PF/SQ/DG/CT - investing comparison

Investing / Brokers
1

Hi everyone!

Im new to Switzerland and Mustachian and Investing! Somehow I found this forum to be more friendly than other places on the internet.

I would like to start investing therefore all I did in the past few weeks was reading everything there is to read on the internet about “Swiss homegrown investors”. Unfortunately what I also found is that every thread starts with a question and finishes with … go IB in the US.

I understand that US brokers are the cheapest BUT I would like to fully understand “local” options. Could you share your experience (positives and negatives) on the most common platforms: PostFinance e-trading vs SwissQuote vs DeGiro vs CornerTrader?

With focus on:

  • Few trades per year as investment in e.g. ETF
  • 20k chf available every year
  • 10, 15, 20 years of investment possible

Slowly building comparison/summary and so far I got:

ETF Costs PostFinance SwissQuote DeGiro CornerTrader
Custody per year 90CHF 60CHF n/a n/a
Commission 1% n/a n/a n/a
Brokerage Fee <5000chf 25CHF 30CHF n/a 25CHF
Brokerage Fee <5000chf (Swiss market) n/a 9.85CHF n/a n/a
Swiss Stamp on Swiss 0.075% n/a 0% n/a
Swiss Stamp on foreign 0.015% n/a n/a n/a

Other bonuses:

PostFinance:

  1. Open a PostFinance e-trading custody account before 31 May 2018 and receive 500 francs of trading credit for free.
  2. The fee amount of CHF 90.00 can be used to pay for transaction fees.
  3. 0 to 19 transactions per year: discount of 10% per transaction.

Happy to be here!
Ciao

2

All these options are terrible. But if you insist cornertrader is probably the cheapest at the moment. And who do you even call ‘local’? Degiro ain’t local, they just buy advertisement spots here. And IB has a large office right here in Zug, 120 FTEs or so [1].

Same for all swiss brokers (and 0% for everyone else), it’s set in the law, not by their own greed.

Don’t fall for these cheap marketing tricks, it’s not real money. They are not competitive at all even with swiss cornertrader

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3

Degiro has no Swiss stamp because not based in CH
Swissquote has flat fee of 9.85 for ETFs traded on the Swiss market.

I would choose either Swissquote or Cornertrader.

4

Thank you for quick reply guys!
All of the above brokers have many customers. I believe some of those customers play with big numbers. Even based on this Mustachian poll, there are people who use them.
If anyone is in investing game and they are serious about it, I imagine they know about e.g. US brokers that are much cheaper. So what I am trying to find out is … why those people use them?

5

I don’t know if all retail investors are that much aware of fees.

For what it’s worth, I work in a financial company (so people there are much more aware of costs) and a lot of employees use IB for their personal account.

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6

If trading costs are important you can forget about any Swiss broker basically. For the (minor) investments I have in Switzerland I buy stocks maybe 3x a year. I do not like the lack of transparency in Swissquote’s costs, I don’t like the way Cornertrader wants to receive payments, therefore that part is with PF. Not because its great, but the least bad.

Other investments are abroad, but I don think IB is the holy grail either. It depends on your own wishes and needs.

7

there is two reasons:

  1. some insist on having swiss domiciled brokers so swiss law applies in case of dispute. i have no idea what the implications are. I once felt like that, but i ultimately moved to IB later
  2. people are home biased and want “swiss quality”
8

well if you are under 100k and only do 2-3 buy per year the first years IB may not even be cheaper than cornertrader (inactivity fee). I do 2 purchases per year, when I will be at 100k I will be switching to IB.

I dislike degiro which in custody account takes 3% ofyour dividend, min 1 dollar. If you have 3 different vanguard etf that is 12 chf minimum per year (3x4 distributions), and can easily go to 60-100 chf per year

9

I am currently liquidating my whole portfolio at Swissquote, fees are high… Even if you have a small portfolio, fees matter…

Fees aside, the platform is easy to use, client support is friendly and the overall design is really okayish.

Did I already mention that the fees are high? :smiley:

10

easy to use? I might be dumb, but it took me some minutes to find out where they put all messages with the new-ish change.

Also. Login to bank or what?
Tbh I feel it’s not that user friendly…

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