The exchange rate has fluctuated significantly in the last few weeks, and we know that some of you have concerns regarding your investments and how these changes impact your money. Our goal is to shed more light on how to best consider current realities in order to make the best long-term decisions about your finances. 

Your long-term returns on Rise beat the exchange rate impact

The first thing to keep in mind is that beyond the impact of exchange rates, your investments are generating stable long-term returns across multiple asset classes. Over time, this will do more to grow your wealth than any temporary fluctuations in the exchange rate.

For instance, between January 2024 and today, users have earned 15.85% on stocks, 3.09% on real estate and 2.5% on fixed income assets in USD terms. 

Despite the significant drop in exchange rates, users’ returns are still positive. If you stretch this over to the year we founded Rise, returns have been stable and your money has grown so much more than any impact of exchange rate volatility, regardless of the timeline of your USD. Hence, our long term investors are and will continue to be better off. 

Naira options are available on your account.

For users who funded more recently at higher exchange rates than today, who may be more impacted by the short term volatility and would rather protect their money in naira today, we added a naira wallet to make it easy to shift from USD to naira when exchange rates are volatile. That way, you don’t experience further losses and can wait out any volatility. You also have the option of earning up to 20% returns in naira per annum by leaving your naira in the vault. There is no exchange rate exposure and you still benefit from earning returns on your investments in your preferred currency. We designed the naira wallet and vault to help you hedge against such volatility and we encourage you to take advantage of it. 

When in doubt, use our cost-averaging strategy.

For some of us who prefer to invest consistently without having to predict or worry about the timing of exchange rates or returns, our preferred strategy is to use a dollar cost averaging (DCA) method. This is when you have a set amount of money you want to invest each month, just like you pay your other bills. Every month, you take that amount, and fund your preferred investment (whether naira or dollar) on schedule. The gain of this approach is that when exchange rates are lower, you invest a larger dollar amount and when exchange rates are higher, your dollar investment is lower. But for you, this frees you from trying to time the market and instead allows you to make consistent and steady progress towards your long term goals. 

The best way to do this is to set up auto-invest on your Rise, so that you don’t need to manually do the investment each time and instead rest easy knowing that your investments are being handled on schedule every time. 

As always, our goal at Rise is to help you make the best of your finances and achieve your long term financial goals, regardless of volatility or short term circumstances. We remain committed to our mission of helping you build wealth over time, and we encourage you to stick to your plans and let time do the heavy lifting. 

Thank you for choosing Rise, and if you have further questions or concerns, kindly contact us via the contact session on your app, or send us an email at [email protected].

Love and returns, 

The Rise Team