Thematic Portfolios

Thematic Portfolios are a long-term investment product which allows you to invest in what you believe could transform the world. They are aimed to maximise exposure to promising long-term trends within your risk preference. Thematic Portfolios are grouped around different promising trends and are composed of exchange-traded funds (ETFs), as well as balancing assets (non-thematic instruments). You can learn more here.

Thematic Portfolios can be a strong addition to a core investment strategy. Thematic Portfolios have a lot of long-term equity exposure, making them a great way to add diversification to your existing investment plan.

Thematic Portfolios are at higher risk compared to our General Investing portfolios. This means that they’re certainly not a replacement for a balanced retirement plan and other savings plans, but they do have the potential to complement long-term financial plans. If you’re a starting investor we recommend you take a look at our General Investing portfolio .

Our annual management fee for Thematic Portfolios ranges between 0.2% and 0.8%, average expense ratio charged by ETF fund managers is 0.52%. However, there's no minimum investment amount and no subscription, switching, and rebalancing fees. Learn more about our pricing here .

Our investment team has narrowed down hundreds of the world's best thematic ETFs by analysing three criteria. How efficiently the fund is managed by evaluating their tracking error versus the target asset class, how cost-efficient the fund is (total expense ratio), and how easy it is to redeem and invest into the fund (liquidity).

When you create Thematic Portfolios with StashAway, you choose the StashAway Risk Index (SRI). Based on the risk you select, we’ll maximise your exposure to the themes and add the so-called balancing assets as the remainder. Balancing assets are the non-thematic instruments included in your Thematic Portfolios to ensure your risk levels are under control.

We selected the themes while looking at the latest thematic investing trends and theme performance in the market. In addition, the demand for these themes also came from our clients - we did user research which showed a clear interest to invest in these topics.

Our approach with Thematic Portfolios ensures maximum exposure to the selected themes while keeping your risk preferences in mind. In addition, the composition of our portfolios is designed to bring extensive diversity to your portfolios. Each Thematic Portfolio is intelligently diversified with ETFs that provide you exposure to multiple sub-themes.

Conventional sector investing is investing in an industry or sector of the economy, for example, real estate or renewable energy. Thematic investing, in contrast, is investing in one topic, however, across several industries. Let’s take healthcare innovation, for example. Healthcare innovation, as a theme, has been adopted across various industries, such as biotech, genomics, medical devices, and many more. And this industry-wide spread approach, known as thematic investing, gives you a much greater diversification compared to sector investing.

Responsible Investing is an ESG-optimised (Environmental, Social, and Governance) portfolio. When you invest in this portfolio, you are supporting a broad range of companies that make a positive social and environmental impact on society, and consider factors such as sustainability, diversity, inclusion, transparency, and community as part of their business operations. In other words, it is industry-agnostic. Through this portfolio, you have the option to build your core wealth with ESG aligned principles. 

In contrast, Environment and Cleantech focuses on the environment industry specifically. It is a thematic portfolio that invests in  innovative low-carbon technologies and sustainable solutions to fight climate change, such as solar energy. The companies in this portfolio have business operations that are directly relevant to clean energy, green growth, clean water, and sustainable waste management. As with our other Thematic Portfolios, Environment and Cleantech provides an option to diversify your investments.

We recommend investors take a longer-term mindset with Thematic Portfolios, and consider an investment period of at least 5-7 years. Thematic Portfolios are investments aimed to capitalise on long-term changes, and it takes time for full adoption of structural changes and the winners in each space emerge.

The StashAway Risk Index (SRI) for Thematic Portfolios ranges from 20% to 45%. Learn more about SRI here . 

It’s really up to you! You can invest in one, two, or all three themes. You can also have two different portfolios (with different StashAway Risk Indexes) of the same theme.

We don’t share expected returns or projections because thematic investing is inherently very volatile. In other words, projections based on historical returns for Thematic Portfolios could be misleading. What’s most important is to pick the most suitable SRI for your risk preferences: There will be short-term ups and downs, and riding them out is the key to capturing the large potential returns that can come with thematic investing.

The composition of Thematic Portfolios can possibly change after some time. Thematic Portfolios, as with all our investment products, are subject to re-optimisation. The basis of our investment strategy is to build portfolios with particular asset allocations that are optimal for four different economic cycles. When our investment team identifies and signals a change in the economic cycle, our technology automatically re-optimises all portfolios' asset allocations. Re-optimisation is applied to keep your risk profile constant while maximising long-term returns. You can learn more about it here .

There’s no minimum amount to start investing in Thematic Portfolios. However, SFC requires a minimum of HK$10,000 deposit for new accounts .