Naira Maintains Stability at Official Fx Window

The Naira maintained its streak on Monday, settling to close at N415.07 per dollar. This is the same price at which the Nigerian currency has closed for the last few days, according to the Investors and Exporters window where the Naira is traded officially.

While there have been very marginal differences in the opening prices over the last days, in the end the currency has come around to settle down at the same price (N415.07 per dollar) at the close of each day.

On Friday, the Naira opened at N413.71 per dollar which represented a 0.03% change from the previous day, according to the Investors and Exporters window. On Monday, the currency opened at a similar price, starting the day off at N413.75 per dollar.

Although there have been minimal changes in the opening prices, generally the currency opens at similar prices, with backgrounds of N413 per dollar and changes of only a few kobo.

While the general opening and closing prices didn’t witness much change, the same cannot be said for the Spot and Forward rates. On Friday, the Spot rate was between N404 per dollar and N444 per dollar. However, Monday saw a significant change in the Spot rate. Across all transactions that occurred on Monday, the naira reached a high of only N405 per dollar (N1 lower than Friday’s high), and went on to reach a low of N456.97 per dollar (N12 lower than the previous day).

The Forward rate – for future transactions that were agreed upon on Monday – saw a more significant change. Friday’s Forward rate high was recorded at N411 per dollar, but on Monday that fell greatly to N452 per dollar. However, Monday’s Forward rate lowest was N453 per dollar, about N2 better than the N455 per dollar at which it traded on Friday.

The total turnover of the dollar recorded on Monday sat at $256.69 million. This was considerably higher than the turnover of $215 million that was recorded on Friday.

At the parallel market on Monday, the Naira fell to close at N569 per dollar from the N560 per dollar at which it traded the previous day. After that exponential rise to about N535 per dollar, the parallel market is seeing the Naira return even closer to the N575 per dollar price at which it had sat for a while.