Hi!

I have my "general" bank accounts settled as I live here quite some time. However, I am not really happy with them when it comes to investments.

What bank would you recommend for good online stock information, trading options, and usability? (Yes, I searched the forum a bit, but did not find any recent discussions)...

The information is mostly free in Internet, unless you need real time quotes Why should you want to pay for it?

A bank would offer only low value expensive services, so you may consider an online discount broker like interactivebrokers or etrade.

I signed up for a Swissquote account earlier in the year and it has been a painfree experience. Certainly cheaper than using my UBS custody account and it also offers some good real-time tools.

So What is the CHEAPEST account for dealing Stocks and Bonds, both domestic and foreign available in Switzerland. I still have a UK Share Centre account which I kept even as I was in Germany as the charges are extremely low, but you can only deal GBP denominated CREST settled values, so I guess I will need a Swissy account too.
I spoke to Migros who looked extremly cheap compared to UBS, CS, etc. Anyone have an opinion to the MIGROS account or a suggestion of anything even cheaper?

Cheapest internet broker depends on transaction size. Take a look at Migros-Bank and Swissquote-Bank.

Just thought I'd push this up. Can anyone give any details of their experiences with Swissquote, Migros etc after using the service for a while? I am thinking of opening a Swissquote account, however user experiences are welcome.

Migros is probably out of the question at the moment due to their website not being in English and my German not being good enough to trade shares.

Any positive or negative experiences?

Just opened a Swissquote account and did my first trade this week (down CHF 50 so far... ). The whole process was very fast and simple. You have to get an authenticated copy of your ID, but you can do it at the Post Office for free, which made everything very easy. They even gave me CHF 200 of credit to use against transaction fees, and I got a courtesy call to check if everything was ok once the account was opened, and who was actually able to answer my question about the possibility of shorting (only on the Eurex apparently).

Been with SwissQuote for about two years. Works well (a bit of a learning curve on all the stuff you can do with the site - go for one of the training sessions). I have been happy with them.

A certain advantage of SwissQuote is they have a full featured platform (can trade many markets, carry balances in several currencies and buy/sell many different products). They are also a Swiss bank which give more protection than some trading only companies.

Easy to transfer money back and forth from your bank account once it is set up. Costs CHF 2 per transfer.

Site is available in English, French, German and I think Italian.

I have been using Swissquote for a couple of years also and it has been very good to me (although the market hasn't...).

I use it at a very simple level and I think there is a lot more available through it that I haven't even started thinking about using.

I chose it over my Cantonale Bank (BCV) because it had better international options and was cheaper for the sorts of trades I would be doing.

Hi There,

With Swissquotes, is it possible to set a limit price to buy and sell stocks automatically? Thanks in advance.

Ashish

Yes it is.

I have used Swissquote since 2002 and have no complaints at all. I use them to buy and sell Swiss SMI shares on a fairly long-term basis.

Sales and purchases are remarkably quick - often within minutes. Presently I have no shares, having through pure good luck sold everything at the end of last year. I would not like to buy at present levels of volatility, but expect the market to be more stable soon...

Thanks for all of the feedback. One thing I have found difficult is trying to calculate the charges before signing off the account info. So far I understand that they charge:

- 0.1% per year, 20CHF per Semester minimum, Safe Custody Fee (across all types of security it seems)
- variable rates for actual trades
- 2CHF to make payments out of the account

Are there any fees I have missed?

I think that the transfer of securities (shares) into your account is free (do check) but they have a fee if you transfer securities out of your account to another account. You would probably only do this if you wanted to close the SwissQuote account and move the shares to another account.

I think there is a fee for end of year tax paperwork if you need something special (it will be listed in the fees section).

are US citizens allowed to invest on the US markets using swissquote?

does anyone use etrade for US stocks? as my previous entry shows, i am under the impression that US citizens cannot invest on the US market with swissquote. anyone know this from experience?

SAXO Bank is also a good option, and cheap for 10.000 + depot

For me, interactive brokers is a great solution. Excellent trading system, real time information, worldwide coverage, stocks and derivatives and good value.

IB is well regarded for those that want to do semi professional trading i.e. short of having a bloomberg machine and a direct link to a broker. I haven't got an account, but I work with some guys who use it to trade commodities, equities, FX etc. You can also do decent technical analysis on it which really really helps if you are going to do real trading.

I do have a Swiss Quote account and it is functional if not intuitively set up.

In fact it looks quite amateurish - the site itself is very averagely presented and the data is often not easy to find (but then again I am mainly looking for warrants to trade). Having said that, it does what it should do and does that well. And by that I mean it enables you to buy and sell a good range of instruments on a great deal of markets. But it is really only a brokerage operation, i.e. it does the execution. You cannot do the analysis using swissquote. To do that, you will have to find another tool, perhaps use a range of websites.

I do like the multiple currency option - I have trades in EUR, USD and CHF (because of the underlying instruments) and it translates it back to CHF for me.

The only thing I wish is that I bought a longer dated put option on the S&P - it expired in August with a target price of 1200. Why didn't I go for mid 2009? Oh well.

Is there anyone else using Saxo Bank? I am looking into opening an account with them...