How to Read a Forex Quote (With Real Examples)
How to read forex quotes: the pair, bid and ask, big figure, pips, spread, daily change and high/low, with real EUR/USD, USD/JPY and cross examples.
You open a trading platform for the first time and see a wall of numbers: two prices for every pair, one pair of digits printed bigger than the rest, a percentage in red or green, and a high and a low. Learning how to read forex quotes takes about ten minutes, and it is the skill everything else is built on.
Quick answer: To read a forex quote, start with the pair: the price is what one unit of the first (base) currency costs in the second (quote) currency. The lower number is the bid, where you sell; the higher is the ask, where you buy. The gap is the spread, counted in pips, the fourth decimal (second on yen pairs).
How to read forex quotes: the parts of a quote screen
Every trading platform has a quote screen, sometimes called the market watch or watchlist. It is a table with one row per currency pair, updating many times a second. The layout varies, but the same seven pieces of information turn up on almost every one. Here is an illustrative screen with four pairs, using realistic prices. The numbers are examples, not live data.
| Pair | Bid | Ask | Spread (pips) | Change | High | Low |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EUR/USD | 1.08500 | 1.08512 | 1.2 | +0.18% | 1.08710 | 1.08190 |
| USD/JPY | 150.250 | 150.263 | 1.3 | −0.21% | 150.880 | 149.960 |
| GBP/JPY | 190.820 | 190.851 | 3.1 | −0.05% | 191.540 | 190.310 |
| EUR/GBP | 0.85430 | 0.85445 | 1.5 | +0.02% | 0.85580 | 0.85260 |
Read one row from left to right and you have everything you need to know about that pair at that moment. The diagram below takes the EUR/USD row apart.
In plain words, the row says: one euro costs about 1.085 dollars. You can sell euros at 1.08500 or buy them at 1.08512, a gap of 1.2 pips. The pair is 0.18% higher than at yesterday’s close, and today it has traded between 1.08190 and 1.08710.
The rest of this guide takes each piece in turn, then looks at how the quote screen relates to the chart beside it. For the short version with a quiz, see our Academy lesson on currency pairs and quotes.
The pair: which currency is priced, and in what
A forex price is always a comparison between two currencies, so it is written as a pair: EUR/USD, USD/JPY, GBP/JPY. The three-letter codes come from an international standard, ISO 4217. The first two letters usually name the country and the third the currency, so USD is the US dollar, GBP the British pound and JPY the Japanese yen. The euro is the exception, with EUR.
The first currency is the base currency. The price is always for one unit of it. The second is the quote currency, the one the price is expressed in. So:
- EUR/USD 1.0850 means one euro costs 1.0850 US dollars.
- USD/JPY 150.25 means one US dollar costs 150.25 Japanese yen.
- EUR/GBP 0.8543 means one euro costs 0.8543 British pounds.
A price below 1, as on EUR/GBP, means one unit of the base currency is worth less than one unit of the quote currency. If you want the price the other way round, divide 1 by the quote: one pound costs 1 ÷ 0.8543, or about 1.17 euros, and one yen costs 1 ÷ 150.25, about two-thirds of a US cent. Brokers do not list the inverted pairs; they follow a fixed market convention about which currency comes first. Our guide to base currency vs quote currency explains that convention in detail.
The pair also tells you how to read the direction of a move. When the number goes up, the base currency has strengthened against the quote currency. When it goes down, the base currency has weakened. That sounds obvious on EUR/USD, but it trips people up when the dollar is first.
This is also how you turn a view into a trade. If you think the base currency will strengthen, you buy the pair; if you think it will weaken, you sell it. Expecting a stronger yen therefore means selling USD/JPY, even though your view is positive on the yen. Our guide to long vs short in forex walks through that logic with more examples.
Bid and ask: which number is your price
Every row on a quote screen has two prices, and they are not interchangeable.
- The bid is the lower price. It is what the market will pay you, so it is where you sell.
- The ask, also called the offer, is the higher price. It is what the market charges you, so it is where you buy.
The same rule applies when you close a trade, which is the part beginners forget. A buy (long) trade is closed by selling, so it closes at the bid. A sell (short) trade is closed by buying, so it closes at the ask. On a one-click trading panel the two prices usually appear as two buttons, Sell on the left showing the bid and Buy on the right showing the ask. Tap through the parts of the EUR/USD quote below.
