The Easiest Way to Invest in US Stocks from Abroad

When you start learning about how to invest, you invariably come across one piece of advice: diversify your portfolio. Most personal finance experts agree that diversification is a great way to hedge against risk and tap into growth in economies beyond your own. And it’s not surprising that the obvious choice for diversification, if you live outside of the US, is to invest in US stocks. Who doesn’t want exposure to stocks like Apple or Amazon? But depending on where you live, adding the American stamp to your investing passport is not that easy.

Buying U.S. stocks from outside the US still comes with attached inconveniences — and expenses. The most common solution is to find an international brokerage firm to manage your investment. But other than having to deal with a lot of bureaucracy, the main barrier for those trying this approach are its high costs. International brokerage firms tend to charge high transaction fees and have a high initial capital requirement. So depending on where you live, you may need a lot of money to even be able to become a customer.

If that weren’t bad enough, by using an international broker, you will most likely also not be able to do more complex trading transactions, like shorting markets or using leverage. This will limit your ability to profit from market fluctuations because you won’t be able to bet against markets or invest more than you currently have in your brokerage account.

Fortunately, blockchain technology is disrupting the finance industry. By virtualizing markets on the blockchain, people living in countries with limited investment opportunities can also benefit from investing in the US market, home to some of the world’s largest and most innovative companies.

Using the Blockchain to Trade US Stocks and Everything Else

If you want to invest in and trade US stocks within a few minutes without having to spend a lot to get started, you should take a look at Morpher. The app uses blockchain technology to make trading and investing easy and accessible to everyone. It is completely free to use and every new account is funded with free crypto. This allows users to learn how to use it without risking their own funds.

On Morpher, you can trade over 700 assets including stocks, commodities, currencies and crypto. So if you want to invest in Apple stocks, bet against the price of gold, and also invest in Ethereum, you can do all that on Morpher without ever needing to use another platform.

The secret behind Morpher is that it uses blockchain technology to create virtual copies of markets like Apple, Gold, or Bitcoin. Via Morpher’s own crypto currency, the MPH token, you can bet on these virtual markets. If you are right, you receive additional MPH tokens depending on how much your market is up. If your market goes down, you lose some MPH token.

What’s special about the application is that all trading is done through smart contracts, which are pieces of software running on the blockchain. On other applications, you trade by buying directly from or selling to another person. However, on Morpher, you are interacting with a smart contract, which has several advantages. 

The first is not having to actually own the asset you are trading. That may seem complicated, but is actually very simple. When you open a position on Morpher, what you are doing is telling the smart contract that you want to bet a certain amount of MPH token on the price of that asset. So let’s say you want to trade 100 MPH of Apple stocks. When you open that position, you are not actually buying Apple stock, what you are doing is telling the smart contract you are “betting” 100 MPH token on the price of Apple. If the price goes up, let’s say 10 percent, the smart contract creates new tokens and gives you back 110 MPH. If the price goes down 10 percent, the contract destroys a proportional amount of tokens (also 10 percent) and gives you back 90 tokens.

Another benefit is that smart contracts are the perfect counterparty. They can never default, they respond immediately, and they also allow you to buy or sell as much of any asset as you want.

In addition, complex trading features, which are usually very difficult to perform because they require a counterparty, are extremely easy to do on Morpher. To go short on Apple, for example, you would usually need to find someone to lend you a share, then find someone else to buy it from you, and finally find someone else to buy it back from when you exit your trade. On Morpher, all that is done via the smart contract and doesn’t require a counterparty. That’s how the platform allows you to short any market and/or  use leverage of up to 10x.

But if everything on Morpher is free, how is this company making money? The answer is simple: Morpher receives 0.015% new MPH token every day, or 5.6% new MPH per year as a reward for operating the trading platform. If you are familiar with blockchain, you know that this is similar to how Bitcoin or Ethereum work, where miners also receive newly issued Bitcoin or Ether as rewards.

So if you want to invest in US stocks (or any other asset) and have struggled to do that in the past, you should check out Morpher. It takes less than 5 minutes to create an account and start trading 700+ of your favorite markets.

Disclaimer: All investments involve risk, and the past performance of a security, industry, sector, market, financial product, trading strategy, or individual’s trading does not guarantee future results or returns. Investors are fully responsible for any investment decisions they make. Such decisions should be based solely on an evaluation of their financial circumstances, investment objectives, risk tolerance, and liquidity needs. This post does not constitute investment advice.