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Comment by AYBABTME | Hacker News Reader

IBKR can also be finicky when it comes to what they allow on their platform. They seem to want people to do stock brokerage, and not use their service for other things despite offering a whole lot of convenient features that suggest they want you to use them.

I used them a lot for automated transfers, paying bills and keeping cash and they weren't happy about it.

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Yup this is true. They don't want to be doing just that, and they'll get pissy if you're doing only that.

Though, it's also a freaking excellent broker, so you could just... use it for your normal brokerage purposes too. They've also got a CMA with rates as good as basically anything except maybe Fidelity (which sorta cheats by sweeping from a mmf), so you can theoretically just use it for your normal banking as well.

I don't actually maintain a IBKR account myself, but if I were to consolidate somewhere, it'd probably be either there of Fidelity. If I had to do forex more regularly, IBKR would win for me, hands down.

I second the recommendation for IBKR which quotes FX rates at market compared to Wise. When the sum is higher, the differences can be drastic.

As long as you run an active trading account with them it should be fine for occasional cash movements.

Agreed, if it's not your primary purpose for having the account then it should be fine. I did a bunch of FX through them not long after opening mine, and they sent me a polite email telling me that I shouldn't do that, which was fair enough. Much better than the "freeze account first, warn later" attitude that many other financial companies seem to have.

Now that I've been investing with them for a while, they don't seem to mind.

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