You had me confused there for a second with your name change.
Have you tried BEN with Post-finance? I am pretty sure it should work there too.
Haha, sorry about that, decided to have more privacy since I seem to be in this forum for the long run 
I have been doing BEN with PostFinance, but it still costed me 10CHF for a 30000CHF transfer. Tomorrow I’m transferring 10000CHF more, and I’ll see if it is proportional.
Interesting, I guess Raiffeisen has better intermediaries.
I would guess it is not proportional since the other options (shared and sender) are a fixed price, interested to know how this turns out.
I am just glad I do not have to get another account.
Who would have though Raiffeisen would be cheap in any way.
The only options I see in PostFinance are:
There’s no BEN option, so I chose shared cost.
Well that sucks. Maybe shoot a message to customer service, maybe they can do something.
Thank you for your message dated 22 May 2017.
We very much regret to inform you that we do not offer an option fo an international transfer free of charge for the sender. You basically only have the the possibility to choose between our cost and shared cost. In oder to save on fees we recommend you to chose the option our cost.
We thank you for your understanding and wish you a pleasant day.
If I remember correctly, someone already tried Our cost and saw it was worse than shared cost, or not? :-/
UPDATE: Wire from CH account to IB - #10 by T78a (20.- + 2.- for “our cost” option). Apparently they either are ignorant about their own costs, or are trying to push customers to costlier options.
Well that sucks, maybe you should consider opening an account with a bank supporting BEN.
But it is probably overkill just to save 2$ per month.
(Also the forum said I reply to you too much XD)
Yeah, I think it would be overkill (even if it is for 6-10 CHF, since we’re talking about transfers of 10000+ CHF). I think globally PostFinance saves me much more than that. I’m just curious to see what their answer is, since I confronted them with the real costs which show that Our cost is actually worse.
Also, bad forum, leave @chestwood96 alone.
Regarding the broker choice, I have one question - IB account makes only sense if I already have more than $100’000?
At least this is how I understand Mr. @_MP’s table:
Although if I’ll take into account CHF/USD exchange (50CHF for 10’000CHF invested), then it might make sense to start investing on IB from beginning. If I’d invest 10’000 x 4 times a year, then the total cost of CT becomes 4 * 20CHF (commission) + 4 * 50CHF = 280 CHF. That’s way too un-mustachian solution.
Currency conversion is surely one factor to take into account. The other might be stamp duty (for foreign securities it’s 0.15% -> 60 CHF on your yearly 40k).
Last factor: transaction costs also depend on which stock exchanges you buy. Buying in USD at LSE (London) - for example the well known VWRD - only costs 0.05% (min. 5 USD).
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How can I check the transaction costs for iShares Core MSCI World UCITS ETF? I couldn’t find it here:
Is it already included in the TER?
You go on the “Listings” tab where you can see stock exchanges, currencies and tickers.
Once you’ve chosen the currency / exchange you use the corresponding ticker to buy.
The ticker for LSE/USD in this case should be IWDA.
I’m buying in USD on SIX currently. Not sure about the transaction costs. It seems that it’s CHF 1.50. At least here I found such information:
http://www.six-swiss-exchange.com/rule_book/08-DIR07/en/27021598094424075.html
It’s expensive to trade on european exchanges, most of the time fees will be a percentage, like 0.1-0.2% or so even with inexpensive brokers. Look at your brokers’ fee, not exchange’s, because you’re customer to the broker, not exchange. In addition, some countries will charge stamp duty, UK’s stamp duty is in particular a bloody ripoff, 0.5% to the buyer!
If you have a choice, better trade on american exchanges. No f-ing stamp duty and trading costs pennies. It makes it even worth to buy european stocks as american ADRs rather than directly on their native exchanges.
The UK stamp tax has been abolished since April 2014 on ETFs
But it’s still there if you’d buy normal UK stocks
Hi Guys, one more question regarding investing via IB. If I’m starter with CHF 15’000 and I can stash about CHF 3’000-4’000 a month, then how often should I invest to minimise the costs? I can see at the IB’s website that they have required minimum monthly activity fee:
Monthly Activity Fee = 0 if monthly commissions are equal to at least USD 10.
If monthly commissions are less than USD 10,
Standard Activity Fee = USD 10 – commissions.
Do I understand correctly then that I should invest every month to minimise the costs? That’s kind of a pain in the butt. Has anyone managed to automate this somehow?
PS. Two more questions: Which account type should I choose - Cash or Margin? Which commissions type - Fixed or Tiered?
You could try captrader or lynxtrader instead, which don’t have minimum monthly fees. Under the hood they both use IB’s platform, but charge somewhat higher transaction fees.
In margin account you’ll be able to loan cash from the broker with the collateral of your stocks. It makes things generally a bit more flexible even if you’re not going to use this facility. You could for example first buy a bunch of stocks and then convert currencies to cover exactly the prices you’ve paid. Or buy the dip before you get your next monthly salary or wire transfer arrives at the broker. Or request a withdrawal without waiting several days for a trade to settle. The interests are actually pretty reasonable, 1.5% p.a. for CHF currently.
Which commissions type - Fixed or Tiered?
Tiered is often cheaper, even at small volumes. With fixed IB charges you a relatively high commission to cover worst case scenarios. With tiered you’d pay a smaller commission to IB plus exchange’s commission, which depends on exchange, type of product traded, whether you add or remove liquidity from exchange. Some exchanges (e.g. BYX) even pay you for removing liquidity, so net it can cost less than IB’s commission.
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Thanks @hedgehog once again for your help!
Oh man! I knew I should have asked before opening the account. I’ve chosen the Cash account with Fixed commissions. I hope it’s still possible to change that.
I think I’ll stick to IB - $10 a month is somehow a lot for a Mustachian, but I’ll try to minimise that by trading every month part of my salary and get to $100k as fast as possible. Other brokers will only shift that cost to different areas, but it won’t be cheaper than IB.
I just opened a Custody Account with DeGiro after becoming fed up with Postfinance high costs.
I have evaluated IB as well but after trying the interface and their website I gave up. It has very good pricing and it is very powerful (I like a lot the idea of public APIs) but definitely not for me. I do not understand half of what I see in the main screen and I would always fear of clicking the wrong button
Degiro is exactly the opposite: the interface is super simple and you can do very few things (even less if - like me - you choose a custody account) but they are exactly what I need.
Some random tidbits:
- you can send only CHF to a CH IBAN (i.e: no cost involved in the transfer)
- if you need to buy stocks/ETF in a different currency, there is a markup of 0.1% from Degiro
- 15 mins delay on all stock markets except the Swiss one
- some ETFs are for free, for the others it’s 2EUR+0.02%
- if you have a custody account, you have an additional fee on dividends (1,00€ + 3,00% du dividende (maximum 10,00%). Nothing if the ETF is accumulating
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