I only just found out recently that the US dollar symbol, $, is used in so many countries, and it made me think that it was only used in the United States before. After looking it up, I learned that Canada, Singapore, and Australia also use $, and it’s really easy to get them mixed up. So now when I see $, I usually look at the currency code to confirm—for example, US$ means the US dollar, C$ means the Canadian dollar, and A$ means the Australian dollar.

Besides the US dollar symbol, the currencies of other countries each have their own symbols too. The euro is €, the British pound is £, the Japanese yen is ¥, and there are also Thai baht ฿, South Korean won ₩, and Indian rupee ₹. The most interesting one is ￥: in Japan it represents the Japanese yen, and in China it represents the renminbi, so sometimes you’ll see CNY￥100 or JPY￥100 written to tell them apart.

When I do foreign exchange (forex) trading myself, the currency pairs I see most often are the euro against the US dollar (EUR/USD) or the British pound against the Japanese yen (GBP/JPY). The one in front is called the base currency, and the one in back is called the quote currency. Once you understand the US dollar symbol and these currency codes, trading is definitely faster—you don’t have to spend ages thinking about it every time.

If you often need to type these symbols, on Mac the euro is Shift+Option+2, the British pound is Option+3, and the US dollar symbol is just Shift+4. On Windows, the euro is Alt+E, the British pound is Alt+L, and the US dollar is also Shift+4. After you get used to it, you don’t even need to think—your fingers will type them automatically.