European Currency Unit opportunity for foreign diversification without reliance on the currency of a single country. The ECU was conceived on 13 March 1979 as an internal accounting unit. It had the ISO 4217 currency code XEU. On 1 January 1999, the euro (with the code EUR and symbol €) replaced the ECU, at the value €1 = 1 ECU. Unlike the ECU, the euro is a real currency, although not all member states participate (for details on euro membership see Eurozone). Two of the countries in the ECU basket of currencies, UK and Denmark, did not join the eurozone, and a third,
Euro Currency Index was 34.38805726 multiplied by the product of all components in the basket of currencies, that have been raised to a high number of their percentage, weighting equal to: ECX = 34.38805726 x (EURUSD^(0.3155) x EURGBP^(0.3056) x EURJPY^(0.1891) x EURCHF^(0.1113) x EURSEK^(0.0785)) The all-time low was constructed on 6 July 2001, with 83.36 points and the all-time high on July 14, 2008, 123.82 points. On 20 May 2011, the exchange ICE Futures U.S. ended the trading of futures and options on the index. On July 28, 2011, the calculation of the ICE Euro Currency Index was discontinued (last value was 108.88