Bennie Kincaid 
The Russian ruble had not ended 2022 on a good note against the US dollar, as volatile trading had seen it decline to six-month lows against the greenback.
Therefore, the first full day of trading in 2023 turned out to be such a great start for the Russian currency, as it kicked it off on the front foot with gains of more than 3% against the US dollar.
Ruble rises
On Monday, the Russian Ruble rose 3.4% against the US dollar by 1005 GMT, which saw it pass through the 70-mark and trade at a value of 69.68.
The currency also recorded gains against the euro of 1.9%, which saw it reach up to a value of 74.77, as it did against the Chinese yuan of about 2.2%, trading in Moscow at a value of 10.23.
Last year, the Russian ruble spent a significant amount of time as the best-performing currency in the world.
However, December turned out to be a bad month for the currency because it ended up taking away a lot of its gains.
December movements
The Russian ruble recorded a loss of about 17% in the month of December alone after Western countries had decided to impose a price cap on Russian oil exports and an EU embargo had also been put into effect.
Market analysts said that before the year had begun, investors had shown a tendency of reducing their exposure to stocks and had moved toward the dollar.
But, they said that if there is no more geopolitical interference in the coming days, then those trends will see a reversal.
This is because major exporters would also begin selling their earnings in foreign exchange that they would have accumulated during the holiday season.
Likewise, investors would also begin to sell the dollars they had purchased for protection purposes.
The market
The first week of January saw trading volumes reach record lows in Russian markets because the start-of-the-year holidays seemed to have extended.
This was partly because Russian markets had seen a mass exodus of Western institutional investors last year due to the Ukraine conflict.
Due to the low liquidity in the markets, there had not been any such major change in stocks and the ruble.
It was mostly because the retail investors that mostly drive the stock markets and the large corporates powering the forex markets of Russia were mostly away from their desks.
On Monday, as the Russian ruble climbed, the stocks also seemed to follow the same route. There was a 3.9% gain recorded in the RTS index, which is denominated in USD, as it reached 979.1 points, mostly due to the currency effect.
As for the MOEX index, which is ruble-based, it saw gains of 0.4% that took it up to a total of 2,164.6 points.
The US dollar has also been suffering from declines over investor expectations that the US Fed would slow down their pace and size of interest rate hikes.
