Forex PIP. What is It? A Tutorail
Saturday, June 27th, 2009Check out this excellent Forex Pips Guide from a cool forex site.
While you start searching for FX trading websites online, you will quickly see references to the forex pip. Your gains and losses will be considered in pips. another thing that is measured in pips is the spread, the variation between the bid and ask prices which is the major cost of forex and how the brokers create their wealth. So it is undoubtedly very crucial to be familiar with what is a pip.
The acronym stands for Percentage in Point (otherwise, price interest point). It is the least increment of changes in rates. It allows us to determine a climb or drop in currency values in percentage terms as a replacement for of dollars and cents.
Why do we need to talk in pips? The reason for this is simple. In the forex market there is no common currency in which to state prices. The United States Dollar may be the most generally traded currency but it is not involved in all forex trades. If you are trading cross rates, i.e. two extra currencies such as EUR/GBP or any other grouping that does not comprise USD, it would not make any sense at all to express your gains and losses in terms of USD. As a substitute, we require something that is a small percentage of the value of whatever currencies we are doing the trade with.
This just means that he monetary price of a pip varies according to the currency pair. Even if you are using the best forex software you have to have a sound understanding about pips.
generally currencies are quoted to 4 decimal points. For illustration you might notice the bid price for EUR/USD quoted at 1.3641 and ask price 1.3645. The difference (the spread) is 0.0004 or 4 pips. In this case a pip is 0.01% of a lot.
therefore if the lot size was $100,000, one pip would be worth US dollar10. Similarly for a lot size of $10,000, one pip would be USD1.
That is the value of pips when the US $ is the quote currency, i.e. EUR/USD , GBP/USD etc. But if the quote currency is something else, one pip is commonly 10 units of that currency (e.g. 10 euros or 10 pounds). Or if your lot size is 10,000 units, one pip is 1 unit (1 euro or 1 pound).
The exception is the Japanese yen which has a very low unit value than most currencies (you get a lot of yen to the dollar). Because of this, the the Japanese Yen is simply quoted to the second decimal point. You might observe a price USD/JPY 110.12. In this instance one pip is 0.01 or 1% but in yen, not dollars. So the pip value is JPY 1000 which at that price would be worth US $11.012.
These figures can be confusing when you are a beginner at currency trading. So it is better to start trading consistently with just one currency pair.
If you are trading one pair repeatedly daily you will soon get used to how much a pip means in terms of your actual profits and losses in your account. You will identify how much one pip is worth in dollars or in your own currency.
But as soon as you are trading a number of different forex pairs, you have to deal with pips of different values. If you get baffled, you could be taking bigger risks than you considered or closing trades with less gains than you thought. It is much easier to deal with just one pair at first until you have a sound awareness of trading practices and forex pip rates.
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