My company has an employee stock purchase plan with etrade.com, but as I'm in Europe, I thought I could sell the stocks and save the bank transfer fees by using bitcoins.
You can sell the stocks online on NASDAQ though, but even to just place the order they ask for an bank account. So I either have to transfer to EU, paying the fee, or to an US account. As I don't have one, could I simply transfer directly to an Bitcoin exchange?
*You basically need to get money into E*Trades US back account.*
E*Trade will either want a wire transfer (from Europe) or a bank transfer from the US. They have to be very careful about Anti Money Laundering. So wont want to accept money directly from a Bit-Coin Exchange.
You can open a US account from your local EU bank. Your local bank will act as a proxy to make the required AML and KYC checks. You can then use bitcoin to route the money via a bitcoin exchanges to that account.
However if this is just a one off. You will probably find the costs, (fees at the EU exchange and the US one) and risk of bit-coin volatility; not worth the effort.
Remember this is a problem which existed before bitcoin. So there will be ways of getting it to work with out bitcoin.
I would contact E*trade EU and US and ask them what would be the best way to find you purchase. (E*trade EU may have an arrangement to do this simply, already)
If you are buying a large enough quantity of shares, then the wire fees etc will only amount to a few percent anyway.
That being said having a US acc would be useful for BTC stuff later on. For example if want to work remotely for a US company, and need an efficient way of transferring money regularly to you home currency personal bank account.
find someone that is interested in your stack, probably a bitcoin american tourist in europe, or someone that is in trading back and foward to europe
