Exchanging Currency

dstirling

Hello

I am considering exchanging some of my Canadian cash holdings to American so I can purchase some US stocks in the future. How would I input the exchange in PS? In my BMO Investorline RRSP account, I would assume that after the exchange, I would show both the amounts of CDN and USD cash I have. Will PS also show the two currency amounts?

Then when it comes time to purchase the US stock, how do I enter the purchase so that the amount is taken from the USD cash balance.

Thank you.

VidasMatelis

For each account, you must specify currency and any cash in that account would be in that currency. So each account can have cash just in that currency. But in your account you might have symbols that are in different currency and that would be handled by PortfolioSlicer without problems.

So normally for your RRSP you would have CAD account and USD account. That is you would normally setup 2 accounts, for example
V-RRSP-USD
V-RRSP-CAD
That is exactly how TD bank handles that and I assume BMO would be the same.
To exchange your cash from CAD to USD you would do 2 transactions:
1. In V-RRSP-CAD you would enter "Withdraw" transaction for symbol "* Cash" for amount 1000.
2. In V-RRSP-USD you would enter "Deposit" transaction for symbol "* Cash" for amount 700 and in ExchRateRpt1Override field you would specify actual exchange rate you used, in above case 1.42 (1000/700). Here I assume that in currency table you specified CurrencyID=1 as CAD and CUrrencyID=2 as USD.

dstirling

With BMO Investorline, in my RRSP account, I can maintain both CDN and USD cash balances.

So I guess in essence, I have two sides (CDN and USD) under one account (https://www.bmoinvestorline.com/FAQs/FAQ_US_Dollar.html).

As an example, in BMO, I can purchase shares of RY.TO in CDN, and then later sell them and have the sale settled in USD. This may be the same in all online brokerages (but not sure).

So would the best method be to create a separate PS account (even though technically they are both under the same account in BMO) using your described method?

VidasMatelis

Hi,

I did not know that BMO behaves differently. In any way, as I said it would be better to create separate accounts for each currency - much better tracking.

dstirling

Thank you