Why do Indians Mostly Invest in the US?

Markets across North America, Europe, and Asia are all accessible to an Indian investor. And yet ask most Indian investors about investing abroad, and they will describe one country. This chapter looks at why that gap exists, and why it is worth questioning.

The US is a global power that has led technology innovation in the past. Some of the world’s leading companies were born in the US, like Nvidia, Google, and Microsoft. Therefore, US markets not only signal quality and authority but also historical wealth-creation and growth stories.

US companies are the ones in your apps, your news feed, and your colleagues' portfolios. So when investing abroad comes up in conversation, the US is the name already sitting in everyone's head. It becomes the default answer before anyone has actually weighed the alternatives. There is nothing irrational about this, familiarity is a reasonable starting point, but it is a starting point, not a conclusion.

For a long time, the easiest way for an Indian investor to go abroad was through a small set of apps and brokers, and almost all of them offered only the US market. When the only door available leads to one market, that is the market everyone ends up in. Not because they compared it against the rest of the world and chose it, but because it was the only door open to them. A generation of Indian investors built their entire idea of going global around whatever a handful of early platforms happened to offer first.

None of these three reasons is unreasonable. They explain, accurately, how most Indian investors arrived where they are. What they do not do is justify staying there without ever looking up.

No. Holding only Indian stocks means betting your entire financial future on one country's economy, one currency, one government. That was the case made earlier in Chapter 1. Treating global investing as a synonym for the US makes almost the same bet, just relocated. It feels diversified because it is no longer India alone. But it is still one country, one currency, one set of policy decisions standing in for the entire rest of the world.

This is not an argument against investing in the US. The US earned its place through genuine scale, real companies, and a long track record, and it will likely remain the largest single piece of most global portfolios for good reason. The point is narrower. Choosing the US deliberately, as part of a wider allocation, is a different decision from ending up there simply because it was the only option ever presented.