • SMMCHA has 1.48B fund volume and 30 mid-cap companies
  • iSHARES CORE SPI CH EBS has 4.38B fund volume with ~200 companies large-cap.

Why do not you pick CHSPI if it has even more companies and more fund volume?

Br,

16

That wouldn’t be the right comparison in this case.

i assumed you specifically wanted a swiss mid-cap etf. The title of this topic is als small/mid cap ETFs :slight_smile:

CHSPI is the total swiss market, not just mid-caps. However teh swiss market is dominated by our big 3, Nestle/Novartis/Roche, that make up almost 50% of the index. So you’d have high concentration here. And they are of course by nature large caps.
The company number alone doesnt tell you much, it’s the weighted distribution that matters more.
in the cas eof a specific cap size fund, such as mid cap fund. The one with more companies however is automatically wider distributed.

Also fund volume after a certain point doesn’t matter that much.

There is also SPICHA from UBS that tracks the same index as CHSPI.

So depends on what your goal is and what you want.

There is also other funds liek SLICHA, that has “only” 30 companies, but cap steh big names to 10%, so you get a different weighting.

3 Likes
17

It’s more like 35% right now, which is still a lot.

18

Hello @Tony1337,

You are totally right, I escaped that detail :stuck_out_tongue:

Well, thanks again for all the explanations here.

Br,

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