Why arvy: Your partner for long-term investing

Most investing apps sell you a portfolio. The good ones also sell you simplicity. What almost none of them sell is the thing that actually determines whether you build wealth over 30 years — or quietly lose half of it to your own emotions. This article is about why that thing is worth everything. And why we built arvy around it.

By Thierry Borgeat, Co-Founder arvy · 14 min read · Last updated April 2026

In 1737, Benjamin Franklin wrote one of the most-quoted lines in financial history: "An investment in knowledge pays the best interest."

It's quoted so often it's become background noise — the kind of wisdom you nod at, screenshot, and forget. But if you actually do the maths, Franklin wasn't being poetic. He was describing something mathematically verifiable. And in 2014, Vanguard proved it.

That's not a forecast. That's the empirical finding of the most-cited research in the entire advisory industry, replicated across three independent studies by three independent institutions. And it's the single most important thing any investor should understand before they put a single franc to work.

Because here's what happens when you compound 1.5% over 30 years on a CHF 500/month savings plan: not a rounding error. Not a small inconvenience. A difference of over CHF 200,000 in ending wealth, at identical contributions, identical markets, identical tax treatment.

The only variable? Whether someone was in your corner when the market dropped 30% and everyone told you to sell.

This article is about the three things nobody tells you about long-term investing — and why arvy was built around all three of them. It's also, indirectly, the honest answer to a question we get all the time: why do your fees look higher than a passive ETF?

The short answer: because 0.5% of additional fees, compared to 1.5% of lost returns, isn't expensive. It's the best bargain in the entire financial industry.

The long answer is everything below.

1. Knowledge pays the best interest — and we can prove it

When Franklin wrote that line, financial markets barely existed. There were no ETFs, no mutual funds, no Bloomberg terminals, no apps. And yet he intuited something that three centuries of financial research would eventually confirm: the best investment you can make isn't in any particular asset. It's in your own understanding.

Here's why that matters concretely.

When you own a passive ETF, you own around 1,500 companies. If someone asked you to name ten of them, you probably could — Apple, Microsoft, Nestlé, Amazon, and a handful more. If they asked you to name a hundred, you'd fail. Not because you're not smart. Because nobody has the time to understand 1,500 businesses. The ETF was designed precisely so you wouldn't have to.

That's a feature when markets are rising. It becomes a bug when markets fall.

Because when the market drops 25% — and it will, repeatedly, over the next 30 years — you'll look at your portfolio and feel a version of what every self-directed investor feels: I don't actually know what I own, so I don't know if it will recover, so I should probably sell before it gets worse.

That sentence is the single most expensive thought in finance. And it's the sentence that explains the 1.5% gap Vanguard measured.

Compare that to owning ~30 quality companies you've actually read about. When Nestlé drops 15%, you don't think "sell" — you think about the 150-year history of a business that sold food through two World Wars, the Great Depression, the 2008 financial crisis and COVID-19. When Visa dips, you remember that every card transaction on Earth still flows through their rails, and that they've never missed a dividend. When LVMH wobbles, you understand it's cyclical, not structural.

The knowledge doesn't prevent the drop. It prevents the panic. And preventing the panic is worth, on average, about 1.5% per year — compounded, for life.

This is what Franklin meant. And this is why every arvy product comes with a weekly company analysis, a book club, 10+ interactive calculators, and a complete education library. Not as a marketing gimmick. As the actual product.

2. The hidden 1.5% tax on emotional investors

The financial industry argues endlessly about fees. 0.25% vs 0.45% vs 0.85% vs 1.1%. Every forum, every robo-advisor comparison, every fintech pitch deck is a race to the bottom on cost. And up to a point, that race matters — because fees do compound, and high fees do erode wealth over time.

But there's a bigger cost nobody's racing to eliminate. Because it's invisible, ugly, and uncomfortable to talk about: the cost of your own behaviour.

Here's what the research actually shows:

Five different institutions. Five different methodologies. Five different time periods. Same answer: somewhere between 1.5% and 3% per year, disappearing from the average investor's returns, for reasons that have nothing to do with markets and everything to do with human nature.

