Currency strength meter: eight majors in one ranking, rebuilt every minute

How it is calculated

The new page at /currency-strength measures every currency against the dollar first: the euro by EUR/USD, the yen by USD/JPY turned over, and so on for all seven dollar pairs. Any cross is one leg divided by another — EUR/JPY is EUR/USD divided by JPY/USD. Cross rates form the same way in the interbank market, so seven quotes give all 28 pairs.

A currency's strength is the plain average of its seven crosses in percent. EUR at +0.20% means that across the other seven currencies the euro gained a fifth of a percent on average. Every currency faces the same basket of seven, so the eight numbers compare with each other directly.

Why another meter shows a different order

Strength meters differ in three choices: which pairs go in, how long the window is and how the result is scaled. Built only from the pairs a broker lists, a currency that appears in two pairs gets a different basket from one that appears in seven. A 0-to-10 scale hides how far a currency actually moved. We show percentages, and the method is written out on the page.

The limits: only the seven dollar pairs are real quotes; the other 21 crosses are computed. A traded cross can differ from the computed one by the spread and a few seconds, which does not change the order of currencies. The window is counted in hourly bars, so on Monday morning the 24-hour window reaches back to Friday. The windows are the same as for forex on /heatmap, so EUR/USD shows the same move on both pages. Strength describes what has already happened; it is not a forecast and not a trading signal.

Put it on your own site

The ranking is also a widget. Embed /embed/currency-strength in an iframe and two parameters do the tuning:

• period — h1, h24 or d7, the window the ranking reads.
• theme — dark or light, to match your page.

The ready-made snippet is in the widget gallery.