You see so many people on Twitter saying
"Infosys ADR is up 5% today."
"ICICI Bank and HDFC Bank ADR ended highly positive today. Good move coming up for Banknifty."
Have you ever wondered what is ADR? You're not alone.
Time for a thread. 👇👇👇
1/ Back in the early 1900s, people were buying shares in foreign countries in the respective country's exchanges (many still do).
There are few issues with that:
- Complexity of the purchase
- Currency conversion issues
- Difficulty in transactions
and so on.
2/ JP Morgan saw this, and thought
"what if people could trade foreign companies
- in our country
- in our currency
- but without the companies having to list themselves here?"
ADR was born.
3/ ADR stands for American Depository Receipts.
It's like a share certificate, issued by a U.S depository bank (like CDSL here), but on a foreign company.
Usually one ADR unit represents one share of the foreign company.
4/ Here's how it works.
The depository bank buys the foreign company shares in the foreign exchange.
This depository bank holds the purchased shares as inventory.
It issues respective ADR for domestic trading.
The ADR is issued & traded in US Dollars.