International Shares

jimmyundertones

Hey you great people,

I have recently been buying international shares, i bought one through IWeb Share Dealing which is run through the Halifax. The trade fee is £7.50 with no monthly fees, but what i did not check is that when i sell my shares i will incur a 1.5% currency fee which is very expensive. They are a complete rip off i dont know how they can justify this charge.

Does anyone please know a good share dealing platform with low fees that do not charge such a large fee as a currency fee on selling international shares? Any help you can give i would be thankful for, thanks for your time and have a lovely day. :money:

bowlhead99

They are a complete rip off i dont know how they can justify this charge

Well, have you ever tried running a business?

This customer wants a service for which he will pay you nothing a year, and you are only proposing to charge him £7.50 for the service of placing and settling an order to buy shares for him on a stock exchange and then holding it indefinitely in safe custody using your nominee company on his behalf, dealing with any dividends, reporting and corporate actions that crop up. Oh, and the stock exchange is overseas.

And the share purchase needs to be paid for in a foreign currency but the customer doesn't have any foreign currency in his account with you because the you don't offer foreign currency cash accounts (because that's a niche requirement that most customers don't want, and your customers only want to pay £0 per year for their account relationship).

So the customer's pounds sterling will need to be changed into foreign currency to settle the transaction. As you are only charging a pittance for the transaction itself, and the customer is not buying hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of currency which could be traded efficiently on the international money markets, you charge a commission on the foreign currency purchase.

The customer rages that you are ripping him off and that he can't see that you can justify making a charge, even though you are providing a service for virtually nothing a year and he is looking for a service that most of your customers don't use, and he's not aware of any other rival providers that wouldn't charge a fee in the same circumstance.

As the business owner, you would probably say that the customer is acting like an entitled douchebag, if he describes you as ripping him off. He's welcome to go elsewhere!

As a fellow investor, I use AJ Bell Youinvest which is 1% on the first £10k of currency purchase value, 0.75% on next £10k and a sliding scale down to 0.25% on £30k+.

I've previously used Interactive Investor - which are not free to use or to do FX transactions - but they offer multi currency cash accounts so if you sell an investment it does not need to take a round trip back into sterling before you reinvest it in something else in the same dealing currency.

Alternatively IG.com do international dealing with a 0.5% forex fee.

So, there are different ways of doing it. You will probably find other (typically less well-established companies offering cheap low rates. Saxobank and Interactive Brokers used to be good for foreign markets generally

jimmyundertones

Thank you a great post, i have left you a thank you.

I agree i suppose i was acting like a douche-bag maybe i needed your post.

Some great advice, thanks so much and perfect advice regarding FX offering multi currency transactions, that is brilliant. Thank you so much.