What Happened to the "Sell America" Trade?

There’s been much discussion in the financial media recently that the Iran war killed off the “Sell America trade” – the trend among international investors to sell U.S.-related assets, including stocks, bonds, and the dollar, simultaneously.

The idea of the Sell America trade got a lot of press last year after President Donald Trump introduced shockingly high tariffs on imports from many U.S. trading partners. Just as surprisingly, the Trump administration began to attack the Federal Reserve. Both sets of policies raised concerns among international investors that U.S. economic policymaking was unstable, prompting them to diversify out of U.S. assets.

More recently, amid the war in the Middle East, analysts speculated that global investors would return to U.S. assets as a haven from geopolitical uncertainty and soaring energy prices resulting from it.

Perhaps there never was a Sell America trade

But in fact, there’s little evidence that there even was a recent Sell America trade. Torsten Slok, chief economist at invesment firm Apollo Global Management, computed that there were only 17 days in 2025 when U.S. stocks, bonds, and the dollar all sold off. And there have been only nine such days in 2026. With about 252 trading days per year, those numbers are not significant as a global trend.

“The bottom line,” Slok wrote in a recent post on the Apollo site, “is that the U.S. remains the most dynamic and innovative economy in the world, delivering the best and most steady returns for domestic and global investors.”

That certainly makes a lot of sense. U.S. stocks represent about two-thirds of global market capitalization, according to LPL Financial. The U.S. also has the world’s largest bond market, at more than $51 trillion, which is roughly 40% of the total for global bonds.

Finally, the dollar remains the world’s reserve currency. While it has ceded some ground to other currencies in recent decades, it is still used more than all other currencies combined, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Image source: Getty Images.

All that said, it’s still a wise move to diversify your portfolio with a decent portion of non-U.S. stocks. When U.S. stocks become expensive (relative to earnings), as they have in recent years, there are comparatively great bargains to be had in international stocks.