Interactive Brokers for dummies

Investing / Brokers
500

Thanks both. I didn’t think about opening a USD account in PostFinance. I start that now.

Meanwhile, just to keep going with my original thought. Yes, mutual funds custody account. Funds can be transferred out from the PostFinance funds account. From their pricelist: Fees for securities delivery to third-party banks CHF 100+vat

It’s IB seemingly not offering LU1046421795 that blocks my original plan. Can anyone search in IB and confirm they don’t get results for LU1046421795? Just to make sure I’m not making a mistake when searching IB or my trading permissions are not correct.

Thanks

501

Why do you want to keep that fund in the first place?

502

I don’t want to keep it. I want to sell it and buy Vanguard ETFs in IB avoiding PostFinance’s USD->CHF conversion charge.

503

The reason to transfer it then would be to pay less sell transaction fee? It can‘t be that bad really, make a USD account, sell it and then transfer from E-Trading to E-Finance (there‘s 2/3 days waiting period) and then onwards to IB

504

I only want to avoid converting USD to CHF by PostFinance because, while I cannot find the PostFinance price for this currency conversion, I expect it’s high. I am not worried about transaction fees or other fees, they would not be as expensive as the PostFinance currency conversion. eg. PostFinance taking 1% of a 200k conversion is 2000 USD or CHF wasted.

At the time of my original question I could see only these two options:

  1. Transfer the USD fund as-is to IB, sell it in IB and buy the USD ETF. (Good, no currency conversion charges)
  2. Sell the PostFinance USD fund into my PostFinance CHF account (allowing PostFinance to charge whatever they want for the currency conversion), transfer the CHF to IB, convert the CHF to USD in IB and buy the USD ETF. (Not good, this USD->CHF by PostFinance would probably be expensive)

You guys have very helpfully shown me a further option which I will try to go for:
3. Open a PostFinance USD account, sell the PostFinance USD fund directly into that USD account, transfer the USD to IB, buy the USD ETF. (Good, no currency conversion charges)

If option 3 fails for some reason, I would like to be able to try option 1 except if IB do not offer fund LU1046421795 then I doubt I can transfer LU1046421795 as-is from PostFinance to IB. So I am still interested if anyone else can see LU1046421795 in IB.

Thanks

1 Like
505

For exchanging 200k they would take “only” 0.38% (probably).
Still Fr 759 too much of course.

506

As this is not PostFinance E-Trading, the fee might be higher as they might use the regular PostFinance currency exchange rate, not the Swissquote one. Maybe around 0.75% above mid-market for >50k.

https://www.postfinance.ch/en/support/tools-calculator/currency-overview.html/info/overview/currency/Index.do

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507

Postfinance E-Trading is Swissquote in the background, and in my experience uses the same fees and fees structure as Swissquote for currency exchange For example at Postfinance E-Trading I exchanged euro 50k to CHF and the fee was 0.5%, I played around at the time and the fee shown dropped from 0.95% to 0.5% at 50k, exactly as in the Swissquote table.

The currency overview you posted is for when one exchanges money in one’s Postfinance private account, and should probably be avoided if one has E-Trading.

508

Yes, however @Pazuzu is talking about PostFinance fund self-service, not PostFinance E-Trading, as far as I can tell.

509

Ah, sorry, I thought your comment “this is not E-Trading” was referring to my link to Swissquote fees. Yes, you are right, I missed that we’re talking about (selling) funds.

510

This will cost you about $25 for the Swift transfer I think, which in this case is not too bad I guess.

511

I have successfully asked IB to add securities. You could try this.

512

Thanks all for your posts and help. It’s done. In case it helps someone in the future I write how long each step took:

Open a PostFinance USD account - 1 day
Sell the PostFinance USD fund directly into that USD account - sell order made on Friday, money arrived in USD account Monday
Transfer the USD to IB - transfer order from PostFinance to IB made on Monday, earliest execution date selectable was Tuesday.
Buy the USD ETF - money arrived in IB on Wednesday and ETF bought on Wednesday.

Transfer from PostFinance to IB cost around $18, I don’t know if that includes PostFinance’s CHF 2 fee or not.

6 Likes
513

Since Degiro will increase its currency exchange fees and after Interactive Brokers removed the minimum deposit fee, I finally changed partly to IBKR. I have two questions:

Yesterday I made my first purchase of US stocks (about 20 stocks, each around 50 US). I got a fee for that of 1 USD. I realized that I have the “Festpreis” price structure and not the “Gestaffelt” in my account.

  1. Is my assumption correct that I can switch between these price structure whenever I want (in the settings menu)? There is no “minimum days” or something similar I have to wait until I can change again?

  2. I mainly trade in ETFs and a few shares (with values mostly above 10 USD/CHF) and never above 1000-3000 USD/CHF at once. In this case the “Gestaffelt” option is definitely the better choice, or have I missed something?

Update: I mainly trade with stocks (US and Switzerland) and ETF (US, Switzerland, Xetra), and as said, normally between 1000-3000 USD/CHF/EUR

514

Changes to account settings are applied overnight typically.

I am not aware of a situation, where fixed fee is better.

515

In theory, the Gestaffelt price can be more expensive on a specific transaction if you are unlucky. If your order on an expensive exchange (Zürich but not NY) is split in an unlikely high number of small transactions, that can be more expensive. I wouldn’t worry about that.

516

Thanks for these helpful comments, much appreciated! I will definitely switch to “gestaffelt” then.

517

Hi all,
I opened an account with IBKR and I want to make a bank transfer to IBKR to buy us shares.
What is the best solution ? If I want to transfer CHF, it tells me that there are negative interest rates.
Thanks for your advices

518

best way is to go to IB portal and do the “make transfer/ deposit”, where you get precise information on how to wire your funds.
dont bother for negative interest as you are about to buy stuff for your swiss francs. dont “store” your cash with IB

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519

Negative rates are from 50k CHF. It is not a place to store your cash, otherwise it doesn’t matter.

1 Like