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.
"Aganju has mentioned put options, which are one good possibility. I would suggest considering an even easier strategy: short selling.  Technically you are borrowing the stock from someone and selling it.  At some point you repurchase the stock to return to the lender (""covering your short"").  If the stock price has fallen, then when you repurchase it, it will be cheaper and you keep the profit. Short selling sounds complicated but it's actually very easy--your broker takes care of all the details.  Just go to your brokerage and click ""sell"" or ""sell short.""  You can use a market or limit order just like you were selling something you own.  When it sells, you are done.  The money gets credited to your account.  At some point (after the price falls) you should repurchase it so you don't have a negative position any more, but your brokerage isn't going to hassle you for this unless you bought a lot and the stock price starts rising.  There will be limits on how much you can short, depending on how much money is in your account.  Some stocks (distressed and small stocks) may sometimes be hard to short, meaning your broker will charge you a kind of interest and/or may not be able to complete your transaction. You will need a margin account (a type of brokerage account) to either use options or short sell.  They are easy to come by, though. Note that for a given amount of starting money in your account, puts can give you a much more dramatic gain if the stock price falls.  But they can (and often do) expire worthless, causing you to lose all money you have spent on them.  If you want to maximize how much you make, use puts.  Otherwise I'd short sell. About IPOs, it depends on what you mean.  If the IPO has just completed and you want to bet that the share price will fall, either puts or short selling will work.  Before an IPO you can't short sell and I doubt you would be able to buy an option either. Foreign stocks?  Depends on whether there is an ADR for them that trades on the domestic market and on the details of your brokerage account.  Let me put it this way, if you can buy it, you can short sell it." Switzerland had to found a special Bank in Frankfurt which acts as an interface to SEPA. The major Swiss banks ran trading and back office ops from the UK. This will move. They has to cooperate with both the US and the EU regulations now. Switzerland as banking has most definitely decreased is size. "For personal investing, and speculative/ highly risky securities (""wasting assets"", which is exactly what options are), it is better to think in terms of sunk costs. Don't chase this trade, trying to make your money back. You should minimize your loss. Unwind the position now, while there is still some remaining value in those call options, and take a short-term loss. Or, you could try this.  Let's say you own an exchange traded call option on a listed stock (very general case). I don't know how much time remains before the option's expiration date. Be that as it may, I could suggest this to effect a ""recovery"".  You'll be long the call and short the stock. This is called a delta hedge, as you would be delta trading the stock. Delta refers to short-term price volatility.  In other words, you'll short a single large block of the stock, then buy shares, in small increments, whenever the market drops slightly, on an intra-day basis. When the market price of the stock rises incrementally, you'll sell a few shares. Back and forth, in response to short-term market price moves, while maintaining a static ""hedge ratio"". As your original call option gets closer to maturity, roll it over into the next available contract, either one-month, or preferably three-month, time to expiration. If you don't want to, or can't, borrow the underlying stock to short, you could do a synthetic short. A synthetic short is a combination of a long put and a short call, whose pay-off replicates the short stock payoff.  I personally would never purchase an unhedged option or warrant. But since that is what you own right now, you have two choices: Get out, or dig in deeper, with the realization that you are doing a lot of work just to trade your way back to a net zero P&L.  *While you can make a profit using this sort of strategy, I'm not certain if that is within the scope of the money.stachexchange.com website." "Fair enough. I used to travel a lot (within a 100km of my home) and ended up eating at a lot of McDonalds. Ones that hadn't been renovated for the new ""look"", were near a border or were in a Walmart tended to be shittier. Ones in downtown used to be pretty consistent but I guess that probably has a bit to do with them being busier as well (no shitty McChickens that are crunchy because they've been heated too long).      Location | Food ---|--- France (Paris DT) | Good, fresh (as can be), slightly smaller portions US border (pennselvania) | sloppy as fuck, tons of sauce Italy (Rome) | Pretty good, like france except normal portions Germany (Frankfurt Airport) | pretty shit, stale burgers, stale fries, flat pop [armenians working there don't give a fuck] Malaysia (Kuala Lampur) | Acceptable, some local options on the menu Denmark | Pretty good, but different from NA McDicks. Different batter used on fried chicken, mayo tastes like grocery store stuff (for better or for worse) Sweden/Norway | See denmark London (Heathrow Airport) | Good, see italy Sri Lanka (Colombo DT) | Some odd topping choices, got a McChicken with cheese, not my thing personally Toronto DT | Hot food and fresh (as can be)" "Arbitrage is basically taking advantage of a difference in price.  Generally extending to ""in different places for the same thing"". A monetary version would be interlisted stocks, that is stocks in companies that are on both the NYSE/Nasdaq and Toronto stock exchanges.  If somebody comes along and buys a large number of shares in Toronto, that will tend to make the price go up - standard supply and demand. But if someone else can buy shares instead in NY, and then sell them in Toronto where the first person is buying up shares, where the price is higher, they the the arbitrageur (second person) can make pretty easy money. By its very nature, this tends to bring the prices back in line, as NY will then go up and Toronto will then go down (ignoring FX rates and the like for ease of explanation). The same can work for physical goods, although it does tend to get more complex with taxes, duties, and the like." It doesn't matter which exchange a share was purchased through (or if it was even purchased on an exchange at all--physical share certificates can be bought and sold outside of any exchange). A share is a share, and any share available for purchase in New York is available to be purchased in London. Buying all of a company's stock is not something that can generally be done through the stock market. The practical way to accomplish buying a company out is to purchase a controlling interest, or enough shares to have enough votes to bind the board to a specific course of action. Then vote to sell all outstanding shares to another company at a particular fixed price per share. Market capitalization is an inaccurate measure of the size of a company in the first place, but if you want to quantify it, you can take the number of outstanding shares (anywhere and everywhere) and multiply them by the price on any of the exchanges that sell it. That will give you the market capitalization in the currency that is used by whatever exchange you chose. You can check whether the company whose stock you want to buy is present on an european market. For instance this is the case for Apple at Frankfurt. 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.