Here we are again with another look at how the British pound has been faring in the currency markets. The last time we looked at the exchange rates we saw that the pound had finished the week with disappointing rates right across the board. Your currency converter certainly didn’t return good rates at that point.
But hopefully a new week will bring better fortunes, as in fact it did at the beginning of last week. It was only the end that was not good.
So without further ado let’s see what actually happened.
An overview of the currency markets for August 4th – August 6th 2010
As always our initial point of evaluation is with the US dollar. Here we are beginning with a rate of 1.5872 on the currency converter, and initially the news was very good. Monday evening saw a closing rate of 1.5959 on the cards.
But would Tuesday turn out to be just as good? Unfortunately the answer was no, as the pound dipped significantly down to 1.5724.
Let’s move on now to see if the Euro produced a similar fight back against the pound. Our initial rate to begin the week was 1.2046, a very good performance from the pound giving us one of the best rates in a long time. But we slipped marginally to kick off Monday on 1.2042 and this led to a lower rate on Tuesday as well. By the time the day was out we were left on 1.1973 instead.
Next up it is Hong Kong, where the pound was left on 12.321 on Friday evening last week. We had good news to begin with as we ended up with a rate of 12.388 on Monday evening, so we were hopeful this was a sign of good things to come.
Unfortunately though we dipped back on Tuesday night and finished the day on 12.207. So once again we didn’t get the upward movement we wanted.
Moving swiftly on, our next stop is the New Zealand dollar. Last time we finished the week on 2.1721, which swiftly went up to 2.1881 as Monday came to a close. Would this be the currency where we could actually get a good result for once? It certainly seemed to be the case because the pound charged up to claim a rate of 2.1896 the following day, giving us our first good result of the week.
But could we do the same with the Australian dollar? Last time we left the pound on 1.7294 and we managed to push that figure up to 1.7368 by the time we closed out Monday evening. We slipped a little on Tuesday but only to 1.7322, so it wasn’t enough to ruin the good work we’d done so far.
Notable events in the world of currency
New Zealand dollar dips against Aussie dollar
Of these two currencies it was the Aussie dollar that came out on top to start the week. The Kiwi dollar moved from 0.7961 down to 0.7911 by the close of Tuesday.
Canadian dollar also falls against the US dollar
There was a loss here too as the Canadian dollar fell back from 0.9783 to 0.9660 over the space of two days.
Swiss franc dips against the Thailand currency
Here there was no doubt about which currency was in charge either, as the Swiss franc fell from 30.556 to 30.212 over two days of trading.
This was certainly not the best start to the week for the British pound, but at least we had some interesting results to look at. There were some interesting news stories around too on the currency front, with this one at the Bloomberg website being of particular note.
It’s interesting to see how various factors affect the currency markets, and indeed they can do so for a long time in some cases. We’ve seen the US dollar struggling in the markets for a while now, and it will be interesting to see how long it is until it manages to pull its socks up again.
So we will be back in a few days with the latest results from the currency market to look at. We’ll see you then.