News

If that first day was encouraging, the second day was even better. By the time the markets closed on Tuesday we were looking at an exchange rate that had gone even higher – to 1.6566. That was a cent and a half up on the previous day, adding on around two cents since the previous week’s closing rate. Could we do even better and add on even more before the week was out? Or was that the best we could hope for?

Last time we saw that things were very bad all in all for the British pound. The exchange rates were certainly going against us wholesale, and we managed to lose ground against every one of the five major currencies we look at each week. We couldn’t find anything to enable us to get ahead against the US dollar, the Euro, the Hong Kong dollar, the New Zealand or the Australian dollars. As a result the whole week was a washout the last time we looked.

Monday got off to a poor start with another loss for the British pound. It wasn’t huge, but it left us on 1.1518 at the end of the day. Did this mean we would end up having another similar result to the one we had seen in the US? That wouldn’t be particularly good news, and if we continued to see more losses during the remainder of the week that would be exactly the kind of situation we’d be looking at.

We always look for a good start to the week but unfortunately we didn’t get what we wanted. By the time trading had finished on Monday evening and everyone went home, the exchange rate was standing at 1.6307. That meant we had already lost out on nearly three cents in what was in effect a single day. This certainly didn’t bode well for the rest of the week, and it made us feel somewhat frustrated – not to mention worried – at what could happen next.

Perhaps the best thing is to look at the individual victories. We did well against the US dollar, which in itself is something worth celebrating as we check the results on our currency converter. Our other victories last time around were against the Hong Kong dollar and the Australian dollar. We saw a small loss – very small in fact – against the Euro, while the biggest loss of the week was the three and a half cents we lost against the New Zealand dollar.

Here we are back again with another weekly report on what has been going on in the world currency markets. We are in the thick of the holiday season now too, with many of us looking for last minute deals to get away for a week or two. That makes it all the more important to use our currency converter to find somewhere that the British pound will give us a decent rate of exchange.

Fortunately as we were bracing ourselves for bad news on Thursday, we ended up being surprised by some good news instead. We finished up on 1.6486 for the day, as we put in a surge of energy to grab a better result. The only question now was whether we could keep that going for another day and finish the week in a better position than we had been the week before.

Well Monday started with something of a surprise really. We don’t often see figures like this going on, especially not against the US dollar. But by the end of the day the pound was claiming a total of 1.6529 US dollars. A quick calculation tells us that the pound had added on nearly two and a half cents in the equivalent of a day, accounting for the weekend of no trading in there too.

We always look for a good start to get us going in the right direction, but that didn’t happen this time around. By the time the markets closed on Monday, the pound had dropped back to 1.6103. So already we were nearly a cent lower than we had been previously. And we’d dropped a cent and a half over the whole week the week before. Did this mean we were heading for a bad time overall?

Last time we saw how the results of the British pound could be very different depending on which part of the world you were looking at. For example, there were three results where the pound was worse off than it had been the week before. These were against the US dollar, the Euro and the Hong Kong dollar. Luckily for us – if you could use that term – the differences were marginal, so we didn’t actually lose out on too much.