What is the difference between BTC/LTC & LTC/BTC markets?

Question

I am little bit confused about markets, In cryptsy there is a market for LTC/BTC in which we can buy or sell LTC using BTC

My questions are,

1. Is both LTC/BTC & BTC/LTC are the same?
2. I have tried cryptocoincharts, but seems to have incorrect values, Any valid market api call to fetch the BTC/LTC market values?

Answer 1

LTC/BTC and BTC/LTC are both ratios of purchasing one currency with another.

For example, with LTC/BTC, the price quoted is for 1 LTC (overlying) in BTC (underlying). If the price is 0.025, that is how many bitcoins are needed to purchase 1 LTC. At this price, 2 LTC would cost 0.05 BTC.

The opposite would be equivielnt to 1/x, using the example above the rate could also be expressed as 1/0.025, or 40 LTC per bitcoin.

The rate is the same. For some lower valued currency, it would indeed be much better to trade in a BTC/COIN format because it is more likely for an altcoin to go lower than 0.00000001 BTC than to go higher than 100,000,000 BTC per altcoin ;)

For the freshest data, I would recommend going to the source (e.g. a big exchange), such as https://btc-e.com/api/documentation