This is great, as someone who frequently transfers money from the US to Canada I wish I had known about this sooner. Hopefully they can actually make some money.
Nobody else comes close in terms of exchange rates and level of service.
Thanks
For larger transfers (ie above £5k/$6k) you have a slew of them; Global Reach Partners, Moneycorp, World First, and Rational FX to name a few.
Disclaimer: I am a co-founder of CurrencyTransfer.com, an aggregator of some of the above larger transfer companies.
On average I send between 500-1000 GBP to USD per month on Transferwise and pay 2.50 - 5 GBP in fees. Compared to a wire at a bank that charges 30 GBP fixed + a % on a sliding scale depending on the amount, it's not really competitive until you get over 10k per transaction. But then at that point you can contact TransferWise customer service to negotiate a better rate.
The two turned out to be nothing alike. Oanda used to let little people convert currency on the same platform as proper FX traders (speculators). This meant you could pay a tiny fee and get some of the most competitive rates in the world because you were trading directly in their two-sided market.
WorldFirst is different. They make you declare the amount you want to exchange and then they synthesize a rate that expires soon after. There is no way to put in an order at a specific price and they do not show you a two-sided quote which would make it plain how much they're taking.
From what I saw, WorldFirst aims to take about 1.5% of each side of each trade at the when they are large, and even more on small trades.
If you're exchanging $500 you may as well use a bank. If you're exchanging $50000 you may as well use a true trading platform.
When exchanging currency at any online or physical marketplace, look at their two-sided quote to see the spread they charge. If they try to show you only one side (buy or sell but not both), go elsewhere.
A common occurence these days, with the rapid rate of innovation. It's like we're missing some efficient product discovery tool.
Types 'https://www.producthunt.com' into a browser.
However, you could have just answered the question. Unless there's a /s i didn't see somewhere on the parent posts...
Q Television Channel - Informercials 24/7
I'm not really that impressed with their results. It's more like popularity based marketing channel(what's with all those videos ? ), because of the lack of good search and deep metadata. Heck many products don't even have a rich, textual description. It's almost like aggregating product reviews from relatively unbiased sources(unlike the cesspool that Amazon has become), and filtering by depth and building a decent search around them and a good community would work better. Than after all this, a video would be very useful.
Ah, and one more thing - try to filter out the bullshit apps, the ones without much value on product hunt. "A dating app where you can only date 1 guy"? and other stuff like that. Sorry but i have much better ways of wasting time.
But let's think about an ideal service. Such a service would have 2 forms:
1. It gathers in some form, all the "jobs" i need to do, and how well they are done today, and how much i pay for them - and than from time to time offers me concrete recommendations how to improve my life: "you could save $X each month , if you'll use this new money transfer startup". Or "you could use this recipe book, to save a lot of time and get similar level of food you're making now". etc.
Amazon does that to some extent, but it has still has some ways to go.
2. Another successful mechanism is create a RICH and DEEP tagging system for each product and search/browse through those tags - jinni.com once did it for movies - and it was a phenomenal movie discovery tool. Far better than anything we have today.
Of course, ideally such tool should also include a price comparison mechanism, and maybe "performance levels" per each relevant performance dimension, kinda like the one you get in digikey, the electronic component store, where you can select chips by speed, power,etc.
The question is, how to get there, and how close it's possible to get?
For #1, this pretty much requires human curation/submission to accurately gather the vendors for each process you might outsource.
For #2, Rich, quality tags that provide a near complete representation of feature sets requires human intervention or a substantial crawl with NLP+ranking algos on par with Google.
The closest that really exists is:
http://alternativeto.net/software/server-density/
http://alternativeto.net/software/sentry/
> Of course, ideally such tool should also include a price comparison mechanism, and maybe "performance levels" per each relevant performance dimension, kinda like the one you get in digikey, the electronic component store, where you can select chips by speed, power,etc.
> The question is, how to get there, and how close it's possible to get?
An AlternativeTo clone with a focus on tagging features/performance dimensions, having people rate those individual dimensions, and submit prices would likely work. The only problem is the incentive for people to:
A) Switch
B) Be that detailed.
C) Avoid it becoming a popularity contest like ProductHunt & AlternativeTo are at present.
I remember a post made not long ago by the HN admins themselves where they said they'll try to reduce the political posts.
So far, it's not working out.
'dang summarized the results of the detox week and has made some recent comments on it as well. Here are some, with some identifiable snippets only so it's not a list of links. I encourage you to read the comments themselves. They don't all directly address this, but I think they all shed some light on the topic.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516969
There's no satisfying anybody about this: not the readers who want more politics, not the readers who want less, and certainly not the partisans on an issue.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13522433
There's a lot more politics on HN right now than there usually is, which is appropriate since it reflects what's going on right now.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516969
When there's a deluge of political stories, as in the last couple days, users heavily flag most of them. But there have still been plenty of major threads spending plenty of time on the front page. That's the status quo for HN: most politics are off topic, but not all. It's a delicate balance and an important one. Letting politics overrun this site would kill it.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13463480
On downsides of the Political Detox Week experiment: there are two comments in the thread.
I am not in an extreme position -- namely to deny that political posts don't have any relevance. That's not true. But I feel those discussions have either rarely been productive, or have way too many comments for somebody to extract a useful gist, or both.
This site seems to break it down: https://norbertsgambit.com/
I've used TransferWise for over $8K and think the service is fantastic. I wouldn't touch this with a ten foot pole and my git is screaming "scam!"
If you pay $20 in fees + spread for 2 trades, that'll be the cost of the conversion. For a $10k conversion, that's 0.2%. Unless you're suggesting that a money market ETF is prone to manipulation, your brokerage is going to scam you, or you don't like to deal with taxes on your stock purchases/sales, there isn't much drawback other than time. The larger the amount though, the more it'll potentially be worthwhile.
More info about this: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/norberts-smart... http://canadiancouchpotato.com/2013/12/03/norberts-gambit-th... http://www.finiki.org/wiki/Norbert's_gambit
For there idea to work they need to get money transferred into all directions...
They had Nigeria as a supported country. But they removed it (sadly)
But money was probably transferred only one direction. So they lost money.
I am a Nigerian and I consider this an unpardonable failure of basic market research. If they had spent a quality hour of their time investigating the Nigerian market, they would have found out that inflow overwhelmingly dwarfs outflow.
Makes you wonder what their decision making methodology is
That's a very good idea.
I'm not even sure if he's a prince.