Recently, I found that when I’m trading forex, I always mix up the currency symbols of different countries—especially when I see $, I have no idea whether it means US dollars or New Taiwan dollars, haha. Later on, I realized that these symbols are mainly used for quick identification, so you can avoid a bunch of complicated writing: seeing € means Euro, and seeing ¥ means you have to figure out whether it’s Renminbi or Japanese Yen.

What’s most interesting is that the same symbol is basically two completely different things in different countries. For example, $ is used across more than 30 countries: in the US it’s US$, in Canada it’s C$, in Australia it’s A$, and in Hong Kong it’s HK$—each has its own way of writing. The Korean won symbol ₩ is also fairly common, especially when trading in Asian markets.

I also later found out that there are tricks for typing these symbols on the keyboard, and Mac and Windows are different. On Mac, the Euro € is Shift + option + 2, while on Windows it’s Alt + E. The US dollar $ is Shift + 4 on both sides. The most special one is ฿—in forex it represents Thai baht, but in the crypto world it means Bitcoin, which is easy to confuse.

Now when I trade, I always add the currency code in front to distinguish them—for example, writing CNY￥100 indicates Renminbi, and JPY￥100 indicates Japanese Yen—so I won’t make mistakes. Have you ever run into a situation where you mix them up?