Why we all make the same mistakes

Before you assume you'd never fall into this trap — that you're different, more disciplined, more rational than the average — consider this: the data includes doctors, lawyers, engineers, CFOs, and professional traders. Emotional decision-making isn't correlated with intelligence. It's correlated with being human.

Here's what happens in every market drop, every single time:

1. The market falls 10%. You feel vaguely uneasy but tell yourself you're in it for the long term.
2. It falls another 10%. You check your portfolio three times a day. You start reading financial news obsessively.
3. At -25%, you tell your partner "I think we should sell at least half." They agree, because they're also scared.
4. At -30%, you sell. The relief is immediate. You can sleep again.
5. Six months later, the market is up 20% from where you sold. You're now facing two choices: buy back in higher than where you sold (humiliating), or wait and hope for another dip (you'll wait forever).
6. Ten years later, you've missed the entire recovery. Your "safe" decision cost you hundreds of thousands of francs.

This is called sequence risk from behavioural error and it's not a character flaw — it's a feature of the human brain. Evolution wired us to flee from danger. A falling stock chart looks exactly like danger to the limbic system. Your rational brain knows it's not. Your limbic system doesn't care.

So here's the uncomfortable question nobody selling you a cheap ETF wants to ask: what is your plan for the moment when your portfolio drops 30%?

Because there will be a moment. Not if — when. It happened in 2008. It happened in March 2020. It happened in 2022. It will happen again, multiple times, before you retire. And the research says clearly: what determines your 30-year wealth isn't the 0.4% fee difference between provider A and provider B. It's what you do in that moment.

arvy's entire product is built around that moment. The portfolio is just the vehicle. The knowledge is the brake.

3. The loneliness of a sideways market

Let's talk about something almost nobody writes about honestly.

Crashes get all the attention. They make headlines, they trigger emotions, they get drawn on charts. But crashes aren't actually the thing that breaks most investors. Crashes are short. They're dramatic. They're over in months.

What breaks people is the slow, grinding, multi-year period when nothing happens.

Look at the S&P 500 from 2000 to 2013. Thirteen years. Two massive crashes sandwiched around one false recovery. Every month you put money in — and every month you had nothing to show for it. Every news article confirmed your fear. Every dinner conversation reminded you of what a mistake investing had been. Your friends who stuck with their savings accounts looked smart. You looked like you were pouring money into a broken machine.

Or look at Japan. The Nikkei peaked in 1989 at nearly 39,000. It did not reach that level again until 2024. Thirty-five years of "where's my money?"

Here's what makes sideways markets so dangerous: you don't know if you're in one. You don't know if the next month will bring recovery or another leg down. You don't know if you're investing into the bottom of a two-year plateau or the top of a decade-long stagnation. You just watch your portfolio do nothing, month after month, and the voice in your head starts whispering: maybe this whole strategy is broken. Maybe I should try something else. Maybe I should just stop.

That voice is the killer. Not the crash. The whisper.

And this is where being alone becomes expensive

When you invest through a passive robo-advisor, who do you talk to during that two-year stretch of nothing? The app? The FAQ page? The help desk of a company whose entire business model is based on not having humans in the loop?

When you invest with your bank, who do you talk to? The advisor who will try to sell you a product that generates a commission. That's not a partnership. That's a sales channel dressed up in a blazer.

When you invest alone, who do you talk to? Your partner? A friend? The comment section of a Reddit thread? "Is it normal that my portfolio has done nothing for 18 months? Am I doing something wrong? Should I change strategy?"

This is the loneliness nobody warns you about. And it's the loneliness that makes 1.5% disappear every year, from almost everyone.

At arvy, that voice takes several forms: the Weekly newsletter that lands in your inbox every Friday, regardless of what markets are doing — a deep dive into Nestlé, or Visa, or Microsoft, explaining why the business is fine even if the stock is drifting. The book club that reminds you that every great investor in history has lived through exactly this. The calculators that let you re-run your projections and see that yes, the long-term maths still works, even from here. The fact that the three founders — Thierry, Florian, Patrick — are also seeing their own six-figure co-investments drift sideways alongside yours, and are writing honestly about what they think, feel, and are doing about it.

