Our philosophy

Improve your financial well-being

Your financial well-being starts with developing good saving habits. But when you've set those in place, what do you do with all your savings? We believe that too much money is sitting on savings accounts, earning almost no interest and is slowly being eaten away by inflation.

Instead, your savings could be working for you. For this reason, we believe that investing is a crucial tool to achieve our mission: to improve the financial health of our generation and ensure that the financial future of each one of us is secure.

Helping you meet your financial goals

Your investment portfolio should help you achieve your financial goals, even if that goal is something as vague as "saving for a rainy day".

For the long term

Every investment carries risk. Even though the global economy has been growing consistently over the last 100 years, there have been periods of downturns where returns were negative (think about the corona crisis!). To iron out temporary fluctuations in the markets and end up with a positive return, it's important to invest for the long term.

Unfortunately, there aren't any investments through which a quick buck is guaranteed without taking a lot of risk. Investing is for the long term, speculation is for the short term.

Follow the market

We believe that passive investing (also called "index investing") is the best strategy to guarantee long-term success. This follows from our conviction that the financial markets are efficient.

Concretely, we think that investments shouldn't be timed based on market sentiment, or worse, feelings and emotions. Active investing, or trying to beat the market by outsmarting other players in the financial markets, is most often not worth the risk nor the additional cost [1].

Instead, we believe in a "buy-and-hold" strategy, in total alignment with a long term view. Some may call it unsexy, but we are convinced that good investing is boring!

Diversify, diversify, diversify

No one can predict the future. Today's winners can quickly become tomorrow's losers (the dot-com bubble?) whereas average industries can suddenly become the hottest thing. Think about Zoom and other online communication companies during the Corona-crisis. The best way to deal with this uncertain future is to put your eggs in many different baskets. Because it turns out that missing out on a winner in your portfolio is a lot worse for your return than having a loser [2].

We believe in diversification across:

• many different countries around the globe
• sectors and industries
• company size

Invest only in what has been proven

Investment portfolios should be built to stand the test of time. They should invest only in assets that are widely understood and that, through decades of research and usage, are predicted to earn significant returns over the decades to come. Concretely, this means index funds of stocks and bonds.

It also means we don't think the following are sensible investments:

• P2P lending
• alternative assets such as art, bottles of fine wine, etc...
• your uncle's great stock tip

Don't invest in destructive companies

Investments should focus on a guiding principle: do not invest in companies that are destructive to the planet.

Seek simplicity

We believe that portfolios with few assets are better than complex portfolios:

• they're easier to analyse and understand
• complex allocations beyond market-cap weighting imply being smarter than the market, which is counter to our belief that the markets are efficient
• they're cheaper because less transactions are needed for each round of investments

Accessible for all

We believe that everyone should be able to invest and earn the dividends of the global economy, regardless of how little money they can invest.