How do stocks like INL (traded in Frankfurt) work?
"A ""stock price"" is nothing but the price at which some shares of that stock were sold on an exchange from someone willing to sell those shares at that price (or more) to someone willing to buy them at that price (or less). Pretty much every question about how stock prices work is answered by the paragraph above, which an astonishingly large number of people don't seem to be aware of. So there is no explicit ""tracking"" mechanism at all. Just people buying and selling, and if the current going price on two exchanges differ, then that is an opportunity for someone to make money by buying on one exchange and selling on the other - until the prices are close enough that the fees and overhead make that activity unprofitable. This is called ""arbitrage"" and a common activity of investment banks or (more recently) hedge funds and specialized trading firms spun off by said banks due to regulation." They don't have to track each other, it could just be listed on more than one exchange.  The price on one exchange does not have to match or track the price on the other exchange. This is actually quite common, as many companies are listed on two or more exchanges around the world.
I think George's answer explains fairly well why the brokerages don't allow this - it's not an exchange rule, it's just that the brokerage has to have the shares to lend, and normally those shares come from people's margin, which is impossible on a non-marginable stock. To address the question of what the alternatives are, on popular stocks like SIRI, a deep In-The-Money put is a fairly accurate emulation of an actual short interest.  If you look at the options on SIRI you will see that a $3 (or higher) put has a delta of -$1, which is the same delta as an actual short share. You also don't have to worry about problems like margin calls when buying options.  The only thing you have to worry about is the expiration date, which isn't generally a major issue if you're buying in-the-money options... unless you're very wrong about the direction of the stock, in which case you could lose everything, but that's always a risk with penny stocks no matter how you trade them. At least with a put option, the maximum amount you can lose is whatever you spent on the contract.  With a short sale, a bull rush on the stock could potentially wipe out your entire margin.  That's why, when betting on downward motion in a microcap or penny stock, I actually prefer to use options.  Just be aware that option contracts can generally only move in increments of $0.05, and that your brokerage will probably impose a bid-ask spread of up to $0.10, so the share price has to move down at least 10 cents (or 10% on a roughly $1 stock like SIRI) for you to just break even; definitely don't attempt to use this as a day-trading tool and go for longer expirations if you can. ACWI refers to a fund that tracks the MSCI All Country World Index, which is  A market capitalization weighted index designed to provide a broad measure of equity-market performance throughout the world. The MSCI ACWI is maintained by Morgan Stanley Capital International, and is comprised of stocks from both developed and emerging markets.  The ex-US in the name implies exactly what it sounds; this fund probably invests in stock markets (or stock market indexes) of the countries in the index, except the US. Brd Mkt refers to a Broad Market index, which, in the US, means that the fund attempts to track the performance of a wide swath of the US stock market (wider than just the S&P 500, for example). The Dow Jones U.S. Total Stock Market Index, the Wilshire 5000 index, the Russell 2000 index, the MSCI US Broad Market Index, and the CRSP US Total Market Index are all examples of such an index. This could also refer to a fund similar to the one above in that it tracks a broad swath of the several stock markets across the world. I spoke with BNY Mellon about the rest, and they told me this: EB - Employee Benefit (a bank collective fund for ERISA qualified assets) DL - Daily Liquid (provides for daily trading of fund shares) SL - Securities Lending (fund engages in the BNY Mellon securities lending program) Non-SL - Non-Securities Lending (fund does not engage in the BNY Mellon securities lending program) I'll add more detail. EB (Employee Benefit) refers to plans that fall under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, which are a set a laws that govern employee pensions and retirement plans. This is simply BNY Mellon's designation for funds that are offered through 401(k)'s and other retirement vehicles. As I said before, DL refers to Daily Liquidity, which means that you can buy into and sell out of the fund on a daily basis. There may be fees for this in your plan, however. SL (Securities Lending) often refers to institutional funds that loan out their long positions to investment banks or brokers so that the clients of those banks/brokerages can sell the shares short. This SeekingAlpha article has a good explanation of how this procedure works in practice for ETF's, and the procedure is identical for mutual funds: An exchange-traded fund lends out shares of its holdings to another party and charges a rental fee. Running a securities-lending program is another way for an ETF provider to wring more return out of a fund's holdings. Revenue from these programs is used to offset a fund's expenses, which allows the provider to charge a lower expense ratio and/or tighten the performance gap between an ETF and its benchmark. Verify if a local bank offers to participate in different stock markets - big companies like apple or facebook often gets traded on different markets - like Xetra (germany) or SIX (Switzerland). That being said I'd recommend you to rethink this strategy and maybe using some products offered by your bank - for 1000$ you will quickly drown