I have a EUR bank account and I recently set up a Trading 212 account in USD (as I expected to be investing mostly in US stocks). It cost me €13 in exchange fees to deposit $800 into my Trading account. My friend set up an account in EUR and obviously had no exchange fee as it was EUR to EUR. It does not show any exchange fee for him when he invests in a US stock but I assume it is included into the stock price?
I am looking to find out if a USD or EUR account is more suitable for me in order to reduce currency exchange fees.
That is a large fee. You would probably be better off with a T212 account whose base currency is EUR. The cost of exchanging EUR to USD on T212 is small. I suggest you read
Be prepared for some hefty SWIFT fees from intermediary banks when you transfer USD from T212 to Revolut!
With an account in Euro you can use SEPA transfers, which are free. Then you don’t need Revolut (and their requests for pay slips and tax documents).
I SWIFT-wired several thousand USDs from Revolut to my T212 USD account (USD → USD), Revolut charged 3.60USD SWIFT fee.
Reversly, I wired 10 USD from T212 to my Revolut USD account (USD → USD), T212 charged zero, I got 10 USD on my Revolut account. I am not sure how these things work, maybe it was not SWIFT as T212 did not charge me anything for this.
While I agree the cost of exchanging EUR to USD on T212 might be small, one caveat of this approach is that you immediately have to convert in T212 the proceedings of your USD stock sale to EUR.
There may be circumstances where the USD / EUR rate is not favorable, and you might want to postpone in time your USD → EUR conversion, waiting for more favorable exchange rate.
Hence a multi-currency account (#1 feature request by the way) is the way to go.
T212 won’t be the ones charging you, it would be the intermediaries and banks that do.
what’s worth noting is that transfers receive different treatment depending on how large they are, so while it was free at £10, this may not hold true for £100 or £1000 et cetera.
when I last did large bank transfers, I didn’t have to pay anything when it was just around £100, but when I made a £450-550 transfer then I got hit with a sizable fee of around £35 for it being international. this between banks, not T212 or relovut et cetera and was a few years ago so may not hold true now, but that was my experience.
T212 does not charge for the transfer, and they would not know how much your bank will be charging you.
Revolut is the bank and they know what they charge