Summary Of Currency Markets For May 19th – May 21st 2010

Welcome back to our latest currency report, which catches up on the events of the last three days of last week.  We’ve been taking a look at how things have turned out on the currency converter for our various different world currencies, and some interesting results have cropped up.

But as is customary now, we shall begin our report by having a quick recap on what happened last week.  We had a two three split as it turned out, with the pound doing well against two currencies and not so well against three others.  The good two were the New Zealand and Australian dollars, where the pound gained around a cent against the Kiwi dollar and did even better with a cent and a half rise against the Aussie dollar.

But elsewhere we had some different stories playing themselves out.  For example the British pound lost out on a cent against the US dollar, while the smaller amount of around a quarter of a cent was lost against the Euro.  This leaves us with one final currency to look at – the Hong Kong dollar.  And here we lost out too, to the tune of 0.065 over the course of those two days.

The question now of course is what will happen next.  Will the pound achieve better results as the week’s second half gets underway?  We are about to find out the answers.

An overview of the currency markets for May 19th – May 21st 2010

As we know, our first stop is always the US dollar.  So here we must start with a figure of 1.4468, a rather low figure that has not been closer to the $1.50 mark for a while now.  It seems a lot to hope that we may reach it now, but let’s see which direction things start heading in shall we?

The starting rate here was 1.4468, but by Wednesday evening we were firmly heading in the wrong direction once again.  By the time the markets closed we were on 1.4299, so we had opened up even more of a gap from the figure we had started with.

The losses stalled on the next day, but the British pound still lost some more ground.  This time we found ourselves on 1.4268 at the end of the day.  But with one day still to go we had a chance to start heading back in the right direction once more, and we did just that by ending on 1.4358.  This meant we had lost just over another cent though, so it wasn’t a good end to the week here.

Let’s move on to see how we could perform against the Euro now.  Our starting rate here was 1.1642, so could we improve on that?

Wednesday started well with an increase that pushed us up to 1.1654.  But once again things then started to go downhill and Thursday night saw us lose ground once more, ending the day on 1.1568 as a result.  And Friday unfortunately saw us gaining momentum in that direction.  This meant our final rate for the week ended up on 1.1489.

So this was the second bad result out of two, with a loss of a Euro cent and a half in total.  Could we do better against the Hong Kong dollar?

Here we were starting with a figure of 11.278.  And once again the trend was definitely not going in our favour, not to begin with anyway.  By the end of Wednesday evening we were looking at an exchange rate of 11.156.  When this slipped further to 11.132 by Thursday evening, it seemed as if we might actually be in danger of finishing on a 10.0 exchange rate in some way.

But luckily we pulled back from the brink and ended up redeeming ourselves to close out the week on 11.207.  This still meant a loss of 0.071, but it definitely could have been worse.

So let’s see now how the British pound fared against the New Zealand dollar and the Aussie dollar as the week came to a close.  These were the only two currencies we had good results on for the first couple of days, so could we continue in that vein here at least?

With the Kiwi dollar we were starting Wednesday morning on 2.0614.  And come that evening we had excellent news – a rate of 2.1107 was achieved.  This wasn’t all we achieved though, with a rate of 2.1300 the following day and a final rate for the week that was even better still.  The closing rate was 2.1433, leaving us with an astounding increase of over eight cents in just three days.  We feel this was redressing the balance in some way, after some significant losses over the past few days.

Finally we move on to the Aussie dollar, where we left things on 1.6506 on Tuesday evening.  And once again we started well, although not as well as we had with the New Zealand dollar.  We still finished Wednesday on 1.6870 though, and the trend continued with 1.7260 on Thursday and 1.7389 to close the week.  This gave us an increase of nearly nine cents in the end, eclipsing the result we had seen with the Kiwi dollar.

So once again it was a week of two halves – but at least the second half was mightily impressive.

Notable events in the world of currency

Impressive increase for the pound against the Canadian dollar

We had a great increase against the Canadian dollar too – from 1.4855 on Tuesday evening to 1.5404 on Friday night.  This gave us an increase of nearly five and a half cents all told.

Another increase against the Swiss franc

It wasn’t quite as notable as the one above, but the pound still increased from 1.6331 to 1.6554 over those last three days.  This was an improvement of 0.0223 against the Swiss franc.

But a drop against the Japanese currency

The news wasn’t as good here though, with a drop from 134.256 to 128.775 over those three days.  This equated to a loss of 5.481 in all.

The story of the week was once again concerning the UK pound, as the story here tells us.  The pound was doing well during the day on Friday, but as the story reveals, this pattern did not last all day.

So there we have it, with a mixed week of results all in all.  Will next week start on a better note?  Can we improve on our good results and get better ones against the US dollar, the Euro and perhaps the Hong Kong dollar as well?  We’ll be here to give you all the answers.