in fees (my bank requires 40$ for every trade. If you buy and sell them you already lost nearly 10% of your investment) If you are looking for a European financials ETF to short, you could take a look at the iShares EURO STOXX Banks, which is traded on a a few German stock exchanges (Frankfurt etc.): iShares Euro Stoxx Banks Website You find its current holdings here: holdings. CFDs (Contracts for Difference) are basically a contract between you and the broker on the difference in price of the underlying between the time you open a position and close a position. You are not actually buying the underlying. With share CFDs, the outcome is a bit like buying the underlying shares on margin. You pay interest for every day you hold the CFDs overnight for long CFDs. However, with short positions, you get paid interest for every day you hold your short position overnight. Most people use CFDs for short term trading, however they can be used for medium to longer term trading just as you would hold a portfolio on margin. What you have to remember is that because you are buying on margin you can lose more than your initial contract amount. A way to manage this risk is by using position sizing and stop loses. With your position sizing, if you wanted to invest $10,000 in a particular share trading at $10 per share, you would then buy 1000 shares or 1000 CFDs in that share. Your initial expense with the CFDs might be only $1000 (at a margin rate of 10%). So instead of increasing your risk by having an initial outlay of $10,000 with the CFDs you limit your risk to the same as you were buying the shares directly. In order to see whether you can buy or sell some given quantity of a stock at the current bid price, you need a counterparty (a buyer) who is willing to buy the number of stocks you are wishing to offload. To see whether such a counterparty exists, you can look at the stock's order book, or level two feed. The order book shows all the people who have placed buy or sell orders, the price they are willing to pay, and the quantity they demand at that price. Here is the order book from earlier this morning for the British pharmaceutical company, GlaxoSmithKline PLC.  Let's start by looking at the left-hand blue part of the book, beneath the yellow strip. This is called the Buy side. The book is sorted with the highest price at the top, because this is the best price that a seller can presently obtain. If several buyers bid at the same price, then the oldest entry on the book takes precedence. You can see we have five buyers each willing to pay 1543.0 p (that's 1543 British pence, or £15.43) per share. Therefore the current bid price for this instrument is 1543.0. The first buyer wants 175 shares, the next, 300, and so on. The total volume that is demanded at 1543.0p is 2435 shares. This information is summarized on the yellow strip: 5 buyers, total volume of 2435, at 1543.0. These are all buyers who want to buy right now and the exchange will make the trade happen immediately if you put in a sell order for 1543.0 p or less. If you want to sell 2435 shares or fewer, you are good to go. The important thing to note is that once you sell these bidders a total of 2435 shares, then their orders are fulfilled and they will be removed from the order book. At this point, the next bidder is promoted up the book; but his price is 1542.5, 0.5 p lower than before. Absent any further changes to the order book, the bid price will decrease to 1542.5 p. This makes sense because you are selling a lot of shares so you'd expect the market price to be depressed. This information will be disseminated to the level one feed and the level one graph of the stock price will be updated. Thus if you have more than 2435 shares to sell, you cannot expect to execute your order at the bid price in one go. Of course, the more shares you are trying to get rid of, the further down the buy side you will have to go. In reality for a highly liquid stock as this, the order book receives many amendments per second and it is unlikely that your trade would make much difference. On the right hand side of the display you can see the recent trades: these are the times the trades were done (or notified to the exchange), the price of the trade, the volume and the trade type (AT means automatic trade).  GlaxoSmithKline is a highly liquid stock with many willing buyers and sellers. But some stocks are less liquid. In order to enable traders to find a counterparty at short notice, exchanges often require less liquid stocks to have market makers. A market maker places buy and sell orders simultaneously, with a spread between the two prices so that they can profit from each transaction. For instance Diurnal Group PLC has had no trades today and no quotes. It has a more complicated order book, enabling both ordinary buyers and sellers to list if they wish, but market makers are separated out at the top. Here you can see that three market makers are providing liquidity on this stock, Peel Hunt (PEEL), Numis (NUMS) and Winterflood (WINS). They have a very unpalatable spread of over 5% between their bid and offer prices. Further in each case the sum total that they are willing to trade is 3000 shares. If you have more than three thousand Dirunal Group shares to sell, you would have to wait for the market makers to come back with a new quote after you'd sold the first 3000. Some liquidity Since you're using IB, and you seem to be an investor not a trader, so you won't notice especially if you walk your orders, but you will suffer the bid/ask spread as everyone else albeit wider.   If buying, the best strategy unless if one is time constrained is to walk the entire bid from the best bid to the best ask.  It is highly likely that someone will hit your order before you hit the best ask.  