You all asked, and here it is.
How can I buy US stocks while in Nigeria?
This is the ULTIMATE GUIDE on How to Invest in US Stocks.
In this post, I will teach you how to invest and make money, in a simple and easy way.
I want to keep this post as short as possible so let us get right into it.
Disclaimer:
This is not financial advice; I am only teaching you how to use the tools available to do your research and make your own decisions on what to invest in. Like any other form of investment, Stocks also involve a fair amount of risk, so make your own informed decisions and talk to a financial expert if need be.
What is Investment?
First of all, what does it mean to invest? Well, it is kind of like buying something, anything, for example, buying a smartphone, and then keeping it until the price of the phone you bought has changed, so you then go back to sell it to someone else at the new price.
But in this case, we won’t be buying physical products like smartphones, we would be buying stocks instead.
While there are other forms of investment we can make, like in crypto or real estate, I will be focusing on stocks in this post alone, because, unlike crypto, stocks are not as volatile, as it is regulated and do not just depend on demand and supply, and unlike real estate, stocks do not require you to have a large amount of capital.
Also, you might be surprised to know that you can still invest in crypto and real estate using stocks. I will teach you everything here.
What are Stocks?
Stocks are ownership in a real existing company, for example, buying stocks in Apple means you own part of Apple.
Owning stocks of a company sometimes means that you even get to vote on decisions made in that company, while in some other cases, the company gives you part of the profits made, as an owner that you are.
If the value of the company goes up, so does your stock value, and you can then sell at the new price, and make profits.
Where can I buy Stocks?
You can only buy stocks in a company that is “publicly traded”, meaning that the company has allowed anyone in the public to be able to buy shares in their company, and for them to do this, they have to be on what’s called the Stock Exchange, which is like a marketplace you go to to sell your stocks.
The marketplace is regulated by different regulatory bodies, many countries have their own Stock Exchange, for example, the NGX (formally NSE) is the Nigerian Exchange Group which regulates the market of publicly traded Nigerian companies, while the NYSE (The New York Stock Exchange) and NASDAQ regulates the Stock Exchange for publicly traded US companies.
These regulations by the Stock Exchange is a lot but most importantly, unlike private companies, public companies must disclose their financial and business information regularly to the public, this means that how well or bad a stock does on the Stock Exchange is not just random or entirely left to demand and supply, it is many times based on news of how the company is actually doing in real life, and because of this, just like companies do not open on weekends or holidays, so does the stock market.
This is one reason why investing in stocks is not as risky as some other kinds of investments that are totally left to the forces of demand and supply. Before investing in any company stocks, you can and should learn about the company, learn about how they earn revenue, review their quarterly reports and subscribe to news about the company.
ONLY INVEST IN COMPANIES YOU KNOW AND TRUST, not companies some random guy told you to.
The companies I will mention in this post are only used as examples to teach you how to invest.
How To Buy US Stocks In Nigeria
To continue, we need to download Bamboo. Bamboo is an app that allows us to buy stocks listed on the NASDAQ and NYSE Stock Exchanges, and the NGX.
Other apps can be used for this but I will only recommend Bamboo because that is what I personally use, and it is the best for stock investment.
Download Bamboo App
So just go to your Apple App Store or Google Play Store and download Bamboo.
After you have downloaded the app, tap on “start building wealth” to create an account and complete all steps in the signup process.
Fund your wallet
Now it is time to fund your wallet, you can do this in multiple ways, but what you should know is that there are 2 main wallets, a USD wallet and an NGN (Naira) Wallet.
Funding the NGN wallet is like funding any other Nigerian app wallet, tap on your NGN wallet and tap on deposit, enter an amount, a minimum of $1 when converted so you can literally start with 2k, choose your preferred payment method, you can either transfer or use your Naira card. It is that easy.
Similar to the USD wallet, the process is the same, you can fund your wallet using a USD/domiciliary card from any bank or you can transfer to a brokerage account using Swift or ACH, for those that know.
However, because we are buying stocks of American companies, we buy every stock in USD.
Meaning that after you fund your NGN wallet, you have to convert that NGN to USD, using the transfer option, when you tap in your NGN wallet, just beside the deposit button, you can easily convert your Naira to USD.
Let’s buy some US stocks
Now we have our USD, it is time to buy some stocks. You can go back to the homepage and tap on “Invest” in the bottom navigation. There you will see a long list of companies to choose from and you can even search for a particular company.
