# Can I tell which country actually owns US stocks and Treasuries?

**Only roughly.** The US Treasury's TIC data is the best public source there is, it is free, and it goes back decades. Three things in it mislead a first reading, and all three are about what the numbers mean rather than whether they are right.

**1. The country is where the security sits, not who owns it.** TIC records the custody location. Fund domiciles and custody centres therefore appear as enormous buyers of US assets on behalf of investors who live somewhere else. In the twelve months to July 2026, foreigners bought **$942 billion** of US stocks, and the **Cayman Islands, Ireland and Singapore accounted for $629 billion of it**. Nobody thinks those three economies bought two thirds of the world's US equity purchases. Treat a country row as a routing address.

**2. A rise in holdings is mostly the market going up.** Holdings change for two reasons, buying and revaluation, and the file separates them for you into a net-purchases column and a valuation-change column. Over the same twelve months foreign-held US equity rose about **$4.3 trillion**, of which buying was $942 billion and revaluation about $3.2 trillion. **Three quarters of the rise was price.** So "foreign holdings of US stocks hit a record" and "foreigners bought a record amount" are different sentences, and only one of them is about demand.

**3. The headline country table includes bills, the long-term table does not.** Short-term Treasury bills sit in one and not the other, so the same country carries two different figures depending on which table you opened. Neither is wrong. Say which one you used.

**Where to get it, free and without a key.** [slt_table1.txt](https://ticdata.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/tic/Documents/slt_table1.txt) is a plain tab-separated file carrying holdings, net purchases and valuation change by country and month, split into Treasuries, agency bonds, corporate bonds and equity. The older series runs back to 1977 in `s1_globl.txt`. One thing to get right on the way in: the file carries both an **All Countries** row and a **Grand Total** row, and they differ, because Grand Total also counts international and regional organisations. Pick one and say which.

**What it is genuinely good for**, once those three are handled: the direction and the composition. Money moving between Treasuries and equity, a single country turning seller for a run of months, or the gap between a buying pace in one quarter and the next. Those survive the custody problem because they are about change rather than about ownership.

Related: [what is actually moving a bond yield](https://www.tigzig.com/agents-faq/is-a-rising-bond-yield-inflation-or-the-real-cost-of-money), and [whether US equities are stretched](https://www.tigzig.com/agents-faq/is-the-us-stock-market-in-a-bubble). Full write-up with the country tables: [https://www.tigzig.com/post/foreign-buying-us-stocks-record-sep2026](https://www.tigzig.com/post/foreign-buying-us-stocks-record-sep2026).

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Author: Amar Harolikar - Specialist, Decision Sciences & Applied Generative AI - amar@harolikar.com - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amarharolikar
Source: https://www.tigzig.com/agents-faq/which-country-actually-owns-us-stocks-and-treasuries
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