Founding op-ed: Why do we invest differently?
The thesis that underpins our long-term wealth approach
Des clients bien gérés.
Et pourtant déçus.
Qu'est-ce qui se perd entre le rendement affiché et la richesse réelle ?
We looked for a rigorous answer to this question. And we found it — not in classical financial literature, but in physics. Starting with an old intuition, formulated in 1927 by Werner Heisenberg.
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that you cannot simultaneously and precisely know the position and the velocity of a particle. The more you try to pin down one, the blurrier the other becomes. And above all: the very act of observing disturbs what is being observed. Measurement is never neutral.
Applied to financial markets, this principle takes on immediate resonance: you cannot simultaneously know the exact price of an asset and its future path. Every investment decision is made in a state of fundamental uncertainty — not for lack of information, but by nature. Uncertainty is not a flaw in the system. It is a constitutive property of it.
If uncertainty is irreducible, the question is no longer to remove it. It is to build a wealth architecture that turns it to advantage rather than merely enduring it.
This intuition led us to the work of Ole Peters, a physicist at the Santa Fe Institute, who published in 2019 in Nature Physics a mathematical demonstration that is its logical continuation. His thesis: classical finance computes the wrong average. It reasons as if an investor could live thousands of trajectories in parallel and average them. But a real human being lives only a single trajectory, in time, one after the other. Uncertainty is not an anomaly to be corrected — it is the very condition in which real wealth accumulates, or is lost.
The illusion of the average return
-25%
An investment that gains 50% in the first year, then loses 50% in the second, shows an average return of 0%. Your real capital, however, has lost 25%. Volatility destroys wealth — silently, mechanically, even when the averages look neutral.
This phenomenon has a name: volatility drag. It is structurally ignored by traditional portfolio management, which keeps optimising expected returns rather than the real growth of capital over time. Heisenberg raised the question. Peters provided the quantitative demonstration. We drew the practical consequences.
The enemy of your wealth,
is not risk.
It is poorly managed volatility.
Un cadre mathématique
construit pour répondre
à cette réalité
Fort de cette thèse, nous avons construit une méthode d'allocation
fondée sur trois outils issus des mathématiques appliquées et de la
théorie de l'information :
Pourquoi l'assurance-vie luxembourgeoise est la réponse évidente ?
A dynamic rebalancing strategy can only work fully if each adjustment is tax-neutral. In France, switching between two supports generates a taxable event — which amounts to taxing the very discipline that produces the performance.
The Luxembourg life insurance policy solves this problem structurally: switches between unit-linked supports are carried out with no immediate taxation. The strategy can be executed with all the rigour it requires, without tax friction, over a horizon of twenty years or more.
To this are added the protection of the Luxembourg Security Triangle, access to institutional supports via dedicated funds, and the international portability of the policy — a decisive advantage for clients whose life plans include geographic mobility.
Profile
Defensive
Capital preservation. Steady growth, controlled volatility. Horizon under ten years or a transfer constraint.
Profile
Moderate
The mathematically optimal balance between growth and stability. The reference profile over ten to twenty years.
Profile
Aggressive
Maximising wealth growth. For clients with an extended horizon and a solid capacity to weather the cycles.
ALTA : quand l'intelligence artificielle entre au service de la rigueur mathématique
Calibrating an allocation on these principles for each client — with their existing assets, their horizon, their taxation, their life plan — represents considerable computational complexity. We developed ALTA to meet it.
ALTA is our wealth-analysis tool powered by artificial intelligence. It models your situation as a whole, simulates the evolution of your wealth under various market and life scenarios, and calibrates your allocation with a precision out of reach for a manual approach. Balmont Conseil is the first wealth management firm in France to embed this level of analysis in its day-to-day practice.
Votre patrimoine mérite
une stratégie construite pour votre réalité
Alexis Sagnier
With over 17 years of expertise in financial engineering, Alexis Sagnier supports company directors and expatriates in securing their cross-border interests.
Pourquoi nous investissons différemment
La thèse qui fonde notre approche patrimoniale long terme