Ok guys thanks for your posts and your patience, I am going to go away and chew on it (I was never top of my maths class if you hadn't guessed) and then make a decision.

a swap is not the same as a loan!

sure, the point is you get a libor mortgage and and hedge the IR risk through the swap.

A swap is OTC product. To get this kind of access you need to have deposited millions with a broker afaik.

IB provides access to the EURODOLLAR market. This is EXACTLY what your lender is using to hedge the mortgage they sold to you, immediately at time of sale. You still might have FX some risk, but you might be able to include that as well.

lender is not using futures to hedge mortgages and trading futures requires relevant professional experience or it can be very risky. that said it could be possible to trade them for various purposes but it is not easy...

What is IB like for holding US-based index based tracker funds for the long haul e.g. Vanguard etc? Or are there alternative brokers one should consider for long term investing as opposed to IB which appears to be geared towards active trading?

Do you live in the UK or Switzerland?

Allow me some basic questions re. trading via IB.
I transferred funds over to IB. I can see them in my account in CHF.
Now I wanted to place an order through the system.
Does IB automatically take the funds out and convert them in USD and execute the order? Or do I need to do something at my end to convert and release the funds?
Again, apologies for the basic questions. The user-interface is not very helpful and after being on hold for 15 mins on the phone, I lost patience.

It is more straightforward if you wish to buy USD denominated securities to convert to USD. You can buy whatever you wish with the CHF cash but it could be a financing charge for using USD. Btw you can buy something and see how it works. I always had USD cash for USD securities.

Have you tried their online help?

https://ibkr.info/node/2059


in general: https://ibkr.info/

Let's say you buy X shares for 10'000 USD. If I understand how IB works correctly, if you have a margin account, it will create a positive shares position (+X shares) and a negative dollar position (-10'000 USD). If you have a standard account, it will not allow you to make that trade, as it will say you don't have the required amount. So you need to convert CHF to USD yourself.

You need to convert the CHF to USD using the TWS trading system. Select USD IdealPRO as the symbol, send the order, and it will then take around 10 mins or so.

Thanks. That is exactly what I wanted to do as well. Convert the CHF into USD and then use the USD for buying stocks.

Apologies, I live in the UK currently, but about to move to Switzerland (Basel-Stadt). Just exploring my options before I move.

Now that I have been using IB for a couple of weeks I am happy with it. Sure the web interface sucks at first and is confusing, but once you get used to it then it's usable and the mobile app more than compensates for it in convenience with the all-day fingerprint login. Plus, it costs 1 fricken dollar to do a trade... this is absolutely ridiculous compared to Swiss brokers and even the $10 per month fee for less frequent traders pales into insignificance compared to the frankly ludicrous commission and stamp duty charged by Postfinance/Swissquote per trade, which soon adds up to a significant amount.

I like the fact you can have a Swiss IBAN and transfers, while not instantenous like I was used to with Postfinance, are still relatively quick and easy. Of course you still need to take into account the time it takes to convert things into USD, but I have compensated for this by transferring my monthly savings to the account and converting them in advance, ready to buy stocks when necessary.

The only thing I have yet to see if how the complimentary tax forms will suffice for my Swiss tax return or if I will need to request anything additional.

I really recommend it to anyone who currently uses a Swiss broker.

Note: one can also convert currencies within WebTrader (their web interface to their trading system).

One gotcha that might be helpful to others. I tried searching for "USD.CHF" in the forex tab. Since the thing I wanted was called "USD CASH IDEALPRO CHF USD.CHF", one might expect this to match! But this didn't match anything - it gave error "The security was not found". Searching for a different substring, eg "CHF", allowed the item of interest to be selected.

I will try to resist speculating on whether this aspect of their interface behaviour is intentional, even specified, or is a leak of some implementation matter involving regular expressions and special characters therein.

The $10/month fee is waived if you have over $100k in equity with IB.

Correct.

Was wondering the same thing. Does anyone have experience with this already?