Interactive Brokers - all eggs in one basket?

Swiss customers are handled by Schwab USA, Schwab UK is only for about 3-4 specific countries.

You can see them here:
https://international.schwab.com/public/international/nn/open_an_account

mifid is completely irrelevant since Switzerland isn’t in the EU.

Regarding Schwab USA for Swiss people: thanks for the confirmation, I think the same but I’ve been mislead by the redirection to the UK by “discovery” of my swiss IP address.

Regarding Mifid, I was specifically referring to PRIIP regulation for retail investors or people who are not classified as “professional”, that is the requirement for fund providers to provide to non professional investors a PRIIP KID as of 1 January 2020. This seems also to apply to swiss investors (see here and here). Quoting @thepoorswiss: “In 2018, the Swiss government voted two new laws: Financial Services Act (FinSA) and Financial Institutions Act (FinIA). Once again, I am not going to go into details of these laws. They are more or less a copy of the European laws for Swiss investors. They also enforce each fund to offer a Key Investor Documented (KID) to all Swiss investors. So, they cause exactly the same issue to Swiss investors that PRIIPS caused to European investors.

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You are (fortunately) mistaken in two ways:

  1. The Swiss laws are not a direct copy of the EU laws (they are less strict). Ok, you may need to grab a lawyer to explain this in detail…
  2. Swiss laws don’t apply to non-Swiss brokers.

Schwab are ignoring mifid for their EU clients despite having that UK office, you can’t seriously suggest they’re going to suddenly care about Swiss laws.

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they very much do. In order to do business with clients you need to respect the law for the country of residence.

do you have a source that states this?

I honestly hope IB and other non CH brokers (like Schwab) will continue to offer us those products…

The topic has been broadly discussed here. If you have further infos your contributions will be surely appreciated as this “risk” concerns many forum members.

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What you say is true… for US law. For everyone else, you’re wrong and you need to spend some time learning about how international law works. If what you claim were true, all brokers would have to charge Swiss stamp duty

I don’t have the link anymore, but someone I know showed me a page where FINMA explained that FinSA only applies to persons and brokerages located in Switzerland.

There was some guy on the MMM forum, look for recent EU related threads.

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CT didn’t but in a private email an employee wrote me they are going to apply it this year. When I asked how much would it be, no more answer, very unprofessional, so CT is not an option for me anymore.

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This link may be useful: Swiss Custody Fees Compared (they also don’t know CT is going to apply a fee this year)

It’s possible to compare the fees with different scenarios under this link https://www.moneyland.ch/en/onlineTrading/index
Obviously, it would depend how much money you have under custody.

But in top, you have most of the time:

  • Cornertrade - no custody fees
  • Postfinance - flat 90 CHF/year
  • Tradedirect - Custody fees: 0.025%, min. CHF 10, max. CHF 25 per quarter.
  • Strateo - 0.02% + VAT (min. CHF 15, max. CHF 35) quarterly.
  • Swissquote - 0.025% (min. CHF 15, max. CHF 50) quarterly (+ VAT).

Some banks are refunding the stock transfer fees from one broker to another one.
For exemple: tradedirect up to 500.-

After, it’s a question of features and personnal feeling:

  • Cornertrade seems to have issue with 2FA (based on the feedbacks from this forum)
  • Tradedirect doesn’t inspire trust with their website homepage (even if BCV is behind)
  • Postfinance has changed multiple time their fees in the last 4 years
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I am using 2fa with corner trader. Recently I changed my phone, so I had to change the credential. I could not do it myself, the option to change it yourself is gone. So I had to call them, then they resetted the 2fa and I could provide the new credential. So this loophole is kind of mended. But of course anyone could call and pretend to be me, so its still not perfect.

My biggest problem with CT is their lack of professionalism. You can see that they are very small. You have issue with 2fa? Bad luck, the guy responsible for this is not in the office today, try tomorrow (seriously, true story bro). It seems to me like the majority of their RMs are Russian, which is strange for a Swiss company.

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Personally, I’m quite happy with Swissquote, except the 2.- for outgoing transfer even in CHF.

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They’d have to call from your number. They verify this.

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You can easily do number spoofing. That’s why tax administration, normal bank and insurance ask you security question and/or personnal details.

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Anyone got more details as to how much custody or account fee CornerTrader are going to introduce this year? Would be good to know what amount they will have and whether it’s

  • a minimum/prepaid fee like PostFinance or Interactive Brokers
  • or a percentage model like Swissquote, Strateo, Tradedirect
    • (actually Stateo have also an ‘account maintenance fee’ of 50 CHF/year if not enough trades executed)

I reread my email exchanges with Mr. Patrick Fuchs (Cornertrader Relationship manager in Lugano) and:

  • bonds custody fees: 0.25%
  • stocks custody fees: none
  • inactive account fees: not specified what ‘inactive’ means and how much they will be

And to be fair I found out he did answer my mail (but it was by mistake redirected into ‘Spam’). So I’m back considering CT a possible ‘basket’.

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PS: regarding IB alternative: etrade seem to offer the relevant vanguard etfs even commission free (see here) - ok they gotta have shitty money transfer fees (sth like 25$?), but no account/custody fee. what’s the catch? (the estate tax!)
Edit: maybe the catch is that they only accept US residents…:thinking:

one more thought re IB alternative: degiro. I assume some of you are already using it. I at first considered it a total no-go, so sad, as for the custody model (which is the only one that makes sense for me) they were charging 1 EUR + 3% for dividends. That essentially means round about 0.1% additional cost. That’s outragous! :sweat_smile:
Now, what if you just stick to accumulating ETFs on degiro (custody model). Wouldnt that actually be a mustachian solution?
Another one re degiro: does anyone know if you pay Swiss Stamp Duty with them? They’re dutch but for swiss you open an account with degiro.ch and have to transfer CHF if I got that right…

Yes that will bypass the dividend fee. I believe you will not be paying stamp tax as the broker is Dutch, not Swiss.

Yes, only US citizen, but you can ask