More Baht for your Pound

[STEVE G]

I agree with BB on that, although you will get charged about twenty pounds or so for a bank transfer, that is hardly significant if you are talking about the sums involved to finance building a house.

[K2OWN]

Hello Big Boy !!!!

Thank you for your reply. Do you mean that I should transfer the money for payments in Pounds Sterling at the bank here in the UK and let the developer change it into Thai Baht? I have been changing it to Thai Baht here then sending it. Your reply to this question would be much appricated.

[STEVE G]

K2OWN, what you do is send the money in sterling to the account in Thailand and the Thai bank will exchange it into baht at the onshore rate on receipt; providing the account is in baht, they will do this automatically, (if that is not what BB is talking about, he will put me right in the morning!).

[Guess]

I am still confused about the enormous difference you guys quote between offshore and onshore rates.

If this is the case then why are there not loads of Forex traders making a killing buying 67 BHT for one pound and selling it for 65 keeping the two as profit.

Any dealer will tell you that and overnight profit of 3% is a dram come true.

My suspicion her is that the UK hight street retail banks are using the merchant arms who have whole teams of speculators. These guys buy when the rate is high and hold and then sell. The obviously first pace to sell is at one of their retail outlets. HSBC deal in great sums of Forex and have (or did have) the luxury of having the own company, Thos Cook to dump the foreign currency.

Also never forget the charges at UK banks for exchange. The last time I bought BHT abroad was in Paris five years ago and I was charged 5 Euros for the transaction + 1.2%. Additionally there was a difference of about 3% between buy and sell rates which would indicate to me that at least another 1.5% was added. I only bought it there to save hassle as I was changing US Dollars and Pounds Sterling at the time and the 5 Euro Charge only applied once. They still had to convert to Euro first and refused to directly convert from USD to BHT. Hence 2.7% twice.

I understand transfers charges have come down since then.


Computer software with regular news updates can make fairly accurate predictions.

This is the rate now

http://www.xe.com/ucc/convert.cgi

Here some pointers to offshore information. A bit too much for me to read at the moment.

http://ideas.repec.org/p/roc/rocher/470.html


This one has many links to other sites that specialize in Forex.

http://ideas.repec.org/p/roc/rocher/470.html

[chelsea]

Just checked Aussie Dollar with naht and is back up to Appx 2700 for $100 whis is about what is was when I was there last year but not as good as 4 years ago when I 1st went to Thailand, was getting over 3000baht for $100

[ozuncle]

Hi chelsea,
Not sure where you got your rate from but my info is.

BKK Bank 28.44

Siam Comm. 28.50

These are the cash rates if you walk into a bank in Thailand.

You get more if you T/T the money.

[chelsea]

I just checked the http://www.xe.com web site to convert $100 Aus to Thai Baht and came up with 2657baht.
When I was in HH last year it was around 2500+ for $100. It is now just over 0.37baht for $1 australian dollar.
Still not bad if u only pay 100baht for a bottle of Heinikin in a bar. I would like to some some in Perth at that price and not the normal $7.00 plus that you pay here

[ozuncle]

chelsea XECOM are not exact.
The bank websites give you the exact rate. In fact I think the bank staff use the same screen to get the exchange rate.

You said 37 BHT to AUD 1.

Do you mean US$ ?

[chelsea]

I will recheck, if you are correct that is even more bottles of Cold Heinikn I get for my money.
Lets hope it keeps on the upward spiral

[buksida]

I still dont fully understand the onshore/offshore difference but I'm sure the Thai banks are giving the onshore rate, and xe.com use the offshore one so I wouldn't say they are wrong - all depends which way your currency is flowing.

If you want to send currency out you want a stronger baht, if you want to bring it in you'll want a weaker one. So those bringing in use the Thai bank rate of 68 and those sending out use the offshore rate of 64.

I could be wrong there thou as I'm no forex trader, more light shed on it by someone in that field would be good!

[Big Boy]

K2OWN, what you do is send the money in sterling to the account in Thailand and the Thai bank will exchange it into baht at the onshore rate on receipt; providing the account is in baht, they will do this automatically, (if that is not what BB is talking about, he will put me right in the morning!).

That's exactly what I meant Steve.

[PeteC]

I checked again today Guess with HSBC HK and their rate is even worse than last week. Last week it was 31.29 Baht to 1 USD if transferred HK to Thailand in Baht. Today it is 31.10. However, USD transfer into Thailand and I'm getting a rate of 34.37 inclusive of any fees. Don't forget, any speculators are subject to the 30% witholding for 1 year if over 20K USD. Perhaps it's not worth their time and effort to deal in such small sums or so many multiple transfers of small sums. Pete

[Big Boy]

Pete wrote:

Don't forget, any speculators are subject to the 30% witholding for 1 year if over 20K USD. Perhaps it's not worth their time and effort to deal in such small sums or so many multiple transfers of small sums

I don't really think that is a factor - the situation has been the same for years. Why didn't they do it before the 30% rule come in to play?

[PeteC]

Before the 30% witholding and two tier rate system I recall that my USD rate at HSBC HK and at a bank in Thailand was within 1 baht of each other.

I'm trying to figure out why what Guess suggests doesn't seem to be happening, i.e. bring lets say dollars into Thailand, sell them for 34 baht per, take that Baht out of Thailand and buy dollars for 31 per and pocket the 3 baht as profit.

The only thing I can think of is that these traders deal in such huge sums, it's not worth their trouble to deal only in sums of less than 20K to avoid the 30% witholding. Maybe I'm way off given that I'm not sure what the baht selling rate may be offshore, sure not same as the buying but you could probably make 1 1/2 baht or 2 per dollar? Pete

[K2OWN]

To Big Boy Steve G & Only Me
A Huge Thank Youfor all your Help. When we move to Hua Hin in February there will be a drink In Crawfords for you [/b]