Buying Foreign Stocks

[UserNameNeeded]

Apparantly ETrade is now letting customers buy stocks not listed on US exchanges.

http://biz.yahoo.com/ibd/070301/general.html?.v=1&.pf=retirement

I'm with Fidelity now, but I'm thinking of dumping them and moving to ETrade. How is everyone's experience with ETrade?

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[Sol Rosenberg]

Their commissions are higher than most online brokerages, but all-in-all they are not too bad. I'm forced to use them for my company stock options and they are fine. Although you shouldn't be trading with market orders anyway, I'd re-iterate not to do it with ETrade. Some of my friends have bitched about being screwed with ETrade market orders, but I don't use market orders so I don't know firsthand.

 

[etf]

a. foreign stocks that have adrs (listed on american exchanges) are usually the more solid companies, like the types you should be interested in. otherwise, leave it to the fund guys who have more experience/access to information.

b. i use market orders, because in the long run it won't matter if i paid a few cents, or even a few dollars more for the shares. however, if i'm really price sensitive, i sell a put option, which is basically a limit order that you get paid to use.

 

[UserNameNeeded]

Well I called Etrade today to enquire about this great new feature, but unfortunately I wasn't impressed. The customer support seems awful (and I used to think Fidelity was bad)! Even though I love idea of being able to directly buy stocks listed exclusively on foreign exchanges, I'll wait for a company other than Etrade.

ADRs are a pretty pathetic lot when it comes to exposing one's portfolio to match the growth potential of an international market. ETFs are better, but again, they're still very limited in their offerings. There are a TON of great companies on certain international exchanges that simply aren't offered to US retail clients. And I don't know about leaving it to the "fund guys" to buy foreign stocks, since most mutual funds have limits on what percentage of their portfolio can be in a single company's stocks. And given the great performance (and expected performance) of many of these international markets, it's pretty apparant serious investors need to be able to invest more and invest more directly in foreign equities.