The bid (1.08500) is the price the broker pays you. If you sell EUR/USD, you sell at the bid.
The EUR/USD quote from our illustrative screen: sell at the bid of 1.08500, buy at the ask of 1.08512. The 1.2-pip gap between them is the spread.
The gap between the two prices is the spread. To read it from a quote, subtract the bid from the ask and count the pips: 1.08512 − 1.08500 = 0.00012, which is 1.2 pips. Many platforms show it in its own column, as in our table. The spread is a cost you pay the moment a trade opens, because a new buy is instantly valued at the lower bid. How much that costs in money, and why spreads widen at night and around news, is covered in our guide to the bid, ask and spread.
Two reading habits help. Glance at the spread column first: a spread several times wider than usual tells you liquidity is thin or news is due. And remember that the midpoint between bid and ask, which some websites show as “the” price, is not a price you can trade at. The Academy lesson on the bid, ask and spread has a short quiz to lock this in.
Big figure, pips and pipettes: reading the digits
Look at the buy and sell buttons on most platforms and the price is not printed in one size. Two digits stand out in large type, the first part of the price is small, and a final digit sits raised at the end. Each part has a name.
The pips are the digits that change most often and matter most, which is why they are printed large. A pip is the fourth decimal place on most pairs (0.0001) and the second on yen pairs (0.01). A move from 1.0852 to 1.0877 is 25 pips. Our guide to what a pip is and the Academy lesson on pips and lots cover what a pip is worth.
The big figure is everything in front of the pips: 1.08 on EUR/USD, 150 on USD/JPY. It changes rarely during a normal day, so dealers leave it out when they talk. A bank dealer quoting EUR/USD as “52, 53” means 1.0852 bid, 1.0853 ask, with the big figure taken as understood. You will also hear a round number such as 1.0800 called “the figure”, as in “it bounced off the figure”. When the price crosses a big figure, from 1.0899 to 1.0900, the small digits change and the large ones reset to 00, so it is worth glancing at the whole price whenever the pips get close to 99 or 00.
The pipette is the raised last digit, a tenth of a pip. Most platforms quote major pairs to five decimals and yen pairs to three, so 1.08523 reads as “1.0852 and 3 pipettes”. Pipettes exist so that spreads and fills can be priced more finely than whole pips. Some platforms, MetaTrader among them, call the smallest increment a point, which on a five-decimal quote is a pipette. So a 100-point move on such a platform is 10 pips, not 100. If a number on your screen seems ten times too big, that is usually the reason.
Try counting pips between two prices yourself in the counter below. The highlighted digit in each price is the pip.
The highlighted digit is the pip. For USD/JPY the pip is the second decimal and its dollar value depends on the price.
Reading yen quotes: why USD/JPY has fewer decimals
Pairs with the Japanese yen as the quote currency look different. USD/JPY trades around 150, not around 1, so it is quoted with two decimals for the pip and three with the pipette: 150.253 rather than 1.08523. The reason is scale. One yen is worth a fraction of a US cent, so the second decimal of a yen price is already a small amount of money, and nobody needs a fourth.
The reading rules do not change. In our table, USD/JPY is quoted 150.250 / 150.263:
- One US dollar costs about 150.25 yen.
- You sell at the bid, 150.250, and buy at the ask, 150.263.
- The spread is 0.013, which is 13 pipettes or 1.3 pips, because a pip on a yen pair is 0.01.
The most common reading error on yen pairs is counting the fourth decimal out of habit. A move from 150.20 to 150.50 is 0.30, which is 30 pips, not 3,000. In the counter below, notice that the highlighted pip digit is now the second decimal.
The highlighted digit is the pip. For USD/JPY the pip is the second decimal and its dollar value depends on the price.
The other thing that changes is what a pip is worth. On a yen pair the pip is counted in yen first: 0.01 × 100,000 units = 1,000 yen per pip on a standard lot. For a US dollar account that has to be converted at the USD/JPY rate, so at 150 it is about $6.67, and it drifts as the rate moves. That is why the familiar “$10 a pip” rule does not apply here. Our guide to pip value by currency pair shows the conversion for every type of pair, and the USD/JPY trading guide explains what tends to move this particular pair.
