What are Forex Quotes Every second, billions of pounds, dollars, Euros, yens, etc. are changing hands around the world. The changing prices are referred to as currency rates, i.e. the currency amount one can buy using another currency. The notion of forex quotes may be a hard one to grasp, but that is ultimately not as difficult. On the foreign exchange market, currencies are exchanged and traded against one another. A quote is a pair of currencies, where the first one is referred to as the base currency and is always equal to 1. The second one is the counter or quote currency. Similar to transactions made on other markets, the forex quotes have two sides, the ask and bid. The ask represents the price at which one can buy the base currency. The bid stands for the price at which one can sell the base currency. Ever since the Euro appeared, it has to be the base currency in every pair as stipulated by the European Central Bank, even though historically, the base pair was to be the stronger one. For example, the quote EURJPY 110.7220 means that one Euro is worth 110.7220 yens. The exchange rates are constantly fluctuating, although these fluctuations rarely reach the tenths. The change is very small and occurs roughly every five seconds. It may drop to 110.710, then increase to 110.7680 in the next five seconds. It is truly a master’s game to make a profit on something like this and in fact, most people don’t. Points to keep in mind when you are looking at the quote are: the trade time, the bid and ask price, the values of the exchange at the closing and opening of trade on the previous day, the day’s range (for example, from 109 to 111), and the annual range (the range of the quote marked in the current year, for example from 105 to 113). Recent data shows that the US dollar was part of 84.39 percent of all transactions; so, maybe using the USD in a pair would have been a more relevant example. All the factors that affect a given currency have impact on the ones it is traded against, thereby creating a correlation between currencies. Therefore, a national economic crisis cannot possibly be contained within the geographic boundaries of the respective country. Back to the most popular currencies – the US dollar is followed by the Euro, the yen, and the sterling with 39.1 percent, 19.0 percent, and 12.9 percent respectively. Next are the Australian dollar, participating in 7.6 percent of all transactions, the Swiss franc with 6.4 percent, the Canadian dollar with 5.3 percent, the Hong Kong dollar with 2.4 percent, the Swedish krona with 2.2 percent, and the New Zealand dollar coming in tenth with 1.6 percent. Other currencies account for 18.6 percent of the transactions. The most frequently traded quotes are EURUSD with 27 percent, USDJPY with 13 percent, and GBPUSD with 12 percent. Every transaction involves two types of currencies in a pair; so, the volume percentages for all the separate currencies come to a total of 200 percent.