Here’s what I found so far and my rating (from 0-10). I’m a non-US person and trying to invest in US ETFs through Ireland domiciled funds such as CSPX and VWRA.
Local Taiwan banks (Rating: 1):
They charge a ton of commissions (~0.2-2%), ongoing annual maintenance fees (~0.2-2%), early withdrawal fees.
They usually invest through a separate company under their name, so no US estate tax issues if investing in US ETFs.
They are all a bad deal unless you’re trying to get premier status with a local bank or invest in the Taiwan stock market, which is a shame - I’d like to invest money locally than having to wire money to other countries to invest.
Buy/sell orders need to be done through your banker for the banks I checked with, and the UI for showing your profit/loss is several days lagged.
No way to trade options or take on margin
IBKR (Rating: 7)
Lowest margin rates in the industry (~1% and lower depending on amount)
No margin calls (they can liquidate your account automatically). They can raise margin requirements anytime. Recently they raised margin requirement by 15% on some equities due to issues in Europe.
Responsive customer support from what I’ve seen, but support staff is from call center so questionable quality and most phone reps ask you to write in an email via secure center
UI isn’t the best and confusing commission system
Real time data is not free
Lots of investment options including stocks, bonds, futures, options, crypto, probably best in industry
Commissions can add up
One free international wire per month
Fidelity (Rating: 9)
Not available to new international customers
Good all-in-one brokerage with checking account, brokerage, 2% cash back credit card
Margin rate can be negotiated down to ~1% to match IBKR. They do margin call and won’t automatically liquidate your account like with IBKR.
Free real-time prices for domestic and international quotes
No commissions for US stocks; fixed $8 buy/sell commission for international stocks (i.e. LSE)
Free domestic and international wires with no limits, but you need medallion signature to link an account (requires a visit to the US)
Premier client group is great; you can call 24 hours and someone on their premier client team in the US will help you resolve your issue
Probably the best web and mobile UX I’ve found out of brokerages in the US (I’ve tried pretty much all of them). Their UX for trading options is not as good as Robinhood.
Yeah I signed up for a personal account from Taiwan using my passport and TW ARC for tax residency. I opened an institutional account with them for my Taiwan company as well and it got approved in 2 days (which was surprising since all the docs were in mandarin). I invest idle company cash using IBKR since not many international brokerages accept TW companies and the local options are terrible (apart from maybe crypto or real estate).
Thank you,
one more question if I may, did you also transfer any existing positions from other brokers to them? or just wired money and started from scratch?
if you transfered existing stocks from another portfolio, how did that go?
They have option of transferring existing position from US or CA brokerage. I haven’t tried it - I started from scratch and most of my positions are at Fidelity. I tried to wire from Taiwan (ESun) to IBKR twice and it worked well (they received wire funds the same day). Usually there’s no way to transfer positions from a Taiwan bank to IBKR since Taiwan banks don’t invest through your name.
I’ve used TD Ameritrade as a passive investor in a CASH account and had no issues. I have set up their mobile app with two-factor authentication. Depositing and Withdrawing money wasn’t a problem. Reached out to their Customer Service a couple of times as well and got good service.
I also signed up for IBKR, and used my Taiwan ARC and GT Mobile bill to verify my identity. Didn’t bother going forward when I realized I had to do an international transfer to deposit. If that’s the case I may as well use my regular UK trading account.
They actually came back later that day with a better offer, and considering they do actual margin calls and have great support I think I’ll probably take it.
The good thing with fidelity is that the low rate is locked in indefinitely. So good time to negotiate 1% margin rates. If rates go up to 8% it’ll be hard to negotiate later on.
My Fidelity rate jumped 0.25% after the fed bump, although they cut it a further 0.125% since we had agreed on the rate the day before. I’d be surprised if anyone at Fidelity has a fixed rate–even the published rates are based on some adjustment to a base rate.