The ringgit did get stronger — against eleven of fourteen currencies. The Singapore dollar was not one of them.

A viewer asked this under a video about the ringgit, and 33 people upvoted it:

If the ringgit falls so much and it recovers back, do you call it the best performing currencies??

We went to check. Bank Negara Malaysia publishes the rate it recorded at noon on every trading day, currency by currency, and it is free to download without an account. So this is answerable to the sen.

The answer is yes, no, and it depends which year you start counting. All three are true at once, and all three come out of the same table.

Against the US dollar, the fall and the recovery are both real

Every rate in this article is BNM's middle rate from the noon interbank session, on the last trading day of December.

At the end of 2015 the ringgit closed at RM4.2920 to the US dollar. It ended five of the next ten years weaker than it began them and five stronger, and it hit its weakest year-end close of the period at the end of 2023: RM4.5915. At the end of 2025 it closed at RM4.0570.

Source: theringgit calculation from BNM Open API middle rates, 1200 session, last trading day of December · zero-based axis

From that 2023 close to the 2025 close the ringgit gained 13.2% against the dollar. Measured across the whole decade it gained 5.8%. The 2025 close is the second-strongest year-end in the eleven-year run; only the end of 2020, at RM4.0130, was stronger, and only by 4.4 sen.

So the first half of the question describes something that actually happened. The ringgit did fall, it did recover, and the recovery carried it past where it started.

Change the start date and the same table says the opposite

Here is where "compared to what" starts doing real work, because the first thing it means is compared to when.

Every figure above is measured from the last trading day of 2015. That date is not neutral. The ringgit was already weak at the end of 2015, and measuring from a low flatters everything that follows. Start the same series at the end of 2020 instead, the strongest year-end close in the run, and the ringgit is 1.1% weaker by the end of 2025, not 5.8% stronger.

Same source. Same session. Same currency. Same published closing prices. Two opposite headlines, both arithmetically correct.

That is not a trick and it is not an argument for ignoring the numbers. It is the reason any claim about how a currency has "performed" is really a claim about a window, and a window that is not stated cannot be checked. When you next see a currency ranking, the first thing worth finding is the two dates it was measured between.

Against the Singapore dollar, there was no full recovery

Now change the other variable: keep the dates and change the currency.

Source: theringgit calculation from BNM Open API middle rates, 1200 session, last trading day of December · zero-based axis

At the end of 2015 the ringgit closed at RM3.0356 to the Singapore dollar. For five years it barely moved: the 2016 to 2020 closes all sit within 2.2% of the 2015 one, four of them within half a per cent. Then it fell hard, to RM3.4822 at the end of 2023, 12.8% below the 2015 level.

The recovery since is real, and large. From that 2023 close the ringgit gained 10.2% against the Singapore dollar by the end of 2025. But it closed 2025 at RM3.1595, still 3.9% weaker than it was ten years earlier. The dollar line finishes above where it began. This one does not.

That gap is the one Malaysians feel, because it is the rate that converts a Johor commuter's pay. A salary of S$1,000 converted to RM3,036 at the end of 2015, to RM3,482 at the end of 2023, and to RM3,160 at the end of 2025. Run it the other way, for the Malaysian earning in ringgit: RM1,000 bought S$329 at the end of 2015 and S$317 at the end of 2025. The same movement, read from the two sides of the causeway, is a raise in one direction and a shortfall in the other. That is arithmetic on a published rate, not a claim about wages, and what has happened to wages themselves on either side is a separate piece with its own household data behind it.

Fourteen currencies, one decade, three losses

We pulled the same two dates for fourteen of the currencies in BNM's daily table. Over the ten years from 31 December 2015 to 31 December 2025, the ringgit is stronger against eleven of the fourteen and weaker against exactly three.

Source: theringgit calculation from BNM Open API middle rates, 1200 session, both year-end dates · zero-based axis

The three it lost to are the Singapore dollar (−3.9%), the euro (−1.5%) and the Thai baht (−7.5%). The gains, at the other end, are not small: +43.1% against the Indian rupee, +37.5% against the yen, +28.0% against the Indonesian rupiah.

Read that pair of facts together and the popular versions of this argument both fail. "The ringgit collapsed" does not survive a table in which it beat eleven of fourteen currencies over a decade. Neither does "best performing currency", because the three it lost to are the Singapore dollar, the euro and the Thai baht, and the first of those is the rate every Malaysian working in Singapore is paid at. A currency that gains 43% on the rupee and loses 7.5% to the baht has not had one performance. It has had fourteen.

"It is not the ringgit, it is the dollar" — the disciplined version

The usual next move is to say the ringgit did not strengthen at all, the US dollar simply weakened, so everyone rose against it. That claim is usually made with the dollar index, a proprietary product of a futures exchange. We are not using it, because a number you cannot open and check is not a receipt.

BNM's own table settles it anyway. Divide the ringgit-per-dollar rate by the ringgit-per-Singapore-dollar rate and you get the Singapore dollar per US dollar, on the same dates and from the same publisher. It went from 1.4139 at the end of 2015 to 1.2841 at the end of 2025. Measured the same way as the ringgit's 5.8% gain on the dollar, that is a 10.1% gain for the Singapore dollar.

