This is CantosCharts. My name is Simon Derrick. I'm Chief Currency Strategist at BMY Mellon. And one of the things that we've been looking at this week has been what volume charts can tell us about investor sentiment, and what's likely to happen in the price action next in the foreign exchange markets.

One of the things we've really explored over the last couple of days has been how difficult it has become for investors to try to find currencies they feel safe investing in.

On the one hand, we've seen a clear loss of faith in the euro, a clear loss of faith in the dollar. On the other hand, the currencies that people have looked to buy as safe havens - the yen and the Swiss franc - are both being constrained or threatened with constraint by the central banks. Therefore investors have a very tough choice what to buy.

Typically, when investors are concerned about currency debasement or they're concerned that currencies will be artificially constrained, they look to buy a hard asset. And one of the hardest assets that people ever buy is gold. And it's no surprise that after the intervention by the central bank in Japan, once again we saw gold sprinting up and hitting new highs.

Following on from that, though, it makes sense that we should look at currencies where there is a strong commodity backing, particularly strong gold backing. And two currencies that fairly naturally spring to mind are the Canadian dollar and the Australian dollar.

So let's start with the Australian dollar. Here is our flow chart for the price action and the volume flows in the Aussie dollar over the course of the last two years.

One of the things that obviously stands out is this incredibly sharp sell-off that takes place at the beginning of May. That is when they introduced the idea of bringing in a super tax on the miners and investors reacted in a fairly logical way.

But one of the things that is very apparent is that even before the announcements of the election, and certainly well before the outcome of the election became apparent in Australia, investors started to show fresh faith in the Australian dollar.

And as you can see, we've been seeing steady buying taking place now for a couple of months, with particular fresh inflows developing over the course of the last week. And this comes despite the fact that we have a minority government and despite the fact there is still vague talk about the super tax being introduced.

It seems to me that's as good an example as any of the desire of investors to find a currency with a real solid backing.

Following on from that, this is our flow chart for Australian equities over exactly the same period. The same things are apparent. Here the sell-off that takes place when investors start to worry about the super tax. And here we can start to see the fresh inflows really starting to emerge, again, as investors are looking for something solid and tangible, something that is potentially backed by gold or by mining profits. And, lo and behold, the inflow starts to take place.

A very similar story, interestingly enough, emerges with Canada, although here we don't have the super tax on miners issue to deal with.

Here we see that right from the summer of last year, fresh inflows starting to emerge into the Canadian dollar as investors worried, first of all, about quantitative easing. And then they started to worry about Europe. And then, clearly, over the last few months, they started to worry about what was left to buy.

What is interesting is this brief period here, in the late spring and early summer of this year, where we actually did start to see some modest outflows taking place, whether that was connected with underlying events within the US economy and the Canadian co-economy, who can say?

But what is very, very clear is that over the course of the past month, as the fresh rally started to emerge in commodities, and particularly in gold, the Canadian dollar has come right back into favour.

And not just the Canadian dollar, but again, the underlying equity markets are still seeing very positive demand. And here we can see holdings currently standing at their highest for two years. Again, if we're looking for signs that investors have real faith in a currency, then buying at the underlying market is usually one of the solidest signs you can see.

This is CantosCharts. My name is Simon Derrick, Chief Currency Strategist at Bank of New York Mellon. Thank you for your time.