I only realized while trading forex recently that symbols that seem simple—like the US dollar symbol and the New Taiwan dollar symbol—actually come with plenty of nuances.

It’s a bit embarrassing to admit: I used to think “$” was just the US dollar, but I later found out that more than 30 countries around the world use this symbol. The New Taiwan dollar is NT$, the Canadian dollar is C$, and the Australian dollar is A$. If you don’t look closely at the codes, you basically can’t tell them apart. That’s when I understood why forex traders have to master these symbols—quickly identifying different currencies directly affects trading efficiency.

The most commonly used symbols are actually only a few: the US dollar symbol $, the euro €, the British pound £, the Japanese yen ¥, and the New Taiwan dollar symbol NT$. I found the easiest to mix up is the ¥ symbol. Japan uses it to represent the yen, while China uses it to represent renminbi—so it looks like you need to add the currency code to distinguish them completely. Another interesting one is the ฿ symbol: in forex it represents the Thai baht, but in the cryptocurrency world it’s the symbol for Bitcoin.

If you often need to enter these symbols, both Mac and Windows have shortcuts. For example, on both systems the US dollar symbol is Shift+4, and on Mac the euro symbol is Shift+option+2. Even though it looks complicated, you can remember it after using it a few times.

Lastly, I want to say that understanding currency pairs is also very important. EUR/USD is the exchange rate of the euro against the US dollar: the first is the base currency, and the second is the quote currency. Once you master these basics, you can make judgments faster in international investing and forex trading.