Trading instrument
A trading instrument is anything you can buy or sell on a market, such as a share, a futures contract, a currency pair, a commodity or a crypto asset.
Traders say “instrument” so one word covers every market. NVIDIA shares, a gold futures contract, the EUR/USD currency pair and bitcoin are all trading instruments, and the same ideas (an order book, a bid, an ask, a price set by the last trade) apply to all of them.
On an exchange an instrument is often shown as a trading pair: NVDAUSDT, for example, is NVIDIA priced in USDT, and SPCXUSDT is SpaceX priced in USDT, both perpetual futures contracts on Binance.
Learn more: classes of instruments and which markets exist?