Red1974

Can anyone give advice on foreign exchange.

We are off to Canada at the end of April and will be banking with HSBC, however we dont want to use them when we come to move all our funds over for the big move.

We have been given details of the Money Corp but wondered if anyone had used another company.


Thanks

Alphawolf

We used Moneycorp to recently transfer some money, relatively straight forward with no hassles

rufus2000

We are currently using HIFX. They also have a good reputation

Helen x

swoops

Theres also http://www.hifx.co.uk/ ...

swoops

Snap!

Rob_999

We used Custom House.
Rates and service seem to be very similar across all these companies - give a couple a call, speak to a trader and see who you prefer.

Paul Wildy

Try Halo Financial (http://www.halofinancial.com/). When it comes to currency exchange there are two things that you need to be concerned with:

1) The competitiveness of the rates the company you use can offer. For example at any given point in time the mid-market rate (the one published on xe.com or similar) might be 1.70 whereas your bank might offer 1.65 and a specialist might offer 1.68. Phone around and the closest you can get to the mid-market rate the better. You might find that the currency specialists rates are all fairly similar though.

2) The timing of the transaction. This is also key since the rates fluctuate daily and fluctuate during the day as well. So the more pro-active your currency specialist is in terms of monitoring the rates on your behalf and calling you when they think the time is right instead of just waiting for you to call them then the better the rate you are likely to get too. That's generally why I recommend Halo - because they seem to be very pro-active.

Some advice that I was also given when I converted currency is to do it in stages to spread the risk. It's devastating to exchange everything at 1.68 and then discover the rate shoots up to 1.78 in a couple of days. But if you only exchanged half at least you still get a better rate on the second half. On the other hand it could go the other way in which case you will have lost out on the second transaction but at least you will have achieved the best rate on the first half.

Deva

I use Oanda. Their money transfer service (http://fxglobaltransfer.oanda.com/) uses their FXTrade forex trading platform so the rates are as close to the market rate as you are going to get. The fee per transfer is US$25.00.

I have traded forex with Oanda for nearly 7 years and have transferred money UK to Canada several times in the past 6 months. I am very happy with them.

Alan2005

This is good advice.

Most brokers will allow you to place orders (i.e. buy or sell when the price gets to a certain value) - you should make use of this in your exchange strategy.

It also pays to remember that these guys are FX brokers; they make their money from marking up the rate they can buy and sell at on the FX market. This means they are not analysts and you shouldn't rely on their advice about where they think the market is going.

We used moneycorp and were happy enough (typical margin from the mid rate was about 1c - however it goes without saying that you should ask them to do better than the first price they give you). I expect most other brokers to be the same.

Red1974

Thank you all for the sound advice.... will check them all out