Interactive Brokers Dividend Election

Investing / Brokers
1

Hello everyone!
What is your setting towards dividend Election at Interactive Brokers?
There are three options: Reinvest, Receive Cash or Follow Account Level.

My Problem is:
As a Swiss resident with maincurrency CHF my dividend income in Euro or Dollar was automatically converted to CHF by Interactive Brokers. I would prefer, receiving Dollar Dividends in Dollar, Euro in Euro etc.

In my settings I choosed “receive cash” for my dividend Election.
Do I have to change this to “Follow Account Level” so that Interactive Brokers does not convert the dividends automatically in CHF anymore?

Maybe important: I bought every stock with AutoFX in CHF. Does that have an impact on the incoming dividend currency? Additionally I have only a cash-account.

Thanks for the answers!

2

Mine is set to “Receive cash” on account level,
And (default) “Follow account” on individual stock levels.

This auto-conversion might be new?
As far as I recall I used to receive all dividends in USD too, now it seems to be all to CHF.

3

Thanks for your answer :slight_smile:

I just read almost every discussion here about IBKR and found out, that every Cash-Position below $5 ist automatically converted back to CHF by interactive Brokers.

I do not know if this is right, but it makes sense. Does anybody know?

4

Yes, it happened to me for my child’s account, as the dividends are also below 5 dollars. I guess you could change the main currency of your account to USD to prevent this. I didn’t try, I just stopped caring, when they introduced the auto fx when buying USD positions when you only have CHF. But of course, you loose 0.03% every time.

5

Perfect, thank you for confirming this!

Well I think I do not care about loosing 0.03% - just like you.
Anyway it’s easier to track my currencies like this in PortfolioPerformance.

6

so I don’t understand…Are dividends received in USD or are they automatically converted into CHF? Is there a setting where you can decide how to receive them?

7

Either is something new, or they receive the dividend in USD, but since it’s less than 5usd, it is immediately converted in chf.

1 Like
8

OK perfetto.
se il dividendo è inferiore a 5USD viene convertito in CHF se è >5USD rimane in dollari

9

Does anything speak against reinvesting (apart from using dividends differently)? No hidden fees or other unwanted shenanigans?

10

You pay the normal trading fees for reinvested dividends.

1 Like
11

So if you get 5$ dividend, it will invest it and charge 0.35ct fee ?

12

If the price of a single share is below $5, yes, I think so. Most shares have a higher price, though, in which case it will either reinvest nothing (no fee) or buy fractional shares where the fee would be 1% with a $0.01 minimum.

I can’t confirm this, though, as I don’t have DRIP enabled.