A suggestion to deal with the USD balance problem - two issues
A. Maintaining a USD balance in a GIA might be costly for Freetrade and possibly hard to administer.
B. An ISA can not hold foreign balances.
Given solving A doesn’t resolve B. Here is an alternative -
Currently a USD trade cash settles after 2 business days - I would request that Freetrade develop a feature that will allow the unsettled cash balance to be traded into another US stock, ETF or cash equivalent product within a certain timeframe, thus avoiding the bid/offer spread and the cash conversion fee.
Naturally this fee is a source of revenue, so I would propose either:
- A fixed monthly fee.
- The bid offer spread saving, retained by Freetrade.
- A combination of the two.
Where no new trade is entered, this would be converted back to GBP using the 0.45% charge or a nominal charge if the customer is paying a fixed monthly fee.
Naturally the same solution can be rolled out for the SIPP.