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Glossary · Trading basics

Quote

The current price of an instrument from a price source; for a currency pair, how much of the second currency one unit of the first costs.

By Sky Trade editorial teamUpdated

A quote is a price at a moment in time. For a currency pair, EUR/USD 1.0850 means one euro costs 1.0850 US dollars. In most markets a quote has two sides — a bid (where you can sell) and an ask (where you can buy) — and the gap between them is the spread.

Where a quote comes from matters as much as the number. Different providers can show slightly different prices at the same instant, and a quote is only as good as its freshness: a price that stopped updating five minutes ago tells you nothing about now.

On Sky Trade the 21 market forex pairs use real interbank quotes (an OANDA feed via Finnhub). If no fresh real quote has arrived for 2 minutes — at weekends, on holidays or during a feed outage — the pair is refused with “market for this pair is closed”. OTC instruments, by contrast, don't use quotes from any market: their prices are generated by Sky Trade's server.

To see the two pricing worlds side by side, read OTC explained and the entry on the base currency.

Example

USD/JPY quoted at 151.240 means one US dollar buys 151.240 yen. If the quote moves to 151.310, the dollar has gained 7 pips against the yen.

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