There certainly isn’t a 1% commission on the whole trade amount. As I understand it, a 1% commission is charged for the fractional part of the trade but only on European exchanges. Depending on the share price and trade amount, this may be noticeable.
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So there seems to be no option to define a recurring order for a US ETF by giving a CHF amount right?
That would be the easiest:
- You wire a set amount of CHF every month to IBKR (lets say 1k)
- You set up a recurring order for VT with the amount of VT you can get for 1k CHF
- IBKR converts the 1k CHF to USD and gets as much VT it can for this amount.
If I set the recurring order in USD, there’ll always be some uninvested leftover (or not enough cash to execute) due to currency fluctuation. And if I need to check this regularly, I can also just buy manually from the start.
Correct. You get some leftovers and have to adjust from time to time depending on the exchange rate.
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Do any of you have the problem that recurring orders that were scheduled for the weekend do not get traded the following day? I have an order that was supposed to be executed on the 25th of May, but it’s still not been executed. There is more than enough money to cover the investment, I don’t see why it wouldn’t execute.
- May was a bank holiday in the US (memorial day), so if you placed an order for a US security there was no trading on that day. The trade was probably executed today with settlement tomorrow (US officially changed the settlement cycle to T+1 as of today).
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You’re so right. I was aware of the US holiday, but for some reason I think it’s Wednesday today.
The order just executed.
I finally have my IBKR account ready and funded.
WRT recurring investments, if I understood everything correctly:
- I need to have fractional shares enabled. Is there any drawback when buying fractional shares?
- When transferring CHF and buying USD ETFs, I need to set the amount purchased with a very conservative exchange ratio to make sure every order goes through, and live with 10% or so lying around unused all the time? Would I get notified if a recurring investment doesn’t go through?
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Fractional shares for US ETFs i dont see a problem (i do it myself), but be aware of some higher fees when trading fractional shares of EU or CH ETFs/shares.
And afaik you would get the usual notification from IBKR if balance is not sufficient and order is not executed (given you have a cash account and not a margin account). But then you could just login manually and execute it.
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Objectively:
When you buy full shares, they are bought at usual stocks exchanges and are segregated from the IB’s own assets. The fraction part is handled separately by IB. They are rather IOU from IB. Also the cost to trade this small fraction is disproportionally high (but we are still talking about cents).
Subjectively:
Lots of people, including, as it has turned out, me, are annoyed by having a fraction of a share.
I don’t have securities that cost 4 digits per share (not even Nvidia), most are 2 digits. So I have got rid of all share fractions.
Buying a couple of funds at most once per month, I have finally decided to not get bothered by IB’s currency conversion fee and by fractional shares. And with a margin account I don’t mind to be few bucks negative.
My procedure is simple:
- Deposit CHF.
- Close CHF balance to USD (my base currency).
- Calculate how many full shares I can buy.
- Submit a limit order (pure precaution) for this number of shares more or less at a market price.
- Make sure that the order was executed, adjust if necessary.
- Go back to reading https://forum.mustachianpost.com/
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But then you pay the minimum 2 USD conversion fee right? If you execute the order without converting first, they do the automatic conversion at a 0.03% increased rate, without any minimum fee. So for any orders <6,000 USD it is cheaper to not do the manual currency conversion.
I guess this answers it partly:
But if you could do less work for better outcome it would still be advantageous, right?
Important step. 
I like this.
Yes! It won’t ruin me. Furthermore, I prefer margin account type.
Not really less work if you have to figure out how many shares can you buy with your CHF balance. For me it is important to buy as many full shares as I can buy and be done with it.
True it’s not that much and probably well worth if you like it more that way.
Personally, I’m still not comfortable with margin accounts, since I don’t like the concept of accidentally going <0 because I messed something up. Rather want such an order to fail, but that’s subjective.
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Can you explain why I shouldnt use the recurring investment with tiered pricing? I want to set up a monthly investment of 1000 CHF in VT and currently have my account set to tiered. From what I read I would also use the automatic currency conversion for this transaction. Is this not the best way then?
Is it possible to avoid fractional shares but still use recurring investments?
and if not, is it possible to simulate the recurring investment orders?
and how do I know if I am on tiered pricing or not?
- tiered/fixed pricing: IBKR Pricing Plan
- AFAIK it’s only possible with fractional shares. What do you want to simulate? You could just transfer money automatically to IBKR and once a month create a buy order manually, maybe takes 2 minutes per month.
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I want to simulate exactly what you described.
Would that be possible?
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To create an order manually? I hope so 
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quite the opposite. To avoid creating the order manually.
No, as stated [1]:
Recurring Investments uses fractional shares trading to help you get more for your money. With fractional shares, you can divide your investments among more US, Canadian or EU stocks and put small balances to work.
You cannot do automatic investing with full shares. Although I also don’t understand what the fuss is all about. Most ETF shares are trading < $200 per share. So what’s the big downside if you have a 6-7 figure portfolio?