Why & how to invest?
The few ideas that decide almost everything about your result — explained simply enough for your first franc, sharp enough to be the reminder a seasoned investor still needs.
Time in the market beats timing the market.
Nobody — not the pros, not the algorithms — reliably calls the top and the bottom. And the market’s best days tend to arrive right after the scary ones, while you’re still on the sidelines waiting for the all clear.
Miss only a handful of those days and decades of patience are undone. Staying invested is what compounds — not jumping in and out.
S&P 500 over about 20 years. Seven of the ten best days struck during bear markets — miss the 60 best and you keep barely 7% of the result. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
The closest thing to a holy grail: a lump sum plus a savings plan.
Have money ready? Put it to work now — time in the market is the whole point. Earning month by month? Set up an automatic plan and keep buying through every mood of the market.
Steady purchases turn volatility into your ally: the dips you used to fear become the months you quietly buy the most shares. The lump sum gives you the head start; the savings plan keeps you in — for life.
Illustrative: a CHF 10,000 lump sum plus CHF 500 every month for 20 years, averaging about 7% a year. The value swings like a real market. Model calculation, not a forecast.
Invest and you might lose. Don’t, and you’ve already lost.
Over a single year, markets can do anything — that’s real, and it’s the price of admission. But stretch the horizon and the odds swing hard in your favour: across nearly a century of market data, no 20-year period has ended in the red.
Meanwhile, doing nothing isn’t safe — it’s a guaranteed slow loss to inflation. And zoom out: two world wars, 25 recessions, oil shocks, pandemics, crashes — through all of it, markets still compounded at 7–10% a year for over a century.
Source: Robert Shiller, S&P Composite, Bloomberg · nominal daily returns, 1928–2022. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
A savings account doesn’t stand still — it shrinks.
Over the past 30 years, a franc left in cash lost almost a fifth of its purchasing power. Swiss equities — the SPI with over 200 Swiss companies, after inflation — did the exact opposite.
At about 2% inflation, that’s what CHF 100 held in cash is really worth later. Doing nothing isn’t safe — it locks in a slow, certain loss.
Source: Pictet Wealth Management, as of 31.12.2024 · chart: Capicura Partners AG. Real SPI total return. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
“Every form of return in life — in wealth, in relationships, in knowledge — comes from compound interest.”
The interest that compounds fastest is your understanding.
With arvy, every position comes with the why — what you own, how it behaves, what just moved and what it means. So your money compounds, and so does your judgement.
“Knowledge pays the best interest — and it’s the one return no market can take back. The more you understand, the better the decisions you make.”
Thierry Borgeat · Co-founder
We’re in the same boat.
The founders each invest CHF 100,000 of their own money, side by side with you.
Before your first franc.
Investing rewards patience — so only money you won’t need for years should go in. A few minutes of groundwork makes everything that follows calmer.
None of this needs to be perfect. Tick these off and you’re ready — the rest you learn by doing.
The rest of the short list.
Master the five above and you’re most of the way there. These keep you on track for the decades that follow.
Risk notice. Capital invested in securities is exposed to market risk — the value of your investment can fall as well as rise, and you may get back less than you paid in. All figures and charts on this page are illustrative, use simplified long-run assumptions (about 7% gross equity return, about 2% inflation) and are not a forecast or a promise. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. This page is information, not personal investment advice.
