Sri Lanka — Finding a Symbol and Reading Its Specification

From an empty Market Watch to a sized order

• Open Market Watch in the terminal: it starts with a short default list, not with everything Exness offers.
• Right-click the list and choose Symbols to open the full tree, grouped into forex, metals, energies, indices, stocks and crypto CFDs.
• Type the ticker rather than the name. Gold is XAUUSD, not Gold; on cent and mini accounts the same instrument carries an m suffix.
• Add the symbol, then open its specification: contract size, digits, minimum volume and swap live there, and every later calculation reads from them.
• Check the digits before reading a spread. Five-digit forex quotes count points, not pips, and mixing them up moves a cost estimate by a factor of ten.
• Only then size the position, on the margin check page, and send the order long or short - all instruments here are traded as CFDs.

What lives behind each branch of the tree

Forex covers more than a hundred currency pairs, from majors such as EUR/USD through minors and exotics. Metals include gold as XAU/USD and silver as XAG/USD. Energies cover crude oil and natural gas. Indices and stocks are index and share CFDs, and there are cryptocurrency CFDs on names such as BTC and ETH which quote around the clock.

The practical point of knowing the branches is that the minimum volume and the contract size change between them. One lot of an index is not one lot of a currency pair, and a position size copied across from a forex habit will not carry the risk it did there.

The check that prevents the most expensive mistake

Before the first order on any new symbol, open the specification and read the contract size out loud against the volume being entered. That single check catches the two errors that cost the most: a decimal misplaced in the volume field, and an assumption carried over from a different instrument.

The second check is the trading session. Instruments do not all quote at the same hours, and an order that will not send on a Sunday evening is usually a closed market rather than a platform fault. The measured trading-hours page records when each instrument on the feed was actually quoting.

From an empty watchlist to a sized order

1. Open Market Watch. It starts on a short default list, which is why an instrument that exists can still look missing.
2. Right-click and choose Symbols to open the full tree: forex, metals, energies, indices, stocks and crypto CFDs each have their own branch.
3. Type the ticker. Searching by name finds fewer instruments than searching by symbol, because the symbol is what the contract is named.
4. Add it, then open the contract specification for that symbol and read four lines: contract size, digits, minimum volume and swap.
5. Convert the quote correctly: five-digit forex quotes count points, and a point is a tenth of a pip, so read digits before reading spread.
6. Size the position from contract size and volume, then send the order long or short - everything here is traded as a CFD, so both directions are available.

The specification is per instrument, not per account. Two symbols in the same group can have completely different contract sizes.

Where this walkthrough goes next