Yard

A unit of size used when currency amounts are spoken rather than typed. A yard of euros means one thousand million euros, and the word is used across the interbank market in the same way that pip, big figure and lot are used, as a piece of professional shorthand that keeps a price or an amount short enough to say quickly and hard to mishear.

The reason it exists is an ambiguity in the English word billion. In the older British convention a billion meant a million million, while in American usage it meant a thousand million, and both were in circulation among people dealing with each other over a telephone line. Milliard, the French and German word, means a thousand million and nothing else, so the market took it, shortened it to yard, and removed the ambiguity from the one word where it was most expensive.

Two things are commonly misread. A yard is an amount of one named currency, not a quantity of contracts and not a value in dollars, so a yard of yen and a yard of dollars are entirely different exposures and only a rate converts between them. And the word appears in commentary about flows because amounts of that order are dealt between banks, which is a different market from the one a retail quote comes from. The ambiguity yard removed at the top of the scale also survives lower down it, since desks differ on what they call a million, which is why professional convention is a local dialect rather than a standard.