Ask HN: How to invest safely in Europe?

- MSCI Europe Custom ESG [1]

- Barclays Euro Govt. Bond [2]

Please note Meesman offers a very limited selection of funds (5 total). As such I am quite sure the Meesman company did good research on what funds best represent certain markets.

If you'd like to invest in the European markets, I suggest you take a look at both. These funds can be bought elsewhere as well, of course.

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[0]: https://www.meesman.nl

[1]: https://www.blackrock.com/lu/intermediaries/products/305363/...

[2]: https://www.blackrock.com/lu/intermediaries/products/228477/...

But in any case, there's no reason why you can only invest in European things (and in fact that would be stupid). The starting strategy for most people should be a mixture of index funds covering the whole world (weighted by market size) and bonds. The proportion of stocks/bonds is determined by your tolerance for risk. You can fiddle with this (for instance as a European it might make sense to overweight European markets because of exchange risk, on the other hand you might prefer to overweight American markets because you already have exposure to the European economy from living there) but you almost certainly want to invest somewhat internationally.

    65% of funds in:
    80% VWRL
    10% VEUR
    10% VFEM
    
    35% of funds in:
    VECP

I'd forget bonds personally. With negative real interest rates, bonds are just the safest way to lose money slowly.

You mention elsewhere you want to avoid currency risk in an ETF. You won't be able do that completely, but to keep it to a minimum you'd need an ETF composed of smaller European companies which have less of an international presence.

I'm unexpectedly in the market for a good European ETF myself as the provider of the two I currently hold (iShares) have just announced they're both being delisted, so I'll have to sell those and re-buy something else, with all the cost and risk that entails, which is pretty annoying. I'm currently considering the "iShares Core MSCI EMU UCITS ETF", which tracks 252 Eurozone companies, but again, these are generally big multinational companies so you're not really protected from currency risk.

There are three problems broadly speaking. First is the currency, American index funds are in dollars while you don't have dollars. There are a couple of index funds that are quoted in EUR/GBP, above.

Second you need to find a bank that offers trading accounts and allow to buy these. It is god awful to find one. European banks are simply disconnected from the stocks market, they don't run brokerage and might not even know what it is when you ask for it. The only thing they sell and know about is their shitty in-house investment plan that's losing money every year.

Third is taxation. American have lax taxation because it's local and they depend on it for their retirement. On the other hand Europe can have high taxation which really kills your profit and some classes of assets have dual taxation (US export + EU taxes) that makes even the best investment worthless.