Recently, I’ve been doing forex trading and discovered a really annoying problem—seeing the $ symbol and not knowing which country's currency it represents. After looking it up, I realized that this symbol is used in over 30 countries worldwide; the US dollar, Canadian dollar, Australian dollar, and Hong Kong dollar all use $. No wonder it’s easy to get confused.

Later, I found out there are actually ways to distinguish them. For example, write USD$ for the US dollar, NT$ for New Taiwan dollar, C$ for Canadian dollar—then it’s clear at a glance. The pound symbol is £, the euro is €, and the yen is ¥—these are easier to recognize. But the most interesting is the ¥ symbol, which in Japan represents the Japanese Yen, and in China represents the Renminbi, so sometimes you’ll see CNY￥100 or JPY￥100 to differentiate.

The few symbols I use most often are the US dollar, euro, and pound symbols, especially when looking at currency pairs like EUR/USD or GBP/JPY. Forex trading is basically the exchange rate between two currencies, for example, USD/GBP shows how many British pounds one US dollar can buy. The first currency is called the base currency, and the second is the quote currency.

If you want to quickly type these symbols on a computer, it’s not hard either. On Mac, the euro is Shift+Option+2, the pound sign is Option+3, and the US dollar is just Shift+4. On Windows, the euro is Alt+E, the pound is Alt+L, and the dollar is Shift+4. Once you get used to it, the input speed is much faster—typing the symbols directly is much more convenient than typing out “US dollar,” “euro,” etc.