Brent crude vs. USD market value
I don't think the two are particularly linked.  While Brick is right in that the price of oil is denominated in dollars, I don't think that's responsible for most of the movement here. Oil has been weak for intrinsic reasons related to oil: supply/demand imbalance, largely.  (Oil also was way over-priced back when it was > $100 a barrel; a lot of that was due to worries about instability in the Middle East.) The dollar has been strong for other, separate intrinsic reasons.  The American economy has had a stronger rebound than Europe or Asia; while we were hit hard in the 2008 recession, we rebounded pretty quickly from a whole-economy point of view (we still have a lot of weaknesses in terms of long-term unemployment, but that doesn't seem to be hurting our productivity much).   Pick another time period, and you won't necessarily see the same matching path (and I would even say that those paths don't match particularly well).  Marketwatch covered this for example; other sites show similar things.  There is a weak correlation, but only in the short term, or for specific reasons. "It's standard to price oil in US$.  That means that if the US$ gets stronger, the prices of oil drops even if its ""intrinsic value"" remains constant.  Same thing happens for other commodities, such as gold.  Think of the oil price in barrels/$.  If the denominator (value of the $) goes up, then the ratio tends to go down."
Most of the gold prices at international markets are USD denominated. Hence the prices would be same in international markets where large players are buying and selling. However this does not mean that the prices to the individuals in local markets is same. The difference is due to multiple things like cost of physical delivery, warehousing, local taxation, conversion of Local currency to USD etc. So in essence the price of Gold is similar to price of Crude Oil. The price of Oil is more or less same on all the markets exchanges, though there is small difference this is because of the cost of delivery/shipment which is borne by the buyer. However the cost of Oil to retail individual varies from country to country. Just because pricing isn't tracked, doesn't mean the dollar price is not backed up by oil (they are others factors involved, of course). But the very fact that OPEC, the worlds largest oil cartel, currently only trade in dollars, effectively means that everyone who wants oil needs dollars to buy it. Therefore, to function in modern global economy, dollars are always needed regardless of exchange rates or interest rates on bonds. In reality the amount debt the US has backed up against its currency wouldn't hold for any other country, apart from US, with its petrodollar status. Yes, the US dollar is the standard for all global trade - IMF driven  And China has been going for that title for the past decade and this is a very smart and tactical way to do it  If this goes through, gold &amp; oil might become really good place to be. The US has been in a supply run and kept the price of oil low.  Things are changing quick... It's very simple.  Use USDSGD.  Here's why: Presenting profits/losses in other currencies or denominations can be useful if you want to sketch out the profit/loss you made due to foreign currency exposure but depending on the audience of your app this may sometimes confuse people (like yourself). "The prices quoted are for currency pairs traded on the foreign exchange market. For currencies traded on these exchanges, the exchange rates of a given currency pair are determined by the market, so supply and demand, investor confidence, etc. all play a role. EBS and Reuters are the two primary trading platforms in the foreign exchange market, and much of the data on exchange rates comes from them. Websites will usually get their data either from these sources directly or from a data provider that in turn gets it from EBS, Reuters, or another data source like Bloomberg or Haver Analytics. These data sources aren't free, however.  In the US, many contracts, transactions, etc. that involve exchange rates use the exchange rate data published by the Federal Reserve. You might see this in contracts that specify to use ""the exchange rate published by the Federal Reserve at 12 pm (noon) on date --some date--"". You can also look at the Federal Reserve Economic Data, which maintains data series of historical daily, weekly, and monthly exchange rates for major currency pairs. These data are free, although they aren't realtime. Data for each business day is mostly updated the next business day." "Moving oil trade out of dollars into yuan will take right now between $600 billion and $800 billion worth of transactions out of the dollar…   When this happens, the US dollar should drop to about 50% of it's current value and at that point, the US century will be over. What happens after that is anybodies guess but I expect that the US will have to either use it's military to shore up the dollar in exactly the same way they did when the invaded Iraq to prevent the sale of oil in Juan OR the US will blink and it's expensive military around the world will have to be clawed back. Simply put, the US will no longer be the world's policeman""." According to your post, you bought seven shares of VBR at $119.28 each on August 23rd.  You paid €711,35.  Now, on August 25th, VBR is worth $120.83.  So you have  But you want to know what you have in EUR, not USD.  So if I ask Google how much $845.81 is in EUR, it says €708,89.  That's even lower than what you're seeing.   It looks like USD has fallen in value relative to EUR.  So while the stock price has increased in dollar terms, it has fallen in euro terms.  As a result, the value that you would get in euros if you sold the stock has fallen from the price that you paid.   Another way of thinking about this is that your price per share was €101,72 and is now €101,33.  That's actually a small drop.   When you buy and sell in a different currency that you don't actually want, you add the currency risk to your normal risk.  Maybe that's what you want to do.  Or maybe you would be better off sticking to euro-denominated investments.   Usually you'd do dollar-denominated investments if some of your spending was in dollars.  Then if the dollar goes up relative to the euro, your investment goes up with it.  So you can cash out and make your purchases in dollars without adding extra money.   If you make all your purchases in euros, I would normally recommend that you stick to euro-denominated investments.  The underlying asset might be in the US, but your fund could still be in Europe and list in euros.   That's not to say that you can't buy dollar-denominated investments with euros.  Clearly you can.  