I just recently realized that the US dollar symbol $ is used by so many countries—I can’t tell them apart at all. After looking it up, I found that more than 30 countries use $, including the United States, Canada, Australia, and Singapore. No wonder that in forex trading you need to label them as US$, C$, and A$ to tell the difference.

In fact, the biggest purpose of currency symbols is to make things easier: writing $40 is far simpler than writing 40 US dollars. The symbol most likely to get mixed up is ￥—Japan and China both use it, but JPY￥ and CNY￥ stand for completely different things. There’s also an interesting one: ฿. In forex, it represents the Thai baht, but in cryptocurrency, it’s the symbol for Bitcoin.

If you often trade forex, remembering how to type the US dollar symbol will be very helpful. On Windows, Shift+4 is $, and the euro symbol € on Mac is Shift+option+2. There’s a table listing shortcut keys for each country’s currencies—British pounds and Japanese yen are included. Forex currency pairs like EUR/USD are the exchange rate of the euro against the US dollar: the first one is the base currency, and the second is the quote currency. That way, the exchange rate is clear at a glance. Have you ever been confused by these symbols when you trade?