By Yoram Lustig, Head of Global Investment Solutions, EMEA, and a portfolio manager in the Multi-Asset Division at T. Rowe Price

T. Rowe Price's headquarters outside the US is based here. We moved to our new office a couple of years ago, just 85 metres from St. Paul's Cathedral, one of London's iconic landmarks. If you fancy escaping the Swiss heatwave for London’s, the city has plenty to offer. My top recommendation for visitors is to walk along the Thames from the Tower of London to the Palace of Westminster, where Big Ben chimes to mark the time for the seventh prime minister in a decade. Beyond that, London has fantastic food, museums, and entertainment. Whether you grab a salt beef bagel on Brick Lane, lose an afternoon in the British Museum, or watch the avatars of ABBA in a «live» show, the city has something for everyone.

What I like about Switzerland

If you stay home in Switzerland for the summer, I cannot blame you. There is much to like: the beautiful outdoors, the punctual people and trains, and the way the country makes complicated things a little easier. I remember visiting more than two decades ago and being struck by the absence of plastic bags in supermarkets and the seriousness with which recycling was taken, years before either caught on elsewhere. Switzerland was ahead of its time and still leaves the rest of us looking faintly disorganised.

Yoram Lustig from T. Rowe Price (Image: zVg)

Where Swiss investors can find opportunities

That same instinct for getting ahead, in my view, is exactly what Swiss investors should apply to their portfolios by constructing them globally. The yield on a 10-year Swiss government bond is below 0,30 percent, the lowest among major developed markets and even lower than that on Japanese government bonds. Swiss government bonds not only pay almost no interest but also offer limited diversification against equity risk. A better approach, and our preferred one, is to invest in global, high-quality fixed income and hedge the currency exposure back to the Swiss franc. This builds more resilient portfolios and pays you for the privilege: the yield on the Bloomberg Global Aggregate Index is over 3,5 percent.

On the equity side, going global lets investors participate in the trends shaping the world. One of them seems to be everywhere: artificial intelligence. Growth-oriented global equity strategies benchmarked against the MSCI All Country World Index (ACWI) provide substantial exposure to the US, the centre of technology and AI, as well as to emerging markets, which supply much of the AI infrastructure, including semiconductors. Over the decade to the end of May 2026, the Swiss stock market returned about 8,5 percent a year on average; the MSCI ACWI returned roughly 13,5 percent. Four percentage points a year, compounded, was the price of staying home.

Finally, we are living through a period of profound change across technology, geopolitics, society and the environment. At times like this, the best approach is to stay invested and diversified, drawing on diversifiers suited to different conditions: global fixed income, exposure to safe-haven currencies such as the US dollar, and active defensive strategies. The Swiss have always understood that the surest way to weather a storm is to prepare for it long before the clouds gather. The same discipline, pointed at the horizon rather than the next headline, is what carries a portfolio through.