Ameritrade plus Interactive Brokers

Investing / Brokers
1

I was wondering if anyone is using the strategy of buying stocks on IB and periodically transferring a part of their portfolio to Ameritrade in order to keep the assets diversified between the two.

My main motivation for doing this is because a) I don’t want to be totally dependent on IB, b) While IB is a large broker in Swiss context, it is not really that large by US standards (not even in top 5), especially for retail investors (For example, none of my US relatives have ever heard of it). In my opinion, politically it is definitely not too big to fail. I suspect that there would be far more motivation amongst politicians to make sure everything is sorted properly if Ameritrade had issues compared to IB. c) More likely, IB will get taken over by one of the top 5 at some point and then we don’t know what will be the new rules.

From what little research I did, it looks like there are no fees to transfer partial positions from IB to Ameritrade. I wanted to diversify my brokerage for some time now. Ameritrade seemed like a good option, but I was hesitant as transferring funds from CH did not seem as straightforward (or cheap) as in IB.

But, doing it this way should avoid the hassle of transferring funds and if still possible, I can do it in reverse whenever I want to liquidate (which won’t be till retirement).

2

Have a look at this thread TD Ameritrade broker or @Tino has some experiences on the topic

Personally, I think having more than one broker is better. However, based on the current explanation from the other threads, i find Transfering money in and out of TD is a bit too complex.
It seems easier to buy stocks at IB and transfer them to a Swissbroker like Swissquote.

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Should be possible to do the same with Ameritrade at the very least. But, I guess there are benefits to having a Swiss based broker.

4

TD Ameritrade is a well known retail broker, especially in the US. But Interactivebrokers is almost as big, just not as well know by retail customers.
If I compare their latest monthly metrics (although unfair comparison, as IBKR just released January stats, while for AMTD I found only November 2020 stats):

Total client assets:

  • IBKR: 313 billion$ (1.2 million client accounts)
  • AMTD: 369 billion$ (unknown number of clients)

Daily trades:

  • IBKR: 3.3 million
  • AMTD: 392 thousand

Also, keep in mind that AMTD is being acquired by Charles Schwab. I also agree with you that more consolidation will likely happen, as the cut throat competition towards 0 fees continue. Some new 0 fee brokers might be bought or killed. Look what happened to Robinhood because they didn’t have enough capital to sustain their business model.

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