Here we are with another currency report for you, delving into the first few trading days of July to see whether the British pound could deliver the results we wanted. With no further ado let’s find out what happened.
An overview of the currency markets for July 1st – July 5th 2013
As the week got underway the British pound stood at 1.5258 against the US dollar. This dipped over the next couple of days until it settled on 1.5173 on Tuesday evening. It perked up a little after that but unfortunately Wednesday’s closing rate of 1.5260 was the best we could do. By the time Friday evening rolled around we were left with an exchange rate of 1.4970 and plenty of disappointment in this respect.
So could we do any better against the Euro? Here we began the week on 1.1665 but we ended up doing slightly better by Monday evening by closing on 1.1678. Again though, Wednesday turned out to be the better day in the first half of the week, as the pound reached a high of 1.1775. However this would then be eclipsed by a series of disappointing results to close out the week and the pound slipped back to 1.1620 as a result.
Let’s move on then and see if there would be a similar midweek peak against the Hong Kong dollar as well. The opening rate was 11.838 and this then dropped back to 11.763 on Tuesday evening. If things went according to plan we’d see a healthy result on Wednesday and a poor one by Friday evening. As it turned out, the pound did recover to 11.832 on Wednesday before dropping back to 11.607 by Friday night.
By now we were expecting bad news to come from other quarters as well. For example, the pound started on 1.9589 against the New Zealand dollar and once again the Wednesday high point was a healthy 1.9716. Now we would expect to see a drop as we had against those other currencies – and that is exactly what happened. We ended up with a closing rate of 1.9115 on Friday evening.
Finally we have to look at the Australian dollar to see if this would follow the same pattern of pushing the pound to a weaker currency at the end of the week. The opening rate here was 1.6531 and this went up to 1.6813 by Wednesday, as perhaps we should have expected. It then fell back again to close out the week on 1.6325, so this was particularly disappointing.
Notable events in the world of currency
Another drop in store for the pound against the Canadian dollar
This was a disappointment too, as the pound fell from 1.5998 to 1.5750.
More bad news against the Swiss franc
Here the news wasn’t quite as disappointing because the drop was lower, from 1.4393 to 1.4348.
Another small drop against the Icelandic krona
Here too we had more disappointment, as the pound lost ground from 188.748 and ended the week on 187.335.
So all in all it was indeed a disappointing week. With so much to be hopeful for, it turned out that the British pound was not capable of attaining any particular improvement against any of the major currencies. Hopefully we will see a better week ahead, but it remains to be seen whether this week was a one off or not. It could be that the pound was simply in a sluggish mood this week. Alternatively this could be the beginning of a period of bad results – it remains to be seen whether this is the case.
Whatever the situation might be, we will be back next week to let you know whether the pound has managed to perk up or not. It has been a while since we had a week quite like this, so we shall be interested to see what happens next. Make sure you come back to find out more in a week from now.