Not every dollar-priced stock is American

2026-09-07 · By Lubin Danilo, founder of Lubin Investment

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This morning, 55 of the 100 stocks scoring a perfect 10 out of 10 on my screener trade in US dollars, the other 45 spread across fourteen other currencies. But a dollar price doesn't mean an American company: MercadoLibre is headquartered in Buenos Aires, Arch Capital and RenaissanceRe in Bermuda. The listing currency tells you where a stock trades, not where the company actually lives.

The reflex I keep correcting

This morning, 100 stocks pass all ten of my financial quality criteria on my screening tool, the maximum my free tier's pagination returns (beyond that, full historical access is a paid feature, worth stating plainly since I'm being precise about what I'm actually measuring). Of those 100, 55 trade in US dollars. The near automatic reflex when you see a dollar price is to assume an American company. That's wrong, and the gap is wider than I expected before checking ticker by ticker.

The other 45 stocks spread across fourteen different currencies: Indian rupee, euro, British pence, Hong Kong dollar, Japanese yen, Canadian dollar, Indonesian rupiah, Swiss franc, Korean won, Chinese yuan, Taiwan dollar, South African cent, Australian dollar, Brazilian real. But the reverse of the reflex is just as misleading: a good chunk of the 55 dollar names aren't American either, not the headquarters, not the employees, not the customers. That's the mix I break down here, backed by numbers and three cases I checked individually rather than trusting a cached ranking.

The mechanism that puts a foreign company in dollars

A company based in Buenos Aires or Bermuda can list its shares on Wall Street two ways. The best known is the ADR, American Depositary Receipt: a US custodian bank holds the real local shares and issues a tradeable certificate in New York, priced in dollars, with dividends automatically converted. The more radical route makes the listed entity itself a US legal shell, usually incorporated in Delaware, while operations, employees and customers stay entirely abroad. Either way, what you see looks identical: a dollar price, a three or four letter ticker, the feeling of buying just another Nasdaq stock.

MercadoLibre, Latin America's largest online commerce and payments platform, illustrates the second route. Its real headquarters sits in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where its executives actually work and where the company was founded in 1999, but the listed entity itself has been a Delaware shell since inception, as every one of its annual filings with the US securities regulator confirms. Why the legal detour? It opens access to the deepest, most liquid capital market on earth, which matters enormously for a company that needs to raise money regularly to fund growth, rather than depending on a narrower and historically less stable Argentine market.

Bermuda: the improbable capital of dollar-denominated reinsurance

Two other names in my sample, Arch Capital Group and RenaissanceRe, share nearly the same address: Pembroke, Bermuda, not a Manhattan tower. That's not an isolated coincidence, it's an entire industry that settled there. The story starts in 1992 with Hurricane Andrew, which inflicted what was then a record loss on US insurers, roughly $23 billion. The catastrophe reinsurance market ran short of capacity overnight, and close to $4 billion in fresh capital flowed into Bermuda within months to form new reinsurers, a cohort the industry still calls the Class of 93.

The mechanism behind why these companies still trade in dollars despite their Bermuda address: their clients are US insurers ceding a slice of their hurricane or earthquake risk, and those reinsurance contracts are priced in dollars, like nearly all of the global property and casualty market. Listing in New York also gives them access to the same deep institutional investors as MercadoLibre, essential for rebuilding capital quickly after a heavy loss year. I've already covered the full thesis on both names in my Arch Capital analysis and my RenaissanceRe deep dive; I won't repeat it here, this piece is about something else.

Why this actually matters to you

The difference isn't just trivia, it changes your currency exposure. If you buy MercadoLibre, Arch Capital, or any of the 55 dollar-priced stocks in my sample, your currency risk as a European investor stops at the euro/dollar rate, exactly the same as for Apple or Microsoft, regardless of the company's real nationality. Buy one of the 45 stocks priced directly in a local currency instead, and you add a second layer of currency risk, independent of how the company itself performs: I've covered that mechanic in depth, with real examples, in my currency risk guide.

What I wanted to show here comes one step before that guide: before you can even calculate a currency risk, you need to know which currency you're actually dealing with, and the price on screen doesn't answer the question of whether a company is American. Business quality still comes first in my method, currency and nationality are just an extra layer of information, one I display on every page of my screening tool rather than leaving it in a blind spot. You'll find how I build each of my ten criteria in my full methodology.

FAQ

Why does a foreign company list in dollars instead of its local currency?

Two possible mechanisms: an ADR, where a US bank holds the real shares and issues a tradeable certificate in New York, or direct incorporation of the listed entity in a US state like Delaware while operations stay abroad. Either way, the goal is the same: access to the deepest, most liquid capital market in the world.

Does the listing currency change my currency risk as a European investor?

Yes, but only if the stock isn't already priced in dollars. A dollar-priced stock, whatever the company's real nationality, only exposes you to the euro/dollar rate. A stock priced directly in yen, rupees or krona adds a second currency risk, independent of the company's actual performance.

Why are some British stocks quoted in pence (GBp) instead of pounds?

It's a historical London Stock Exchange convention: most shares there are quoted in pence, 100 pence to the pound, not whole pounds. It's a classic data reading trap: a price shown as 850 in GBp is worth 8.50 pounds, not 850. I flag it because confusing the two throws off a valuation calculation by a factor of 100.

How do I find out where a company is actually based before investing?

Listing currency or exchange name aren't enough. The most reliable document is the annual report filed with the regulator, a 10-K for a US-listed stock, available on SEC EDGAR, which states the real headquarters address in black and white, not the legal shell's.

Related reading

• Foreign stocks: the currency risk you need to know
• Japan: the quality stocks France never notices
• Yuanbao (YB): why the market values it so low

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About the author

Written by Lubin Danilo, founder of Lubin Investment. A self-taught individual investor, I find fundamental analysis fascinating, and it has delivered excellent results. For three years now, my performance has beaten the S&P 500. But analyzing every stock took too much time: sites with incomplete data, calculation methods and criteria never aligned with mine. And spotting the best stocks was just as time-consuming, even with my own well-defined checklist. So I put my software development background to work to build this software, base my investment strategy on its results, and share it with people who share the same passion as me. It judges a company's quality and its price separately, using criteria drawn from the financial literature (Warren Buffett, Michael Mauboussin, Aswath Damodaran).