Good evening! As I wrote earlier, topping up Interactive Brokers has gotten harder. I haven't yet figured out the CNY-route via BCS, but in the meantime I opened an account remotely with Freedom Finance Kazakhstan.
Cost: ~4k RUB to a Kazakh facilitator on Avito for the Kazakh tax ID, the local card, and the brokerage account itself; ~5k RUB for non-resident card servicing at Freedom; the card and account at Tsifra Bank (Freedom's Russian subsidiary) are free. FX conversion at Freedom is on the expensive side; trading commissions look reasonable at first glance.
Money flow was actually fast and transparent: Tinkoff → Tsifra Bank → Freedom Brokerage. End-to-end under 24 hours. After that I spent another week on KYC and verification with Freedom, then another week not understanding why I couldn't fund the account. Support could be better. But eventually it worked.
Made two small ~$500 trades — basically testing Freedom — and IB is also accumulating dividends. Portfolio just crossed 5M RUB; on one hand that's nice, on the other the period of attractive prices is over and from here on most additions will be made with USD around 100, and that's the optimistic scenario. End of August / early September I'll be doing larger purchases — let's see where USDRUB and TQQQ end up by then.
Portfolio: link
- TQQQ — 76.53%
- TCS Group — 8.92%
- Zynex — 4.18%
- Yandex — 1.82%
- Baidu — 1.03%
- KWG — 1.02%
- Times — 0.85%
- Redsun — 0.77%
- Baozun — 0.75%