Welcome back to another report which this time takes us into December. How will things develop from here, and will we be able to celebrate a good week – or will we be commiserating a bad one?
An overview of the currency markets for December 2nd – December 6th 2013
Let’s start as usual with the British pound up against the US dollar. The opening rate here was 1.6344 and this improved to 1.6386 on day one. We saw another good move ahead the following day as the pound rose to 1.6416. However this turned out to be the best rate of the entire week, as the pound ended up dropping after that and finishing on a disappointing 1.6344 – only marginally up from its starting point a few decimal points down.
So would we see a similar pattern against the Euro? The pound began the week on 1.2008 here before climbing to 1.2105 on Monday night. However we peaked too soon here and ended up slipping back through the rest of the week. By the time Friday evening arrived the best the British pound could manage was 1.1964, taking it below the rate it had started with.
This made us a little pensive going into the third currency pairing of the week, which as usual is against the Hong Kong dollar. We opened on 12.671 here before climbing over the next couple of days and reaching 12.726 on Tuesday evening. But once again we did too much too soon and could not replicate this performance over the remainder of the week. By the time the next few days had played out, the British pound was far lower than it had been on those good days, dropping to 12.674 as a result. At least it was slightly higher than it had begun on Monday morning.
We started with a healthy 2.0051 on Monday morning against the New Zealand dollar, but once again this was not easy to retain. We slipped back to 1.9983 on Tuesday before recovering slightly and crawling back up to 1.9981 on Wednesday. Unfortunately we couldn’t sustain this performance and we ended up falling back to 1.9936 by Friday evening.
So we were expecting another poor performance against the Australian dollar as well, to complete what was turning out to be a disappointing week. Perhaps the exchange rates were not all bad, but they were hardly encouraging either. So we were left in the unlikely position of actually achieving more on this day than we had on other days. We started on 1.7933 and ended up improving slightly to finish on 1.8024 by Friday evening. It was a surprise but at least it was a small improvement.
Notable events in the world of currency
A better result against the Canadian dollar
This turned out to be a surprise, as the pound rose from 1.7284 to 1.7406 against the Canadian dollar.
But a drop against the Swiss franc
We were back to bad news here though as the British pound fell from 1.4767 to 1.4633 over the course of the week.
And more of the same against the Icelandic krona
Here we had more bad news as the British pound fell from 196.706 to close out the week on 195.464.
So we had some bad news here and it was a shame to find so many poor results for the British pound last week. We have had some more encouraging weeks recently though so perhaps we were ready for some lower results.
Either way we shall be watching closely to see if this turns out to be a prolonged bad patch throughout December or whether we can now work towards a better performance leading up to the end of the year. Hopefully it will be the latter, but it still makes you wonder how productive 2014 will be when we reach that stage. Will we have a good time in store, or something quite different?