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Experience using Interactive Brokers for both USD & GBP investments?

Financial discussion for any financial queries for Expats
alanambrose
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Experience using Interactive Brokers for both USD & GBP investments?

#364038

Postby alanambrose » December 8th, 2020, 12:57 pm

Hi,

As the title says does anyone have any experience using Interactive Brokers for both USD & GBP investments? That is keeping two separate currency balances and trading out of those? I can see already (I think) that their list of UK funds is a bit limited. But in general does it work out OK in practice? Any drawbacks? I'm a UK national, UK tax resident if it makes any difference.

TIA, Alan

JamesMuenchen
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Re: Experience using Interactive Brokers for both USD & GBP investments?

#364088

Postby JamesMuenchen » December 8th, 2020, 2:54 pm

Yes, I do run a USD and GBP cash and stocks in IB.

Also had a CAD balance for a while when one of my pot-stocks got delisted from the US.

It all works ok, can just be a bit confusing transferring balances at first. You have to buy or sell the currency pair.

You may also find you're not allowed to make certain trades by default, until you tick the right box in your config.

Happy to help if you get stuck.

Bushman
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Re: Experience using Interactive Brokers for both USD & GBP investments?

#364511

Postby Bushman » December 9th, 2020, 5:20 pm

JamesMuenchen wrote:It all works ok, can just be a bit confusing transferring balances at first. You have to buy or sell the currency pair.


Yes, you can sell/buy currency pairs - e.g. fund your Interactive Broker account with GBP and "sell" some (or all) of that GBP to buy some USD. The FX rates/commissions are the best around. But you can also fund your account directly with various currencies (e.g. USD, GBP, EUR, etc.), avoiding the need to buy/sell currency pairs. For example, I have a USD Currency Account with HSBC UK and I can pay USD from there direct into my Interactive Broker account and use those funds to buy US shares. Moreover, if you hold foreign shares that pay dividends in your Interactive Broker account, the dividends will be credited to the appropriate currency balance - for example USD dividends to your USD balance, GBP dividends to your GBP balance, etc.

JamesMuenchen wrote:You may also find you're not allowed to make certain trades by default, until you tick the right box in your config.
I encountered this the first time I tried to trade French shares (AIRBUS) - US and UK shares worked straight out of the box for me.


alanambrose wrote:But in general does it work out OK in practice? Any drawbacks?
Yes, it works OK. Apart from the limited fund choices you already pointed out, one drawback people seem to mention is that the UI is not as user friendly as it could be and takes some getting used to.

JamesMuenchen
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Re: Experience using Interactive Brokers for both USD & GBP investments?

#364679

Postby JamesMuenchen » December 10th, 2020, 9:45 am

Bushman wrote:I have a USD Currency Account with HSBC UK and I can pay USD from there direct into my Interactive Broker account and use those funds to buy US shares.

I haven't figured out how to link two accounts for transfers in/out. How do you manage it?

alanambrose wrote: one drawback people seem to mention is that the UI is not as user friendly as it could be and takes some getting used to.

yes, and just when you get used to it they change it again.

alanambrose
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Re: Experience using Interactive Brokers for both USD & GBP investments?

#366450

Postby alanambrose » December 15th, 2020, 2:17 pm

Thanks for the insight. I've been using IB for USD trades for some time and I like it. I particularly like the security lock-down by IP address and they're the only broker I know that let me trade US ETFs now (I used to work in financial services).

I only just twigged I could use IB for GBP trades, duh, having a UK broker (HL) atm for that.

Sounds a silly question, but being UK-based, I assume you set GBP as your base currency?

I too can only see a way to wire in my base currency right now, which is USD and I have only one related bank account and can't see a way atm to nominate another. Maybe there's a paper system for that?

Do you extract to any trade accounting system? I'm looking at tradelog atm but I have not figured out whether it's too US-centric. It would be great to use the same trade accounting system for USD and GBP.

Thanks, Alan

alanambrose
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Re: Experience using Interactive Brokers for both USD & GBP investments?

#366451

Postby alanambrose » December 15th, 2020, 2:28 pm

Oh yeah, I just noticed the currency drop-down box on the 'Choose a New Deposit Method' dialog. I guess it is also possible that the FX rates are good enough that it doesn't actually matter too much which currency you deposit in.

GrahamPlatt
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Re: Experience using Interactive Brokers for both USD & GBP investments?

#366456

Postby GrahamPlatt » December 15th, 2020, 2:52 pm

alanambrose wrote:Oh yeah, I just noticed the currency drop-down box on the 'Choose a New Deposit Method' dialog. I guess it is also possible that the FX rates are good enough that it doesn't actually matter too much which currency you deposit in.


It may be - please let us know what they are.

stockton
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Re: Experience using Interactive Brokers for both USD & GBP investments?

#366857

Postby stockton » December 16th, 2020, 8:04 pm

Another who finds the website interface pretty crap.

DiamondEcho
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Re: Experience using Interactive Brokers for both USD & GBP investments?

#370956

Postby DiamondEcho » December 29th, 2020, 7:59 pm

stockton wrote:Another who finds the website interface pretty crap.


I think of it differently, that it's a professional/semi-professional level offering and the interface isn't dumbed down for 'everyman'. So yes say the trading screens can be somewhat complex, but then you can trade 100+ markets and gawd knows how many instruments, ditto order types and so on.

Perhaps there is a line there, for many people IB requires some willingness to learn about the choices they will be presented with. Maybe if you don't want choices and require 'plain vanilla' buy/sell instead there are more comfortable venues.

alanambrose
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Re: Experience using Interactive Brokers for both USD & GBP investments?

#414109

Postby alanambrose » May 22nd, 2021, 11:34 am

I have not reported back on this yet...

In practice this works very well:

You can do cash xfers in whatever currency you like, report in whatever currency you like, and the FX trades are very economical. So, that makes the whole 'trade in shares in multiple countries/currencies thing' easy. The big advantage with IB is that you get very exhaustive access to the US markets (and a bunch of other markets besides). The limitation is that access to UK funds is a bit limited.

Alan


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