How to Send Money to Your Interactive Broker's account for free

[ajPT]

@demian91

Just one question: If you sent CHF and you want to buy USD based funds do you need to convert manually the balance in your account via a Forex trade? If so how does it work?

Yes.

You can follow the steps bojack described here:

Interactive Brokers for dummies

Alright, I’ll check it out for the next transfer. Thanks! So the simple instruction for dummies of your first purchase at IB would be: Transfer 10’000 CHF to IB using the CH IBAN (not GB) Login to WebTrader, check that you have 10’000 CHF Click on the Forex tab, enter CHF, look for the CHF.USD Enter the amount 10’000 and choose the type SELL You should now have 0 CHF and everything converted to USD Go to Stocks tab and type in VT, select the type BUY What I’m not so aware of: how safe it is…

If the base currency of your account is USD, you can follow the steps as described.

If it is in CHF, you need to “discount” the commission fee when converting, as I said here:

Interactive Brokers for dummies

I managed to do it successfully the way @Bojack said and paid 1,97 CHF commission to convert my CHF to USD. Basically I’ve put the full amount I wanted to convert and pressed “preview order” to check the commission. There, it said the commission will be 1,97 CHF for the amount I wanted to convert, so I modified my order to subtracted this commission (tbh, I subtracted 5 CHF to be on the safe side, but then 3 CHF stayed in my account). This was the way I’ve found to not have negative CHF balan…