I split my time between Spain and Belgrade, and I lead Obermatt’s stock business, headquartered in Zurich. So, I don't have a straightforward "home market." Serbia is where I grew up, where I still judge companies partly by reputation and word of mouth rather than by numbers. Spain is where I've built a daily routine and read the local business press. Switzerland is where the company is based, though our analysis stretches well past Swiss borders, from Europe or the US to Asia or Africa, comparing each stock against its own regional and sector peers rather than against a single national benchmark.
Most investors never ask themselves about their home market. The answer seems clear to everyone: home is wherever they happen to live, and that's also where most of their portfolio ends up. This isn't really a decision. It's a well-documented behavioral pattern called home bias, the tendency to hold more of one's own country's stocks than global diversification would justify.
“Home market” usually takes one of two shapes. Either the literal home market, or, increasingly, regardless of nationality, the S&P 500. It's treated as a stand-in for "the market" itself because it's familiar, closely covered, and has performed well for years. Both choices feel safe. Both carry a cost that's easy to overlook: whatever return sits outside the home market that feels safe is never even considered, let alone purchased. Investors don't just concentrate their risk this way. They quietly cap their own upside without making a deliberate decision to do so.
The Home Market Bias
Home bias survives because it feels like knowledge rather than a shortcut. Reading news in your own language, recognizing brand names on the commute, following a company because its CEO turns up on the evening news, all of that builds a comfortable sense of familiarity. But familiarity is not insight. Knowing that a company exists, or that its products sell well locally, says little about whether its stock is fairly priced relative to its peers. The confidence a domestic investor feels toward a local company is proximity dressed up as due diligence.
Overcoming Currency Risk
Currency is the other quiet blocker. Ask most investors why they haven't bought a stock listed abroad, and the honest answer is rarely about the company itself. It's a vague unease about exchange rates, one that rarely gets examined closely enough to be confirmed or dismissed. Currency risk is real, but it's a specific, measurable variable. It isn't a reason to rule out an entire market before looking at what's in it.
None of this makes the instinct to stick with what's familiar irrational. It's a reasonable response to genuinely difficult information: unfamiliar markets, unfamiliar accounting conventions, unfamiliar company names. The problem isn't the instinct itself. It's mistaking the comfort that instinct provides for actual knowledge of whether a stock is a good investment. Closing that gap doesn't take more comfort. It takes a different kind of information.
Finding Foreign Investments
The Obermatt 360° View is built to close the information gap. A single number on its own, a P/E ratio, a dividend yield, a growth rate, means little without something to compare it to ("When Is Good Really Good? What Relative Stock Performance Uncovers"). The same logic applies even more directly once a border is involved. Instead of asking an investor to become a local expert before buying a foreign stock, we rank each company against its actual peer group inside its own region and sector, so the comparison already accounts for local valuation norms and market conditions that would otherwise take years to learn firsthand.
To give more context around each stock, we now publish news summaries. A rank tells you how a stock compares to its peers. A short summary of what's actually happening at the company gives you the context for why that comparison looks the way it does. The combination of Obermatt tools makes investing beyond your home market something you can actually act on.
This is the first piece in a series on investing abroad. The next ones will focus on making investing in distant regions more feasible with regional analysis and stock tips. In the meantime, ask yourself how much of your own portfolio actually sits outside your home market.