Canada has always been one of the most popular immigration destinations for Hong Kong residents. A certain amount of Hong kongers still want to invest in Canada even they have no intention to emigrate there. They invest in stocks or buy properties as a means of assets allocation.
Jay is a wealthy middle class, and he appreciated the local living environment, so he decided to deposit one million USD in a major Canadian bank for fixed deposits and US stock investments. He planned to buy property there five years later. However, this decision marked the beginning of a nightmare.
Jay opened a Canadian dollar account but deposited in USD. The Canadian bank automatically converted all the USD into 
Canadian dollar savings account. Later, Jay opened a US stock investment account, and he had to convert the Canadian dollars back into the USD to trade. If he sold stocks, the received USD was automatically converted back into Canadian dollars.
Jay spent 300,000 USD of his funds to trade US stocks, making short-term speculation by earning 3-5% profit in each trading. In the first month of his investment, he operated three trades, and made a book profit of 27,000 USD, but finally incurred a loss of 27,000 USD in the balance. Upon serious inspection, he discovered that the high exchange rate charge had caused his losses. Indeed, Canadian banks charge 3% fees for each currency conversion, comparing with Hong Kong banks, which charge 0.5%only.
To prevent further losses, Jay decided to remit one million USD back to Hong Kong. Nevertheless, the Canadian bank would charge approximately 60,000 USD (48 thousand HKD), which is 6% of the total amount of the remittance. To save this fee, he has to go personally to this Canadian bank branch in Canada to make the wire transfer. Due to the large amount fees involved, he flew to Canada early last month to manage the remittance. His cost for this wired transfer was the 14,000 HKD flight ticket, but it helped him to save 46,6000 HKD exchange charge.
If he did not buy US stocks but instead of purchasing property, he has to pay an additional property transfer tax 20-25% and then pay capital gains tax upon resale. Due to the complicated procedures, Jay also abandoned his plan to purchase property in Canada.
