Hi danjuma, Agree with all above....not mentioned is if you incur losses in USD or EUR denominated products you need to square this off with a currency transaction v your base currency, GBP. There is a function for this on TWS but it's not that easy to find, happy to post it here if anyone interested. IB is also a great way for UK traders to get USD to other US brokers at the best possible rate with a tiny currency commission. It can all be set up in IB s account management and you get one free transfer per month last time I looked. Cheers.
Thanks for the tip T44. My IB account base currency is actually USD, but I am based in the UK and thus have my funds in GBP. So the idea is to transfer GBP from my bank account to my IB account, and then convert the transferred GBP into USD through IB's trading platform.
As several people already pointed out to you, if you simply look to fund your account it makes much more sense to assess which currency the assets are denominated in that you plan on trading most frequently. That is because your pnl will be denominated in that base currency of the assets you trade. If that USD then yes convert your pounds into USD at IB. Else simply change your account base currency to pound. You can easily do that in IB as well.