None of that changes the market. All of it changes your relationship to the market. Which is, statistically, the actual product.

4. Nobody told you investing could be fun

Now for the part of this article that nobody expects.

The financial industry has spent decades convincing everyone that investing is serious, dry, intimidating, and borderline dangerous. They do this because if you're intimidated, you'll pay someone to handle it for you. Fear is a great business model for asset managers.

But here's the secret nobody with a commission structure wants you to know: investing is one of the most fascinating intellectual hobbies you can possibly have.

Think about it. When you own a piece of Ferrari, you're not just holding a stock ticker. You're a fractional owner of a company that has sold waiting lists for its cars — actual five-year waiting lists where people pay tens of thousands of euros upfront for the privilege of eventually being allowed to buy. That's not a business. That's a religion with an income statement.

When you own Hermès, you're part of a business that deliberately makes fewer Birkin bags than people want to buy, which means the secondary market resells them above retail price, which means there's never been a single year in Hermès's history where the brand lost pricing power. Think about how rare that is. Think about what it means for the mathematics of compounding.

When you own ASML, you're a fractional owner of the only company on Earth that can make the machines that make the most advanced computer chips. Not "the best at it." The only company. Their main product costs EUR 200 million each, takes three years to build, and has a multi-year order backlog. If ASML stopped shipping tomorrow, the entire semiconductor industry — the foundation of the modern digital economy — would grind to a halt within 18 months.

These aren't abstract ticker symbols. These are real human stories about why some businesses are extraordinary and most aren't. And when you start to learn them — really learn them, not skim headlines — investing stops being a chore and starts being something closer to a puzzle or a detective novel.

This is what we mean when we say arvy is an investment education company that happens to have an investment product. The Weekly is designed to be genuinely entertaining reading — the kind of thing people save in their bookmarks and forward to friends. The Book Club picks the best investment books of all time and distills them into ten-minute summaries. The 10+ calculators are designed to make you play with the numbers and actually understand compound interest, tax savings, and FIRE scenarios in a way that no passive ETF provider offers.

And yes, the 30+ articles we've published in NZZ The Market — Switzerland's most serious financial publication — were written by the same three people who manage the portfolio. Not outsourced. Not PR-driven. Actual investment analysis by actual CFA charterholders who actually invest their own money the same way.

Because we believe — and the data supports us — that an investor who's genuinely interested in their own portfolio makes dramatically better decisions than one who isn't. And one of the best ways to become genuinely interested is to realise that the businesses you own are weirder, cooler, and more fascinating than anyone told you.

5. What a partner actually does (that an app cannot)

Let's put all of this together with a simple definition.

There are three broad ways to access investments in Switzerland:

All three can get you the same market return in theory. But in practice — in the empirical, measured, research-backed reality of actual investor behaviour — only the third one helps you actually capture that market return, because only the third one addresses the 1.5% you're silently losing to yourself.

A partner isn't a feature. It's an entirely different product category. And it's the product category arvy was built to be.

What that looks like in practice

6. The fee question, answered honestly

Now the part everyone's been waiting for.

Passive ETF robo-advisors in Switzerland charge 0.25% to 0.45% per year + TER of usually 0.20% - 0.30%. arvy charges 0.84% to 1.11% (All In, incl TER). That's a difference of roughly 0.20% to 0.5% per year. Let's not pretend that number is zero. On a CHF 500,000 portfolio over 20 years, a 0.5% fee difference compounds to something like CHF 60,000 of extra cost.

That's real money. We're not going to insult your intelligence by pretending it isn't.

But here's the actual question you should be asking: what does that 0.5% pay for, and is the thing it pays for worth more than 0.5%?

Here's the comparison nobody else will show you honestly:

Same contributions. Same markets. Same taxes. The only difference is whether you had the knowledge and the framework to stay invested rationally. That difference is worth CHF 173,000. And you paid an extra CHF 50,000 in fees over the same period to get it. Net: you're CHF 123,000 ahead.

