Sterling Stays Strong

Welcome to the New Year!! The festive period has given us virtually no data releases of any note and as such during the periods of very thin trading the market has seemingly been guided by prior trends and general overall sentiment. This has lead to significant gains for the Pound – the strongest of the three majors for most of the last few months. We are back up around the highs we experienced in October/November of last year, which at the time were the best buying rates for Euros since January of 2013, and for Dollars even further back into 2012.

There is not much in the way of data due out for the remainder of this week with some UK and European manufacturing numbers this morning, and some US employment and manufacturing figures this afternoon. Things warm up ever so slightly tomorrow with UK house prices, European CPI inflation and a speech from FED chairman Bernanke. None of these are likely to be huge movers, but in the absence of much else going on they are well worth keeping an eye on as the market looks for something to work with…

As ever please keep in close touch with your CI account manager if you do have a currency requirement coming up, and with rates so good for buying with Sterling it may well be worth investigating a forward contract and how you could use one to secure your currency while the rates are high.