The big 4 banks tend to offer a buy/sell spread on USD of about...

The big 4 banks tend to offer a buy/sell spread on USD of about 60 basis points and 31 bp per trade, which I agree is not great. In terms of international brokers I have looked at interactive brokers, though the CHESS registry is something I like to have for my ASX listed companies. On the topic of brokers, never look at them. Brokers follow share price movements rather than predicting and simply encourage high trading frequency. My aim is to passively hold good quality and add savings/dividends where a good quality company becomes cheaper. At the moment I am thinking of accumulating some Visa stock in the next few days.

MQG is expensive (75B market cap/ 2B interim profit) and considering it is trading on a PE in the high teens any negative company specific or financial market news in general is going to hurt the share price. The difference between our situations is that you don't have a legacy position with high CGT liabilities. Macquarie is a high quality company and hopefully the earnings will grow over many years - but yes I am not bullish on the short to medium term share price.

In summary, it is overvalued and perhaps it is a mistake to hold even accounting for CGT. It is the risk we all take investing.