How can I invest in US Stocks from outside the US with a credit card instead of a bank account?
You'll have to take cash from your Credit Card account and use that to trade. I doubt any brokerage house will take credit cards as it's trading without any collateral (since credit cards are an unsecured credit)
"How often should one use dollar-cost averaging? Trivially, a dollar cost averaging (DCA) strategy must be  used at least twice! More seriously, DCA is a discipline that people (typically investors with relatively small amounts of money to invest each month or each quarter)  use to avoid succumbing to the temptation to ""time the market"".  As mhoran_psprep points out, it is well-suited to 401k plans and the like (e.g. 403b plans for educational and non-profit institutions, 457 plans for State employees, etc), and indeed is actually  the default option in such plans, since a fixed amount of money gets invested each week, or every  two weeks, or every month depending on the payroll schedule. Many plans offer just a few mutual funds in which to invest, though far too many people, having little knowledge or understanding of  investments, simply opt for the money-market fund or guaranteed annuity fund in their 4xx plans.  In any case, all your money goes to work immediately since all mutual funds let you invest in thousandths of a share. Some 401k/403b/457 plans allow investments in stocks through a brokerage, but I think that using DCA to  buy individual stocks in a retirement plan is not a good  idea at all. The reasons for this are that not only must shares must be bought in whole numbers (integers) but it is generally cheaper to buy stocks in round lots  of 100 (or multiples of 100) shares rather than in odd lots of, say, 37 shares. So buying stocks weekly, or biweekly or monthly in a 401k plan means paying more or having the money sit idle until enough is accumulated to buy 100 shares of a stock at which point the brokerage executes the order to buy the stock; and this is really not DCA at all.  Worse yet, if you let the money accumulate but you are the one calling the shots ""Buy 100 shares of APPL today"" instead of letting the brokerage execute the order when there is enough money, you are likely to  be timing the market instead of doing DCA. So, are brokerages useless in retirement fund accounts?  No, they can be useful but they are not suitable for DCA strategies involving buying stocks. Stick to mutual funds for DCA. Do people use it across the board on all stock investments? As indicated above, using DCA to buy individual stocks is not the best idea, regardless of whether it is done inside a retirement plan or outside. DCA outside a retirement plan works best if you not trust yourself to stick with the strategy (""Ooops, I forgot to mail the check yesterday; oh, well, I will do it next week"") but rather, arrange for your mutual fund company to take the money out of your checking account each week/month/quarter etc, and invest it in whatever fund(s) you have chosen. Most companies have such programs under names such as Automatic Investment Program (AIP) etc. Why not have your bank send the money to the mutual fund company instead? Well, that works too, but my bank charges me for sending the money whereas my mutual fund company does AIP for free. But YMMV. Dollar-cost averaging generally means investing  a fixed amount of money on a periodic basis. An alternative strategy, if one has decided that owning 1200 shares of FlyByKnight Co is a good investment to have, is to buy round lots of 100 shares of FBKCO each month. The amount of money invested each month varies, but at the end of the year, the average cost of the 1200 shares is the average of the prices on the 12 days on which the investments were made. Of course, by the end of the year, you might not think FBKCO is worth holding any more. This technique worked best in the  ""good old days"" when blue-chip stocks  paid what was for all practical purposes a guaranteed dividend each year, and people bought these stocks with the intention of passing them on to their widows and children." "No. Credit card companies will typically not care about your individual credit card account. Instead they look either at a ""package"" of card accounts opened at roughly the same time, or of ""slices"" of cardholder accounts by credit rating. If an entire package's or slice's balance drops significantly, they'll take a look, and will adjust rates accordingly (often they may actually decrease rates as an incentive to increase you use of the card). Because credit card debt is unstructured debt, the bank cannot impose an ""early payment penalty"" of any kind (there's no schedule for paying it off, so there's no way to prove that they're missing out on $X in interest because you paid early). Generally, banks don't like CC debt anyway; it's very risky debt, and they often end up writing large balances off for pennies on the dollar. So, when you pay down your balance by a significant amount, the banks breathe a sigh of relief. The real money, the stable money, is in the usage fees; every time you swipe your card, the business who accepted it owes the credit card company 3% of your purchase, and sometimes more." Unfortunately not. Even if the credit card balance is positive (i.e. customer has overpaid the credit card account), you cannot withdraw cash (for free) - as any cash withdrawal is subject to 12.9% interest - even if repaid in full at the end of the month! The clarity credit card is one of the best cards for overseas spending, as its load free (no fees for purchases abroad) and it gives near perfect exchange rates. If your balance is positive, you start at £0, then fund that credit card account from your bank account £500. You can then spend on your credit card, and when your next bill is due at the end of the month - they will use that extra £500 sitting in your account first, and ask for the remainder from you. i.e.  scenario1:  scenario 2: It is better in my opinion, to set up a direct debit to always clear out the full amount on your credit card. That way, you have cash in your bank account for emergencies (getting £500 back from a credit card will take a few days to process as opposed to having the ability to withdraw cash from the cashpoint 24/7). And once the direct debit is paid automatically at the end of the month, there are no fees - voila your credit card is almost like a debit card, spend on it when you like, it gets paid automatically, no hassle, no worries. This approach does take a careful mindset though, as you need to know your credit limits and also you need to ensure your bank account has enough to pay off the direct debit at the end of the month. Otherwise those darn fees will get you (and hurt your credit rating). For cash spending, you will want to either take cash with you (check online here for best rates & get the money well in advance to avoid fees). Also in some countries the exchange rate is better there, than in the UK, google will help you here. If you dont like the idea of carrying large sums of cash with you can use a prepaid card like CaxtonFX, which is one of the better ones out there. The other well known ones are FairFX and Travelex Cash Passport. "You ask about the difference between credit and debit, but that may