Foreign investors bought more than twice the amount of US stocks last year as they did a year before, even as US President Donald Trump’s tariffs rattled markets and clouded corporate outlooks.
Non-US purchases climbed to US$720.1 billion on a net basis last year, up 134 percent from US$307.5 billion in 2024, according to US Department of the Treasury data released on Wednesday.
The sharp surge in buying is a challenge to the “Sell America” sentiment that gained traction last year as US tariffs threatened to upend global trade and investors worried about White House threats to US Federal Reserve independence.
Photo: Bloomberg
“Sell America is an overstated story, at least for equities,” Acadian Asset Management LLC senior vice president and portfolio manager Owen Lamont said.
“What we see is American exceptionalism,” he added. “That process of the extreme love for American tech stocks seem to be continuing.”
While investors’ policy-related worries stirred up volatility on US stock indexes last year, some of their concerns were offset by the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), which, until very recently, was largely seen as a force that would boost corporate profits.
Still, American stock gains fell short of global peers last year: the benchmark S&P 500 Index posted a 16 percent annual return, trailing that of the MSCI World Excluding United States Index by 13 percentage points.
Excluding the Cayman Islands and Ireland — where many global investment funds are registered — Norway was the biggest buyer of US stocks last year, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of the data, which go back to 2023.
The Nordic country net purchased US$81.8 billion, almost three times its 2024 total. Singapore, the top buyer in 2024, was a close second, purchasing US$79 billion. South Korea was also a major buyer, adding US$73.6 billion, nearly five times more than it did in 2024.
Mainland China was a net seller for the third year in a row, shedding US$34.1 billion worth of US stocks last year. Only Kuwait sold more, offloading US$36.5 billion.
Canada, which was the biggest seller of US stocks in 2024, became a buyer last year, net purchasing US$10.6 billion. That turnaround came despite Canadians expressing fury about trade policies that weighed on their economy and Trump’s threats to the country’s sovereignty.
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