It's just that it adds currency risk to the other risks of the investment.  Unless you deliberately want to bet that USD will rise relative to EUR, you might not want to do that.   Note that USD may rise over the weekend and put you back in the black.  For that matter, even if USD continues to fall relative to the EUR, the security might rise more than that.  I have no opinion on the value of VBR.  I don't actually know what that is, as it doesn't matter for the points I was making.  I'm not saying to sell it immediately.  I'm saying that you might prefer euro-denominated investments when you buy in the future.  Again, unless you are taking this particular risk deliberately. NUGT and DUST both track GDX with triple leverage, but in opposite directions. GDX has been rising steadily throughout 2016, and certainly since over the last month. DUST experiences much higher volume when GDX is in a downward trend, as it was from 2013-2016. I think you'll see the same thing with DRIP and GUSH when oil has been moving steadily in one direction or the other. This is really a reflection of the herd mentality to jump in when things look like they're going a particular direction. HSBC exchange spread between HKD and USD was 483 bps (1 bps is 0.0001) on their 24 hours exchange network a few weeks ago when I checked. It is very high for a pair of linked currencies which has very little fluctuation. One should expect less than 5 bps or even 1 bps. I did my currency conversion at a US brokerage which can take HKD currency and then I was able to pick the time/rate and amount I like to make the conversion. Basically, the currency pair runs within a tight band and you just need to buy USD with HKD at the time when it is near the edge of the band to your advantage. There is usually no fee on currency conversion. They make money through the spread. HSBC premier allows you to wire free among countries. I forget whether they offer tighter spread or not.  Rob was right on about the cost of transferring money overseas. The majority of the cost is in the conversion, not the wiring. The missing information is at the end of the first line: the price is from NASDAQ (most specifically Nasdaq Global Select), which is a stock exchange in the USA, so the price is in US Dollars. Russia main reserve is Euro, Gold and Yuan. They have dumped good sums of dollar since way back. The rest of oil buyers would gladly pay russians in whatever currency they want, specially if it is non dollar. Cheap oil on cheaper currency?  Who doesn't want that?  The chinese pay their oil in Yuan. Russian gladly takes Yuan, since its the most liquid currency in pacific, not to mention china is their no.1 trading partner. "First of all, the answer to your question depends on your starting dates and ending dates. So developed markets returns are higher over one period, and emerging markets returns over other periods. So far, there does not appear to be a systematic tilt in favor of one or the other. The reasons are as you said. Emerging markets tend to have higher returns in nominal terms, but developed markets currency movements (sometimes) cancel this out. So watch out for periods of strong and weak developed markets (e.g. U.S) currencies. In ""strong"" currency periods (such as those of the past five years or so),  you want U.S. market exposure, and in ""weak"" currency periods, the larger nominal local returns will be fully reflected in dollar terms as well." "In the US, stocks are listed on one exchange but can be traded on multiple venues.  You need to confirm exactly what your data is showing: a) trades on the primary-listed exchange; or b) trades made at any venue. Also, the trade condition codes are important.  Only certain trade condition codes contribute towards the day's open/high/low/close and some others only contribute towards the volume data.  The Consolidated Tape Association is very clear on which trades should contribute towards each value - but some vendors have their own interpretation (or just simply an erroneous interpretation of the specifications). It may surprise you to find that the majority of trading volume for many stocks is not on their primary-listed exchange.  For example, on 2 Mar 2015, NASDAQ:AAPL traded a total volume across all venues was 48096663 shares but trading on NASDAQ itself was 12050277 shares. Trades can be cancelled.  Some data vendors do not modify their data to reflect these busted trades.   Some data vendors also ""snapshot"" their feed at a particular point in time of the data.  Some exchanges can provide data (mainly corrections) 4-5 hours after the closing bell.  By snapshotting the data too early and throwing away any subsequent data is a typical cause of data discrepancies.   Some data vendors also round prices/volumes - but stocks don't just trade to two decimal places. So you may well be comparing two different sets of trades (with their own specific inclusion rules) against the same stock.  You need to confirm with your data sources exactly how they do things. Disclosure: Premium Data is an end-of-day daily data vendor." You will most likely not be able to avoid some form of format conversion, regardless of which data you use since there is, afaik, no standard for this data and everyone exports it differently. One viable option would be, like you said yourself, using the free data provided by Dukascopy. Please take into consideration that those are spot currency rates and will most likely not represent the rate at which physical and business-related exchange would have happened at this time. To the best of my knowledge, Los Angeles County does not require a lawyer to be involved in a real-estate transaction. I looked through the County Recorder site and found no evidence that a lawyer is required. I live in a different county in California where a lawyer is also not required for real-estate transactions. Some counties do require a lawyer to be involved. That said, a purchase contract - is a contract. A legal document which you sign. A realtor may be able to help you understand the housing market pricing trends, but cannot (not allowed by law) draft the contract for you or advise to you on the clauses of the contract you're signing. Only a lawyer licensed in your State (California) is allowed to do that. So if you want a legal advice about the contract you're going to sign - you need to talk to a lawyer. Especially if you want a contract drafted for your own special needs, or have some specific titling requirements (for a company, or a trust - for example). Same goes for the mortgage contract and any other piece of paper you'll be signing during the closing meeting (and there will be plenty of such signatures). So it is not a question of need, it's a question of should.