«There are conceptually better solutions than ETFs»

It’s not every day that you come across an investor whose fund has 5 stars from Morningstar over 3 and 5 years. I had this great pleasure on Tuesday, 13.05.2025. I was invited by MRB Fund Partners AG to their prestigious offices between Paradeplatz and Lake Zurich to talk to Dr. Stephan Ahne. It’s amazing what this graduate engineer can achieve. The conversation lasted almost an hour, unfortunately far too short. I highly recommend reading it! Thomas J. Caduff, CEO, Fundplat LLC

• Caduff: Dr. Ahne, you studied engineering and originally knew the financial sector only from a customer perspective. With this rather unusual background, why did you decide to launch a mutual fund?

Ahne: Because I believe that there can be conceptually better solutions than ETFs in the multi-asset segment.

• Caduff: What is conceptually better about your investment concept?

When optimizing diversification, independent investment segments are crucial, not maximizing the number of securities. Dr. Stephan Ahne

Ahne: First of all, diversification. It is not essential whether you have 1,000 or more individual securities in your portfolio. What is much more important is the independent behavior of the investment segments used and their long-term return expectations. That’s why the investment concept applies more independent investment segments than are used in traditional mixed and multi-asset funds. This achieves greater stability. It’s easy to explain: if I have more independent investment segments than, for example, just equities and bonds, the probability of all segments suffering losses in the same direction is lower. This creates scope for a structural increase in returns, i.e. high-yield segments can be weighted more heavily without the investment strategy exceeding a moderate overall risk level.

• Caduff: Is this also reflected in the investment results?

Thanks to optimized diversification, investors can expect a structural increase in returns and greater stability. Dr. Stephan Ahne

Ahne: Yes, it certainly is. Since the fund was launched in January 2020, this investment strategy has already weathered an unusually high number of turbulent events and excesses on the capital markets, such as the coronavirus pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the AI hype and Trump’s tariffs. Nevertheless, it delivered a relatively stable excess return of approximately 2 percent p.a. compared to balanced index fund solutions and approximately 3 percent p.a. compared to the peer group across all market phases. In addition, price declines were below average. For example, the results also showed relative strength in the crisis year 2022. Even after the market turmoil at the beginning of April this year, the fund performance was already back in positive territory by the end of the month.