I just recently discovered how particular the Chinese Yuan symbol is to type; I used to use it randomly until I saw others distinguish between CNY￥ and JPY￥ and realized that the ￥ symbol is actually different in China and Japan.

Actually, the main purpose of currency symbols is to save effort; writing $100 is much faster than writing 100 USD, and at a glance during transactions, it’s easy to recognize. I’ve compiled a few common ones: US dollar is $, Euro is €, British pound is £, and both Japanese Yen and Chinese Yuan are ¥ but require a code to differentiate.

The most interesting thing is that the $ symbol is used in over 30 countries: the United States, Canada, New Taiwan Dollar, Singapore, Australia—all use $. So, seeing US$, NT$, HK$ is the only way to clearly distinguish them. Also, that ฿ symbol, which represents Thai Baht in forex, has become Bitcoin in cryptocurrency, which can be very confusing.

If you want to type them on a keyboard, Mac and Windows each have shortcuts. For Euro on Mac, it's Shift+Option+2; on Windows, it's Alt+E. For British Pound on Mac, it's Option+3; on Windows, it's Alt+L. For US dollar, both sides use Shift+4. As for the Chinese Yuan symbol, the method varies depending on your system, but generally, it can be found in special symbols.

In forex trading, you often see currency pairs like EUR/USD, GBP/JPY—the first is the base currency, and the second is the quote currency, representing the exchange rate. Understanding these symbols and shortcut input methods definitely makes trading much more convenient.