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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38002 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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People attribute this to the British's affinity for bricks and mortar over investing in companies and while I agree that plays a part (see the reverse in the US where the exact same Ryanair share trades at a 30% premium in the US over its European counterpart)

There is no way this is true.

Yep, ADR premiums (and discounts too, sometimes!) do exist for a wide variety of reasons. AFAIK though Ryanair in the US is still pretty liquid (roughly similar volume by value of shares traded, 5x in number of actual shares but that's because the American ADR is more than 1 share per ADR). But perhaps making that point in my post just detracted from my housing argument which was the main thing.

Oh it's true (%age may be off but a difference very much exists). The shares aren't fungible so you can't turn one into the other (or else this would have been arbitraged away). People are just willing to pay more for shares in the US compared to Europe.

If they aren't fungible then they aren't the same shares.

They literally are the same thing, pay the same dividends, have same voting rights etc., the US version is just a depository receipt of the European share. The reason they aren't fungible is because of regulations, not because they are different. One just trades in the US and the other in Europe.

(Yes, we treat them as separate but highly related things at work due to the lack of interconversion but fundamentally they are the same thing).

The fact that the applicable regulations are different is what makes them different shares. Would you rather have one MSFT share in your IRA, or one MSFT share in your brokerage account? Both have the same nominal value on E*Trade, but they do not convey the same privileges. When Microsoft pays a dividend, I can use the proceeds from my brokerage MSFT share to buy a pack of gum at the convenience store. I can’t do that with my IRA MSFT share. On the other hand, I can sell my IRA MSFT share for a profit without paying capital gains tax. I also cannot trivially convert a brokerage MSFT share to an IRA MSFT share at no cost.

The European stock RYA shows a market capitalization of 17.04 billion euros = 18.51 billion dollars, while the US stock RYAAY shows a market capitalization of 21.54 billion dollars, which is bigger by 16 percent. I'm not saying that's the whole story, but there is a discrepancy.

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