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Interactive Brokers $10 Monthly Inactivity Fees Eliminated!

Yesterday, some Interactive Brokers clients noticed some changes on their official website:

from Interactive Brokers website

It looks too good to be true. But it really is.

Beginning 1st July 2021, Interactive Brokers have eliminated the monthly Inactivity Fees for all retail and adviser-client accounts below – regardless of the prior US$100,000 AUM.

This is big news for a lot of retail traders and investors who wanted to be on Interactive Brokers but were apprehensive due to this monthly inactivity fee.

What this Monthly Inactivity Fee is About

Prior to this change, if you go to the same page, you would observe this:

If the net liquidation value of your account is less than USD$100,000, IBKR will charge an inactivity fee of USD$10 a month (I am not sure why it called an activity fee haha)

If you made trades in the month, the commissions are net off from this $10, so IBKR do not double charge you.

If you are under 25 years old, they have a competitive inactivity fee of US$3.

But with this change, all these inactivity fees go away.

Who Benefits from this Monthly Inactivity Fee Elimination?

I think almost everybody benefits.

The traders benefit less. If you trade on the US stock exchanges under IBKR or IBSG’s Tiered commission structure, each stock trade would roughly cost you US$0.35.

It would take you 29 trades a month to equal that monthly inactivity fee.

It is that cheap.

But I think the biggest group of people that will benefit are the young, long-term, buy-and-hold, passive investors.

These young adults just started work and want to DIY and invest in just a few low-cost, broad-based, Irish-domiciled, tax-efficient exchange-traded funds (ETF), most likely listed on the London Stock Exchange.

Some popular ETFs are ETFs that track the MSCI World, MSCI All Country World, FTSE All-World, various factor and multifactor ETF, MSCI Emerging Market, MSCI World SmallCAP, Bloomberg Barclays Global Aggregate Bond, High Yield Bond Index, Semi-conductor Index, China Internet Stock Index.

As young investors, they are not sure if they would eventually accumulate to US$100,000. They are also unsure how suitable is Interactive Brokers before using it.

With this inactivity fee elimination, the biggest stumbling blocks have been eliminated and long term investors have a great platform for them to custodised their stocks long term.

The Advantages of Interactive Brokers Platform

I will try to list down why I think Interactive Brokers is a great platform to subscribe to:

  1. Easy to set up. With MyInfo, the fastest I heard is someone funding their account to be ready for trading in 2 hours. Everything is done online. You can follow my guide below.
  2. The commission is very competitive. Under Tiered pricing, my UCITS ETF cost worked out to be 0.056% a trade. My US stock trade cost like US$0.35.
  3. Near spot current conversion at a flat fee of US$2. Out of all the brokers out there, Interactive Brokers run their own treasury trading desk and the advantage is that you get a currency conversion very close to the spot. It is very easy to convert from SGD to USD, HKD, CNY, EUR, GBP. If you wanna speculate on currency prices, you could just convert to and fro.
  4. Many exchanges to trade on in one platform. Check out the full listing.
  5. You can trade options and other derivatives on it.
  6. It has a mobile application that allows you to trade and check your portfolio on the fly.
  7. No dividend handling charges and custodian charges.
  8. The notification informs you when there is a corporate action, or dividend is a deposit.
  9. Create a joint account (if you create a joint account, it will be on IBKR instead of IBSG)
  10. Margin rate currently at 1.65% p.a.
  11. Easily fund your account by local transfer from your DBS account to IBSG’s DBS account or through FAST transfer.
  12. Very comprehensive monthly report with Portfolio Analyst (about 30 pages). There are also ad-hoc reports.
  13. You can set up the account to automatically send daily reports and monthly reports to your email.
  14. For those who know how to program, you can make use of their API to program your execution.
  15. Many registered investment advisers, boutique funds, mini-hedge funds use Interactive Brokers to help their clients managed their money or trade for them. They probably stick with Interactive Brokers for a lot of good reasons.
  16. Interactive Brokers have been around for 40 plus years. They are listed and you can frequently take a look at their financial standing.

While there are advantages, there are some challenges as well. This would include that you have to purchase the live prices, you can argue other platforms provide more sophistication when it comes to options but I feel these are manageable challenges.

If you are interested, give Interactive Brokers a try today.

My Comprehensive Interactive Brokers How-to Guides

Interactive Brokers is a great low-cost, financially strong brokerage platform that can be the standard broker for holding your long-term investments. You can access 150 global exchanges, including exchanges such as Singapore, the US, Hong Kong, London, European and Canada.

You will enjoy cheap commissions and zero minimum recurring platform fees or maintenance fees. Convert your funds to different currencies at near-spot rates, paying a flat US$2 fee.

To get started or become familiar with Interactive Brokers, check out my past articles on how to invest with Interactive Brokers. I hope the guides make your life and investing experience easier and brighter.

