I only just realized how complicated currency symbol notation is. I really hadn’t paid attention before. For example, the $ symbol is used by more than 30 countries—such as the United States, Canada, Hong Kong, and Singapore—so no wonder it’s easy to mix things up during forex trading. If you want to distinguish them, you likely need to add the country code, like US$, HK$, and NT$, to make it clear.

The most interesting one is the ¥ symbol. Japan and China both use it, but it represents completely different currencies—one is the Japanese yen and the other is the Chinese renminbi. And then there’s the ฿ symbol: in Thailand it stands for the Thai baht, but in the cryptocurrency world it actually represents Bitcoin. That’s really something.

I put together shortcut keys for commonly used currency symbols. On Mac, the euro is Shift+option+2, and the British pound is Option+3. On Windows, you use the Alt key combination. If you want to quickly identify forex currency pairs—like EUR/USD, which is the exchange rate between the euro and the US dollar—the one in front is called the base currency, and the one in back is called the quote currency. In fact, once you understand the differences in currency symbols, it’s less likely you’ll mistake numbers in forex trading.