It occurred to me this morning that some of you may not know this:
Many Canadian stocks are also traded on New York in U.S. dollars. So for example, you can choose to hold Royal Bank in Canadian dollars in your RRSP, or hold them in U.S. dollars. If you already hold a bunch in Canadian dollars you can choose to have your brokerage do a journal entry to hold them in U.S. instead. So, today, that conversion would be done a .727, thus 10,000 Canadian book cost, would translate to 7270.00 U.S. book cost and the current value would go from $13,000 CDN to $9451 U.S.. Having it done as a Journal entry gets you a LOT better exchange rate than selling the Canadian stock, converting the proceeds to U.S. then buying the U.S. stock.
You can also chose to buy U.S. stocks like Amazon, Google etc. in your RRSP or TFSA in U.S. dollars, and you can buy index funds like HXS, as HXS.U which is the same S&P 500 index traded in U.S. dollars.
If anyone has questions, post them and I will try to answer them.
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