Currency conversion losses with online brokers?

Hi,

I asked this question before but the title may have been confusing so I'll try to maybe rephrase it slightly: I am wondering how you avoid currency conversion costs when buying shares in multiple markets via an online broker.

For example if you use interactivebroker or firsttrade presumably the conversions would be:

Euro -> Dollars -> Sterling (to get funds into your broker account and then buy in the UK)

or even worse:

Euro -> Dollars -> Euros (to get funds into your broker account and then buy in the Euro zone)

It may be that I have missed how this works so the question does not make sense?

Or is it actually worth having a US, a UK and Euro online broker account to avoid currency conversion losses if you want to buy shares in all three currencies???

Cheers,

SL100

You can lodge euro to your Interactive Broker account and have that as you base currency ie convert through IB to £ or $ as the need arises - fx rates / charges are competitive imo. Somewhere along the line you will have fx charges ie if you open a GPB account with a broker you will still have to convert € to get the GBP to fund your account.