US investors

Most of this registry applies to a foreign individual investor anywhere. If that individual is a US person — citizen, green-card holder, or US tax resident — three extra walls appear that the rest of the readership never hits. This page names them once, so the country pages don't have to.

1. Brokers that won't have you

FATCA makes US clients an expensive compliance project, and many non-US brokers simply decline them. Among the multi-market brokers profiled here: DEGIRO, Trading 212, Saxo, EXANTE and Swissquote do not onboard US residents (each broker page carries a "US persons" line in its facts table — that's the authoritative place to check). Several others — eToro, moomoo, Tiger, Revolut — serve Americans only through separate US entities with different, usually narrower, market lists than the international apps described on their pages. Singapore's bank-brokers commonly decline US persons; frontier local brokers are a mixed bag — some refuse, some genuinely don't mind, and the only way to know is to ask.

What works without friction: Interactive Brokers (the US LLC is the home entity — the registry's default broker is, conveniently, American), Fidelity — whose international trading feature gives US residents 25 markets online including the JSE, Athens, Mexico and Warsaw, in USD or 16 local currencies — Charles Schwab (Global Account, ~12 markets), and the US arms of moomoo and eToro for what they cover. Among the registry's specialists, mystocks.africa is US-registered and takes US investors into its twelve African exchanges — a rare frontier route that gets easier, not harder, for Americans.

2. The PFIC trap

The quiet one. Most non-US funds — ETFs listed in London or Europe, closed-end funds, investment trusts — are PFICs (passive foreign investment companies) in the eyes of the IRS, and the default tax treatment is punitive enough to erase the investment case. This matters here because several of this registry's "Listed abroad" tables include exactly such vehicles: VOF and VEIL (the London-listed Vietnam closed-end funds), UzNIF (Uzbekistan), Ceiba (Cuba). For a US person these are generally to be avoided — or held only with a timely QEF election and an accountant who knows what that is.

The rule of thumb: ordinary shares and ADRs are fine — foreign-listed funds are not. Where a country table offers both (Vietnam: the US-listed VNM ETF versus the London funds), the US-listed vehicle is the American's answer. Individual stocks on the LSE, TSX or anywhere else carry no PFIC issue at all.

3. Sanctions (OFAC)

US persons carry obligations other nationalities don't. Where it bites, the country page says so prominently — Cuba (comprehensive CACR restrictions) and Venezuela (a licensed-but-live sanctions framework with snapback risk) are the current cases. If a page here has a sanctions section, an American should read it before anything else on the page.

Calling for more markets

Is there a US specialist for further markets? Yes — and it's hiding inside Schwab: the Global Investing Services desk trades 30 markets buy-and-sell broker-assisted by phone (plus 8 sell-only), while the Schwab Global Account only does 12 of them online. The desk's list includes Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and South Africa — markets IBKR's US entity doesn't reach. That's the de facto US further-markets specialist for retail. Fidelity's phone desk, by contrast, does not extend the map — rep-assisted trades cover the same 25 markets as online, just at higher commission. Above the Schwab desk sits the institutional tier (Auerbach Grayson and peers, 90-odd markets) — funds and family offices only, not individuals. And the rest of mainstream America doesn't help: Vanguard, E*TRADE and Merrill Edge are US-listed-only, and so are Robinhood and Webull's US entities (whatever their overseas cousins offer). Among the big US brokers, only IBKR, Fidelity and Schwab cross the border at all.

The practical default

For a US person, most of this registry compresses to one setup: an IBKR account, Fidelity for the JSE and Athens lines, Schwab's Global Investing Services desk for the markets beyond both, plus the US-listed names and Canada. IBKR's 35 direct markets cover the registry's larger names (Brazil, Mexico, Saudi, UAE, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, the Baltics…); the offshore-listed tables on every country page lean heavily on NYSE/Nasdaq ADRs and Toronto-listed operators, all PFIC-free; and before writing a market off as unreachable, check the Schwab desk's list (800-992-4685; 30 markets buy-and-sell, including Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and South Africa). The genuinely local routes that remain (Kazakhstan's brokers, Sri Lanka's CSE, the Caribbean exchanges) mostly turn on the broker's own appetite for US paperwork — ask, and report what you learn.

None of this is tax or legal advice — PFIC rules in particular are genuinely intricate, and the cost of getting them wrong is real. Confirm with a US-qualified tax adviser before buying any non-US fund.