Speculators raised their net long US dollar position to the highest level since around late December, according to calculations by Reuters and US Commodity Futures Trading Commission data released on Friday.
The value of the net long dollar position was $32.30 billion in the week ended April 2, compared with $29.25 billion the previous week.
US dollar positioning was derived from net contracts of International Monetary Market speculators in the Japanese yen, euro, British pound, Swiss franc and Canadian and Australian dollars.
In a broader measure of dollar positioning that includes net contracts on the New Zealand dollar, Mexican peso, Brazilian real and Russian ruble, the US dollar posted a net long position of $27.68 billion in the week ended April 2, compared with $24.22 billion the previous week.
Despite the Federal Reserve's shift toward holding off on interest rate hikes, the dollar has held steady, boosted by data that showed generally stable growth for the world's largest economy.
The dollar's fortunes have also been helped by Britain's woes in its planned exit from the European Union, with investors buying the greenback as a safe-haven currency.
Britain could ask the European Union for a long Brexit delay next week if crisis talks between Prime Minister Theresa May's government and the opposition Labor Party fail to find a way out of the impasse over Brexit.
The dollar index so far this year was up 1.2 percent, after gains of 4.4 percent in 2018.
In the cryptocurrency market, speculators' net short position on bitcoin Cboe futures further increased to 1,343 contracts in the week ended April 2, from 1,244 short contracts the previous week.
Bitcoin though has started to creep higher, hitting a roughly five-month high of $5,345 early this week on the Bitstamp platform, after a major order by an anonymous buyer set off a frenzy of computer-driven trading, analysts said. On Friday, bitcoin was up 2.4 percent at $5,029.53.
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