I know someone who bought Swiss Property at 2 CHF to £, they hedged £1,000,000. That hedge has cost them over 550,000 CHF to date,
Do you understand what a hedge is? It's to prevent any profit or loss from a change in exchange rate, if it moves in your favour you have to pay the profit, if it moves against you you get refunded your loss. Such financial instruments are positions held in the portfolio & are not free.
Currrency hedging simply turns variable foreign currency risks into a fixed sure loss in your target currency.
Hedged ETF normally use 1-month currency forward swaps, so the exact amount of loss varies month by month. These swaps are essentially like shorting one currency and buying another at the same time, e.g. to hedge S&P 500 in CHF, you short same US dollar amount and hold CHF. Money market instruments are paying 1.2+% interest on USD (if we take 1-month LIBOR as a proxy), so if you short USD you're gonna be paying at least this much for the privilege. Likewise, for CHF, you're gonna be paid some interest - problem is the interest is *negative* at the moment. SNB's tariff is -0.7%! Both combine to about 1.5-2% cost to you at the moment.
Still complaining about zero interest rates on your savings account?
Hedged ETF don't advertise these things as a cost - they would usually just tell you something innocent like "we're tracking S&P 500 index hedged to CHF", and that's where the devil hides.
AFAIK hedging is forced on you by the swiss gvt.
Anyway: I am currently staying away from 3a as I no longer need to amortise property. Once I reach 55 or so I will start think about 3a again...unless the 3a rules change (which does seem to be the case lately).
Together with max 50% restriction on stocks part - https://www.admin.ch/opc/de/classifi...index.html#a55
But it didn't prevent banks from launching 75% funds - based on loophole in Art. 50 BVV. Notice just how selective banksters are at ignoring parts of the laws!