Traders say this quantity out loud thousands of times a day and almost never write it down. "The Fed moved fifty bips." A basis point is one ten-thousandth — a hundredth of one percentage point — and it is the working unit of interest rates, credit spreads and fund fees, because 0.5% and 0.05% are one keystroke apart in a way that costs real money. The character that means precisely that is this one, and the industry that owns the unit ignores it completely.
The notation itself is the clearest thing about it. Count the zeros beneath the bar: one gives you the percent sign and a division by a hundred, two gives you per mille and a division by a thousand, three lands here, at ten thousand. Unicode's own note glosses the character as a percent of a percent and records permyriad as an alternative name, which is the older and more elegant word for the same idea.
Why it lost is worth a moment, because obscurity is not the reason. It has better web plumbing than far more famous punctuation: HTML gives it a named entity, ‱, which is more than the interrobang ever managed. What it lacks is everything else. There is no keyboard route to it — 2031 then Alt+X in Word, or the Character Viewer on a Mac, and that is the whole list. It is missing or poorly drawn in a great many fonts. It rarely survives a plain-text pipe or a spreadsheet import intact. And at nine points on a trading screen, the difference between two zeros and three is not a distinction anyone should be betting a position on. The letters "bps" have none of those problems, and they can be said aloud.
So the symbol lives where precision is set rather than typed — the occasional academic paper, the odd technical standard — while the trading floor writes three characters instead and never misses it.
One rung further down, for completeness: per cent mille, one part in a hundred thousand, abbreviated pcm and used in reactor physics to describe reactivity. It has no symbol at all. Somebody had to stop drawing zeros, and they stopped one line above.
About Per Ten Thousand Sign
Per Ten Thousand Sign is the Unicode character ‱ at codepoint U+2031 in the General Punctuation block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Technical Reference
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Per Ten Thousand Sign
To use the Per Ten Thousand Sign symbol (‱) in HTML, insert the
entity ‱ directly into your markup. The decimal entity ‱ works in any HTML-serialised document.
In CSS pseudo-elements use content: '\2031';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u2031' evaluates to ‱. In Python source, write '\u2031'.
The character encodes to E2 80 B1 as UTF-8 bytes and 2031 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 8241.
This is a text-based Unicode character. It will render in the current font on most platforms. If a font lacks this glyph, the browser may show a placeholder or fall back to a system font.