I only realized when I started trading forex that currency symbols may look simple, but there are plenty of traps. For example, the $ symbol is used by more than 30 countries. When you see $100, you can’t tell right away whether it’s in US dollars, Canadian dollars, or New Taiwan dollars—you need to add a prefix (US$, NT$, C$).

I compiled a chart of currency symbols from different countries, listing the most commonly used ones. In Asia, the ￥ symbol is used by both Japan and China—one stands for Japanese yen and the other stands for Chinese yuan. To distinguish them, write JPY￥ and CNY￥. In Europe, € , the British pound £, and the Russian ₽ each have their own distinctive styles. In the Middle East and Africa, the symbols are even more varied; for instance, Thailand’s ฿ symbol also represents Bitcoin in cryptocurrency, which makes it easy to mix up.

If you often need to type these symbols, there are shortcuts on both Mac and Windows. The euro is Shift+Option+2 (Mac) or Alt+E (Windows), and for US dollars you can just use Shift+4. If you don’t feel like memorizing the shortcuts, just copy and paste—most software supports it nowadays.

When trading forex, you often see notations like EUR/USD and GBP/JPY. The one in front is the base currency, and the one after the slash is the quote currency, which indicates the exchange rate. For example, EUR/USD=1.08 means that 1 euro can be exchanged for 1.08 US dollars. Before you start trading, it’s still necessary to get these symbols and codes straight; otherwise, it’s easy to read the market wrong.