Why foreign investors love to bash America all day, but still buy its stocks all night

But for a brief "Sell America" wave last April, foreigners were big buyers of U.S. equities in every month of 2025. Photo by Richard Drew /The Associated Press

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When it comes to the United States, investors the world over now love to bash all day and buy all night. Travelling recently across Asia, Europe and the Middle East, I was struck by the rising intensity of complaints about America under Donald Trump, from its tariffs to designs on Greenland and apparent disregard for the old global order. Polls show the same erosion, with favourable opinions of the U.S. plummeting worldwide.

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Then I got back to New York, looked at the numbers and saw that, even as opinions of the U.S. plunge, the money is flowing in like never before. Last year, foreigners poured around US$1.6 trillion into U.S. financial assets, including nearly US$700 billion into stocks, both new records and significantly higher than the levels of recent years. The story is much the same for U.S. corporate bonds, with foreign purchases up sharply.

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But for a brief “Sell America” wave last April, foreigners were big buyers in every month of 2025. They were aggressively “buying the dip,” just like U.S. retail traders. From Singapore to Seoul, they are staying up all night to trade on increasingly popular after-hours U.S. trading platforms.

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Among the few foreigners sitting out this buying spree were central banks, which have been moving money from the dollar into gold. And the one new hint of caution in 2025 was that global investors were hedging more of their unprecedentedly large dollar exposure than in the year before. Foreign institutions alone now own nearly 15 per cent of U.S. stocks, a record share and up by half from the level a decade ago.

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So why would people buy so heavily in a country they profess to increasingly despise? One reason is inertia. Until recently, the U.S. had steadily outperformed the rest of the world since the global financial crisis of 2008, so many investors are still chasing past performance. They have come to assume that “there is no alternative” to investing in the U.S. markets, given their vast scale and liquidity.

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The rest of the world also remains in awe of the U.S. lead in technology. While Europeans have long been perhaps the most enthusiastic buyers of American tech stocks, remarkably the single biggest source of foreign flows into the U.S. stock market last year was South Korea, where the rage for assets tied to America or artificial intelligence is acute.

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Market trends don’t last for ever and the bash all day, buy all night habit is not likely to be different. The mania for AI stocks in the U.S. is raising existential questions, since it’s not clear which companies will win the AI arms race, or that they will be American. China has shown it can compete, with some of its AI models offering similar performance, at cheaper training costs.