{"id":17712,"date":"2023-09-01T00:00:29","date_gmt":"2023-08-31T22:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gerd-kommer.de\/blog\/gerd-kommers-world-portfolio-confident-investing-with-etfs\/"},"modified":"2025-12-19T18:23:31","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T17:23:31","slug":"gerd-kommer-world-portfolio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gerd-kommer.de\/en\/blog\/gerd-kommer-world-portfolio\/","title":{"rendered":"Gerd Kommer’s world portfolio \u2013 confident investing with ETFs"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Daniel Kanzler<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Jakob Riemensperger<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n What is a “world portfolio\u201d actually? Anyone involved in passive investing<\/a> in German-speaking countries will sooner or later come across the term “world portfolio”, which Dr. Gerd Kommer introduced a good 20 years ago. But what is it all about actually? What does a world portfolio look like in concrete terms? And do you need one too? You can find answers to these questions here in this blog post.<\/p>\n Before we get started, let’s start with the terminology: The world portfolio is not a single, specific portfolio of specific ETFs or indices, but a portfolio concept with which every investor can build an individual world portfolio tailored to their personal needs and preferences.<\/p>\n In this blog post, you can find out what the most important construction principles are and how to put them into practice.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The central scientific principles from which the world portfolio concept is derived were developed by four American economists who all won the Nobel Prize in Economics (at different times) for their pioneering contributions to financial economics or macroeconomics:<\/p>\n To make use of the findings of these four economic superstars and other top researchers as a private investor, you don’t need to understand the mathematically and statistically complex elements of what is known as Modern Portfolio Theory in detail. It is sufficient to know the central conceptual conclusions. This blog post aims to help with this.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The world portfolio is the translation of the above and other research findings into a “complete”, “fully integrated” investment concept that<\/p>\n are able to practice.<\/p>\n Even this draft summary makes it clear that the world portfolio concept is realistic and can be implemented in the long term (for a lifetime) for normal private investor households. As a global portfolio investor, you don’t have to be a stock market freak who spends ten or more hours a week on financial topics.<\/p>\n The portfolio should be integrated and adapted holistically, as recommended by science, to the income and asset situation of a private investor household \u2013 throughout an adult life with all its changes and also during existential life crises.<\/p>\n Kommer first named and described the world portfolio concept in 2001 in his book “Weltweit investieren mit Fonds”<\/a> (German edition only). One year later, in 2002, the first edition of his subsequent bestseller “Souver\u00e4n investieren mit Indexfonds und ETFs”<\/a> (German edition only) was published. The book initially sat on the shelves of bookshops like bricks. However, with the onset of the Great Financial Crisis in mid-2007, sales of the book began to rise. in 2016, the book won the German financial book prize awarded by Deutsche B\u00f6rse AG and Citibank.<\/p>\n To date, around 300,000 copies of Souver\u00e4n Investieren<\/em> and simplified, shorter versions of it have been sold. In the editions of the book, which have been revised approximately every four years, as well as in the monthly blog that has existed since 2017, Kommer has repeatedly updated the world portfolio concept in an evolutionary manner and has addressed special aspects.<\/p>\n In Souver\u00e4n Investieren<\/em>, the world portfolio concept is derived from science and described. Here we have summarized a brief world portfolio definition with the most important key aspects:<\/p>\n The term world portfolio stands for an investor portfolio that consists of two main conceptual components: A “high-risk” part of the portfolio, which is responsible for generating returns in the overall portfolio (the “return driver”), and a “low-risk” part of the portfolio, which primarily serves as an anchor of stability and security in the overall portfolio. Both parts of the portfolio are highly liquid. Other core aspects and characteristics are: (a) maximum global diversification and elimination of all single asset and default risks, (b) disciplined, consistent buy and hold, supplemented by rules-based rebalancing to reduce return losses and opportunity costs (lost profits) from timing as well as the effective tax burden, (c) the reduction of costs through the use of low-cost index funds and ETFs, and (d) the reduction of counterparty risks from e.g. banks, other financial service providers and financial product manufacturers to a level that cannot be further reduced. <\/em><\/p>\n The definition components (a) and (b) implicitly contain the important avoidance of active, forecast-based investing, as this produces unattractive risk-return profiles from a scientific perspective. Active investing in capital market investments is done by means of security selection or market timing or a mixture of both. Active investing in its infinite number of individual forms “is what everyone does”. It has a global market share of over 95%.