muyuu: You can trade GBP with direct GBP bank funding in MtGox. Currently Intersango's GBP trade volume usually matches and exceeds MtGox's however the actual bitcoin prices are a lot better on MtGox, especially with discounts applied. How do you deal in dollars? I've been looking into it but haven't found a cost effective way of converting and transferring my currency.
That's the problem, it's not cost effective. I have an account in dollars and another one (abroad) in Euros, however my salary comes to my British account in GBP and that's what I prefer to use. Transfers and currency conversion usually cost a lot more than fees from either MtGox or Intersango and also trounce the spread difference. Beating costs associated to deposits and withdrawals is basically a matter of volume, for trading small amounts making a free UK deposit to my Intersango account can't be beaten. MtGox and its £5/£15 fees would make sense for £10k+ and I'm not trading that much. However, if you don't plan to move funds much you can still justify trading in several currencies and with some arbitrage you'd come at an advantage after a bunch of trades. Again, I'm not speculating that much.
I'm looking into forex trying to find a way to get funds converted and moved into exchanges more effectively, in a few months I will be trading about £5k which is not much, but it's enough to look more into this.
If I'm moving funds from GBP to US$ then I use
XE Trade very easy & reliable, no fees if sending to a US bank account & rates are much more competitive than UK high street banks at 1.4% less than the xe.com quoted mid market rates, no fee for transfer to a US bank account using ACH/EFT & Wire - you can fairly simply set up a bank account as a non resident in the US though I've only done this in person there & with a US address too. Otherwise via XE straight to Mt. Gox via Wire then there's a £12.55 fee, cleared there usually by the next day
GBP to Euro bank accounts also work well with them & likewise no fees
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 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 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.