Interactive Brokers summary and costs

Like you don’t have some? This was a forum for swiss residents last time i checked…

Minimum balance requirement can be lower than 100k though if you sign up for an IB account through some of their white label resellers like captrader. Or if you’re under 25, the monthly fee for under 100k account is $3 instead of $10.

European ETFs have both higher commissions and enormously higher trading costs including potentially stamp duty.

Effort needed to fill the tax declaration is about the same, filling DA-1 is only marginally more involved than filling main WV form, what’s exactly your problem with it? You get paid for this effort with reclaimed taxes

Losses on dividend withholding taxes is one of the biggest differences. How’d you like to give up 0.30% of your wealth each year for no good reason?

Well, with US ETFs you have both - low yearly expenses thanks to the economy of scale and very low trading costs

US brokers have SIPC protection for securities - swiss banks have nothing like that. 100k swiss deposit protection is for cash only, securities aren’t covered. SIPC cash protection limit ($250k) is also higher than esisuisse’s

Thank you all for your answer. I’ve already started to edit my first post a bit. I am not sure about the formatting though. I hope it’s clear. I had to break most of the links since I’m new here. Sorry about that.

Hey ma0,

I did put quite some effort into the US Witholding taxation issue. please cosult this thread

from what you can read there, you will find the general principle of witholding taxes everywhere: the counties of domicile of a fund and it’s underlyings usually witholds a certain percentage. US 30%, CH 35%, IE 0%. for the combination of US domiciled assets and Swiss resident, the 30% can be lowered to 15%

Thanks, I will have a look. I am also curious if you mention the differences between those taxes at the end of the year. For example, the 35 you mention for Switzerland is usually given back fully while the 15% for US funds I don’t know.
I might have to differentiate the domicile of the fund and the domicile of the assets. An IE Fund (0%) with US assets (30%-15%) etc… Well maybe it doesn’t make sense to differentiate, since you can’t really buy the same assets with different domicile…

15% stays in the US no matter what with no possibility to reclaim it, but the swiss can reimburse you it if you’re paying swiss taxes in it, as part of double taxation relief per US-CH tax treaty. Reimbursement is requested by filing DA-1 form, which is a lot like Wertschriftenverzeichnis from the main tax declaration.

If your swiss tax rate is less than 15%, you won’t get everything back - reimbursement comes out of your future swiss taxes and they can’t afford to give back more than what you pay them

Since when?? There are some assets you can’t buy without a certain domicile like controlling shares in chinese companies, but assets from most developed markets are freely traded unrestricted across borders

IE fund with US assets is losing you 15% of dividends each year that you can’t reclaim (yet you have to pay swiss taxes in full on them), on top of expensive TER

To simplify, you can put it like this:

Advantages of Interactive Brokers over Corner Trader:

  • no stamp duty of 0.15% per transaction value
  • slightly lower transaction costs for both US and EU stock exchanges

Advantages of ETFs domiciled in USA over Ireland:

  • can reclaim withholding tax on US domiciled stocks* (15% of dividend, ca. 0.3% of portfolio)
  • lower TER
  • higher selection
  • lower bid-ask spreads

* applies to Swiss residents

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If you buy a world etc, then USA is 55% of the assets. Alas only 1.1% dividends comes from us, so with 15% withholding you get 0.165% not 0.3%

So it would appear, but if you compare the CAGR of VT and VWRL then you will notice that VT has a higher return by about 0.35% per year. This is due to the dividend, but also the TER.

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They do not use the same index. Of course you can compare but if you look into the past this 0.35% is not a given. Sometimes vwrl does better! Securities lending (also active decisions of managers) has way bigger impact

I edited again my post, but I start to feel the need of a wiki, since all this back and forth sometimes doesn’t lead to a precise answer.

Boggleheads forum has a wiki where you could put this up if you want

I’ve tried once but they banned me on account of my username

Their loss

I think the threads are interesting as they show the way we ended up with the conclusions. There are actually multiple Threads considering the current problem but they have not been active for a while.

I’d prefer threads linked to a definitive answer. I do sometimes mix up words and get corrected and this happens to other people as well. Sometimes there are questions that get mixed in the same thread and all this could be problematic especially for people that are not experts on the field and/or not native speakers.

I could put up a wiki in minutes, but I suppose it would be better if it’s hosted on this domain. Nugget’s google sheet could be transformed in a dynamic way to calculate costs, but we should also 100% agree on it’s correctness :slight_smile:

i know what you mean, and it made me put up this guidepost of the forum and its underlying guides/threads. however, the forum structure limits the way we can organize it’s content in a way that you would find it.

bluntly speaking 90% of that was written in this forum is lost to outside users because you cannot browse for it efficiently. for example this thread: hardly anyone is going to start at the top and read all the way down here. there is no summary of the findings in this thread…

Please note that we are currently working on a way of making the forum more readable :slight_smile:

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Nice, but they are still posts to read and sometimes can get confusing.
(tiny example of confusion: sometime (on this thread as well) people talk about 0.x% of your wealth.Tax deductions are usually on the gains so what is not said is that the 0.x% is calculated from a “standard” gain of 2% for example).

A wiki with some calculation tools would be nice.

What username did you use, that they banned you?

For the record, I think this forum engine kicks ass. I have never used a more modern and friendly one. The quoting mechanism, the editor, it’s really great.

covfefe, perfectly normal and possibly the greatest username there is! I really don’t understand what was their problem and too lazy to ask. Maybe it was envy

Small forums and communities tend to come and go. If you want to preserve the knowledge i do suggest sticking to boggleheads wiki, they are the biggest of this kind. Just too bad they don’t have regional subforums that’s all

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I was about to say it. 100% agree. I even spent some time trying to understand which software runs it. :joy:

Well I just had a look at the source code and saw that it uses Ember.JS. Then a bit of googling and voila:

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