Foreign investors poured a record $800B into US stocks, and the biggest buyers might surprise you
Norway, Singapore, and South Korea led the charge while China headed for the exits, according to Treasury data reported by Barchart.
Foreign investors purchased over $800 billion worth of US equities over the past year, shattering previous records and signaling a level of global confidence in American markets that even tariff uncertainty couldn’t dent.
The figure, reported by Barchart, represents the largest foreign inflow into US stocks ever recorded. To put that number in perspective, foreign net purchases of US equities hit $720.1 billion in 2025, itself a 134% increase from the $307.5 billion recorded in 2024.
Who’s buying, and who’s selling
The country-level breakdown tells an interesting story. Norway led all buyers with $81.8 billion in net purchases during 2025, followed closely by Singapore at $79 billion and South Korea at $73.6 billion.
Then there’s the other side of the ledger. Mainland China was a notable net seller, offloading $34.1 billion in US stocks.
Private foreign investors, rather than sovereign entities or central banks, drove the bulk of these purchases. In one particularly active month, June 2026, private foreign buyers accounted for $144.7 billion in net equity purchases alone. That’s nearly half of what foreign investors bought in all of 2024, compressed into a single month.
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The scale of foreign ownership
A preliminary Treasury survey pegged total foreign holdings of US equities at $19.843 trillion as of June 30, 2025.
The US Treasury’s International Capital data, known as TIC data, corroborates the trend. The 2025 annual total for foreign equity purchases was the highest in at least a decade, and the momentum has clearly carried into 2026.
What this means for markets
The China data point deserves its own consideration. Beijing’s net selling of $34.1 billion in US stocks, while modest relative to total foreign flows, fits a pattern of gradual financial decoupling between the world’s two largest economies.
The 134% year-over-year jump from 2024 to 2025 also raises a natural question about sustainability. Growth rates like that rarely persist indefinitely.