<\/p>\n In the rest of this blog post, we look at the requirements for a real world portfolio according to Gerd Kommer and use specific products and solutions to show what such a portfolio could look like in its simplest form.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n From a bird’s eye view, the world portfolio can be divided into a high-risk portfolio component, risk asset (RA) and a risk-free portfolio component, risk-free asset (RFA). The RA is the return driver<\/em> responsible for generating the portfolio return, while the RFA serves as a “safety or stability anchor” in the portfolio. We call this dichotomy Level 1 asset allocation<\/em>.<\/p>\n As far as the allocation between RA and RFA is concerned, all combinations from 100% RA\/0% RFA (“100\/0 portfolio”) to 0% RA\/100% RFA (“0\/100 portfolio”) are conceivable. A 100\/0 world portfolio has the highest expected return, but will also fluctuate widely (be volatile) over time. A 0\/100 portfolio, on the other hand, has the lowest expected return, but also hardly fluctuates over time. In practice, the action is somewhere in between for the vast majority of private investors, as few will prefer the fringe allocations.<\/p>\n In a simple version of the world portfolio, the RA consists of one or more index funds\/ETFs that track the global stock market. The asset class (asset class) stocks is the asset class with the highest long-term return, higher than the corresponding average returns of real estate, bonds, commodities, precious metals or collectibles or financial products derived from or related to these asset classes, such as interest-bearing bank deposits, capital-forming life insurance policies or hedge funds (Private equity investments have statistically similar returns to stocks, but are riskier and more illiquid).<\/p>\n The RFA is not expected to contribute a significant long-term average return after costs, taxes and inflation, as such an expectation would be at the expense of the core function of stability anchor<\/em>. Significant positive real returns after costs and taxes could only be achieved in the past and will only be achieved in the future in the long term by bearing risk.<\/p>\n The RFA consists of highly liquid government and corporate bonds with (a) a short time to maturity (and therefore little interest rate change risk), (b) low credit risk (and therefore default risk that can hardly be reduced) and (c) no exchange rate risk.<\/p>\n For RFA investment volumes of up to EUR 100,000, you could also use an overnight money deposit with a bank, as this amount per bank-customer combination is within the statutory (state) deposit guarantee in the EU.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n An essential advantage of the world portfolio concept is that \u2013 unlike active investment strategies or actively managed financial products \u2013 it does not require any forecasts, i.e. no forecasts of securities prices, economic variables (e.g. interest rates, inflation, economic growth) or other developments in society, politics and the economy that influence the stock market.<\/p>\n We know from science that making economically exploitable forecasts on the capital market is largely unsuccessful. The damage from following the majority of incorrect forecasts outweighs the benefit from following the minority of correct forecasts.<\/p>\n Investment forecasts are ultimately bets on one or more of the following investment aspects:<\/p>\n If you would like to find out more about why such bets generally don’t work out, you can read our blog post “Ten reasons why active investing works badly<\/a>“.<\/p>\n In short: These kinds of bets represent bad, because they are avoidable (“diversifiable away”) risks that are not worth taking due to the lack of expected compensation (in the form of an expected return). Conversely, it is therefore advisable to avoid forecasts of any kind, especially when it comes to important matters such as retirement provision. This can be achieved by relying on the entire<\/em> market economy, i.e. maximum global diversification and buy and hold. This can be easily implemented with regard to stocks by purchasing a suitable index fund\/ETF that tracks the global stock market.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Buy and hold (B&H) is just as important a basic principle in the world portfolio concept as freedom from forecasts and global diversification. B&H (a) reduces workload and costs (especially by minimizing the costs of buying and selling), (b) lowers the effective tax burden in a tax system like the German one and (c) eliminates the potential damage to returns from bad, emotion-driven timing decisions. This is particularly likely to be the case for private investors, as behavioral finance research (behavioral economics) and empirical financial market research have shown many times.<\/p>\n In the world portfolio concept, B&H is linked to rebalancing. Rebalancing is the rule-based restoration of the desired percentage weightings (target weightings) of all positions in a portfolio over time after they have “moved away” from the previously deliberately selected target structure due to market effects. This “path development” will inevitably occur sooner or later in practice and does not contradict the buy and hold concept. The reason for this is that without rebalancing, the composition and thus the risk-return profile of a portfolio would change over time due to market fluctuations and move away from the actual investor preferences. Rebalancing is also a special form of anti-cyclical (“contrarian”) investing based on the sell-high\/buy-low principle.