What are stock market indices priced in?

Trading Systems Expert Advisors and Automated Trading
1

Hi all,
I’ve been looking at the commodities and stock index futures(?) available on my MT4 platform. It seems to me that all commodities (XAUUSD, USOil, UKOil) are priced against the USD.
It also seems that the stock index instruments (are they futures or CFDs?) are priced against the currency of the country that that stock market is in. i.e. the SUI30 (swiss stock index) is priced against CHF.

Have I got this right and is this always the case?

Also, some brokers offer ‘CFD-Index’ instruments on UK and US stocks (i.e. #AAPL).
It looks like UK stocks are priced in GBP, actually in pennies.
I am assuming the US stocks are priced in US dollars.

Can anyone tell me if I’m correct and if there are any other instrument pricing conventions I should know about.
The reason I’m asking these things is to write EA’s in MT4 that work on all the the available speculative instruments.

Thank you!

2

Indexes (or indices, for you language purists) are [I]pure numbers.[/I] They do not have “units”.

What are units? — Hours, miles, degrees, dollars, etc.

The DJIA (Dow Jones Industrial Average) [I]is calculated from prices in USD,[/I] but after all the mathematical manipulation that’s done to the US-dollar prices (of 30 large industrial companies), the dollar-units are dropped, and the result — say, 18,096.90 — is reported as a pure number. Not a price, not a total of 30 prices, and not an average price. Just a pure index number.

The DJIA (Dow Jones Industrial Average) is, therefore, not an “average”, so many people prefer to call it the DJI-Index.

All other stock indexes are, similarly, pure numbers, not prices.

3

Interesting point. Thanks Clint.