Hey
@Baptiste Wicht
Thanks a lot for the new book. I really appreciate your direct writing style, and how you explained your approach to choosing indices and corresponding ETFs. I've been meaning to for ages, but reading your book gave me the final push I needed to open an IBKR account and open some positions.
I do have a few pieces of feedback (constructive, I hope) on a few things that have tripped me up a bit:
1. During the account application process I entered 1 year of trading experience and something like 1-10 trades per year. It then said that this was not sufficient and that I needed to take an "exam" to get my account approved. I was not expecting this, and it made me fairly stressed. However, the exam turned out to be a set of fairly straightforward questions and actually it doesn't let you proceed until you give the correct answers. A heads up about this in the book might have relieved my anxiety somewhat.
2. I wanted to convert around 8k CHF into USD and buy VT with it, and so I followed your advice and manually converted the currency (since for such an amount it should be cheaper that automatic conversion). In the book it says that the order should be completely instantly, which was correct, but it also gave me the impression that I would be able to then buy the stock using the USD immediately. However, I faced a really strange problem which seems to be reported by others (see
here and
here). I tried to submit a market buy order for a number of shares that were definitely valued at less than the USD amount listed on my account after manual conversion (in my case ~9.3k USD) even accounting for the fees. However, IBKR was telling me I didn't have enough cash settled in order to make a trade. It also gave all the numbers in CHF which was super confusing since I'd already converted the CHF into USD. In the end I was able to make the trade go through by setting a USD amount that I wanted to buy (rather than a number of shares). However, when I looked at my orders I see that, without my knowledge, I had bought around 9.3k of USD.CHF and then immediately sold a similar amount of USD.CHF. It looks like it did some automatic conversion, in addition to the manual conversion I had performed earlier. After reading the linked posts, it seems like I should have waited up to 2 days for the manual conversion to go through. Anyway, I think it was a good learning experience for me but definitely gave me the impression that IBKR is too complicated for me and that I was out of my depth. I still don't really understand how this happened. Probably I should have just started with an automatic currency conversion, rather than try to do it manually. BTW my account is a Cash account (as advised in the book), but I noticed in some of the figures in the book that a Margin account is shown. I guess with a Margin account you wouldn't hit the problem.
3. I downloaded the epub format and the figures do not seem to display well either on my phone or on my laptop. Maybe it would have been better to download the PDF. It seems a bit strange to have to choose either PDF or epub before buying the book. I would ideally like to have both.
Thanks again for your great effort with the book. Despite facing the issues above, I am still very satisfied that I have finally taken the plunge and starting learning how to do it myself without going via a financial advisor etc.
thepoorswiss.com
