The FT
The financial times is renowned world wide for its coverage of business and financial events. This is both in terms of data and in terms of editorial analysis. Within the FT website there is a large and comprehensive market data section that deals with all active trading markets from equities, such as normal stocks and shares, to commodities, such as oil and coffee.
Like many such sites the ft allows you to track a portfolio of shares, access free annual reports, such as those published by companies for full year and interim results, etc.
The FT has an outstanding reputation for delivering facts and as such it is relied upon by many in the city of London as a one-stop-shop for much of their financial data needs.
The currency converter is very much one of the stripped-down school of thought. The screen that welcomes you to the currency conversion section is one with very few things on it: There are only 3 choices to be made:
Number of units – this box is where you should enter how much (what value) of starting currency you'd like to convert from.
There follows a pair of drop down lists where you can choose from a selection of major currencies. Unlike several other websites there are relatively few currencies to choose from, at less than 30 in each drop down list. As you can imagine there are none of the more exotic, or obscure currencies, or foreign-exchange-traded scripts listed. Likewise none of the traditional forex “hedges”, such as gold or platinum make the lists.
These are major world currencies only – the most outlandish that they have on offer being, arguably, the Argentine peso. As such the ft currency converter offers what is essentially a tourist-information type page that would not really be of use to anyone trading in the spot market.
Normally (with other currency conversion sites) if you input any currency symbols – such as £ or € – into the Number of Units box you get an “invalid currency amount” error. You do get the same kind of “invalid currency amount” error on the ft conversion site too, but, funnily enough, not if you use the $ dollar symbol. Strangely, this applies for every currency. e.g.
If you enter the Number of Units as being $6, and choose to convert from UK Sterling to Danish krone, the output on the results page has the jolting format:
$6 UK Sterling = XX Danish krone
The exchange rate used is the correct UK (GBP) to Danish Krone (DKR) rate, i.e. The currency symbol has no impact on the calculation, but it is slightly unnerving to see it, nonetheless.
All in all the simplicity of the page is good as there is very little that could confuse anyone, and the page is less fussy than many currency conversion pages. As a tourist ex rate page it serves its purpose. However, given the fact that it is pretty limited in scope this converter only gets 3 stars.
Rating (out of 5 stars):
- 3 Stars
Link: http://mwprices.ft.com/custom/ft2-com/html-currency.asp?