Hi all,

I need to bring my UK funds over to Canada very soon and am shopping around to try to get the best rate. At the moment Canadian Forex seem to be giving me the best rate (higher than HiFX) but I don't know much about them and can't find many reviews on the web.

Has anyone used them? What was your experience? Has anyone used XE Trade too? I'm wondering about registering with them too but wary about sending all my personal ID documents to too many companies!!

Thanks for any advice!
Suze

Shopping around for a 'best rate' is a waste of time. The rate changes by the second and what you get offered from one could well be different the next time you call them back or someone else. Some companies include their fees in their rate, others charge it as a flat fee. Unless you compare like for like at any one instant in time, you are not going to get much of a comparison.

For one time FX the rate is never going to be the best rate going. Regular customers will always get a preferred rate.

The best strategy by far I find is to pick a rate you can accept and once you get offered that, take it. By the time you have thought about it it may get worse, as some found a few years ago when the GBP went on the slide, from which it has not recovered. I still hold GBP because $2.14 was not good enough and decided to hold out, it went down from there. It could be a while before I do a trade on that.

Another is to hedge the FX, by at different times and average the rate out. I still prefer to set a target rate and go with that.

If you want to check historical rate, try Oanda.com, also for live rate (This is the spot rate not the not the retail FX) go here http://www.forexdirectory.net/gbp.html

Watching for the AUS$ to go down on CDN$ right now!

We have used XE for a year, been very happy with them and the money has appeared in our account very promptly

I always use Canadian Forex back and forth and never had a single problem, very good rates and fast transfers which usually take about 4-5 days.

Used to just use Lloyds TSBs money transfer, but they decided to look up the swift code and change the bank name that I gave them to something completely wrong and ended up delaying a payment for about a month so I never used them after that.

We have used HiFX quite successfully twice now.
most recently we got CAD$1.59 and I now notice the rates are hovering at $1.54 so we are quietly patting ourselves on the back

The only thing you need to watch HiFX for is the disappearing $15 when your money arrives at destination. this happened to us both times, but HiFX paid the missing amount back to us without a quibble once we produced destination bank statements.

The Aviator is quite right. The best is to order a rate you want. It doesn't really matter much which broker you use.

I compared many and at the end used Oanda.com, but they didn't provide pre-order. When the rate went up to almost 1.62 a few weeks ago, I knew that would not last long. I really wanted to lock the rate, but I couldn't. Eventually when my money got into the Oanda account, it dropped to 1.60. Compared to know, it was still not bad!

You can use this to check the historical data, then predict your order rate.
http://www.forexpros.com/currencies/gbp-cad-chart

Thank you for all your responses. I am seriously wishing I had made the transfer when I saw the exchange rate go up to 1.62 not so long back....but sadly I got stuck into the whole 'but maybe it will keep going up....' thing and missed my chance. I am still waiting in the vain hope that it might rise slightly before we have to close on our house purchase at the end of August, we shall see. Thanks again for giving me your opinions

Suze