US companies dominate most finance apps, but not the world's stock markets. According to SIFMA's 2026 Capital Markets Fact Book, the US accounted for 43.7% of global equity market value in 2025. More than half of the world's listed companies by value trade somewhere else: chipmakers in Taiwan and the Netherlands, carmakers in Japan and Germany, pharmaceutical groups in Denmark and Switzerland, banks in India.
You can research all of them from a phone. The information is published, most of it free, and much of it in English. What makes international research harder is not access but a handful of traps: the wrong listing, the wrong currency unit, different accounting rules and coverage that thins out quickly beyond the largest markets. This guide shows where to look and what to watch for.
Many large foreign companies can be bought in more than one place. There is the home listing, such as Toyota in Tokyo or Nestlé in Zurich, and there may be an American Depositary Receipt (ADR) trading in New York, where each ADR can represent a fraction of a share or several shares. Some ADRs trade on major exchanges and file full reports with the SEC; others trade over the counter with thin volumes and less disclosure.
Data sites identify home listings with a suffix on the ticker, and it is worth learning the common ones: .L for London, .T for Tokyo, .DE for Germany's Xetra, .PA for Paris, .HK for Hong Kong, .KS for Korea, .NS for India's National Stock Exchange, .TO for Toronto and .AX for Australia. When a price looks odd, the first question is always which listing you are looking at.
Whatever the market, the company's own investor relations page is usually the easiest place to start. Annual reports, results presentations and call recordings are often there in English, straight from the source.
Always check the currency a price is quoted in, and the unit. London prices are usually quoted in pence rather than pounds, so a share shown at 2,450 costs £24.50, not £2,450. Johannesburg quotes in South African cents and Tel Aviv in agorot. An app or spreadsheet that misses the unit will show a price a hundred times too high, and every ratio built on it will be wrong.
Currency moves matter as much as units. A Japanese company can grow revenue strongly in yen while the yen falls against your home currency, leaving a foreign investor with a flat or negative return. When you compare companies across markets, compare growth in each company's reporting currency first, then decide separately how much currency risk you are willing to take.
Research is only half the job; owning a foreign share has its own costs. Check whether your broker offers the home market at all, what it charges to convert currency (often a larger cost than the commission itself) and whether it holds the shares in your name or through a nominee. Some markets add transaction taxes: in the UK, most purchases of shares in UK companies carry 0.5% stamp duty reserve tax. Many countries also withhold tax on dividends paid to foreign investors. Tax treaties can reduce the rate, sometimes only after you file a reclaim, so a high headline dividend yield may be worth less than it looks.
Large companies usually publish an English annual report, but the most detailed documents, such as Japan's annual securities reports or smaller companies' local filings, may exist only in the home language. Machine translation on a phone handles these better than it used to, but tables and legal terms still trip it up. Where a figure matters, check it against the original table rather than the translation, and prefer the company's own English summary when one exists.
FRED, the St. Louis Fed's free database, includes many international series, but check the date of the last observation before relying on one: some international series there stopped updating years ago. For current figures, go to the national statistics office or central bank: the Office for National Statistics and the Bank of England, Eurostat and the European Central Bank, Destatis in Germany, e-Stat and the Bank of Japan. The World Bank and IMF publish comparable cross-country data, updated less often.
Yahoo Finance's free app covers more than 100 exchanges and is a practical first stop for prices, charts and basic financials. Koyfin's app offers deeper fundamentals across many markets, with a limited free plan. Most regulators' filing sites work in a mobile browser, even if they were not designed for one, and PDF annual reports read well on a larger phone or tablet. Exchange websites are underrated too: most publish trading calendars, corporate actions and official closing prices, which are useful for checking a figure an app shows you.
Researching international stocks is no longer a job that needs an institutional subscription. The filings are public, many are in English, and the essential tools fit in your pocket. The discipline is the same as at home, with two extra habits: always know which listing and currency you are looking at, and always check which accounting rules produced the numbers. Get those right, and the rest of the world's markets become as readable as your own. For a deeper look at checking figures, see our guide to verifying financial data.