Capitalize On Currency Flucuations With Google’s Help
internet, making money March 11th, 2007While looking at my Google earnings the other day I thought of an idea to make a bit of extra money each month through currency flucuations. This would only work if there is in fact some flucuations in the currency you are paid out in and the currency that your earnings accumulate in.
I am from Calgary, Alberta up in Canada so Google wires my monthly earnings to me after converting it to Canadian dollars from US dollars. Now, a 3 - 4 months ago when oil prices were at their peak the Canadian dollar was quite strong. That resulted in the US dollar to Canadian dollar conversion rate to be in the 1.11 range. Today, with oil prices back down (and I am sure a lot of other market factors) the same exchange rate is closer to 1.18.
The way to make money via Google’s help would be to freeze the payments during the months where the exchange rate is at 1.11, and then resume them when the exchange rate is back at 1.18. Of course, as the saying goes hindsight is 20/20. The only way to make money through this method is if you freeze the payment when the exchange rate is lower and resume them when its higher. If you screw up and freeze payment when your currency is weaker, and then resume as it gets strong, you’ll end up losing money. With Canadian and US currency it seems quite predictable and less prone to error.
Here is a quick example to illustrate how this works:
$5000 earnings from Google:
at 1.11 exchange rate, I would get $5000 x 1.11 = $5550
at 1.18 exchange rate, I would get $5000 x 1.18 = $5900
An extra $350 for doing nothing. This money making strategy of course would not make sense if you have the financial know-how to earn more than $350 yourself by investing that money. For someone like me that doesn’t have a clue how to invest money properly, this simple trick provides an extra lump sum of money to spend on some text link ads, or maybe to order up some reviews for my blog.
I can’t test this method out right now as the Canadian dollar is weak right now (cue the Canadian Tire Money jokes) so I will try this next time the exchange rate dips into the 1.11 - 1.12 range, provided its not predicted to slide to par. This method can also be applied to any vendor that allows you to control when payments should be made.
If anyone tries this, please let me know how it went.
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March 11th, 2007 at 11:56 pm
You really have to look at the big picture when you’re playing this game.
About three years ago I read 2 stories in early October. One story showed how the US dollar traditionally goes down in mid October. The other story was about US delegates at the G8 stating that the US dollar was “too high”.
That was all I needed to hear. We moved about $1MM USD into $CAD. Two weeks later it would have cost us an extra $40k.
The big picture is about what the markets are doing AND what the policymakers at the highest levels are saying to the big players.
May 29th, 2007 at 8:30 am
[...] has been particularly painful as the Canadian dollar is at $0.932 USD. Back in March, I wrote about making money with currency flucuations with Google. I was thinking of putting my Google payments on hold but many experts are predicting [...]