From Seoul to Frankfurt, Investors Are Betting on America

Four big economies are leaning away from home

Economists call it home bias. Korean companies make up about $1.60 of every $100 of the world’s stock-market value. If Koreans spread their stock money the way the world’s market is spread, they would keep about $1.60 of every $100 at home. In 2025 they kept about $65. That gap is home bias.

Theoria’s Home Bias Index turns the gap into a score (Exhibit 1). A score of 1 means a country keeps all its stock money at home. A score of 0 means it keeps no more at home than its share of the world’s market. From 2014 to 2025, four scores fell. Korea’s dropped the most, from 0.85 to 0.65. America’s barely moved, from 0.61 to 0.62.

More of that money now sits in America

The money that left home has increasingly gone to US companies (Exhibit 2). For euro-area investors, US companies held $17.24 of every $100 they kept in stocks in 2014. By 2025, they held $32.08.

Some of that is simply rising prices. US stocks grew faster than most, so their slice of any portfolio grew even without new buying. So compare with the market itself. Outside the euro area, US companies made up $41 of every $100 of stock-market value in 2014 and $42 in 2025. Yet the US slice of euro-area investors’ stocks from outside the bloc jumped from $39 to $59. Prices alone do not explain that.

Korea made US stocks easier to reach

For most of the year, New York’s market opens at 10:30 p.m. in Seoul and closes at 5 a.m. A Korean who wanted to buy a US stock while it traded had to stay up. In February 2022, Samsung Securities began letting clients trade US stocks during the Korean workday. Nineteen more Korean brokers followed.

Korea’s index fell more than any other. But it was already falling about 0.02 a year before 2022, and it kept falling at the same pace after. If daytime trading had made a big difference, the fall would have sped up. So we cannot say how much it mattered.

Research suggests access counts, though. A 2024 study by European Central Bank economists found that households in countries farther from the rest of the world, or sharing fewer languages with it, keep more of their fund money at home. For professional investors, distance and language do not matter. For ordinary savers, what feels far away is likely to get less of their money.

Tokens put US stocks on sale around the clock

A tokenized stock is a digital token that tracks the price of a real share. Robinhood sells Europeans tokens of US stocks from 2 a.m. Monday to 2 a.m. Saturday, Central European Time. That is 120 hours a week, nearly four times the 32½ hours New York is open (Exhibit 3).

People use the extra hours. In a sample of five of the most liquid tokens, the International Monetary Fund found that more than half of trading happens outside New York’s regular trading hours. About 80% of trades are for less than one share. Those buyers are likely small investors trading on their own clock. The market is still small, about $2.3 billion.

The EU’s biggest company already has a token. It isn’t issued in the EU

Since July 2026, a Robinhood unit in Jersey has issued a token that tracks ASML, the Dutch maker of chipmaking machines and the EU’s most valuable company. It is priced in dollars, and it gives no rights in the company’s shares.

What Europe cannot do is put the real shares on a blockchain. Its law for that, the DLT Pilot Regime, admits only companies worth less than €500 million. ASML is about 1,130 times that. Even the euro area’s 10th-largest company, Prosus, is about 310 times too big (Exhibit 4). The European Commission proposed lifting the cap in December 2025. The new rules are unlikely to apply before 2028.

The case for waiting

Europe’s caution has real grounds. The IMF found tokenized stocks about 1.5 times as volatile as the shares they track. Europe’s markets regulator worries that buyers will mistake a token that tracks a share for the share itself.

But look at what the law actually blocks. Europeans can already buy bets on stock prices called contracts for difference, or CFDs. EU rules make each broker say what share of its retail accounts lose money. Theoria checked seven big brokers selling to Europeans. Between 70% and 80% of their retail accounts lose money. What the law holds back is the real share on a blockchain, the version whose buyer actually owns the share. That would reduce the very confusion the regulator fears.

Drop the size limit, then list the real thing

In February 2026, nine tokenization firms and venues asked EU lawmakers to lift the size limits quickly. Raising the limit is not enough. Even a limit 100 times higher, €50 billion, would still shut out all ten of the euro area’s largest companies. The European Parliament and EU governments should drop the company-size limit for shares and pass that change first.

Then Deutsche Börse’s 360X, which already trades tokens of American stocks, could list the real shares of ASML and the rest of the top ten. The dollar token already exists. Europe should offer the real thing.

Since 2014, investors abroad have put more of their stock money into America, and some now buy tokens of it from their phones. Europe should make sure they can buy Europe too.