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Markets and instruments

Trading on margin can lose you more than you put in. Past results, including backtests, do not predict future results. Cloud9Trader provides tools and education, not financial advice. Read the full risk warning.

An instrument is anything you can buy or sell: a currency pair, a contract on an index or a commodity, or a cryptocurrency. You trade it through a broker, which shows you prices and carries out your orders.

Most instruments on Cloud9Trader are currency pairs, such as EUR/USD. A pair has two parts:

  • The base currency comes first (EUR). It is the thing you are buying or selling.
  • The quote currency comes second (USD). It is what the price is counted in.

So a price of 1.0850 for EUR/USD means one euro costs 1.0850 US dollars. If you buy EUR/USD, you buy euros and pay in dollars, and you gain if the euro rises against the dollar.

Some brokers also offer CFDs (contracts for difference). A CFD lets you trade on the price of something, such as a stock index or gold, without owning it. You gain or lose the change in price, the same way as with a currency pair.

Some brokers offer crypto too. Buying on the spot market means you buy the coin itself, for example BTC paid for in USDT, with the same base and quote structure as a currency pair.

A worked example

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You buy 10,000 EUR/USD at 1.0850.

  • You now hold 10,000 euros, paid for with 10,000 × 1.0850 = 10,850 US dollars.
  • If EUR/USD rises to 1.0900, those euros are worth 10,000 × 1.0900 = 10,900 dollars: 50 dollars more than you paid.
  • If it falls to 1.0800, they are worth 10,800 dollars: 50 dollars less.

The profit or loss is in the quote currency (here, US dollars). If your account is in another currency, it is converted.

In Cloud9Trader

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Cloud9Trader names each instrument by its symbol and its broker, because two brokers can quote the same pair at slightly different prices. For example, EUR/USD:FXCM is EUR/USD from FXCM, and EUR_USD:OANDA is EUR/USD from OANDA.

You choose the instrument in Instrument: when you start a backtest or a trading session. In an algorithm, the instrument it runs on is available as INSTRUMENT, with its base and quote currencies as INSTRUMENT.BASE and INSTRUMENT.QUOTE. Other instruments are available through INSTRUMENTS, for example INSTRUMENTS["EUR/USD:FXCM"].

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