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n All other things being equal, costs reduce the net return on an investment, i.e. the return that really matters. Costs act like a negative compound interest effect.<\/p>\n Here is an example calculation: With a starting capital of EUR 5,000, an average annual return of 10% and costs of 0.5% per year, the final asset value after 30 years is a good EUR 76,000. However, if the annual costs had been 1.0%, the final asset value would only be around EUR 66,000 \u2013 EUR 10,000 or almost 15% less.<\/p>\n As costs are one of the few influencing factors in investing over which you have a high degree of certainty and<\/em> control, it is particularly worthwhile to actually exercise this control.<\/p>\n Moreover, the old general rule “higher quality also costs more” does not apply when investing. Rather the opposite is the case: Some of the most expensive investments, such as hedge funds, closed-end funds or capital-forming life insurance policies, are also the ones with the lowest returns.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A sometimes overlooked part of the world portfolio concept is the consistent avoidance of process and financial product-related counterparty risk inherent in most forms of active investing. What do we mean by that?<\/p>\n Many financial products, e.g. endowment life insurance, private pension insurance, certificates, many private equity investments, hedge fund investments, investments in closed-end funds, investments on some crypto exchanges and investments in P-to-P loans, are linked to (typically overlooked) counterparty risks. In other words, if the counterparty in question gets into financial difficulties or even goes bankrupt, the investor’s money may be partially or completely lost. Incidentally, this also applies to bank deposits above the state deposit guarantee of 100,000 euros per bank-customer combination.<\/p>\n In principle, there are no such counterparty risks with the world portfolio concept because (a) index funds\/ETFs \u2013 unlike the financial products mentioned above \u2013 are legally so-called special assets<\/em> and (b) the bank only acts as a custodian in the case of a bank deposit, not as a debtor as in the case of a bank deposit.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The following overview shows a simple graphic illustration of the general basic structure of a global portfolio.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As an optional add-on worth considering, so-called factor premiums can be taken into account when constructing a global portfolio. Factor premiums are characteristics of securities that can be used to increase the expected return (i.e. the statistical average return) of a portfolio compared to the total market. Over the last 100 years or so, factor investing (using two or more factor premiums) would have generated a return that was significantly more than one percentage point per year above that of the “normal” stock market (the total market) \u2013 with similar risk in terms of volatility (fluctuations in return).<\/p>\n The best-known factor premiums are<\/p>\n The longer the observation period or investment period, the clearer the factor premiums become. By way of illustration: With a super-short observation period of one day, the stock market statistically has a return above zero in 53% of all cases (days). If the observation period is extended to ten years, the key figure “proportion of returns above zero” increases to 93%. A similar law applies to excess returns from factor premiums.<\/p>\n You can read more about factor investing in this blog post<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In the simplest case, a world portfolio can be implemented with one ETF for the risky part of the portfolio and one for the low-risk part. For an investor who wants a 100\/0 Level 1 asset allocation or wants to use overnight money within the government deposit guarantee for the RFT, even an ETF alone will work.<\/p>\n In its simplest form, such a portfolio could look as follows (as at July 2023):<\/p>\n(1) The four scientific pioneers behind the world portfolio concept<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
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(2) Dr. Gerd Kommer’s world portfolio –\u00a0a brief definition<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
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(3) The division into a high-risk and a low-risk part of the portfolio (“level 1 asset allocation”)<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
(4) Forecast freedom and maximum global diversification<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
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(5) Buy and hold & Rebalancing<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
(6) Reduction of costs<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
(7) Elimination of process-related and financial product-related counterparty risks<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
(8) A simple graphical representation of the world portfolio concept<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
<\/p>\n(9) Optional: The world portfolio in the factor investing variant<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
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(10) Possible world portfolio solutions<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
(a) For investors who want to invest on their own (in Do-it-yourself mode):<\/span> <\/strong><\/h3>\n
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