USD deposit account recommendations please

I work for a UK company which is now owned by a US company and we thus have a share options scheme which allows us to buy shares in the US company. This is all operated via the on-line brokers E-Trade.

As far as I can see the only sensible way to use E-Trade is if I have a US Dollar account of some sort.

Can anyone recommend a good account for this sort of use? I will probably only want to do one or two transactions per year and they won't be particularly large (I'm not rich!), of the order of a few thousand dollars at the most.

I've looked at both HSBC and Nationwide (where we have current accounts) and they both look rather expensive for the amounts involved.

Citibank's "Foreign Currency Deposit Accounts" would seem to be a reasonable option, no minimum balance and (as far as I can see) no cost for keeping the account open. Does anyone have any experience of this account or any recommendation for anything else which might be better?

Reply to
usenet
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Why? You can send them a US$ cheque (once) to get started or sell some of the shares you've (presumably) acquired in the account and use the cash from that. Any time you sell shares the cash will stay in the account and you can use that to buy other shares.

Reply to
Tumbleweed

Since it's for a share options scheme I'm not really aiming to trade in shares, I'm just going to buy all the options I get offered as an employee. Therefore in general I just have a requirement for getting dollars into the E-Trade account. It's both slow and expensive to send dollar drafts.

Reply to
usenet

Check with e-Trade... you may be able to do a direct international bank transfer from your UK account to the Us account. That's what works with me (not E-Trade).

Reply to
Ian Cornish

First of all check if its etrade uk or us, my employer does similar but its etrade uk so IIRC you can pay them sterling and have it converted. In any event you'll have to get the money into your us dollar account (if you had one) from your UK bank account.

for example its either ,

1) existing uk bank account --> new UK account-->linked dollar account --> etrade or 2) existing uk bank account --> new UK dollar account --> etrade or

or

3) existing uk bank account --> etrade

even if its slow to do the latter, the additional steps in 1 or 2 also slow it down ,but since you are buying options speed isnt an issue anyway.

Reply to
Tumbleweed

No, that's where I started, they seem to only want to know about dollars.

Reply to
usenet

It's E-Trade US as they (my company) haven't had the decency to make it easy for us in the UK to buy shares.

As far as I can see though it's cheaper to set up (for example) a Citibank dollar account and feed it from my UK bank account. Then transfer dollars from that account to E-Trade.

Reply to
usenet

Quite possibly but if you are only doing a few xfers a year (no more than 4 I'm guessing, eg one a quarter) how much will you actually save compared with the hassle of setting up extra bank accounts and all the juggling between them?

Reply to
Tumbleweed

I am looking for a simple method as well as a reasonably cheap one. The advantage of the 'via Citibank dollar account' method I *hope* is that I can do it all on line. Getting dollar bank drafts is distinctly un hassle free if my previous experience is anything to go by. Once the Citibank account is set up the process comprises:-

Make a payment from my HSBC (or Nationwide) account to Citibank, this can be in GBP from the point of view of making the payment.

Make a payment from the Citibank account to E-Trade in dollars.

Buy the shares.

It can't get *much* simpler than that can it? The only minor problem is that the exact amount required is never known beforehand but that's a problem however you do it.

Reply to
usenet

Hi

I have used E-Trade US for years. There is no need to open a USD account and in fact I think it would be more of a hassle than anything else.

All you need to do is a SWIFT transfer and can be done online with most banks I believe.

Hope this helps.

Reply to
Pollux

Are you sure? I tried to send some foreeign currency a year or so ago and neither HSBC nor Nationwide seemed to be able to do it without me trogging down to a branch. I'll investigate again though as this would seem to be a sensible approach if I *can* do it on line.

Reply to
usenet

dont know about any others, but with HSBC UK you cant do it online at the moment, however up to a certain value (5 or 10k i think) you can do them over the phone if thats more convienient than going to a branch.

Ian

Reply to
ian.tomes

Maybe try asking specifically for a SWIFT transfer. My bank (Smile) doesn't have any facilities to send directly a SWIFT payment, so I simply sent an e-mail via their secure messaging thing giving them all the details of the payment and that was it.

Reply to
Pollux

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