Large Currency Exchange
 

Where in the US would be the best place to make a large US-EUR currency exchange for a good rate? The banks I've checked with gives quite a poor exchange rate.

For instance current EUR-USD rate is 1.48. BofA is currently offering 1.57.

Large amounts to you may not be large to the banks. They maintain foreign currency exchange as a product they offer to customers and hence need to make money off that service. You will never ever get the rates you see online as those would be the rates the banks get.

If you have a brokerage account, they can treat the exchange as a trade and work to get your the best rate but on top of that you'd be paying commission so net net it may be a wash.

Yeah, I do understand that I'd never get the intra-rates, but closing the gap a bit would be nice. For regular bank business, savings, stocks etc there are discount brokers/alternatives, but are the something similar for currency exchanges?

Try Traveler's Cheque?

^^ Some people scoff at TC's, but I find them useful. I never travel without some funds in TC's.
AMEX office will cash them commission free.

are you going to be traveling to europe? there are debt cards with 0% forex fees. i use schwab banking and usually get pretty close to the mid day exchange rates.

Don't companies like xe.com now offer currency exchange?

The last place you want to go to are those thieves that jokingly refer to themselves as banks...

you may get a better rate exchanging euro to dollar in europe.

if you are trying to exchange over €20,000 try

http://www.comfex.com/

their rate is bank minus 1 to 1.5% (plus a $10 wire transfer fee)depending on amount and frequency.

i agreed to honor faxed checks. i would get a rate and dollar amount, and fax them the check and the copy of the pro invoice i had received. the money would hit the european vendor acct. the next day.

if you are looking at a one time transfer of less than 20K, avoid every bank you can think of, and start calling the mid-sized guys and ask each for the rate for 10K or whatever. if you or a friend has an AAA account, call them also. they used to have an excellent exchange rate.

i also used Ruesch International. the rate was not that bad, but they were a real pain to deal with.

usually cash is more expensive to trade than transfers.

You may find better rates in Europe than in the US. I do USD to EUR exchanges all the time as a three currency transaction by way of our local currency at the local independent exchange houses, with an exchange loss total for both transaction of less than 1%. I can sometimes do that for GBP and SFR, too.

does that include fees? i have never been able to get under 1%. is that at the correct bank rate? if you were to do a buy and a sell, would it be under 2%.

I've found that for large cash transactions ($100k+) you are best served going to a grey-market Hawala agent. You can usually find them by asking around in heavily immigrant areas. Just be careful of counterfeit notes.

Hawala, for me, is worrisome not just on account of possibility of counterfeit notes. Hawala, funds are not transparent. The recipient has no means to show the source of their income, nor do I know what activities might be funded through Hawala.
Fundamentally, it's quite efficient, like Mumabia's Dabbawallahs. Even the EIC, sometimes, relied on Hawala sources to fund its operations.

Indeed, hence the reference to "grey market". That said, Hawala agents take lower commissions than banks, are open 24/7 unlike banks and never ask you for more information than you are comfortable providing.

My only comment here is that Hawala is not for the faint of heart. But then again, anyone dealing with $100k+ cash transactions probably isn't very fainthearted to begin with!

Please define "large". most forex trading is done in blocks of 10k so if you are looking at exchanging only a few 1000 you aren't going to get a good rate.

If anything feel good as I am looking right now, the EUR/USD has dropped as its 1.4315

I am not sure about US, but I know Citibank gives preferential exchange rate if you are a Citigold customer for example. So maybe give them a quick ring and see what they say.