Every other yen pair, such as EUR/JPY and GBP/JPY, follows the same rules.
Cross quotes: reading EUR/GBP and GBP/JPY
A cross is a pair without the US dollar, such as EUR/GBP or GBP/JPY. You read a cross quote exactly like any other: EUR/GBP 0.85430 means one euro costs 0.8543 pounds, and GBP/JPY 190.820 means one pound costs 190.82 yen. Where those prices come from is less obvious.
The dollar sits on one side of almost nine in ten currency trades worldwide, according to the Bank for International Settlements’ triennial survey. Because the dollar pairs are so liquid, cross rates are closely tied to them: a cross is effectively two dollar pairs combined, with the dollar cancelled out. If a cross drifted far from that implied rate, traders would buy one side and sell the other until the gap closed.
This explains something odd in our quote table. GBP/JPY changed by only −0.05% on the day, even though USD/JPY fell 0.21%. Behind the scenes, GBP/USD had risen about 0.16%. The pound gained against the dollar while the dollar lost against the yen, and the two moves almost cancelled out. Reading a cross well means asking which of its two legs is doing the moving.
Two practical points follow. Crosses usually have wider spreads than the dollar majors, because they are traded less and, in effect, price two conversions at once. And their pip values are in a third currency. On EUR/GBP a pip is 0.0001, worth £10 per standard lot, which is $12.70 to a dollar account when GBP/USD is 1.27. On GBP/JPY a pip is 0.01, worth 1,000 yen per standard lot, like any yen pair. Here is the GBP/JPY quote from our screen to explore.
The spread is the gap between bid and ask: 3.1 pips here. It is the cost of opening a trade, paid the moment you enter.
GBP/JPY is a cross with yen as the quote currency: one pound costs about 190.82 yen, and the 3.1-pip spread is wider than on the dollar majors.
How crosses, majors and exotics differ in cost and behaviour is the subject of our guide to major, minor and exotic currency pairs.
Daily change, high and low: the rest of the row
The last three columns describe the trading day so far. They do not tell you where the price is going, but they put the current price in context.
- Change is how far the price has moved since a reference point, usually the previous day’s close. It may be shown in pips, in price or as a percentage. A green +0.18% on EUR/USD means the euro is 0.18% stronger against the dollar than at yesterday’s close.
- High and low are the highest and lowest prices traded since the day began. The distance between them is the day’s range.
These numbers are useful in three ways. First, the range tells you how active the pair has been. EUR/USD covering 52 pips by mid-afternoon is an ordinary day; 150 pips means something has happened. Second, the position of the current price inside the range tells you which side has had the upper hand: near the high, buyers; near the low, sellers. Third, a percentage change lets you compare pairs that are priced very differently, such as EUR/GBP at 0.85 and GBP/JPY at 190.
Treat them with some care, though. Platforms do not all start the day at the same moment. Many use 17:00 New York time, which is 22:00 in London for most of the year, while some data sites use midnight in their own time zone. Change may be measured from the previous close on one screen and from today’s open on another. The high and low are usually based on the bid. None of that is wrong; it just means two screens can disagree by a few pips.
Those four numbers (open or previous close, high, low and current price) are what a daily candlestick draws. Tap the parts of the candle below.
The body is the range between the open and the close. A long body means one side was firmly in control for the whole period.
A daily candle draws the same numbers as the right-hand side of a quote screen: the open at one end of the body, the current or closing price at the other, and the day's high and low at the tips of the wicks.
Quote screens vs charts: what each one shows
The quote screen and the chart are two views of the same prices, built for different jobs. The quote screen tells you what you can trade right now: both prices, the spread and today’s summary. The chart tells you how the price got here: its history over minutes, days or years. You need both, and it helps to know how they connect.
A candlestick shows the same four prices with a filled body between open and close. Direction and strength are visible instantly. This is what most traders use.
The same EUR/USD prices drawn as a line, as OHLC bars and as candlesticks. Each bar or candle summarises the same four numbers a quote screen shows for the day: open, high, low and close.
