Currency Trading – What Are Pips?
I have been reading about the new foreign exchange software Pip Android and I commenced wondering if the amateur traders know what are those pips anyway. FX trading pips are a crucial part of forex trading that any trader must understand. They’re the measure of changes in price, and thus of profit and loss. Brokers generally interpret pips into dollars and cents for you, or into the currency that your account is held in, if it’s not US dollars. However, when comparing 2 trades with different position sizes it is the profit or loss in pips that tells you more than the profit in bucks.
PIP means percentage in point. It is utilized as a measure of change in price. Spread is also measured in pips. The pip is the smallest part of the measured cost of a quoted currency.
In practice, most currencies are quoted to 4 decimal places, e.g. 1.2315. In this case one pip is 0.0001 units of the quote currency. So if that price changes to 1.2316, the price has increased by one pip.
The Japanese yen is the only one of the major currencies that is low enough in value to be usually quoted to two decimal places. So when the yen is the quote currency, one pip is 0.01 yen.
Some brokers are now beginning to quote the other major currencies to 5 decimal places. Logically this should mean that one pip would be 0.00001 currency units, but the potential there for misunderstanding is big, if a pip would be worth 10 times as much with some brokers than with others. So it seems likely that the pip will stay at 0.0001 units for most currencies.
Most traders record their profit and loss in Forex trading pips as well as in money. This enables simple comparison of one trade with another so you can guage a system. It also implies that traders can debate their results in a forex forum without exposing the scale of their account or their profits in greenbacks and cents.
If a trader tells you that they made one hundred pips profit, you do not learn anything about their money situation. If they are trading a pair like EUR/USD where the dollar is the quote currency, a hundred pips profit would be $1,000 on a standard lot of $100,000 but only $10 on a $1,000 micro lot. To grasp the scale of one pip in dollars in this position multiply 0.0001 by the lot size.
To calculate profit or loss from pips where the dollar is the quote currency, you only need to know that one pip is $0.0001 x lot size. If you have another currency as the quote currency, the pip is of course in that currency, and you can multiply by the exchange rate to know the pip value in bucks.
All this may appear confusing at first sight but anybody who starts trading will very soon understand what a pip means in practice. Currency trading pips are a useful tool for measuring and recording movements in prices in forex trading.