Chile Forum

In the past we've had a bit of discussion about xe.com getting out of sync with the local currency exchange market. Well, here is a spectacular example. According to EMOL the dollar closed today at "$537,80 comprador y $538,20 vendedor", but just under 5 hours later xe.com is still showing this:

Live rates at 2009.06.18 22:18:54 UTC
1.00 USD = 551.781 CLP

Now I'd like to know where xe.com is picking up those numbers so I can buy a few pesos there!

Cheers,

James.

If you are doing $10,000,000 + blocks of exchange on wall street you get something like that rate on XE.com. Thus, why the rate you get from your ATM visa card will often beat the Chilean central bank's observed rate (and thrash the rates at every bank in Chile by a mile). Visa or Mastercard or the major international ATM networks likly have more influence over the Chilean exchange rate than the central bank ever does, no matter how much dollars they are dumping from their reserves.

EMOL is not the place to check. They are way behind. You want to compare XE.com to http://www.bcentral.cl/eng/

Really, playing the peso by peso exchange game day to day is a lost cause for the little guys. If you average the exchange rate in Chile out over say the last 5 years, it has likly been almost the exact same rate mas o menos 50 pesos.

admin wrote:EMOL is not the place to check. They are way behind. You want to compare XE.com to http://www.bcentral.cl/eng/

You mean the observado rate? That seems to be set the previous day, whereas the EMOL business section has twice-daily updates on what the peso is trading for locally at opening (9:00?) and closing (13:30) time. My local bank rate seems to track the latter pretty well, better than xe.com does recently.

Interesting though if that's the rate people are really trading at in the US! With that size of gap (2.5%), a corporate buyer could easily make a tidy profit by buying abroad and selling here..

Cheers,

James.

sorry, realized I missed a few zeros.

And they already do. That would be the amount of money you get ripped off at the bank when you send a wire.

admin wrote:And they already do. That would be the amount of money you get ripped off at the bank when you send a wire.

Right, but in this case they would be taking advantage each other, rather than the poor defenceless public, which I thought wasn't supposed to happen in a free market where everyone has access to the same information, for obvious reasons. Though I'm having trouble finding a quick citation to back that up convincingly. I do notice that Wikipedia now says, under "efficient market hypothesis" that critics "blame belief in rational markets for much of the current financial crisis" .

James.

If you read today's chat exchanges, you will see that I actually saw xe.com spike down to 533.

It would REALLY REALLY REALLY BE HELPFUL if someone can chime in who exchanged dollars for pesos THIS AFTERNOON and the rate they received.

Curious. I suppose I can check the local numbers and xe.com synchronously tomorrow if I remember. I had wondered whether the numbers after 2PM locally might by dominated by a small volume of overseas trade; I'd have thought most CLP trading would happen here.

James.

Xe.com down to 538.566 at 11:37 today. EMOL reports 537 at 9:24.

At bloomberg they are showing about 535 now, and yesterday the rate was at 537-538, and not "555".

{ edit: the correct link is: http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/curren ... ncies.html }

eeuunikkeiexpat wrote:It would REALLY REALLY REALLY BE HELPFUL if someone can ...

... help, when the number of spare pants is small.

Rune will sew you some more.

So, the story from EMOL at closing time (story posted at 13:35) is "La divisa estadounidense bajó $2,30 a $535,40 comprador y $535,90 vendedor en el mercado chileno".

At 13:36:54, xe.com said this: 1.00 USD = 536.676 CLP.
(Exactly 5 minutes earlier at 13:31:54 it said 536.453).

So today they're in agreement within 0.2% (do they read allchile.net?).

Of course if you're mainly interested in what you get from your US cash card, you'd want to be comparing that with xe.com, as EEUU said, rather than what's happening locally.

Cheers,

James.