xe.com
XE.com bills itself as the worlds favorite currency site.
“Universal” currency converter is a bold claim, but one that EX makes, nevertheless. I thought I would try to catch it out with some less-common currencies: Azerbaijan Menat, Mongolian Tughrik, Oman Rials, but when scrolling through the list of choices it's plain to see that not only is every currency I could possibly think of here, there is plenty of stuff that I would not have expected:
Palladium ounces - It is tempting to wonder if this would be for interstellar travel – ET Ex, but nevertheless it is there, along with the other precious metals: Gold, Silver and Platinum. In reality the precious metals offer a level of stability, or hedge, not often found in a base currency. E.g. if the USD is falling in value, switching to Gold, which is sold in USD, insulates you against the drop in the value of the USD. In other currencies your holding remains stable, in USD it raises.
Special Drawing Rights! (if you don't know what they are it's not important, but wikipedia's simple description is: “SDRs are defined in terms of a basket of major currencies used in international trade and finance. SDRs are used as a unit of account by the IMF and several other international organizations. A few countries peg their currencies against SDRs, and it is also used to denominate some private international financial instruments.” - it's the sort of thing that central bankers and text-book-economists worry about in the real world, but people still want to trade them.)
As is quite standard the home page has a ready-reckoner table of the major currencies or the currencies with the most interesting/ extreme movements (the ones with the best opportunity for picking up PIPs) at the time of writing the currency that fell into the “interesting”category was the Zimbabwe's Dollar (ZAR) as high inflation ravages that country.
Unlike several other site's tables, the format is not a complete cross-reference square. Eleven columns are plotted against just the 3 big western rows: UK pound (GBP); EUR, and USD
This helps keep the format simple.
The site itself offers a range of services from a Foreign Exchange payment system, called XEtrade, that allows you to make payments around the globe that can be sent in one currency and received in another. No sign-up fee, or monthly/ annual charge, you commit to a trade before you fund the transaction and you can do it all via your existing bank account – you don't need to set-up a new account that needs funding before you can make a transaction.
XE.com have a full suite of forex charting packages: free, advanced, and premium. The charts in the packages cover all the bases in terms of forex data required to make sure you have your trade correct before pulling the trigger.
XE.com forex speculation allows you to set up a forex trading account and start trading online.
The currency converter itself is very simple to use.
You start by selecting how much you want to convert – e.g. if you were going to convert €6000 Euro (EUR) into US Dollars (USD) you would enter the amount 6000 into the first box entitled “Convert”. The amount should be entered without any currency symbol.
Next select the currency you wish to convert from the list in the box entitled “From this currency”. The currencies are listed along with their 3 letter international currency codes (e.g. EUR for Euro). If the currency that you require is not listed there, you can select the “more currencies” link, just below the box. It takes you to a page where you can select from “every know world currency”!
If the currency is available in the original list (in most cases it will be) just select it there.
Then choose the currency that you wish to convert to from the list box entitled “to this currency”. As before they are all listed with their 3 letter currency code (e.g. JPY for Japanese Yen). Finally click “Go!” to get the live mid-market rates.
The results are given in the format 6000 Euro = $X USD, and the cross rates are published below for reference purposes.
The fact that exchange rates are 'live' is unusual, as they are normally delayed by 15-20 mins to give people a reason to subscribe to a site.
On the whole this is a very good site with lots of forex details available instantly.
Rating (out of 5 stars):
- 4 Stars
Link: http://www.xe.com/ucc/