Interactive Brokers for dummies

I just post this definition here: https://www.investopedia.com

It depends what you want. You determine the limit by checking the last price shown in the app or other sources like google or yahoo. You can also set a limit order way below the current price in anticipation of a rapid drop in price.

You usually see a Bid and Ask price. Bid is the highest people are offering to buy some. Ask the lowest people are accepting to sell.
So your limit should be somewhere in between there, depending on how much time you have. If you just want to buy instantly, the limit has to be at least at the Ask price.

If you are trading something that lot of people are trading on a big exchange, market would also be fine… But IB annoys you with a lot of warnings if you do that.

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One more point/question in my new IB journey, that might be interesting for others too:

For use with a swiss tax declaration, what report should be used?

  • Is IB generating a yearly report by itself, and is this useful?

  • Should one make a custom report template, and then what items should be included?

Maybe someone already figured this out, then it would be a great help if you could share.

CTRL + F “IB Taxes”

You’ll find all. Make a yearly report and if you wish include it. The rest is the usual.(they need to see what you do with anything else (bank accounts etc.)

edit: Ok maybe not “IB Taxes” , try “Interactive taxes”.
you’ll get this (please try first)

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I’m weary of being a ’ free floater’ so indeed I searched IB Taxes and strolled through several threads, but I didn’t find any.
I think it should be good to include it in the Dummie thread too, as everyone starting will get to this point.
Thanks for the help!
Interactive taxes sounds very scary as a concept, by the way…

They don’t provide a Swiss report.

Mine looks like this.

No issues so far - that said, I’m probably not worthy of the tax authority’s full attention. My income from employment is rather low and boring, whereas my securities statement probably looks to bothersome to scrutinise (lots of foreign accounts and reports, lots of transactions, yet many of them small or minuscule and still relatively modest net worth overall)

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Searching the forums and this thread didn^t help. My question is whether IB allows registering shares with the company register?

Additional question:
Some shares I had with PF were registered with the company. Now those shares have been transferred to my IB account. Are they still registered with the company? I haven‘t sold my positions, still same shareholder. So I would guess they‘re still registered?

Another question: how „exact“ do I need to announce a deposit to my IB account?
Situation: i have a reasonable amount of NOK in my UBS multi currency account. Those NOK I‘d like to transfer to IB as I will close the NOK currency container of my UBS account.
UBS told me that the transfer fee (SWIFT; payment abroad costs between CHF 5-25) will be deducted in NOK. So in my understanding, if I transfer out 100% of these NOKs and announce these 100% as incoming NOKs at IB, I may have a problem as the transaction fee is deducted and now there is only 99% to arrive at IB.

Has anybody experience with this question? Obviously I want to avoid UBS fx fees.

I’m fairly sure it doesn’t have to be exact, wire fees are common (but you can ask support if you want).

You could also pay all fees upfront by making an „OUR“ transfer.

UBS is not able to tell how much the payment costs, so I wouldn‘t know what arrives at the end with IB when i chose to have all costs borne by the sender.
Should not be an issue if IB doesn‘t expect the exact amount as announced. Will know in a few days as I instructed the payment and registered 100% with IB. Can tell next week if it worked.

I was even doing transfers without it being setup in ib at all.

“OUR” transfers are explicitly designed to “price in” third-party expenses and make sure that the recipient receives the full amount.

The differences between “BEN”, “SHA” and “OUR” are explained on many banking sites, also see here at UBS in services and prices.

I assume it would cost you a few francs more though.

I’d be optimistic as well in that particular case. They can’t their customers worldwide to always make transfer bearing the costs at the sending bank. It’s what I’d have done as well. :slightly_smiling_face:

If you have to pay an invoice/bill in full though, it might good to know about it.

i dont knwo what you were searching but this is straight from the first result on google

“We do not currently provide individual registration of holdings, for example Registered or Namenaktion shares. Inbound transfers of registered positions will be converted to ‘street name’.” [https://www.interactivebrokers.co.uk/en/index.php?f=40930&p=transfer]

Why not transfer it with Transferwise to your CHF account, and then with SEPA to IB? Might be cheaper…

SEPA is only EUR.

But thanks anyway, if it fails for some reason, this might be an alternative. It’s roughly CHF 20k, I expect IB to be cheaper than IB.

If TrickMcDave wants to pay in (and possibly keep or invest) in NOK at IB, he will not have to do currency conversion.
If he wants to convert currency anyway, IB should clearly beat TransferWise in rates/costs of doing so.

SEPA is only EUR.

SEPA is only EUR, yes, of course. I meant, putting it in IB’s swiss bank account, which is also free.

If TrickMcDave wants to pay in (and possibly keep or invest) in NOK at IB, he will on currency conversion.
If he wants to convert currency anyway, IB should clearly beat Transfer in rates/costs of doing

Yes, I understood. But I’m not sure, depending the circumstances, if NOK->IB (Banking fees)-> FX@IB is cheaper than NOK->transferwise->CHF->(no banking fees)->FX@IB. It might be an alternative.
It’ll depend on the amount I guess, as the banking costs (hopefully) are fixed.
Just trying to point at the option, not saying it is better.
Unfortunately, Transferwise does not allow transfers to IB accounts. That would be nice.

Certainly it will be.

As I understand, the NOK are on his Swiss bank account.
Neither does TransferWise have a domestic NOK account in Switzerland, nor is there any “cheap” domestic NOK transfers in Switzerland (that I knew of). Whether he’ll transfer them to IB or TransferWise shouldn’t make much difference - it will be an international SWIFT transfer anyway.

Put differently, there’s (virtually) no way of avoiding that “expensive” international SWIFT transfer to transfer these funds out of UBS. Except for converting to CHF at UBS’s rates.

On a five figure amount though, IBKR will charge so much less for FX than TransferWise, let alone UBS, that it should be a no-brainer to exchange at IBKR (if he’s holding that IBKR account anyway).

I don’t disagree with you, I was just explaining my train of thought (before he mentioned the amount).
Left or right, if you have foreign currency that is not EUR stuck in Switzerland, you are doomed :slight_smile: