Cheapest place to buy and hold International Shares

Couple of thoughts:

1. If "old", moderately wealthy, looking to increase your holdings over time in US domiciled stock and not a US citizen, you should check the potential of IHT/US estate duties and process which may be applied in the event of your untimely demise (anything domiciled on US soil);

2. Worth considering a USD cash account attached to your trading account to avoid the constant, relentless cherry biting of FX on both purchase and dividend payments - use your div (which should be automatically paid in USD) to reinvest directly back in US denominated securities as required;

3. For initial purchases circa $25K, you may wish to calculate potential benefit in reducing inflated bank forex fees by purchasing USD via a currency specialist (eg HiFX etc), rerouting to a USD sub account attached to your main current account (Barc, HSBC do this, probably more) then sending that USD to your trading account;

4. Points 2 and 3 would mean you take one modest hit on forex then nothing further on this score (but building a position in purely USD unless you manually exit);

5. interactive investor is worth looking at if you go down this road; flat 22.50 GBP per quarter, to offset against 10 GBP (infrequent rate) trading credits; USD account automatically included and divs automatically paid out in USD too (you can choose to settle trades/ swap accumulated USD to GBP at their forex rate too which is high versus a forex specialist but lower than most UK banks);

6. I think investing in single US shares at the moment is verging on the impetuous and that CGT liabilities may be the least of your future concerns 

Thanks
Am I able to use Revolut for this?
I was not aware of any accounts that allow you to have a USD account - I will look into interactive investor though, thank you

Interactive Investor will not accept transfers in from, or make payments out to, USD & EUR accounts unless they are held in the UK, e.g. HSBC, Barclays, Santander, Citi.

They would not accept my Bunq (Netherlands) euro account.

Thanks, but II stated in an email to me "Thank you for your email regarding a bank transfer.
 I'm afraid we cannot process international bank transfers, your deposit must originate from a UK bank account."

I've just escalated this issue (generically) via the payments team and received confirmation that overseas payments in are still absolutely fine per that link so long it's a direct transfer and the ii and origin bank account names match....withdrawals can only be made back to the current country of residence though (so, USD/EUR back to a foreign currency sub account of e.g. Barc GBP current acc etc).

So unless bunq is run via a custodial account system or does indirect transfers (so might not meet the name matching condition), I guess you got an uninformed customer service rep.

Interactive Brokers is hands down the best.
- $2 flat fee per FX conversion which is always at mid market rate
- extremely low trading fees (usually $1 per trade or less)
- no holding costs except $10 per month inactivity fee, with all commissions credited against it, so if you spend $7 in commissions in a month, you pay an additional $3 in inactivity fee. Inactivity fee is waived entirely if your account is over $100k. You can hold UK stocks as well in the account, and cash in all currencies, so you can hold a lot of assets together there with a total value of >$100k in order to avoid the inactivity fee.