That's not a sales pitch. That's empirical research from three separate institutions, applied to a realistic scenario, with honest maths on both sides.

Now — all of this assumes the behavioural benefit actually materialises. If you're the kind of person who would have stayed invested anyway, who reads annual reports for fun, who didn't blink in 2008, and who never needs a voice in their ear — then yes, honestly, a passive ETF might be cheaper and better for you. We'd tell you that directly. We have told people that directly.

But if you're a normal human — if you've ever felt the urge to sell during a drop, if you've ever wondered whether your strategy is broken, if you've ever lain awake at 3am because of a red number on a screen — then the partner model is overwhelmingly the better mathematical choice. Not because we say so. Because three decades of independent research says so.

7. Join the journey

Here's what we actually believe about long-term investing, stated as simply as we can:

The market will do its job over 30 years. Global equities have returned 7-9% per year on average for a century, through wars, pandemics, inflation, deflation, political crises, and everything else. That's not going to stop. It's the most reliable wealth-building mechanism humans have ever discovered.

Your job is to still be in the market 30 years from now. Not to time it. Not to beat it. Not to pick the best quarters. Just to be present and compounding for the entire journey.

The only thing that can stop you from doing your job is yourself. Specifically: your emotions during drops, your boredom during sideways markets, your loneliness when nobody's explaining what's happening, and your natural human tendency to seek certainty in an inherently uncertain process.

A good partner's only real job is to keep you doing your job. Through knowledge (so you understand what you own), community (so you don't feel alone), honesty (so you trust the framework), education (so you get better over time), and enjoyment (so the journey doesn't feel like a chore).

That's why arvy exists. That's what we're trying to build. And that's why — when you read the rest of our content, from the Weekly to the calculators to the expat guides — you'll notice it doesn't feel like standard financial marketing. It feels like something someone actually wrote because they wanted you to understand.

Because we did. Because you deserve to. Because the research is clear on what happens when you don't.

You don't need to decide anything today. You don't need to move any money. You don't need to close any accounts.

You just need to take one step: read one edition of our Weekly. See what it feels like to actually understand a quality company in ten minutes. See if the voice feels honest. See if the analysis feels useful. See if it makes investing more interesting, not less.

If it does, keep reading. If it doesn't, unsubscribe — no hard feelings, no emails, nothing lost. The maths, the companies, the research, the ideas — they're all yours either way. Knowledge pays the best interest whether you invest with us or not. That's what Franklin was actually saying.

But if it does resonate — if a weekly company story starts changing how you think about what you own — then we're here when you're ready. For 3a. For your savings plan. For your children's account. For the whole 30-year journey.

Because the best time to start investing was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. And the best way to still be investing 20 years from now is with someone who actually understands why you might want to stop — and writes you a letter every Friday to remind you why you shouldn't.

Written by Thierry Borgeat, Co-Founder arvy. Reviewed by Patrick Rissi, CFA and Florian Jauch, CFA.
The three founders co-invest over CHF 100,000 of their own money in the same portfolio as arvy clients.

Further reading

Pillar 3a for Expats · How to Invest in Switzerland · Beginner's Guide to Investing · Investing in Turbulent Times · CHF 500/Month Allocation · arvy's Weekly Newsletter

Disclaimer: This article is for general educational purposes and does not constitute personal investment advice. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. The behavioural research cited (Vanguard Advisor's Alpha, Morningstar Gamma Study, Envestnet Capital Sigma, Dalbar QAIB, JP Morgan Guide to Retirement) represents average findings across studied populations and may not apply to your individual circumstances. Projections of ending wealth at various return assumptions are illustrative only and not guarantees. arvy is a FINMA-supervised asset manager. The 0.84-1.11% fee range refers to arvy's current all-in fees across its 3a and savings plan products as of April 2026; please consult arvy.ch/en/fees for current pricing. The mention of other providers (Finpension, VIAC, frankly, True Wealth, findependent, Viac Invest) is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an endorsement or affiliation.