You can provide Selma with up to 16 pieces of information about your life to help her create your ideal investment mix within 5 minutes, removing at least one of your worries so that you can focus on the more entertaining things in life! This is how Selma makes sure that your investments match your life situation.

Have you primarily saved your money in your cash account, or have you ventured into investments such as funds or bitcoins?

Understanding how you manage your finances significantly impacts your future investment strategies. By knowing your past investment choices, Selma can determine the best investment options to maintain a balanced portfolio tailored to your life circumstances. This approach helps mitigate overreliance on any single source of wealth.

Additionally, non-monetary assets like cars, art, or property often go overlooked in financial assessments. However, they can appreciate or depreciate in value, sometimes in sync with financial markets. Considering these assets is essential to minimise exposure to significant risks.

In summary, the following information pieces will be considered in this section:

Higher returns come with higher risk. Thus, it is important to understand how much risk you can and should take.

While you aim to achieve growth with your investments, you may also have upcoming expenses (like buying that flashy new computer or renovating your apartment).

To address this, Selma calculates how much you should allocate monthly for spending and how much you can invest. By planning ahead, Selma forecasts your potential future savings, factoring in variables such as your age, employment type, and income stability. For instance, the savings potential differs greatly between a 27-year-old freelancer and a 43-year-old university professor.

The duration of your investment is also significant. It's advisable to have a long-term horizon of over 10 years, where the likelihood of losses is extremely low and the potential for strong returns increases.

Ideally, you should avoid withdrawing investments prematurely to cover expenses. Doing so may lead you to exit the market at an inopportune time and reinvest at higher prices later on.

In summary, the following information pieces will be considered in this section:

Beyond your ability to take risks, Selma evaluates how comfortable you are in dealing with losses. It combines your initial self-assessment with a few tests of your emotions and reactions to loss scenarios.

This is important because your investment plan can only be good if you can also stick to it if and when times are getting harder.

In summary, the following information pieces will be considered in this section:

When you set your investment horizon, you're determining how long you plan to keep your money invested overall, regardless of the provider.

Generally, the longer your investment horizon, the more your money should be invested in asset classes that offer potentially higher long-term returns.

In case your investment horizon is long enough, Selma will assess whether adding bonds (i.e. "loans to companies or countries") to your investment portfolio is beneficial. If you have a long investment horizon, a strong financial situation and a high risk willingness, Selma may reduce or even exclude bond investments from your regular investment account.

Once Selma knows you better, she creates your ideal mix of investments based on your profile. She does that by:

To prevent you from taking too much risk in certain areas, Selma excludes for example real estate investments in case you have already bought a house or own an apartment.

Based on your investor profile Selma calculates which part of your money should be invested in growth-focused investments (e.g. company shares) vs. in more stable funds that focus on keeping their value (e.g. loans to countries and companies). Generally, Selma looks for products that offer the best diversification at the lowest cost for you.

If you prefer sustainable over traditional investing, Selma will pick only funds that fulfil the highest common "SRI" criteria. Thankfully, the fund offering has improved so much that you don’t have to accept any drawbacks in terms of diversification or cost. Selma creates a portfolio for you that is just as well diversified and low-cost as the traditional ones!

To make sure your investments aren’t dependent on the performance of single companies, industries or countries, Selma spreads your risk across the globe. This also provides you access to regions with higher economic growth rates.

As a result, your Selma portfolio can include many, if not all, of the following investments (depending on your investor profile):

Depending on your investor profile, up to 100% of your money may be put into “growth” assets (i.e. mainly company shares), which tend to have higher returns, but also higher risk.