If they don't, as a long term investor, the few pennies won't make or break you, especially if the price per share is 100 USD equivalent, but it is an excellent habit to form and fun. Since you're buying ETFs, even though your orders are small, you would be adding liquidity to your market, helping it become more efficient because your orders could be used to arbitrage against all of the ETF's holdings, in turn providing liquidity for those holdings. No liquidity This could only be done with an extremely low cost broker like IB because the trading commissions would make it prohibitively expensive. There are huge risks when trading an illiquid security such as VEUR.  EWL would be much less risky thus less expensive. Securities with no liquidity can be traded, but they must be traded very carefully.  In the case of a security that can only attract about 20 shares per day in volume, only single shares should be bid.  The market makers, suffering from a dearth in volume may not even be willing to haggle; therefore, the only recourse is a statistical arbitrageur, who will attempt to profit from the spread between other more liquid versions of the security. Considering the available alternative, VEUR is not recommended to trade. Depending on your broker, you can buy these stocks directly at the most liquid local exchanges. For instance, if you are US resident and want to to buy German stocks (like RWE) you can trade these stocks over InteractiveBrokers (or other direct brokers in the US). They offer direct access to German Xetra and other local markets. "The case you are looking at is rather special, because the Chinese government for the longest time did not allow foreigners to invest in Chinese stocks. The ADRs explained in @DStanley's answer are a way around that restriction; recently there are some limited official ways,  In general, it is perfectly normal for a stock to appear on different exchanges, in different currencies, and it's all the ""real"" stock. Because remember: a stock exchange is really nothing more than a fancy place for people to buy and sell stocks. There is absolutely no reason why a specific stock should only be traded in one place. Companies that have decided to be publically tradeable generally want to be traded in as many exchanges as possible, because it makes the stock more liquid, which helps their shareholders. Individual exchanges have different requirements for a stock to be listed for trading there, some may even do it without the company's explicit approval." International equity are considered shares of companies, which are headquartered outside the United States, for instance Research in Motion (Canada), BMW (Germany), UBS (Switzerland). Some investors argue that adding international equities to a portfolio can reduce its risk due to regional diversification. This has never really adequately explained it for me, and I've tried reading up on it all over the place. For a long time I thought that in a trade, the market maker pockets the spread *for that trade*, but that's not the case.  The only sensible explanation I've found (which I'm not going to give in full...) is that the market maker will provide liquidity by buying and selling trades they have no actual view on (short or long), and if the spread is higher, that contributes directly to the amount they make over time when they open and close positions they've made.  It would be great to see a single definitive example somewhere that shows how a market maker makes money. Short answer: Liquidity. Well, you have to see it from an exchange's point of view.  Every contract they put up is a liability to them.  You have to allocate resources for the order book, the matching engine, the clearing, etc.  But only if the contract is actually trading they start earning (the big) money. Now for every new expiry they engage a long term commitment and it might take years for an option chain to be widely accepted (and hence before they're profitable).  Compare the volumes and open interests of big chains versus the weeklies and you'll find that weeklies can still be considered illiquid compared to their monthly cousins. Having said that, like many things, this is just a question of demand.  If there's a strong urge to trade July weeklies one day, there will be an option chain.  But, personally I think, as long as there are the summer doldrums there will be no rush to ask for Jul and Aug chains. The Explanation is correct. The Traders buys the 1st call and profits linearly form 40$ onwards. At at 45 the short call kick in and neutralizes any further profit on the first call. "First, welcome to Money.SE.  The selected page is awful. I don't know the value in listing different expirations at the same strike. Usually, all the strikes are grouped by month, so I'd be looking at Jan '15 across all strikes.  ""In the money"" means the price of a stock is trading above the strike price, if a call, or below it, if a put.  On 10/20 of some year, Intel was trading at $23.34. The January $25 call strike was just $0.70, and April's was $1.82. These were out of the money. The $25 puts were ""in the money"" by $1.66 so you could have paid $1.90 for the Jan $25 put, with $.24 of time premium.  By November, the price rose and the put fell, to $.85, all time premium.  As with stocks, the key thing is to only buy calls of stock that are going to go up. If a stock will fall, buy puts. Curious, what was the class discussion just before the teacher gave you this image?" In a simple statement, no doesn't matter. Checked on my trade portal, everything lines up. Same ISIN, same price(after factoring in FX conversions, if you were thinking about arbitrage those days are long gone).  But a unusual phenomenon I have observed is, if you aren't allowed to buy/sell a stock in one market and try to do that in a different market for the same stock you will still not be allowed to do it. Tried it on French stocks as my current provider doesn't allow me to deal in French stocks.