I’ve always been puzzled about why foreign exchange trading uses those symbols, but later I realized it’s actually very simple. Writing $40 is much faster than writing 40 US dollar, and that’s the meaning of having a price/currency symbol. Especially when trading forex, you can tell at a glance what currencies are involved in pairs like EUR/USD or EUR/JPY, which is much more efficient.

The easiest symbols to mix up are ￥ and $. In Japan, ￥ represents the Japanese yen; in China, it represents the renminbi (people’s currency). So if you want to distinguish them, write CNY￥100 for renminbi and JPY￥100 for yen. As for the $ symbol: more than 30 countries use it—US$ for the US dollar, NT$ for the New Taiwan dollar, C$ for the Canadian dollar, HK$ for the Hong Kong dollar. You have to add a prefix so there’s no confusion.

If you want to quickly type these symbols on Windows or Mac, I’ve gathered some shortcuts. For the euro €: on Mac it’s Shift+option+2, and on Windows it’s Alt+E. For the British pound £: on Mac it’s Option+3, and on Windows it’s Alt+L. For the US dollar $: both sides are Shift+4. For the Japanese yen ¥ on Mac it’s Option+Y. Actually, just memorizing a few commonly used ones is enough—you don’t need to memorize them all.

There’s also an interesting detail: ฿ in forex represents the Thai baht, but in the cryptocurrency world it means Bitcoin. The same symbol has two different meanings, so you need to judge based on the context. Forex currency pairs are simply the exchange rate between two currencies. For example, USD/GBP means how many British pounds one US dollar equals. The first part, USD, is called the base currency, and the second part, GBP, is called the quote currency. Once you understand the details of these price/currency symbols, it’s much less likely you’ll make mistakes when trading.