Welcome back to our latest currency report, hot from the markets and revealing all the movements from the last week. How did the British pound do?
An overview of the currency markets for August 29th – September 2nd 2016
The British pound started the week on an exchange rate of 1.3212 against the US dollar. This soon dipped to 1.3068 by Monday evening though – quite a drop for a single day. It meant we’d be spending the rest of the week trying to regain those losses. We managed a big step in the right direction on Tuesday, rising to 1.3112 as a result, but things did get better from there onwards as well. By the time we closed things out on Friday evening, we’d had four good days of trading that took us back up to 1.3283 – slightly higher than we’d started with before that initial loss.
We had a slight dip against the euro to begin the week with as well – falling from 1.1702 to 1.1699 here. But again, the next few days were a lot more encouraging. We rose to 1.1741 on Tuesday, before taking another couple of days to do better still. Thursday evening saw us achieve a closing rate of 1.1897 – which turned out to be the best one of the week. That meant we had a drop to contend with on Friday, but it wasn’t a big one. It took us to 1.1868 to finish the week on, which meant it was good all in all.
The picture we’d seen against the US dollar – one drop on Monday followed by four good days – was seen again where the Hong Kong dollar was concerned. The pound began trading on 10.246 before falling back to 10.135 on Monday. Then we saw four very good days that sent the pound soaring to 10.303 to finish with – yet another good result for the week.
We had a rather different pattern to look at against the New Zealand dollar, with two good days to begin with followed by a less-than-certain second half of the week. Beginning on 1.8043, we rose to 1.8113 by Tuesday night. A slight drop occurred on Wednesday, ahead of a rise to 1.8271 on Thursday. We then managed to drop back a little to 1.8192 on Friday, which was still better than we’d begun on.
Finally, we should see whether we did as well against the Australian dollar. We’ve had four encouraging results so far, so would this one make it five out of five? We definitely opened well, with a starting rate of 1.7286 climbing to 1.7303 on Monday alone. We then had three more strong days to follow, which took the pound up to 1.7609 by Thursday evening. That meant even a drop to 1.7576 on Friday was not enough to dent this good performance.
Notable events in the world of currency
Better news against the Canadian dollar this time around as well
The good news continued here, as the pound started on 1.7022 and climbed significantly to 1.7378 this week.
More good news followed for the pound against the Swiss franc
It kept on getting better this week, as the pound reached 1.3006 at the end of trading, from a starting rate of 1.2794 this time.
But a drop against the Icelandic krona
Just to prove it wasn’t all good news last week, the pound went from 153.752 to 153.397 against the krona, suffering a marginal drop in the process.
So we can see last week was a good one all told. The main currencies were not able to beat down the pound for any length of time, instead offering scant defence in terms of putting in a good performance.
It’s good to see the British pound doing better, although it is still some way off the exchange rates that were evident in the run-up to the referendum a while back. Perhaps we can hope for better things to come, perhaps even built on the results we saw this week? We will report back with more news next week.