Stock portfolio value & profit in foreign currency
I think this will do the trick: 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).
From an investor's standpoint, if the value of crude oil increases, economies that are oil dependent become more favourable (oil companies will be more profitable).  Therefore, investors will find that country's currency more attractive in the foreign exchange market. At the heart of this issue is an accounting disagreement that BIS has with current accounting standards.  So basically, foreign investors want to invest in lucrative American Dollar investment products but they don't want to have to buy American Dollars in order to do so because of foreign exchange risk (the risk that by the time your investment is realized, any gains are adversely effected by the change in currency values). So instead, they trade in a series of (currency) swaps that allow them to mitigate that foreign exchange risk. In doing so, they are only required by current accounting standards to record such transactions at fair value = 0, thus skipping over the balance sheet and only hitting the footnotes. BIS believes these transactions should be recorded at gross values and on the balance sheet as opposed to the footnotes.  The debt is hidden insofar as global dollar debt is calculated using liabilities on balance sheets and not the footnotes. That being said, in no way are these transactions truly hidden as (1) any good analyst values footnotes as much as the financial statements themselves and (2) exposure isn't really the same as debt.  TL:DR BIS (as reputable as they are) wants to change currently accepted accounting standards and screaming $14 TRILLION DOLLARS is their way of doing it. To transfer US$30,000 from the USA to Europe, ask your European banker for the SWIFT transfer instructions.  Typically in the USA the sending bank needs a SWIFT code and an account number, the name and address of the recipient, and the amount to transfer.  A change of currency can be made as part of the transfer.   The typical fee to do this is under US$100 and the time, under 2 days.  But you should ask (or have the sender ask) the bank in the USA about the fees.  In addition to the fee the bank may try to make a profit on the change of currency.  This might be 1-2%.    If you were going to do this many times, one way to go about it is to open an account at Interactive Brokers, which does business in various countries.  They have a foreign exchange facility whereby you can deposit various currencies into your account, and they stay in that currency.  You can then trade the currencies at market rates when you wish.  They are also a stock broker and you can also trade on the various exchanges in different countries.  I would say, though, they they mostly want customers already experienced with trading. I do not know if they will allow someone other than you to pay money into your account. Trading companies based in the USA do not like to be in the position of collecting on cheques owed to you, that is more the business of banks.  Large banks in the USA with physical locations charge monthly fees of $10/mo or more that might be waived if you leave money on deposit. Online banks have significantly lower fees.  All US banks are required to follow US anti-terrorist and anti-crime regulations and will tend to expect a USA address and identity documents to open an account with normal customers.   A good international bank in Europe can also do many of these same sorts of things for you. I've had an account with Fortis. They were ok, there were no monthly fees but there were fees for transactions.  In some countries I understand the post even runs a bank.  Paypal can be a possibility, but fees can be high ~3% for transfers, and even higher commissions for currency change.  On the other hand, it is probably one of the easiest and fastest ways to move amounts of $1000 or less, provided both people have paypal accounts. "My question boiled down: Do stock mutual funds behave more like   treasury bonds or commodities? When I think about it, it seems that   they should respond the devaluation like a commodity. I own a quantity   of company shares (not tied to a currency), and let's assume that the   company only holds immune assets. Does the real value of my stock   ownership go down? Why? On December 20, 1994, newly inaugurated President Ernesto Zedillo   announced the Mexican central bank's devaluation of the peso between   13% and 15%.  Devaluing the peso after previous promises not to do so   led investors to be skeptical of policymakers and fearful of   additional devaluations. Investors flocked to foreign investments and   placed even higher risk premia on domestic assets. This increase in   risk premia placed additional upward market pressure on Mexican   interest rates as well as downward market pressure on the Mexican   peso.  Foreign investors anticipating further currency devaluations   began rapidly withdrawing capital from Mexican investments and selling   off shares of stock as the Mexican Stock Exchange plummeted. To   discourage such capital flight, particularly from debt instruments,   the Mexican central bank raised interest rates, but higher borrowing   costs ultimately hindered economic growth prospects. The question is how would they pull this off if it's a floatable currency.  For instance, the US government devalued the US Dollar against gold in the 30s, moving one ounce of gold from $20 to $35.   The Gold Reserve Act outlawed most private possession of gold, forcing   individuals to sell it to the Treasury, after which it was stored in   United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox and other locations. The   act also changed the nominal price of gold from $20.67 per troy ounce   to $35. But now, the US Dollar is not backed by anything, so how do they devalue it now (outside of intentionally inflating it)?  The Hong Kong Dollar, since it is fixed to the US Dollar, could be devalued relative to the Dollar, going from 7.75 to 9.75 or something similar, so it depends on the currency. As for the final part, ""does the real value of my stock ownership go down"" the answer is yes if the stock ownership is in the currency devalued, though it may rise over the longer term if investors think that the value of the company will rise relative to devaluation and if they trust the market (remember a devaluation can scare investors, even if a company has value). Sorry that there's too much ""it depends"" in the answer; there are many variables at stake for this.  