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Sooty's Table of Foreign Stocks on American Stock Exchanges


If this is your first time here please read the explanation on why these stocks were selected. You should understand that Sooty is a "value investor" with a "buy and hold" strategy who is only interested in income generating stocks and bonds. If you are a day trader with technical strategy looking for momentum or short plays you will find Sooty's strategy boring. You may still be interested in the three spreadsheets on this page that include all stocks listed on the NASDAQ, NYSE and AMEX exchanges including over 50 columns of stock performance and profile data.

The following is a list of candidates for your investigation. Once again Sooty is NOT recommending you buy these (nor does Sooty expect a cut if you make a lot of money on them). Foreign stocks represent less than 10% of the stocks on the American exchanges but if you are Canadian and interested in tax sheltered investments that will not suffer a $US currency risk these are about all you get.

There is a tax agreement between Canada and the USA so that American stocks held in Canadian pension instruments (RRSPs, RIFs and LIFs) are not taxed at the source nor are Canadian stocks held in 401Ks. Exchanges in other countries will require you pay a withholding tax and file a tax return to recover this tax. Non-pension investments by Canadians (like TFSAs) will suffer a withholding tax and you will have to file a US return to get (some) of your money back.

The stocks are listed are the top foreign stocks with the highest income/price ratio listed on each of the exchanges. The table is limited to the top 20 stocks and one should be skeptical of stocks with yields over 20% because there is either something wrong with the data or the company. If you go to the CSV you will see all the stocks.


Clicking the column header will sort by that column. A short comment about the column will appear if you move the mouse over a column header.

NASDAQ Stock Exchange



NYSE Stock Exchange



AMEX Stock Exchange



These tables were last updated . A CSV spreadsheet of companies with more detailed information is available at these links:    NASDAQ stocks   NYSE stocks   AMEX stocks


How the Table was Created - a Programmers View

To acquire, convert, reconcile and store the information to support this site is a fairly involved process. It would be nice if standards for the semantic web were in place and Sooty's computers could talk directly to the information sources. I am sure one could purchase an information feed in XML format but that would violate the rule that one should not pay for advice on public information. Besides it is a lot more interesting to build the robots that scrape the websites, tinker with the parsers that strip out the data from the html, and design the database and analysis programs that find information on the shipping industry.

Sooty does not have time to do the work by hand so the whole process is automated:
  1. At 8:00 PM Pacific Time a Java robot scrapes the NASDAQ and AMEX exchanges at www.nasdaq.com for a directory of listed stocks. For each stock it visits the stock's "Profile" page on finance.yahoo.com to obtain the home country and company web site.

  2. A Java robot scrapes the NYSE at www.nyse.com for a directory of listed stocks. The NYSE provides the home country and company website as part of their listing.

  3. A Java database program reads the NASDAQ, NYSE and AMEX directories and using the performance information from the "Key Statistics" pages at finance.yahoo.com it loads roughly 50 performance measures into a MySQL database.

  4. A Java reporting program reads the MySQL database and creates Comma Separated Value (CSV) extracts with all the available performance values. It also selects the 10 highest yielding foreign income stocks to display and writes the JavaScript code that makes the tables on this page work.

  5. After midnight the three CSVs and three JavaScript code fragments are uploaded to this page.
The database programs and the web upload only take a few seconds but each directory scrape takes 20 minutes and each performance scrape takes 30 minutes so the whole process completes in a little under 2 hours. Most of the time is consumed waiting for web sites to load and the demand on a Intel 3Ghz processor is less than 10%.