In everyday conversations, we care about a handful of currency pairs that affect our lives. For some Singapore residents, relevant pairs include SGD/MYR, SGD/INR, SGD/JPY. For me, the relevant pairs include USD/SGD and SGD/RMB. Every “relevant” currency pair has two formats — XXX/YYY vs YYY/XXX.  A practical question is … “Which format should I adopt, and shall I stick to that choice all the time?”

Aha .. whenever folks talk about YYY being a bargain, or getting expensive, they implicitly treat YYY as asset.  They wish to see a price history of YYY not XXX as asset.

By default, I prefer the industry standard format, i.e. news media format (rather than the reverse format). The first currency is the asset currency.

eg: USD/SGD .. “USD is falling” or “USD cheaper now”
eg: SGD/RMB .. “SGD is rising”.

Price history is almost always in the standard format, not the nonstandard format. Price history is fundamental to the concept of cheaper/attractive/bargain.

However, there are special situations to “prefer” the nonstandard format.

Eg: when SGD is my home currency, and we have some fixed amount of RMB to convert. It is more natural to say “RMB getting expensive”. This is one of those moments of decision.

• Do we become flexible and designate the more “natural” RMB as asset currency?
• Or Do we decide to stick to the market format, but be flexible to adopt a new speaking habit like “SGD relative to RMB is getting cheap”