The first link is that most retail charts are drawn from the bid. The last price on your chart is the bid in the first column of the quote screen, and the ask sits one spread above it, invisible unless you switch on an ask line in the chart settings. Some charting websites draw the mid price instead. For a buy trade this rarely matters. For a sell trade, whose stop is triggered by the ask, it can matter a great deal when spreads widen, a point our guide to the bid, ask and spread illustrates with a diagram.
The second link is that forex has no single official price. It is traded over the counter rather than on one exchange, so each broker builds its own quotes from the prices its liquidity providers send. Platforms usually agree to within a fraction of a pip, but highs, lows and candle shapes can differ slightly. If your chart’s high is 1.08712 and a news site says 1.08705, neither is wrong.
Use the chart for context and the quote screen for action: read the chart for the trend and key levels, then check the live bid, ask, spread and today’s move on the quote row. The Academy lesson on chart types shows how each chart is built, and our guide on how to read candlestick charts goes further.
The method is the same on every pair: identify the base and quote currencies, take the right side of the quote, count pips on the right decimal, then convert from the quote currency into your own. Our guide to calculating profit and loss in forex applies it to more pairs.
Common mistakes when reading forex quotes
Reading the wrong side of the quote
Expecting to buy at the bid, or to close a short trade at the bid, is the most common reading error. Buying always happens at the higher price, the ask, and selling at the lower, the bid. That applies to closing a trade just as much as opening it.
Counting pipettes as pips
On a five-decimal quote, a move from 1.08523 to 1.08533 is 1 pip, not 10. If your platform reports a move in points, divide by ten to get pips. Mixing the two up makes stops ten times too tight or targets ten times too far away.
Using the four-decimal rule on yen pairs
On USD/JPY, GBP/JPY and every other yen pair, the pip is the second decimal. A move from 150.20 to 150.50 is 30 pips. Counting the fourth decimal turns that into 3,000, which is the kind of error that makes a position size calculation wildly wrong.
Reading the direction backwards on dollar-base pairs
A rising USD/JPY means a stronger dollar and a weaker yen. If your view is that the yen will strengthen, you sell USD/JPY. Always ask which currency comes first before deciding what an up or down move means.
Expecting every screen to show the same price
Forex has no central exchange, so quotes, highs, lows and daily changes differ slightly between brokers and data sites. Use one consistent source for your own analysis, and check what time your platform starts its trading day.
Frequently asked questions
How do you read a forex quote for beginners?
Start with the pair: the price is what one unit of the first currency costs in the second. Then find the two prices. The lower one is the bid, where you sell; the higher one is the ask, where you buy. The difference is the spread, counted in pips. Finally, check the daily change and the day's high and low for context.
What does EUR/USD 1.0850 mean?
It means one euro costs 1.0850 US dollars. The euro is the base currency, because it comes first, and the dollar is the quote currency. If the number rises, the euro has strengthened against the dollar; if it falls, the euro has weakened. Most platforms show it to five decimals, such as 1.08500.
Why do yen pairs have fewer decimal places?
Because one yen is worth a small fraction of a US cent, so pairs such as USD/JPY trade around 150 rather than around 1. The second decimal of a yen price is already a small amount, so the pip is 0.01 instead of 0.0001. With the extra pipette digit, yen pairs are quoted to three decimals, such as 150.253.
What is the big figure in forex?
The big figure is the part of the price in front of the pips: 1.08 in EUR/USD 1.0852, or 150 in USD/JPY 150.25. It changes rarely within a day, so dealers often leave it out and quote just the pips, such as 52 and 53. Platforms usually print it in small type with the pips large.
Does a forex chart show the bid or the ask price?
On most retail platforms the chart is drawn from the bid, so the last price on the chart matches the bid on your quote screen. The ask sits one spread higher and is only visible if you switch on an ask line. Some charting websites draw the mid price instead, so check your settings.
Why is my broker's price different from other websites?
Forex is traded over the counter, not on one exchange, so there is no single official price. Each broker builds its quotes from its own liquidity providers and may start its trading day at a different time. Differences are usually a fraction of a pip on major pairs, though highs, lows and daily changes can vary a little more.
Free course
Learn this step by step
“Forex Foundations” is a free BrokerCut Academy course: 11 short lessons (about 92 minutes), quizzes, interactive tools and a certificate when you finish.
Enrol free
