The yuan's gains for the year are in line with the 4 to 5 percent traders in the onshore market had expected at the start of the year. Traders still see the yuan appreciating for all of 2012 as China faces US pressure to do more to rebalance bilateral and world trade, while it continues to record trade surpluses. But the rate of appreciation is expected to slow to about 3 percent next year, with most of the rise happening in the second half, they said. Many market players saw the strong mid-point as an attempt by the People's Bank of China to make the percent gain for the year look better. "After the PBOC set a record high mid-point today, some major state-owned Chinese banks quoted the yuan at high levels to support the central bank's window-dressing move," said a dealer at a major European bank in Shanghai. "But that does not represent a strong uptrend for the yuan. Instead, the yuan is most likely to move narrowly in the first few months of 2012 before resuming a slow appreciation process well into 2012." NDFS IMPLY DEPRECIATION Many dealers said the yuan would likely move in a narrow 6.3/6.4 range in the first few months of 2012 as China assesses the impact of global weakness, caused mainly by the euro zone debt crisis, on its economy and exports. Spot yuan opened at an all-time high of 6.3070 versus the dollar, topping its previous record of 6.3160 touched on Monday. It then pulled back slightly to trade mainly around 6.31, still up 0.15 percent from Thursday's close of 6.3192. Before trading began, the PBOC fixed the dollar/yuan mid-point at a record high of 6.3009, up 0.23 percent from Thursday's 6.3157. The central bank uses the fixing to express the government's intention for the yuan's movements in a day. Offshore, benchmark one-year non-deliverable forwards (NDFs) fell to 6.3900 on Friday against 6.4000 at the close on Thursday, but still implied that the yuan would depreciate over the next year. They now imply 1.39 percent depreciation over the next year, compared with a 1.55 percent fall implied on Thursday. One-year NDFs began to mainly imply yuan depreciation in late September, reversing a general trend of forecasting yuan appreciation in place since the yuan's landmark revaluation in July 2005. Some overseas investors have since September shorted the yuan amid signs that the world's second largest economy is slowing.