Degiro - avoiding auto fx fees?

When you buy or sell stocks in degiro, there’s an auto-fx applied by default which is 0.25%. Mightn’t sound like much but it adds up if you have a few hundred k to play with.

Anyway, anyone on here turn off the auto fx and find another way to do the fx? I was thinking of using something like wise?

Manual FX

In addition to Auto FX, some of our clients choose to exchange foreign currency manually. Enabling Manual FX gives you the flexibility to perform currency transactions as you see fit.

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I turned off Auto FX for a few years and held FX currency for trades.

It's more expensive to do manual FX exchange when you decide to cash in back to euro.

I got around this by switching back to Auto FX before changing all my currency back to euro.

When Auto FX is reset all the foreign currency changes back to euro after a short time.

Unfortunately Degiro don't allow foreign currency deposits or withdrawals.

IBKR have lower FX rates and also allow FX deposits and withdrawals.

I do the same as S class.

The only other niggle is when you have auto FX turned off and you then buy/sell e.g USD stocks using your USD, you still need to have EUR in your account to cover the fees.

In my case I’m thinking of selling everything to get cash out my stocks. Seems like wise is “from 0.48%” which is even worse. Expected them to be cheaper

I picked Degiro because I wanted to spread my investments around differnt brokers but I hated the UI and resented the charge on buying/selling ETFs/stocks when other brokers offered it for free. Eventually I switched everything into Trading212 and Lightyear.