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Below is a sample mailout from the XE.com E-Mail Currency Update Service. Once you subscribe to the service, a message like this will arrive by electronic mail every business day.
As you can see in the sample below, the effective date and time of the rate data appears near the top of the mailout. (In this example, the mailout uses rates from 21:20 UTC on March 14, 2002.) At the end of this line you can see the base currency for the rate table. This is the currency in which all other rates are expressed.
Rate tables contain three columns. The first column lists each currency unit. The second column lists the amount of your selected base currency that you could purchase with one unit of the currency listed in column one. The third column lists the amount of currency listed in column one that you could purchase with one unit of your base currency.
In the sample mailout, the selected base currency is USD United States Dollars. To see what the table tells us, let's say we were interested in how the new Euro fares against the US Dollar. Find the second row under the "Currency Unit" heading, the which is "EUR Euro". In second column of that row you will find the number of US Dollars that you could purchase with one Euro; in this example, "0.882525". The third column lists the number of Euro that you could purchase with one US Dollar; in this example, "1.13311". (Of course, these values only apply specifically to the date in question.)
Let's try another currency, the Japanese Yen. Read down the table to the fifth row, the row that starts with "JPY Japan Yen". Under the "USD/Unit" heading, we see the value "0.00773976". This is the number of US Dollars per each Yen, which is to say the number of US Dollars that a single Yen could buy. Under the "Units/USD" heading, we see the value "129.203". This is the number of Yen that a single US Dollar could buy on the date in question.
If you are interested in how any other listed currency compares to the US Dollar, you need only find that currency's row and repeat the above process.
Sharp-eyed subscribers will notice that the apparent "precision" of the listed values varies from currency to currency. Those familiar with the concept of significant figures will notice currency values in the list have either (a) six significant figures or (b) two decimal places, whichever yields more information. For more information on this significant figures and rounding, click here.
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