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Are you in the US? While I've never personally done Norbert's Gambit my understanding is that it's extremely popular for Canadian investors to do if they want t
by chrisfosterelli 7y ago
Are you in the US? While I've never personally done Norbert's Gambit my understanding is that it's extremely popular for Canadian investors to do if they want to get USD. Might not be vice-versa.
The most common use case I'm familiar with is within RRSPs, as there is sometimes a tax advantage to using US-listed ETFs within them. Most brokerages charge 1.5-2% to do currency conversion so it would be a lot better deal to do Norbert's Gambit to get USD trading funds.
- eru 7y agoThat's weird? Why is paying the ETF spread twice cheaper than paying the CAD/USD spread once?
- perl4ever 7y agoFor some reason, people think the cost of buying and selling a security is equal to the explicit commissions and fees, I guess.
- eru 7y agoGiven some weird structure of fees and spread, paying the ETF spread twice might very well be cheaper. I have no clue. I was just wondering, what weirdness must be going on to make that so.
- derriz 7y agoI'm not in the US but there are probably even more online discount brokers operating in the US and Canada so maybe it's a tax efficiency thing? Paying 1.5%-2% for FX conversion between two major currencies is very expensive unless the sums are small. The last time I converted currencies using a discount broker - including all costs I was charged less than .1% compared to the mid-market rate at the time.