Currency pairs

Our trading vehicles

Instruments traded on most popular forex spot market are currency pairs. EUR/USD, USD/JPY, GBP/CHF these are our trading vehicles. Currency pair price equals the ratio of one currency valued against another. The first currency in pair is called base currency, the second one is referred as the quote currency. When you want to buy, an currency pair price specifies how much quote currency you have to pay to obtain one lot of the base currency. When you want to sell, the currency pair price specifies how much quote currency you get when selling one lot of the base currency.

ISO Currency Symbols

All currencies are assigned an ISO (International Standards Organization) code abbreviation. US dollar is as you probably noticed referred as USD, GBP is United Kingdom Pound etc. These abbreviations are commonly used to describe currencies in financial world. List of currency codes is placed [ here ].

Pip and its value

What we are earning here?

While during trading stocks traders are earning cents or its fractions, when trading futures points are being earned or lost during forex trading we are earning or losing pips. Depending on currency pair pips are second or fourth place after coma. For example exchange rate (or currency pair price) for EUR/USD is as for now 1.2068. If it raise to 1.2075 it will be 7 pips up. USD/JPY price is 118.51, pips here are describing second place after coma. Pips can have different values depending in which currency account is denominated. If account is denominated in USD each pip earned in different currency than USD need to be exchanged to USD. In example when we trade USD/JPY we are earning or losing JPY pips. To add then to our USD denominated trading account we need to exchange them to USD. We will look then for JPY/USD exchange rate and we will see how much JPY pip is worth. Every trading platform does such calculations automatically but its good to know why on some pairs we are earning more dollars per pip when on others we earn less. On major currency pairs pips value vary from as low as $0.7 to as high as $1.6. These values are of course approximations as they depend on exchange rates which are changing every minute.