An Easy Step-By-Step Guide to Setup Interactive Brokers (IBKR)

How to Fund & Withdraw Funds from Your Interactive Brokers Account

How to Convert Currencies in Interactive Brokers

How to Buy and Sell Stocks and Securities on Interactive Brokers

How Competitive are Interactive Brokers Commissions Pricing?

How Safe is it to Custodized Your Money at Interactive Brokers? The things they do better than other brokers.

How Safe is it to Custodized Your Money at Interactive Brokers (2)? Financial strength of IB during recent banking crisis and during Great Financial Crisis

Interactive Brokers have Eliminated the US$10 monthly inactivity fee. More details here.

How to Transfer your shares from Standard Chartered Online Trading to Interactive Brokers

How to trade after-hours and premarket

Create Customized Reports and automatically send them to your email

What is the PortfolioAnalyst Report and Automatically Send the PortfolioAnalyst Report to Your Email

Send Money from TransferWise to Interactive Brokers

Interactive Brokers’ Fluid Interest Income on Cash

Introducing IMPACT by Interactive Brokers

Kyith

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Wil

Monday 3rd of January 2022

Hi Kyith,

Just get an updated from IBSG recently it is allowed to opened joint account. There are 3 types including 1) Tenants in Common; 2) Community Property; 3)Joint Tenants with Rights of Survivorship.

Do you have any ideas what are these 3 types about? What will be the most common choice if i want to open joint account with my wife.

Many thanks.

Wil

Friday 7th of January 2022

@Kyith, thanks for reply. I studied through IBKR terms for these 3 types. Seems like "Tenancy by the Entirety" maybe the ideal choice for marriage couple and it can avoid the inheritance tax if happen to either one? Pls correct me if i understand wrongly.

Kyith

Tuesday 4th of January 2022

Hi Wil, those are different kind of ownership split or handling when both of you are alive and when one person passes away. Tenants in Common if i am right is that whether alive or dead, its split in a certain percentage. Joint Tenants with Rights of Survivorship is likely that if alive its based on the percentage but if one of the spouse passes away, the other spouse assumes ownership.

I think there is no most common choice because each of the family dynamics is a bit different. Maybe I will write more on this.

Stanley

Monday 8th of November 2021

As of November 8 2021, I see this info on their website:

5. Minimum Monthly Activity Fee - as we cater to active traders we require accounts to generate a minimum in commissions each month or be charged the difference as an activity fee. The minimum is $10 per month. It's here: https://ibkr.info/article/1287 . So, what was dropped?

Stanley

Tuesday 9th of November 2021

@Kyith, did not look for it , just googled it :-) . Thanks for the update!

Kyith

Tuesday 9th of November 2021

I just checked with IB. It is not updated. They will update the page accordingly. They were surprised you managed to find the page haha!

Kyith

Tuesday 9th of November 2021

It should be this monthly inactivity fee. I am not sure why it is still there.

June

Wednesday 22nd of September 2021

Hi Kyith,

I was following your advice by buying VWRA using SCB online trading because I didn't want to pay the monthly fee that IBKR was charging. Now that they removed this fee, and with the commission much more attractive than SCB, i wanted to switch to using IBKR to build up my portfolio. I was wondering if there are any concerns or cons against against IBKR compared to SCB. Like for how it affects buying stocks where through SCB the stocks are held in our CDP and not custodian. Would you be able to advise if there is similar concerns for ETFs?

Thanks vm in advance.

Kyith

Thursday 23rd of September 2021

HI June, in that regards there is no differentiation. Under SCB, it is not held in your CDP as well. Comparing both of them, fees aside, I think you can reach SCB staff easier. With priority banking, you do not have minimum commission as well. It is not the best but as you move up, you enjoy other banking perks and synergies at SCB that you cannot have with Interactive Brokers

Petrel

Saturday 4th of September 2021

Hi, I just finished reading your article, very informative. I do have a question if you don't mind me asking.

Do they allow currency conversion only in their account. I'm thinking of putting some US dollars in there and take advantage of conversion rate fluctuation by converting back and forth between USD and CAD.

Thanks.

Kyith

Monday 6th of September 2021

HI, they do not have that. But because there is no fee for using, you can make use of that service!

Daniel Lee

Friday 3rd of September 2021

Fyi warning to all, I transferred my IBKR acct to IBSG, then realised they charge margin interest rate of 2.6% instead of 1.6% for IBKR acct holders. Now want to switch back to IBKR but they do not allow the change. Keith, any idea if there is a way to switch back? Thanks.

Kyith

Friday 3rd of September 2021

Hi Daniel, we noticed that but could not confirm. Have been asking around but my friends say the rates are meshed up so its hard to pin point if its 2.6%. I think there are not a lot of way. I think one way people say is... when you try to open an account... you can use MyInfo to fill in the details or submit things manually. If you submit things manually, they seem to allow you to create a IBKR account instead.

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