It took so much wrangling to open a business account with IB, only to find out that they are restricting me from trading exchange traded funds. It turns out even though it has 30k in it, the account is still classified as retail. The (2 out of 3) requirements than need to be met in order to upgrade from Retail to Professional are: 1) To have made 10 trades in a single quarter at some point in the past year with value exceeding 200k euros. 2) To have 500k euros in my company's main account. 3) To have worked for a year in a finance institution in the past. So I can trade highly volatile individual stocks and leveraged CFDs, but diversified ETFs are too dangerous apparently. I am pissed at this. I can't meet any of these requirements apart from potentially the first one, but I am not going to churn my account just to meet that one. I didn't expect this. I had a small personal account open with IB a decade ago and didn't run into any issues trading with them then. Any good alternative brokers that have access to EU and US markets that I could look into? What would you do in my shoes? I already sent them a ticket telling them I am going to close unless they upgrade. There is currently a bull market in Croatian (and Slovenian) stocks, and the one index fund inside the home country that I found has ridiculous fees of like 3% per year to invest in them. It also has 1-2% front loads, so I want to buy the Expat ETF on Xetra instead. A decade ago, I spent 6 years trading getting nowhere, before switching to software engineering, and now I have a highly paid job in that field and have actual funds to invest so I am returning to trading. IB is basically only useful for the interest it pays me on the cash balances right now. Which is good as the banks here are thieves that pay 0.1% interest on cash balances, but not in whole what I signed up for.
We do not offer foreign trading but we do offer all US listed stocks, ETF, and Options to all customers.
You created a new nick just to vent your frustration. There are hundreds of brokers in this world (including those in European region). Spend your energy looking for alternative brokers. Your first reaction ought to be to look for brokers in European region, and not to beat the hell out of IB.
It's a problem. Nonsense EU regulation. Anyway, you can't buy it but you can sell it if you own it. You can have it assigned from options if optionable, a synthetic long to expiration would do it. Or you could look for the European Etf equivalent.
This is very interesting Robert. Brokers based here can't do it, mifid ii regulation. Is this because you have no branches in Europe but still accept european customers? I read this is also a way around for us over here.
Maybe if I kick up enough of a fuss they'll upgrade the account, but I am doing what you're suggesting. There are IB partners that could offer me what I want, and I fired them emails, so it's not an idle thread that I am going to switch. I'll also try getting in touch with their support. I already opened a ticket and I should get a live chat with one of their reps. It such a pain to open a new account, it took me nearly a month to do it with IB.