The best answer is to say, ""Look at history and what happened"" and you might see a pattern emerge; what I see is a lot of uncertainty in past devaluations that cause panics." Great question. Surprisingly, stock returns and GDP growth are mostly unrelated. In fact, they are slightly inversely correlated when you look across countries. Consider a firm that earns $100 on average per year with zero growth. If investors apply a 10% discount rate to this firm, the company will have a market value of $100/10% = $1,000. If it continues to earn $100 per year, it will produce 10% returns despite zero growth in earnings. You can see that realized returns are largely a function of the return investors demand for putting their money in risky assets.  I say mostly unrelated because an increase in GDP growth may increase our firms earnings (though the relationship to earnings per share is muddied by new share issuances, buybacks, M&amp;A, etc.). But you can see from the above example that returns can vastly exceed growth in perpetuity. The currency market, more often referred as Forex or FX, is the decentralized market through which the currencies are exchanged. To trade currencies, you have to go through a broker or an ECN. There are a lot's of them, you can find a (small) list of brokers here on Forex Factory. They will allow you to take very simple position on currencies. For example, you can buy EUR/USD. By doing so, you will make money if the EUR/USD rate goes up (ie: Euro getting stronger against the US dollar) and lose money if the EUR/USD rate goes down (ie: US dollar getting stronger against the Euro). In reality, when you are doing such transaction the broker: borrows USD, sell it to buy EUR, and place it into an Euro account. They will charge you the interest rate on the borrowed currency (USD) and gives you the interest and the bought currency (EUR). So, if you bought a currency with high interest rate against one with low interest rate, you will gain the interest rate differential. But if you sold, you will lose the differential. The fees from the brokers are likely to be included in the prices at which you buy and sell currencies and in the interest rates that they will charge/give you. They are also likely to gives you big leverage to invest far more than the money that you deposited in their accounts. Now, about how to make money out of this market... that's speculation, there are no sure gains about it. And telling you what you should do is purely subjective. But, the Forex market, as any market, is directed by the law of supply and demand. Amongst what impacts supply and demands there are: Also, and I don't want to judge your friends, but from experience, peoples are likely to tell you about their winning transaction and not about their loosing ones. First of all, I think I'll clear off some confusion in the topic. The Sterling Ratio is a very simple investment portfolio measurement that fits nicely to the topic of personal finance, although not so much to a foreign exchange trading system. The Sterling Ratio is mainly used in the context of hedge funds to measure its risk-reward ratio for long term investments. To do so, it has been adapted to the following in order to appear more like the Sharpe Ratio:  I Suppose this is why you question the Average Largest Draw-down. I'll come back to that later. It's original definition, suggested by the company Deane Sterling Jones, is a little different and perhaps the one you should use if you want to measure your trading system's long term risk-reward ratio, which is as followed:  Note: Average Annual Draw-down has to be negative on the above-mentioned formula. This one is very simple to calculate and the one to use if you want to measure any portfolio's long-term results, such an example of a 5 or 10 years period and calculate the average of each years largest drawdown. To answer @Dheer's comment, this specific measurement can also be used in personal investments portfolio, which is considered a topic related to personal finance. Back to the first one, which answers your question. It's used in most cases in investment strategies, such as hedging, not trading systems. By hedging I mean that in these cases long term investments are made in anti-correlated securities to obtain a diversified portfolio with a very stable growth. This one is calculated normally annually because you rely on the Annual Risk-Free Rate. Having that in mind I think you can guess that the Average Largest Drawdown is the average between the Largest/Maximum Drawdown from each security in the portfolio. And this doesn't make sense in a trading system. Example: If you have invested in 5 different securities where we calculated the Largest Draw-down for each, such as represented in the following array: MaxDD[5] = { 0.12, 0.23, 0.06, 0.36, 0.09 }, in this case your Average Largest Draw-down is the average(MaxDD) that equals 0.172 or 17,2% If your portfolio's annual return is 15% and the Risk-free Rate is 10%, your Sterling Ratio SR = (0.15 - 0.10)/0.172, which result to 0.29. The higher the rate better is the risk-reward ratio of your portfolio. I suggest in your case to only use the original Sterling Ratio to calculate your long-term risk-reward, in any other case I suggest looking at the Sharpe and Sortino ratios instead. "What you are seeking is termed ""Alpha"", the mispricing in the market. Specifically, Alpha is the price error when compared to the market return and beta of the stock. Modern portfolio theory suggests that a portfolio with good Alpha will maximize profits for a given risk tolerance. The efficient market hypotheses suggests that Alpha is always zero. The EMH also suggests that taxes, human effort and information propagation delays don't exist (i.e. it is wrong). For someone who is right, the best specific answer to your question is presented Ben Graham's book ""The Intelligent Investor"" (starting on page 280). And even still, that book is better summarized by Warren Buffet (see Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders). In a great disservice to the geniuses above it can be summarized much further: closely follow the company to estimate its true earnings potential... and ignore the prices the market is quoting. ADDENDUM: And when you have earnings potential, calculate value with: NPV = sum(each income piece/(1+cost of capital)^time) Update: See http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2014/02/24/warren-buffett-berkshire-letter/ ""When Charlie Munger and I buy stocks..."" for these same ideas right from the horse's mouth"