Welcome back to another in our series of currency reports, which reveals how the British pound has been doing on the currency converter when it goes head to head against a range of other currencies.
Last time we discovered that the pound had got off to the best possible start for the month, with good results in many places. But will it manage to do the same and finish off that first week in good style?
With some promising results of late we are curious to see whether the pound can deliver more good results here as well. Let’s find out now shall we?
An overview of the currency markets for August 4th – August 6th 2010
Let’s begin as always with the US dollar. We had an outstanding result here to open the week as the British pound ended those initial two days on 1.5932. Could it do better still to close the week out on, possibly tipping over the 1.60 mark as well?
We had a marginal increase on the Wednesday, pushing us on a little further to 1.5941 against the US dollar. After that we saw a dip the following day to 1.5897 – only half a cent or so down but enough to take away the chance to end the week on a great note. And indeed with Friday ending on 1.5872 it was not the result we wanted to close out the week.
Over to the Euro now, and we were starting from 1.2051 here. We had a small improvement to 1.2071 initially, but here again we then dipped back to 1.2058. Finishing the week on 1.2046 we could see this wasn’t the best ending we could have hoped for.
Moving on to Hong Kong, we left things here on Tuesday night with a rate of 12.367 on the cards. The pattern would follow through here as well, with an increase to 12.376 on Wednesday followed by a dip to 12.342 and then 12.321 to end the week. This was not turning into the best end of the week outing we’d hoped for.
Now it is on to New Zealand, where the British pound finished on 2.1728 on Tuesday night. We started well with a small jump to 2.1758, but the biggest surprise came the following day. This was when we managed to achieve 2.1884. But we still slipped back overall as Friday saw us limp to the finish line with 2.1721.
Finally we have the Australian dollar to look at, where the pound finished on Tuesday evening with a rate of 1.7484. One day later this had dropped to 1.7460, and then that went down to 1.7399 by the following day. Finally we ended the week on 1.7294, a rather disappointing rate all in all.
Notable events in the world of currency
British pound drops against the Canadian dollar
We had a fall from 1.6320 to 1.6223 here as well, which didn’t bode well for the pound last week.
Another fall against the Chinese currency
We had a fall here too, when we went from 10.791 on Tuesday night to 10.743 at the end of the week.
Dipping against the Icelandic currency too
The British pound went from 188.466 to 186.913 over three days here too, so it wasn’t the best week by any stretch.
There were some interesting currency stories around last week, with the week ending story of note being one about the US dollar. You can read it at the Reuters website.
So there we have it for another week – and one which was a disappointment in the end for the British pound. It just goes to show how much things can change within a few days, doesn’t it? The pound did very well over the first couple of days of the week and then everything changed to produce a disappointing ending.
Hopefully when we come back to kick off a new week we shall have better news to report once more. At least the pound didn’t lose all the early gains it had made though, so perhaps this dip is a minor blip in the good news rather than anything else.
It’s strange reading back over some of the more recent reports as the pound has now gone into something of a slide. That’s why I wanted to read a few recent reports to see if I could spot where things started to go wrong.
It’s actually not easy to do that, or at least I don’t think so. I mean, all currencies have off weeks don’t they? They’ll have good times and not so good times, but this doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve gone into a slump or a good run. It just happens that the currency markets are always up and down in some respect.
Personally I think the pound has only just started to slide, but it looks as if things will remain in a negative way for some time to come.