Bitcoin Forum

From the info in this support email, I estimate that I will get hit with a 2.5% trading fee about 97% of the time when I deposit and trade in euros because the USD trade volume was 35x higher than the euro volume (last 24hr).  How can I work around this?  Combined with the trading fee and the transfer fee it seems like a lot. I don't understand why they force all the orders to be in the same pool if they are going to charge this much.  Also, what is the typical fee to use the SEPA deposit option?

I have bought several times BTC for Euros and only standard 0.6% fee was applied by MtGox ;) It would be highly unusual if they matched orders from several currencies.

IMHO the 2.5% fee applies only in case you have i.e. no EUR wallet and you send euros to their account, so they have to be converted. Or when you convert it manually. It doesn't happen at trade time.

That is precisely what they do.

So they arbitrage between currencies? That's interesting. Intersango also does this?

Is it really written anywhere on their page or another reliable source? This
I have understood like "if you trade in USD you have more chance to execute the order", not that "order with EUR can be matched by order in USD".

Well I'd like to think of myself as a reliable source.

https://support.mtgox.com/entries/20800336-multi-currency-trading

Thank you very much. I was somehow unable to find this bit in the FAQ. Indeed, if Gox randomly executes multicurrency trades with 2.5% fee, that's one more reason to stay away from them....

Found this info in the Intersango thread.  It seems that for smaller amounts, depositing £ and € onto Intersango for free is the best, as I avoid the 2.5% conversion and the deposit fees at MTgox, and withdrawls are also much cheaper.  The spreads at Intersango are higher, but I find if I put my order just a hair closer than the best one on the orderbook, and wait a few hours for it to be filled, I actually beat the MTgox price and the higher spread benefits me.  This would not work if I tried to do more than a few thousand euros though as it could take days to fill the order.  MTgox is better for large volume.

For large volume deposits there are much better options than otoh's pick of xe.com (http://xe.com) which charges 1.4%.  The foreign exchange market is the most efficient market in the world so its outrageous to be paying entire percentage points to convert currency.  Oanda.com (http://Oanda.com) has money transfers that cost €20 flat.  I wire € to them, and they convert it to USD for about .001% and then send it on to MTgox.  So it costs me a total of €50 (the €30 wire fee to oanda plus their €20 fee), but it gets converted at almost the exact rate that it should be.  So if I am only transferring €1,000 this is very high at 5%, but if I am doing €10,000 it is .5% which beats the hell out of paying gox 2.5% to do it for me.

In practice the seller doesn't pay the additional 2.5% when a trade is carried out between different currencies. Instead, the sell order is posted into other currency markets at the original price +2.5%.

Basically, the buyer sees the sell order as +2.5% of the original sell order, but adjusted to their own currency.

Cheers

The prices you see in the orderbook already have the 2.5% added on (or subtracted off, depending on the order type).

So the only time you pay the extra 2.5% is when the best real Euro offer is 2.5% worse than the best offer in a different currency.

In other words, if they had separate pools for each currency, you would never get a better deal than you are currently getting, and would usually get a worse deal.

I remember looking at the EUR market on Gox when they first introduced the new currencies, and noticing that there was a 5% spread between best buy and best sell prices, whereas the USD market had the same volumes but with an almost 0% spread.