Wednesday, 20 July 2011

Understanding Pips In Forex Trading

To forex traders, everything revolves around pips. 

"I'm up 35 pips for the day."

"I made a 127 pip profit on my last trade."

That's great, but what's a pip?

Pip is short for "percentage in point" and you may sometimes hear people refer to pips as points. 

Put simply, a pip is the smallest unit of price for a currency. It's the last decimal point in exchange rates or currency pairs. 

For most currencies its 0.0001. So if you bought USD/CHF1.2475 and sold at 1.2489 you made 14 pips. 

One common exception is USD/JPY. In this currency pair there are only two decimal places so a pip is equal to 0.01.

The reason pips are so important is because they are the basis for calculating profit or loss in forex trading. 

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