That’s proactive action though. I just don’t want them to tell me “hey your zillions dollars portfolio you keep feeding with FOP is costing us a lot of money, please find another place”. They’d be well within their rights.
While position transfer from IBKR is free, I’m not aware of any Swiss broker where it’s free. Saxo and Swissquote both charge CHF 50 per position, if I remember correctly.
For monthly selling during retirement, I would definitely just sell at the Swiss broker, not transfer back.
I bought my foreign ETFs at IBKR for many years until end of last year, then transferred a significant chunk to Saxo and am now planning to use both brokers (+ Swissquote) without further transfers. Cheap enough on average for me. And much less hassle and less risk of Saxo cancelling my account.
As long as you sell in chunks (eg 40k?) I think transfer +selling on ibkr will always be cheaper, esp for US securities. (Unless your broker is very cheap, but it’s easy to pay > 50 CHF for a transaction)
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Are you doing high turnover strategies? Else this will reduce your final return by a max of 0.30%. Though systematic loss, this is less than intraday volatility. Over many years the time consumed by complexity will add up, even if it was otherwise free.
I don’t even know what those are 
I was thinking of transferring some of the ETFs I have on IBKR to a Swiss broker like SaxoBank or SQ and then leave them there, perhaps forever, as in a retirement phase I would prefer selling on IBKR.
Yes, I think FOP is the only IB offers to transfer to non US or AU brokers.
The first time I did IB->SQ, IB told me “tell your destination broker about it”. I asked SQ’s support bot and it said not to bother, so I didn’t. The position then just sat in IB for 10 days or so and then jumped to SQ. So since then I always did it this way. Not sure if it can be sped up by involving SQ directly, but I don’t care about speed so never checked
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Yes IBKR to Saxo position transfer is free and relatively straightforward
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I guess the cost comes when selling in CH - as the platforms here have much higher trading fees than IB.
can’t one transfer back to the cheaper broker and sell there?
Position transfer from Swiss brokers is not free. While it could still be worth it by transferring sufficiently large chunks, it’s not suitable for, e.g., monthly selling+withdrawal during retirement.
If a yearly position transfer is sufficient for you, that should be doable - assuming the Swiss broker won’t terminate your account for never trading.
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Got it. It seems to cost 50 money for each ETF you transfer, no matter the amount. Would be fine to do it once a year in the withdrawal period I guess.
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