I have a fairly large amount of USD I want to exchange to Euro.
Anybody got any tips about how to best do this .
My default is just to do it within the multicurrency accounts of my own bank accounts.
Are there specialty FX accounts anybody can recommend and share any experience with them? Any in HK that are useful?
I don’t want to do anything too complicated or risky just to save a few Euro.
For my experience Taiwan bank exchange rates are good, close to real rates. If sending out, I used wise which was ok too.
From what I heard, the best rates should be when using a brokerage account which supports multiple currencies. For example, Interactive Brokers. Then you can even set up limit orders to exchange when a specific rate has been reached.
If you have enough to open a premier account with HSBC you get a preferential rate, take a look at whether it works out better for you.
Thanks all. HSBC rates unfortunately aren’t that great.
Interactivebrokers may be the best bet given a good rate , straightforward pricing and ease of use.
I have used IBKR for USD to EUR and they give fantastic foreign exchange rates and instant transaction , even BETTER than the rate quoted in Google !
Really wish I had figured this out earlier. Well better late than never. Thanks for everybody’s suggestions.
Have you tried Wise, seems good but have not used it for transfers yet to TW.
Wise charges quite some fees for exchanging currency while IBKR allows exchanging currency at spot rates. The only downside being that they only allow explicit currency conversions into the „base currency“ of an account and not the other way round (not sure if for all countries or just for some).
I never had that issue. I have exchanged from my base currency (USD) to EUR, HKD and SGD.
Same, very good rate even better than gooogle rate when I used it. But if you try to hold some non USD currencies too long in it they may start charging you.
Are you using the IBKR “Lite” or “Global Trader” app? They are limited versions of the real thing. For the full experience you need a “Pro” account.
I do not know what you mean? I have a base “USD” account and I can convert between USD and EUR in both directions. You may need FX trading permissions though.
It‘s a pro account (business account). When I tried to exchange EUR into USD, they just showed some error message that this wasn’t possible, but I was eligible to change my account into a margin account. I even tried that - but still, same result. At that point, I just gave up because it wasn’t that important to me. But could be that I still haven’t found the settings to activate this feature.
Exchanging USD into EUR works flawlessly and at great rates, though.