Welcome back to our regular weekly report, which this week takes on a shorter four day week, owing to the start of the Easter weekend. So how did the British pound perform over the four days it had to play with? Let’s find out now.
An overview of the currency markets for April 2nd – April 6th 2012
The week began with the British pound worth 1.6016 against the US dollar. By the end of day one it had improved marginally with an increase to 1.6026. But this was the best we could do, since just 24 hours later it had fallen back to 1.5993. The following two days saw the pound lose more ground too, and it finally finished up on 1.5855 to close out the week.
So were we in for a similar picture against the Euro? Our starting rate here was 1.1991 and we had a good day to begin with, as the pound improved to 1.2032 by Monday evening. This dropped a little on Tuesday though, leaving us to ponder whether we were about to hit a low point again. But the story here was very different, and in fact the pound finished up the four day week on a much healthier 1.2132 by Thursday evening.
With one good result and one not so good, let’s see which camp the Hong Kong dollar would fall into. We began on 12.436 and added a little to this throughout Monday, leaving us on 12.445 to close. This dropped to 12.417 by the close of Tuesday and the slide continued after this as well. We clearly followed the path we’d taken against the US dollar here, as we finished up on 12.312 for the week.
Let’s move on to the New Zealand dollar now and see whether we could break the curse of bad performances against dollars here. We opened on 1.9491 and improved to 1.9554 on Monday night, but that was as good as things would get, as we would soon see. The worst rate for the week was saved for Thursday night, when the pound closed on 1.9444.
Finally would we do better against the Australian dollar? We were looking to improve on 1.5392 and we made a good start with an improvement to 1.5451 by Monday evening. Even though we lost a little ground after that we still made an improvement overall on the week, finishing on 1.5421 in the process.
Notable events in the world of currency
Bad news against the Canadian dollar
The pound fell from 1.5962 to 1.5823 against the Canadian dollar last week.
But there was better news against the Swiss franc
If we wanted some better news for the pound last week, we did at least get it against the Swiss franc, where we climbed from 1.4444 to 1.4589.
But more bad news came out against the Chinese yuan
We had to take the good news wherever we could last week, but it didn’t come against the Chinese currency. The pound fell from 10.083 to 9.997 last time around.
It is plain to see that the British pound did well against the Euro last week as opposed to all the other currencies. The reasons for this became clear in a range of stories about the positioning of the currency on the currency markets. This story from Reuters gives more information on how the pound performed and why.
So it was not the best run up to Easter the British pound has ever had. Perhaps the second short week, beginning after Easter Monday, will produce rather better results for us. We can only wait and see. Until then we can at least be happy that the pound managed to do well against the Euro and a few other currencies, even if it did not perform well against the dollars in their various guises.
We’ll be back next week with the next full report on the currencies.
I’ve seen this happen before, where the pound does really well against an individual currency but doesn’t achieve anything of note elsewhere. It is an interesting situation but I think it relies more on the other currency to be in a bad position, otherwise the pound would do better against a number of currencies. Still I can take a good result against the Euro any day! It makes a change from constant bad news, so it is good to see one glowing result among the disappointment this week.
I don’t understand why the pound should perform well in just one place and not anywhere else. There must be a proper explanation for this but I have yet to find it.