Foreign investors poured a record $800B into US stocks, and the biggest buyers might surprise you

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. The scale o...