What are your favorite offshore brokers, particularly for equities trading?
Thanks everyone.
Thanks everyone.
Offshore brokers
- Thread starter stevenpaul
- Start date
I've been thinking about giving Alliance Investment Management a try, 4/1 margin intraday, NO pattern day trader rule whatsoever!
"offshore" depends on where you live. Canada is offshore if you live in USA.
a lot of the "offshore" places are in countries where it is very complicated, and you might suddenly someday not get your money back.
And if doing to avoid taxes, the govt more likely than not will find you. the days of "hiding assets" no longer safely exists. Find out what happened with German investors hiding assets in Lichtenstein recently in the news. [/size]
Please do let me know how Alliance works out for you. I have been looking into them and they sound like everything I am looking for in a broker: direct access trading with ECNs, pre and post market hours trading, low commissions, offshore, etc. I am concerned with their liquidity. I don't imagine they have 4 billion in liquid assets like IB. Also, they haven't returned an e-mail I sent them midway through last week. That's never a good sign. Hopefully they'll work out though. Direct access trading trading with low commissions from offshore is hard to find.
Well, for US residents, Canada's treaties and historic cooperation with the US preclude its status as an offshore haven, I think.
Regarding getting caught, I don't think there's anything illegal about trading as an agent of an offshore corporation of which one is not a shareholder. The problem is when traders have some sort of beneficial ownership in the offshore company, making it a controlled foreign corporation. But so long as one is a mere agent, given power of attorney to trade for the corporation, trading revenues aren't taxable for such an agent (although any compensation for acting as an agent of the corporation is). If you think I'm wrong on this, please do explain the error of my reasoning.
Americans usually try try to offshore for one of two reasons. To evade taxes or to shelter assets from lawsuit/govt seizure.
Is this "agent" also the "owner" in some convoluted way? You avoided the tax question.
There is no such thing as a safe "offshore haven" for tax purposes. Now, if you are trying to make the funds harder to locate for lawsuit purposes, that makes sense. But US Citizens need to pay taxes as if trading in the USA. Offshore havens and clever corporate structuring do not change the fact if the govt decides something was set up to evade taxes. And the old methods that are still advertised are valid in this post-9/11, highly connected, internationally-cooperating world are pretty much useless.
That is why I said: The "real" havens, few as they are, that refuse to sign onto the international money-laundering/tax evasion agreements, may very well imperil the funds placed within them.
Quote from moarla:
It depends all on the structure .... there are so many ways to do things
you know that for non US citizens the USA is one of the best tax saving heavens?
Delaware, Nevada, etc...
I called that alliance investment and they say they are an employer of traders... huh?