Name: Pound plunge in 60 seconds | FT Markets
Uploaded: 2016-10-13T03:10:09.000Z
Duration: 1 min 22 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Sterling fell 6% in early Asia trading on Friday.

The FT's Jennifer Hughes explains what happened.

Adverbs of degree

The pound plunged and there is really no other word for the 6 per cent fall in the major currency in 2 minutes flat.

It went from trading at about $1.26 to $1.18 just at 7 p.m. in New York.

As 9 a.m. in Tokyo and 10 a.m. in Sydney, it soon bounds back to $1.24.

But moves that sudden are extremely rare.

Traders suggests it may've been a mistaken fat finger trade where someone keyed in the wrong price,

Or a rogue computer algorithm effect to be doing the same thing.

The backdrop is that this happened at the weakest point in the FX trading day.

New York has gone home and Asia is really only just getting up to speed.

We are speculating about what cause this and a new debate on the pound's value.

Now it really did bounce back quickly to the $1.23, $1.24 level,

but it hasn't recovered all that ground it lost,

suggesting traders are happy enough thinking that the Sterling will keep weakening.

It perhaps not quite as dramatically as this plunge.