I am in the process of setting up a small hedge fund in Europe and I was considering using IB as my broker for the fund setup since in the past eight years I have been on average quite happy with IB. At least I could understand most of the things I was unhappy about. I just found out that IB charges benchmark - 2.25% for (larger size) short balances on top of the borrowing fees for the stock. That is a 2pp difference to USD based fees. For CHF and EUR short balances that means an annual fee of 3.18% and 2.95% (July 30), respectively, plus borrowing fees. Those margins must have changed substantially from 2-3 years ago and it just does not fit at all into my picture of IB targeting professional investors. As small fund you are already facing 1.5% to 2.0% administrative fees, plus trading commission. If you want to run a market-neutral portfolio or even more in general if you want to do what hedge funds do, short stock, then you could run a more than 100% of NAV short portfolio throughout the year. Now with this IB fee setup you are already down 5% when you start the year! Do you know of other EU-based brokers, which are not so ridiculously expensive? I am primarily interested in holding liquid large-cap European short positions over a longer period of time. So far, I only found DeGiro NV which charges a 1% fee. Do you know any other comparable brokers/prime brokers in Europe and what fee they charge on the short cash balance?