Cable

The market nickname for one specific currency pair, sterling against the US dollar. Dealers use it in place of the pair's letters in the same way they use greenback for the dollar or loonie for the Canadian dollar, and it appears in commentary, broker notes and voice broking far more often than the written pair does.

The name is literal history. Before a submarine telegraph cable joined London and New York, a sterling to dollar rate could only be settled by ship, so the two markets quoted independently for weeks at a time. Once the cable carried the rate between them within minutes, the price that came down the wire took the wire's name, and it kept it long after the technology disappeared.

The common error is to stretch the word. Cable names the sterling to dollar rate only. A sterling cross such as sterling against the yen is not cable, and neither is sterling itself, which desks call sterling or the pound. Some traders do use cable loosely for sterling in general, which is why a sentence about cable weakening is worth reading twice: it can mean the pair fell, or it can mean the currency fell against everything.