Welcome to the latest currency report, which delves into how well (or not) the British pound is doing on the currency markets at the moment. We’ve seen some tough times recently, so would that pattern continue once again this week?
An overview of the currency markets for September 26th – September 30th 2016
Here we go, with a look at how the British pound fared against the US dollar last week. The overall picture hasn’t been good for a while, so could the pound do any better this time? We opened on 1.2973 before dropping to 1.2931 on day one. After that, however, we had three very good days to contend with. This meant that by Thursday evening, the pound was looking a little healthier on 1.3026. We did then drop back to 1.2962 on Friday though, so we did have a disappointment there.
Next up is the pound against the euro. We opened on 1.1569 before dropping down to 1.1482 on Monday night. However, if we thought this may not bode well for the rest of the week, we were mistaken. We actually improved each and every day from that moment on. By the time Friday night rolled around, we’d managed to increase our exchange rate with the euro to 1.1614.
The picture looked to be pretty much the same against the Hong Kong dollar, but actually it turned out a little differently here. The opening rate was 10.062 before the pound fell back to 10.028. However, the next three days were much better, pushing the pound back to a better rate of 10.102 as a consequence. We did say the pattern didn’t quite match that seen against the euro though, and that was because there was a drop on the final day – to 10.051. It was only marginally lower than we had started out with though, so things could have been worse here.
Over against the New Zealand dollar, the pound started trading on 1.7857 this week. Two bad days followed, leading to a rate of 1.7807 by Tuesday night. However, we then improved to 1.7932 on Wednesday and again to 1.7937 the following day. It was just unfortunate we fell to 1.7849 to ruin the week’s good progress by Friday night.
Finally, could the pound do anything to improve its standing against the Australian dollar? Well, we started out on 1.6989 before falling to 1.6937 after the first day of trading. Could we improve on that? It turned out we could, and the remaining four days of the week were very good indeed. We finished up with a closing rate of 1.7022 on Friday night.
Notable events in the world of currency
A slight improvement against the Canadian dollar
There was something of a surprise here as the pound managed to improve from 1.6920 to 1.7060 this week.
Better news against the Swiss franc as well
Here too things were looking up. We managed to start on 1.2595 before climbing to 1.2631 this week.
But a drop was in store against the Icelandic krona
There was no good news here though, as the pound fell from 148.577 to 148.303 this week.
So we can see there were some pieces of good news tucked in among a few disappointments this week. All in all, though, we did have some good news to enjoy, which is rather better than we have seen elsewhere from time to time at the moment.
We have to think this was a reasonable week all in all. We could hope for more improvements to be made next week, but at the moment it is difficult to see whether any changes will be far-reaching. It is far more likely for the occasional improvement to be seen, before the pound begins to struggle once again. Due to Brexit, it would seem the pound will have plenty more time to find it hard to go up against a range of other currencies too. We’ll see how things go.