The Singapore Dollar Hits A Rough Patch

This month we are going to take a look at the Singapore dollar, to see whether it has managed to weather the current storms rather better than some other currencies.  Unfortunately the answer just recently seems to be veering towards a ‘no’.

The first half of March has certainly been an intriguing one as far as the Singapore dollar is concerned.  It bagged an exchange rate of 0.5112 Euros to the dollar on the first of the month, and it has slipped slightly since then.  It improved things to 0.5143 on the 4th, but that wasn’t the end of the matter.  Anyone who was tracking events by using a currency converter would have been surprised by how things have turned out since.

By the end of that week the Singapore dollar could claim just 0.5111 Euros, leaving us wondering where the currency would end up next.  By the time Friday 13th hit, the exchange rate had slid back further to 0.5025.

Would the Singapore dollar do better elsewhere though?  Let’s take a look at how it performed against the British pound – itself doing rather badly of late.  And let’s face it, it always gets rather interesting when two of the weaker currencies go head to head like this.

Back on the 1st March, one Singapore dollar was worth 0.4566 British pounds.  That peaked at 0.4581 for that first week, before sliding back to finish on 0.4549 as the weekend beckoned. 

The very next week it was definitely the turn of the Singapore dollar to take the upper hand though.  The dollar finished on 0.4672 at the close of play on Monday, before climbing steadily throughout the week.  The high point was on Thursday, as it managed to bag 0.4760 British pounds to the Singapore dollar.  But it let itself down somewhat on the Friday though, as a news story in the RTT News website testified.  You can read it here.  By the end of Friday the exchange rate had stalled on 0.4633.  So a small win for the pound, and not such a good end to the week for the dollar, it seems.

You might expect more of a tussle if we put one dollar up against another one.  In this case, let’s pick the US dollar to go up against the Singapore dollar.  And this turned out to be a real up and down affair during the first two weeks of March.

On the 1st March one Singapore dollar would have got you 0.6464 US dollars.  This fell to 0.6430 the very next day, before increasing over the next two days to end on 0.6457.  The week had a better end in store for the Singapore dollar too though, as it finished on 0.6470. 

But as the second week of March got underway, it seemed as if the more unlikely Singapore dollar was getting the best results.  Tuesday saw it bagging 0.6516 US dollars, and by the time the 12th reached us this figure had increased to 0.6537.  Unfortunately the US dollar was the one that got the upper hand for the end of the week, as the exchange rate dipped back to 0.6485.

The Singapore dollar did rather better against the Japanese yen though, and there was a much less choppy picture here than we saw against the US dollar.  The figure for the 1st March was 63.004, and by the time we reached the 13th March that had climbed up to 63.837.  That doesn’t take into account the ups and downs which occurred in between those two dates, but they weren’t as pronounced as the ones some of the other currencies were involved in.

So it was a mixed time for the Singapore dollar, although it should be said that it wasn’t the best of times either.  This currency isn’t one of the major players on the world stage, and as such it isn’t often paid as much attention as the other currencies are.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep an eye on what is going on in areas such as this, as they can still help to give us an indication of how good or bad the currency markets really are.