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by mlrtime 4211 days ago
If you do this transfer often I recommend moving your currency to a brokerage and then doing a FX trade. You will often get close to BBG spot rate using IB.
3 comments

I'd also recommend this approach. FX is a cash cow business for banks. Money changing is one thing, where the business has cash management risks and cost, but FX on a wire transfer is close to 100% profit for the institution. They trade at mid and keep that 4%.

As the parent poster commented, Interactive Brokers will give you rates close enough to mid as to not matter (e.g. the current rate to buy/sell EUR with USD is 1.2313/1.2312, plus a few dollars commission).

How would you go about setting something like that up?

I assume this comes with quite a few caveats?

Sign up with a brokerage account, there are many. interactive brokers is one of the cheapest (I'm not affiliated). Then, link your two bank accounts with the brokerage. Buy/Sell you currency then transfer the funds via wire/ach...
Seems awesome for personal uses (which I expect to be doing on a fairly regular basis). I persume this might make business tax compliance a bit more complex, but at some point it may be worthwhile for me in that realm as well.

Thanks!

Hell, even Transferwise would be < 1%