The Cost Nobody Puts on the Pricing Page

If you buy a share listed in London or Tokyo through a US broker, two things happen and only one of them is priced on the commission schedule. The trade has a commission. The conversion of your dollars into pounds or yen has a markup, and it is usually somewhere else entirely.

Start with who can even do it

Of the twelve brokers we score, three publish international share dealing: Fidelity, Charles Schwab and Interactive Brokers. For the other nine the question does not arise — they trade US-listed securities in dollars, and a reader should not read the absence of an FX rate at Robinhood or Webull as a hidden charge. There is nothing to convert.

The three that can, and what they charge

Read that table twice, because the units invite a misreading. Interactive Brokers charges two tenths of one basis point. Schwab charges up to three hundred. That is a factor of roughly fifteen hundred between the two disclosed figures, on the same operation.

Two honest qualifications. Schwab publishes a maximum, not a flat rate, so the charge on a given conversion may be lower — what it publishes is the ceiling. And Interactive Brokers prices currency as a tradeable instrument, so the low rate comes with the complexity of placing a currency order rather than having the platform convert for you. Neither of those closes a fifteen-hundred-fold gap.

Why it hides so well

A commission is a line on a confirmation. A conversion markup is a worse exchange rate. Nothing on the statement says $300 — you simply receive fewer pounds than the mid-market rate would have given you, and the difference is the broker’s. This is why it survives at levels that would be unthinkable as a commission: a broker charging $300 to place a trade would be a story, and a broker taking $300 inside a rate is a Tuesday.

The other conversion, on money rather than trades

Currency also gets converted when money moves in or out in something other than dollars, and that is priced separately again. Two firms in our set publish it: Public charges 0.30% of the transaction volume as a foreign exchange transaction fee, and eToro charges a 0.25% FX spread plus a $25 processing fee on international wires sent in a non-USD currency. Neither of those firms sells foreign shares; this is the cost of funding or withdrawing across a border, which is a different question from the one above and should not be compared against it.

What we could not verify, and what that means

Eight of the twelve brokers we score publish no currency conversion cost we could find. For most that is because they do not need one. For Fidelity it is a genuine gap: it sells international shares and we could not read what the conversion costs. We record it as unverified rather than guessing, and it is the single most consequential unread figure in our database, because it is the one where being wrong by a factor of a hundred is possible.

Before you buy a foreign share

1. Ask what the conversion costs, in basis points, as a separate question from the commission. The commission is usually the smaller number
2. Ask whether the rate you are quoted is a maximum or a flat charge
3. Ask whether you can convert currency yourself as a separate order rather than letting the platform do it inside the trade
4. Compare the total — commission plus conversion — against buying a US-listed ADR or ETF that gives similar exposure without any conversion at all