Here we are again with another report focusing on the events surrounding the British pound on the currency markets last week. If you read the excerpt that led you into this article you’ll already know this wasn’t a great week.
An overview of the currency markets for October 28th – November 1st 2013
As the week opened the British pound was worth 1.6172 against the US dollar. This wasn’t a bad start but it would be as good as things would get. In fact the pound started by losing ground and finishing Monday evening on 1.6151. This would not be the worst rate of the week either, as the currency continued on its downward slide. It looked as though the pound would continue heading in the same direction as well – and this was proven to be true by Friday night. By this time the pound had slid to a closing rate of 1.5956 – not a good week by any standards.
This now made us wonder whether we could assume the same would happen against the Euro. The starting rate here was 1.1738 and this too went on a downward slide. By Tuesday evening we had endured two sets of lower rates, taking us to 1.1672 in the process. However we then started to see better results. The pound closed Wednesday on 1.1683 but there was better news in store. The following two days each saw better results as well, which meant we could appreciate a successful close on 1.1815 at the end of the week.
Let’s see now which way things would go against the Hong Kong dollar. We opened on 12.539 here and again things went downhill over the first couple of days. This resulted in a closing rate on Tuesday of 12.460. Would we now follow the path against the US dollar and lose more ground, or would we end up doing better and follow the path we’d taken against the Euro? Unfortunately the answer conformed to the former, with a closing rate on Friday of 12.370.
Things can look very different when you focus on the New Zealand and Australian dollars though, so let’s take the first of those and see how the pound did there. We opened on 1.9487 and dropped immediately to 1.9476 on day one. This was followed by another – somewhat predictable – series of losses that took us right through the week to a closing rate of 1.9309 on Friday. It could have been worse, but it did show the pound was not in charge this week.
Finally we should look at the Australian dollar to see what happened there. Our opening rate was 1.6867 and although this dropped a little on day one, we closed out Tuesday on a healthier rate of 1.6931. Unfortunately that turned out to be the peak of the week, leaving us with a disappointing closing rate of 1.6854 in the end.
Notable events in the world of currency
Another bad performance against the Canadian dollar
The pound dropped considerably from 1.6879 to 1.6638 last week.
A slight improvement against the Swiss franc
Here at least we had a good result, climbing from 1.4494 to 1.4544.
Another fall against the Chinese yuan
We were back to bad news here as the pound fell from 9.8384 to 9.7336 against the Chinese currency.
As you can see this was not a great week for the British pound. Sometimes we can pick out one or two good results among the bad ones, but here we were struggling to do even that. Apart from the effort against the Swiss franc and the Euro, we had little else to report that was worth looking at.
Maybe next week we can report better news for you. Stay tuned and make sure you have the chance to come back and read our next report, which will hopefully have some good results from the British pound. We’ll keep our fingers crossed.