2013 Year End FX Musings

GBP appears to have bottomed out. Interestingly, it goes in line with house prices - currencies and land values are both driven by the same speculative flows - rather than moving inversely to house prices:

Most of the currencies are also on the up (from a low base, USD, EUR, CAD) or near all time highs (SGD, CHF and AUD). The only one which is approaching the bottom is JPY:

So if you were thinking of taking a punt from GBP into JPY, those charts seem to say "hang on a bit, give it another month or two". The message from the simple JPY vs GBP chart for the last five years is "pile in now, it's a good a time as any":