I recently realized that the question of what the dollar sign looks like is actually quite interesting. Because the $ symbol is used in over 30 countries, just looking at the symbol alone can't tell if it's US dollars, Canadian dollars, or New Taiwan dollars, no wonder forex traders use USD$, CAD$, NT$ to distinguish.

I’ve organized some common currency symbols; euro € , British pound £ , Japanese yen ¥ , Korean won ₩ , each has its own style. In Asia, Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines also have different symbols, and the Indian Rupee ₹ looks quite unique. To quickly input the dollar sign on Mac and Windows, both use Shift+4; for euro, Mac uses Shift+Option+2, Windows uses Alt+E, which is quite convenient.

The easiest to confuse is the ￥ symbol; Japan uses it to represent the Japanese yen, while China uses it for the Renminbi, so you need to write CNY￥100 to clearly indicate Renminbi. Another interesting one is ฿, which in forex represents the Thai Baht, but in the cryptocurrency world, it becomes the symbol for Bitcoin, the same symbol with completely different meanings.

When trading forex, seeing currency pairs like EUR/USD, GBP/JPY, the first is the base currency, and the second is the quote currency, indicating the exchange rate between the two currencies. Actually, as long as you remember how the dollar sign is marked and understand each country's currency code, it’s less likely to misread the exchange rate.