Some of the most important companies in the world do not trade in New York. TSMC makes the chips. Samsung and SK Hynix make the memory. Toyota makes the cars. Alibaba and Tencent run Chinese tech. If your portfolio ends at US listings, you are missing a large slice of the global economy.
Getting at that slice from the US ranges from easy to nearly impossible depending on the company. Here are the four real routes, with the drawbacks stated plainly.
Route one: ADRs
An American Depositary Receipt is a US-listed wrapper around a foreign share. A bank holds the real shares abroad and issues receipts that trade in dollars on a US exchange. The big ones work well: TSM, SONY and BABA all trade on the NYSE with deep liquidity, normal spreads and standard brokerage support.
The catch is coverage. An ADR only works if a liquid one exists, and for many important companies it does not. SK Hynix has only a thin, unsponsored over-the-counter ADR that most brokers handle grudgingly if at all. Samsung has no US-listed ADR available to regular American investors. The companies at the center of the AI memory boom are exactly the ones the ADR system serves worst.
Route two: a global broker
Interactive Brokers offers direct access to Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore and other Asian exchanges. It is the genuine article: real local shares in real local markets.
It also inherits everything local. You trade Tokyo during Tokyo hours, which is the middle of the night in the US. You deal with local currencies, exchange-by-exchange permissions and market data subscriptions. It suits committed international investors. It is heavy for someone who wants to trade one Korean stock.
Route three: ETFs
Country and region funds like EWY for Korea or EWJ for Japan trade on US exchanges like any stock. One ticker, instant diversification, no foreign anything.
Diversification is also the drawback. If you have a view on one company, a fund dilutes it with dozens of others. A big SK Hynix move becomes a modest EWY move. ETFs are fine for owning a country. They are blunt for trading a company.
Route four: trade them through Based
Through Based you can trade Hyperliquid markets on major Asian names directly: SK Hynix, Samsung, TSMC, Kioxia, SoftBank, Hyundai, Alibaba and more. Every market is quoted in USD and runs 24/7, so Seoul's trading day being your 3am stops mattering.
The honest mechanics: these are perpetual futures tracking each stock's price on Hyperliquid, not the local shares. You get price exposure, long or short, without dividends or votes. You trade from a self-custodial wallet with no brokerage account and no bank account, which also means no foreign-account paperwork of any kind.
One more advantage worth naming. Asian market news breaks in Asian hours, and with a 24/7 market you can act on it live instead of waiting for New York to open and gap. For Korean memory names in particular, that timing gap is the whole trade. More on that at the memory stocks hub.