The UK Stocks

The UK stocks:

In building an international stock portfolio, I would have about 10% to 11% of my total holdings selected from among the UK S&P 150 list of securities. The UK market contains many high quality companies whose stocks trade at about half the P/E multiple of the S&P 500.  The S&P high-quality Global 1200 list contains 150 U.K.-based names, which represents 12.5% of the list. These are stocks of mostly very high quality companies that can be traded using a broker connected to the London Stock Exchange or many of them can be bought in the United States.

Some of the biggest British stocks trading in the U.S. as ADRs are BP plc (NYSE: BP), Vodafone plc (NYSE: VOD) and HSBC plc (NYSE: HBC), which are globally-active large cap corporations. Here is a link to a list of British stocks that are traded on the NYSE:

If you wish, rather than trade foreign stocks (British, Canadian, German and Swiss exchange-listed stocks) through the NYSE or Nasdaq, you can directly and electronically trade them on their local (domestic market) exchanges via Interactive Brokers.  If you have a serious interest in British (U.K.) stocks, I recommend you go to the JP Morgan web site www.adr.com where you will find a lot of detailed information.

The simplest and least costly way for most securities traders to gain a balanced investment exposure to the UK market is, in my view, through iShares MSCI Index Fund (AMEX: EWU).

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