What are RBC Direct Investings foreign translation fees?

[woodywoodford]

I can't find anything in their commission/fee schedule...

I just made a trade for some US options and I can't get it to add up... I'm a rookie to real-money trading so I'm trying to know where every penny went.

I bought 4 US contracts on calls for 2.40 = 960 USD
960 USD at the posted exchange rate 0.9861 is 946.66 CAD.

Commissions are 28.95 + 1.5 per contract, so 34.95 CAD.

This brings me to 981.61 CAD that should have been debited from my account, but the actual bill was 996.03 CAD.

Somebody wanna enlighten me? Are the exchange fees captured in their posted exchange rate? Are commissions charged in the currency of the respective market (US in this case)? Even if that exchange rate isn't bang on, it'd have to change to 1.0011 to balance out, and our dollar is definately not on that side of par, unless I'm missing something here.

[roopi]

One thing I have noticed with RBC is that if the trade is filled in multiple transactions then they charge the commission fee on each transaction. Then at the end of the day they remove the duplicate commission fees. Not sure if this is the case with options though.

If you click the exchange rate link you will see that the rate is from the previous day and this will not be used for the current day. So that would have some affect on your total.

[woodywoodford]

Originally posted by roopi
One thing I have noticed with RBC is that if the trade is filled in multiple transactions then they charge the commission fee on each transaction. Then at the end of the day they remove the duplicate commission fees. Not sure if this is the case with options though.

If you click the exchange rate link you will see that the rate is from the previous day and this will not be used for the current day. So that would have some affect on your total.

Yeah, after digging around I found this (http://www.rbcroyalbank.com/rates/cashrates.html) link where turns out RBC will sell us US dollars at a different, higher rate, and buy them back at a lower. Makes sense and all, but it would have been nice if they had *any* kind of information on their direct investing site to show me that. No big deal as I had a good day on those options today, but still... inconvenient.