be because you're missing something important. Regardless of credit/debit, there is value in carrying two different cards associated with two different accounts. The reason is simply that because of loss, fraud, or your own mismanagement, or even the bank's technical error, any card can become unusable for some period of time. Exactly how long depends what happened, but just sending you a new card can easily take more than one business day, which might well be longer than you'd like to go without access to any funds. In that situation you would be glad of a credit card, and you would equally be glad of a second debit card on a separate account. So if your question is ""I have one bank account with one debit card, and the only options I'm willing to contemplate are (a) do nothing or (b) take a credit card as well"", then the answer is yes, take a credit card as well, regardless of the pros or cons of credit vs debit. Even if you only use the credit card in the event that you drop your debit card down a drain. So what you can now consider is the pros and cons of a credit card vs managing an additional bank account -- unless you seriously hate one or more of the cons of credit cards, the credit card is likely to win. My bank has given me a debit card on a cash savings account, which is a little scary, but would cover most emergencies if I didn't have a credit card too. Of course the interest rate is rubbish and I sometimes empty my savings account into a better investment, so I don't use it as backup, but I could. Your final question ""can a merchant know if I give him number of debit or credit card"" is already asked: Can merchants tell the difference between a credit card and embossed debit card? Yes they can, and yes there are a few things you can't (or might prefer not to) do with debit. The same could even be said of Visa vs. Mastercard, leading to the conclusion that if you have a Visa debit you should look for a Mastercard credit. But that seems to be less of an issue as time goes on and almost everywhere in Europe apparently takes both or neither. If you travel a lot outside the EU then you might want to be loaded down with every card under the sun, and three different kinds of cash, but you'd already know that without asking ;-)" The best way to do this would be to exchange the funds into USD and wire the funds to your bank account in the US. It is up to you whether you want to hold USD or Euros.  Depends if you plan to invest money in the US. "Your question asks ""how"" but ""if"" may be your issue. Most companies will not permit an external transfer while still employed, or under a certain age, 55 or so.  If yours is one of the rare companies that permits a transfer, you simply open an IRA with the broker of your choice. Schwab, Fidelity, eTrade, or a dozen others. That broker will give you the paperwork you need to fill out, and they initiate the transfer.  I assume you want an IRA in which you can invest in stocks or funds of your choosing. A traditional IRA. The term ""self-directed"" has another meaning, often associated with the account that permits real estate purchases inside the account. The brokers I listed do not handle that, those custodians have a different business model and are typically smaller firms with fewer offices, not country-wide." I traded futures for a brief period in school using the BrokersXpress platform (now part of OptionsXpress, which is in turn now part of Charles Schwab). They had a virtual trading platform, and apparently still do, and it was excellent. Since my main account was enabled for futures, this carried over to the virtual account, so I could trade a whole range of futures, options, stocks, etc. I spoke with OptionsXpress, and you don't need to fund your acount to use the virtual trading platform. However, they will cancel your account after an arbitrary period of time if you don't log in every few days. According to their customer service, there is no inactivity fee on your main account if you don't fund it and make no trades. I also used Stock-Trak for a class and despite finding the occasional bug or website performance issue, it provided a good experience. I received a discount because I used it through an educational institution, and customer service was quite good (probably for the same reason), but I don't know if those same benefits would apply to an individual signing up for it.  I signed up for top10traders about seven years ago when I was in secondary school, and it's completely free. Unfortunately, you get what you pay for, and the interface was poorly designed and slow. Furthermore, at that time, there were no restrictions that limited the number of shares you could buy to the number of outstanding shares, so you could buy as many as you could afford, even if you exceeded the number that physically existed. While this isn't an issue for large companies, it meant you could earn a killing trading highly illiquid pink sheet stocks because you could purchase billions of shares of companies with only a few thousand shares actually outstanding. I don't know if these issues have been corrected or not, but at the time, I and several other users took advantage of these oversights to rack up hundreds of trillions of dollars in a matter of days, so if you want a realistic simulation, this isn't it.  Investopedia also has a stock simulator that I've heard positive things about, although I haven't used it personally. "Or here's a better idea: don't have a credit card at all.  They offer no real benefits and plenty of dangers.  Don't take my word for it, though: ""I tell every student class I get, high school students, university   students, you know, they'd be better off if they never used credit   cards""   - Warren Buffet (Net worth: $44 billion) Before anyone says anything about using credit cards ""wisely"" and getting the rewards points, I can save 15% on many kinds of large purchases ($100+) using cash.  You won't find a reward system offering that level of incentive.  Two recent examples of cash discounts: After I bought my house I needed a lawnmower and a my wife wanted a new vacuum cleaner.  Went to Lowe's and found the ones we wanted.  They were $600 combined.  Found the manager, stuck five $100 bills in his hand and said ""this is what I have, and that is what I need.""  16.6% saved. Bought my daugher a bed recently. Queen box spring and mattress were on sale for $300 but it didn't come with the rails, which they wanted $50 extra for.  Went to the bank and got $320 in cash from the bank, walked in, set it in his hand and said, ""I need the bed box spring and rails, tax included.""  He replied, ""Sorry man, I can't.  I'm already taking a loss on..."" Then he stopped mid sentence, looked down at the cash again and said ""Hold on. Let me ask my manager."" Manager walks over, guy explains what I said, manager looks at the cash and says ""Make it happen""  14.3 % saved. As for purchasing a home, it is a myth that you need a credit score to obtain a mortgage for a home.  Lending institutions can do manual underwriting instead of just relying on your credit score.  It is a little tougher to do and banks usually have stricter requirements, but based on the information the OP has given in this and other questions, I think he can easily meet them."