Watch that number, because it is this article's own subject caught in miniature. The cross rate itself fell 9.2%, and 9.2% and 10.1% are the same event with different currencies on top: one is the US dollar's fall against the Singapore dollar, the other is the Singapore dollar's rise against the US dollar. Both are arithmetically correct and they are not interchangeable. We quote 10.1% because it is computed the same way as every other percentage in this piece, and we quote 9.2% here so you can see the difference rather than trip over it somewhere else.

So the claim is half right, and the half that is right is the boring half. The US dollar did weaken against regional currencies over this window. The ringgit rose with them, and rose less than its nearest neighbour. That is a comparison between two published series, and it is as far as this table can take the argument. BNM does not publish that cross rate itself, so the division is ours.

Where the rate reaches the budget, and where it stops

The bridge people build next is the federal budget. The Ministry of Finance projects petroleum-related revenue of RM43 billion for 2026, 12.5% of all federal revenue, down from 31.7% in 2019, and it is the line reached for whenever the exchange rate and the budget are discussed together.

The line this rests on

“Petroleum revenue 12.5% of federal revenue in 2026, against 35.4% in 2010.”

Retrieved 29 Jul 2026 · check it yourself

Bank Negara's rate table cannot tell you whether that line moves with the ringgit, and neither can we from here. Petroleum-related revenue is a bundle of the Petronas dividend, petroleum income tax, royalties and export duty, each with its own base, its own contract terms and its own exposure to the oil price. None of that is in a currency series. We can state the rate and we can state the revenue. We cannot multiply them together, and nobody can without the documents underneath, which are a different cell and a longer job.

The honest answer

Over the ten years the question is probably about, the ringgit strengthened against most of the world and weakened against Singapore, Europe and Thailand. It fell to its weakest year-end close in 2023 and has recovered strongly since, ending 2025 stronger against the dollar than it began 2015 and still weaker against the Singapore dollar. When we pulled the series on 28 July 2026 it stood at RM4.0865 to the US dollar and RM3.1624 to the Singapore dollar, 0.7% and 0.1% off the 2025 year-end closes.

So: yes, it recovered. No, that does not make it the best performing anything, and we could not find a primary source for who made that claim or over what window, so we have not attributed it to anyone or argued with it as stated. Rankings of that kind are true or false only against a named window and a named set of currencies, and the honest form of the answer is to give both, which is what the three charts above do.

There is one thing this table cannot reach at all. Bank Negara's open series begins in 2006: query it for 1998, or for any year up to 2005, and it returns a valid response with no rows in it. The 1997-98 crisis and the RM3.80 peg, which ran until 21 July 2005, sit entirely outside it. Every "the ringgit used to be stronger than the Singapore dollar" argument is about that period, and answering it needs a different Bank Negara document. That is the next piece in this cell, and we will say plainly where the figures came from when we have them.

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Notes on the figures. All rates are BNM middle rates, quote=rm, noon (1200) Kuala Lumpur interbank session, on the last trading day of the month. BNM also publishes 0900 and 1700 interbank sessions and a separate 1130 series of best counter rates from selected commercial banks, which is a different instrument; a figure pulled at another session will not match these. BNM quotes the yen, won, rupiah, dong, baht, rupee, Hong Kong dollar and new Taiwan dollar per 100 units and the US dollar, Singapore dollar, euro, pound, yuan and Australian dollar per 1, and the percentages here are computed on each currency's own quoted unit, so they are comparable with one another. Every percentage in this article is our own arithmetic on those published rates: the ringgit's own move is the inverse of the move in ringgit-per-unit, and BNM does not publish it as a series. Year-end values are single trading days, not annual averages; the API serves daily observations only and has no average endpoint, which is exactly why the base-date section exists. The third chart shows all fourteen currencies we pulled, in order of the ringgit's result: rupee +43.1%, yen +37.5%, won +29.7%, rupiah +28.0%, dong +24.0%, pound +16.5%, Australian dollar +15.4%, yuan +13.9%, Hong Kong dollar +6.2%, US dollar +5.8%, new Taiwan dollar +1.0%, euro −1.5%, Singapore dollar −3.9%, baht −7.5%. The Singapore-dollar-per-US-dollar cross is our own division of two BNM series; BNM does not publish it. Throughout this article a currency's own gain is the inverse of the move in the rate quoted against it, which is why the Singapore dollar's decade against the US dollar appears as +10.1% and the cross rate's own fall as −9.2%; both are stated rather than one being quietly preferred. The S$1,000 and RM1,000 conversions are illustrative multiplication of a round figure by the published rate, not survey data.

Not verified. The phrase "best performing currency" in the question itself. We could not find a primary source for who said it or over what period, so we have neither attributed it nor rebutted it as a stated fact. Anything before 2006: BNM's Open API returns a successful response containing zero rows for 1998 and for every year we tested through 2005, so the crisis years and the peg period cannot be sourced from it, and we have not yet obtained the BNM publication that covers them. A trade-weighted or effective exchange rate for the ringgit: we looked for a BNM-published nominal or real effective rate through the same API and every endpoint we tested returned 404, so every comparison in this article is bilateral, currency by currency, with no index construction anywhere in it.