Searching for a company is easy, this is because every company on the Stock Exchange has a ticker symbol, which is like a username to help identify specific companies. So for example, the ticker symbol of Apple is “AAPL”, while Alphabet(google’s parent company) is GOOG.
You can of course just search for the company names in full, but if you know their ticker symbol (which you can just google), it is a lot more straightforward, as multiple companies can have similar names.
When you find the company you want, you can tap to see the company details, its stock chart, recent news about the company and just a lot more.
Bamboo shows a lot of information to help you make a decision, so much so that I cannot possibly list each and everyone here.
But just below all that information is the “BUY” button.
When you tap on buy, you are presented with a couple of options, with explanations of what those options mean, but let us just tap on “Buy Now”.
Enter the amount you want to buy, review the order and complete your purchase
Congratulations, you just bought your first stock.
You can do the same process for any other companies you are looking to invest in, or if you do not have the funds yet, you can just add that company to your wishlist using the love icon in the top right corner of the company details.
If you are not sure what companies to Invest in, Bamboo offers “personalised investment”, where by answering a few questions, Bamboo can recommend a list of companies to invest in based on your risk appetite. This can be found at the top of the list on the Invest page.
But even on top of that, Bamboo has various categories of stocks you can invest in, including “the Magnificent 7” (the 7 most popular stocks), stocks their ambassador like Falz are invested in, stocks world-renowned investors and finance experts like Warren Buffet are invested in, and categories based on different industries like REIT for Real Estate and Bitcoin stocks.
What are Bitcoin Stocks (ETFs)?
Bitcoin Stocks, you ask? Well, first I have to explain what is called an ETF.
ETFs, or Exchange-Traded Funds, are investment funds that are traded on a Stock Exchange, just like individual stocks, but rather than an individual stock, it is usually a collection of multiple individual stocks or multiple assets in other forms.
They are designed to track the performance of a specific index, sector, commodity, or asset. This means that when you buy shares in an ETF, you are essentially buying a piece of a portfolio that represents a particular market index or sector.
Think of an ETF as a basket of fruits sold at a market. Each fruit in the basket represents a different company’s stock. When you buy the basket (the ETF), you’re buying a small piece of each fruit (each company’s stock) within it.
This allows you to own a variety of fruits (stocks) without having to buy each one individually. And just like how the price of the fruit basket depends on the prices of the individual fruits, the price of an ETF changes throughout the day based on the total value of the assets it holds.
The S&P 500
The most popular ETF is one you have probably heard of, it is the S&P 500. The S&P 500, or Standard & Poor’s 500, is a stock market index that tracks the performance of 500 of the largest publicly traded companies in the U.S. It is like investing in the biggest 500 companies at once.
However, note that they are different S&P 500 ETFs, but the most popular one is the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF and the ticker symbol for that is VOO. ETFs are just like individual stocks so they all also have ticker symbols.
Other ETFs
Similar to the S&P 500, there are different ETFs on Real Estate that track the real estate market and on physical commodities like Gold and Oil, as well as Crypto.
So you can invest in various things and various industries, all using ETFs, all on the Bamboo app. That’s why when people ask me about getting started in Investment, I tell them that the Bamboo app is all they need for real.
Diversification
This is also great because, every financial expert will tell you the importance of diversification, you should diversify your portfolio into different stocks and ETFs to help reduce risks and make your portfolio more stable.
Conclusion
So back on your homepage, you would find your investments, with two options, “US Stocks” and “Fixed Returns”. Fixed returns we would maybe talk about in another post but US Stocks is where we can click to see the list of your current investments and wishlists.
On the US stocks page, You will see a button called “breakdown”, tap here to see a full breakdown of your investments including charts, and other useful data. On this page, you would also see your Portfolio “Cost Basis” and “Current Value”.
Cost Basis is how much you invested and current value is how much you have right now.
So now you know how to buy stocks and how to track your investments.
If you want to learn more about investing, bamboo has a tab called “learn” specially dedicated to that.
If you want to stay ahead of the curve and make the right investments, there are tons of YouTube channels and Twitter profiles you can follow, but you can also join Bamboo’s Whatsapp channel to get the latest news and information on what’s happening to help you make better decisions, because like I said, Stocks are not entirely a gamble, they are affected by real-life choices, news and announcements, so being an investor in stocks means you have to follow the news and watch out for useful information.
That is all for today, if you have any questions, please let me know below.
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