Why?
There is an entire thread (or rather, multiple of them) dedicated to show how the IB user experience is indeed not as taxing as some want to paint it.
And yes there are already “step by step” guides on this same forum, no need for another one.
Maybe the admins could just extract the relevant posts into one topic and lock it for further posts (until something else useful comes up).
Yes, Google sheets for one 
Jokes aside - IB does have portfolio views and reports which are decent, yes.
Damn that looks awesome. Care to share your file?
The admin is MP, who is not active on the forum. Plus there are two moderators: @Julianek & me. We did create a wiki section at some point, some threads are enabled for everybody to edit. But of course it is a community effort to build a sensible FAQ etc. If we were all a bit more disciplined, we could link to useful posts each time they pop up. But in the end it takes some curation and editing to make something easily accessible for a newcomer. If you can do the search through the forum and make a guide, that would be great.
Absolutely, happy to share!
Feel free to copy the doc from here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ifBr45rDuNe1WZHaM647s6pa-Iw5N_-mbVR8fo5CSNA/copy
Few notes:
Shoot if any further questions. 
Yeah but Revolut have a monthly limit.
Hi, yes. I know, for me 6k per month is enough
In any case, I need/want at least 2 brokers, I have a big position in stocks and I don’t sleep well having all the money in the same basket… I tried with DeGiro and CornerTrade and I closed the accounts. Too expensive, and doesn’t fit my needs. I wrote why in another post.
Now, for the transfers. I’ve been thinking that I’m going to maintain my IB account. They are cheap, professional and in general good. I’m going to send money to TD either from Revolut, Transferwise or better, like now, send CHF to IB, exchange there and since both IB and TD are in the US, sending the USD between them. Always if there is more than 6000 USD that is the maximum of Revolut.
That’s my idea.
Btw, what about IBKR Lite? I mean I’m just buying ETFs?
Damn, just for US clients. Too bad.
What other US broker is there that gives you access to forex and lets you transfer money in different currencies?
I am planning to complain the shit out of IB if they make US ETF unavailable. And I start a riot with people from this forum.
Guys, please only make a copy and then edit to your liking, don’t edit directly there.
Your experimentation ruins the sheet for others’ reference.
(I guess I could lock it for editing, just allow copying - will check for that)
Ja makes sense, but why bother with the 2 steps?
There’s also Schwab if you want another decent broker, but you also need to convert currency elsewhere since they charge 0.5%.
Ah yeah, that influencial MP forum that IB really care about.
Don’t worry, mutliple big Swiss banks are working hard to make sure that US ETF’s will be avialable after 2022 when the new rules start applying to funds.
Can’t you make it read only if you are worried about that?
I can too, true. 
Now I just modified the URL so it guides straight to making a copy; to reduce the effort for others 
To answer that question, we could start with:
While I am sure many people would be able to follow these steps verbatim, if spoon-fed to them…
I think that’s neither easy nor intuitive for most non finance savvy people.
For comparison see TransferWise’s currency exchange workflow “you send - recipient gets” And works both directions with currency pairs. Couldn’t be more intuitive.
This may sound controversial, but I believe if people can’t or are not willing to grasp these few basics of forex trading and stock trading, then they shouldn’t do it. Sure, IB could make currency exchange as easy as Revolut, but small inexperienced traders are not their goal. So you can either learn these few steps or go start elsewhere, with less favourable conditions.
By the way, IB asks you at the beginning about your experience, and will not let you trade unless you have considerable experience or just lie about it. I wonder why this check exists, maybe they really don’t want unexperienced people to access their platform.
Doesn’t make sense. IBKR wants as many customers as possible for sure.
Clearly it does not. Maybe it doesn’t want to deal with people with 10’000 USD who constantly have support questions, make mistakes in trading and give them bad reviews. Much better than 20 such traders is one trader with 200’000 who knows what he’s doing. But with this IBKR Lite maybe their focus shifts. I wonder if for IBKR Lite you still need to say that you executed 100 trades in your life and have 4 years of experience etc.
I assume your questions above are hypothetical, so I won’t be answering them.
(But yes, you can buy USD.EUR, however the math is far easier to work out when you say “give me as much as possible USD for this much EUR”; than “how much EUR do I actually need to buy precisely this much USD?”)
Fair enough.
But in that case I would argue that those non-finance-savvy people, who additionally refuse to inform themselves sufficiently to understand these few key steps, probably then also don’t (or at least shouldn’t) purchase stocks / ETFs, at least not directly through such platforms.
IB recently implemented a currency conversion tool, at least in the mobile app. I haven’t tried it but it seems quite straightforward.
In case some new people will read this thread in the future. This is how I remember it intuitively. The dot means “with/for”.
