What Is the Exchange Rate (USD/TRY)?

An exchange rate is the value of one currency expressed in another. The most closely watched rate, USD/TRY, shows how many Turkish lira equal 1 US dollar. Likewise EUR/TRY tells you how many lira one euro is worth. A rate is a price: it is the amount of lira you must pay to buy or sell a foreign currency, and it changes continuously with supply and demand.

What is a rate and how do you read it?

A pair like USD/TRY is a ratio of two currencies. The one written first (USD) is the base currency and the second (TRY) is the quote currency; the rate tells you how many units of the quote currency one unit of the base currency buys. So when USD/TRY rises, the lira is losing value against the dollar, and when it falls the lira is gaining value. The same event reads two ways: as the dollar gets more expensive, the lira gets cheaper.

In everyday life a rate may look like a single number, but it actually has two sides:

• Bid (alış) — the price at which an institution is willing to buy the currency from you.
• Ask (satış) — the usually slightly higher price at which the same institution will sell it to you.

The gap between them is the spread (makas). When you buy and sell currency, this spread is a transaction cost to you; the "mid" rate shown in news and charts is not the price at which real trades happen — those occur on the bid or ask side. The wider the spread, the more it costs to buy a currency and sell it straight back; that is often why the rates you see from different sources differ.

Why do rates move?

An exchange rate is the outcome of supply and demand for a currency. Interest-rate differences, foreign trade and the balance of payments, capital flows, inflation expectations and central-bank policy are among the many forces that constantly shift that balance. For example, if a currency's interest rate is relatively high, demand for it may rise; if inflation expectations climb, it may tend to lose value. These forces act at the same time and often pull in opposite directions, so explaining a rate by any single cause is misleading. The purpose of this page is not to predict which force will dominate and when — where a rate will go in the future cannot be foreseen, and no forecast or steer is offered here. What matters is the structural idea: a rate is not a direction but the relative value between two currencies; when one gains, the other loses.

Why does the rate matter to a fund investor?

The rate's main function on this site is to convert a return into a dollar (foreign-currency) basis. A fund is measured in Turkish lira; but if the lira itself is losing value against foreign currency, part of the rise in lira is not a genuine gain, only the effect of the rate. To see this difference, a lira return is carried into dollars like this:

USD-based return ≈ (1 + lira return) × (period-start rate ÷ period-end rate) − 1

That is, the nominal lira return is rescaled by the USD/TRY rates at the start and end of the period. The result can be striking: a fund that looks positive in lira can come out flat or negative in dollars if, over the same period, the lira fell faster against the dollar. This is not a contradiction; "how many lira did I earn" and "how many dollars was it worth" are two separate questions.

Currency conversion is one face of the real return idea: converting to foreign currency is also a kind of purchasing-power measure — but it looks through a hard-currency lens rather than a consumption basket. Inflation-based real return answers "can my money still buy as much as before"; the inflation lens and the USD-based return answer different things — the latter asks "did my investment gain value against the dollar." They can point in different directions for the same fund.

An exchange rate is not the same as a currency fund

These two terms are often confused but are distinct. An exchange rate is a price — the ratio between two currencies, and the subject of this page. A currency fund is an investment vehicle: a fund that holds its portfolio mainly in foreign-currency-denominated assets (such as eurobonds and FX deposits). The rate is a unit of measurement; the currency fund is a product affected by that measurement. You can view different currency funds on the currency funds category page.

On this site the rate data is sourced from TCMB EVDS (the Electronic Data Delivery System); the USD and EUR pairs are fed from the official source. To see step by step how a given amount would have changed between two dates in both lira and foreign-currency terms, use the calculator on the /fon-getiri-hesaplama page. These pages give no recommendation; they simply show the figure converted onto different bases.