Forex trading symbols

[stockton]

Can anyone tell me the symbol for selling dollars and buying euros ?
I can find a variety of symbols but not one for this combination.

[DiamondEcho]

'For example, if the USD/EUR currency pair is quoted as being USD/EUR = 1.5 and you purchase the pair, this means that for every 1.5 euros that you sell, you purchase (receive) $1 in U.S. currency. If you sold the currency pair, you would receive 1.5 euros for every $1 you sell. The inverse of the currency quote is EUR/USD, and the corresponding price would be EUR/USD = 0.667, meaning that 66.7 cents in U.S. currency would buy 1 euro.'
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/currencypair.asp

[johnhemming]

Here is an example from Google
https://finance.google.com/finance?q=usdeur

[stockton]

Thanks everybody. It appears that the platform that I was trying to use (IB) simply does not permit one to use usdeur rather than eurusd.

[JMN2]

Surely EUR is the base currency and USD the quoted currency? Other base currencies were Irish Punt and Malta Pound. Always irritated me to do FX with continental banks where they had EUR as base currency against Sterling where as it should of course be GBP.

[DiamondEcho]

Surely EUR is the base currency and USD the quoted currency? Other base currencies were Irish Punt and Malta Pound. Always irritated me to do FX with continental banks where they had EUR as base currency against Sterling where as it should of course be GBP.

There's a convention in 'the west', the way currencies are quoted and ISTR the commonwealth currencies, A$, NZ$, GBP etc all had their own way, even as exceptions to everything else. Forget what the rule was now...
Got to be damned careful in other countries, esp. where a pair is around parity, to identify which side is which in a quoted price.

IB being a US company might quote the $/Eur pair from a US-centric perspective. I do little FX but recall doing an FX conversion GBP>US$>S$ trade via them and one of the legs went through the wrong way around. Before I could figure out what had gone wrong, and then unwind it, I'd turned something like a £50 profit on it hehe...