I just put together a set of notes on money symbols, and I realized my understanding of these symbols before was still pretty superficial.

The most common one is the $ symbol, but it doesn’t just mean the US dollar. More than 30 countries around the world use it—like Canada, Singapore, and Australia. So when you see $, be careful. It’s best to look at the full code so you don’t mix things up. The same goes for the ¥ symbol: Japan and China both use it, representing the Japanese yen and the Chinese yuan, respectively. If you need to distinguish them, write them as JPY￥ or CNY￥.

If you often trade in the foreign exchange market, money symbols matter even more. For currency pairs like EUR/USD, € is the money symbol for the euro—you can tell at a glance that it’s talking about euros. I even looked up how to type them quickly on a keyboard: on Mac, the euro is Shift+option+2, the British pound is Option+3, and the US dollar is just Shift+4. On Windows, the euro is Alt+E and the British pound is Alt+L.

One interesting case is the ฿ symbol: in forex it represents the Thai baht, but in the world of cryptocurrencies, it becomes the symbol for Bitcoin. One symbol, two uses—it really is easy to get confused. Anyway, I’ve written down the main money symbols across Asia, Europe, and the Americas, so if you see one you don’t recognize, you can just look it up in the reference chart. Do you pay special attention to these symbols when you trade?