What this shows: the rolling 12-month sum of foreign net transactions in U.S. corporate stocks, in billions of dollars. Each point adds up the most recent twelve months of cross-border buys minus sells, so lumpy single-month prints (large block trades, index rebalances, one-off foreign official trades) are smoothed into a readable trend of foreign appetite for US equities. Positive = foreigners are net buyers over the trailing year; negative = net sellers.

Data: the Treasury International Capital (TIC) Continuous Securities Long Term (CSLT) series — U.S. custodians, broker-dealers and banks report cross-border securities transactions for foreign official institutions and private investors. Net transactions are measured at market value and are not seasonally adjusted. The series is FRED FORLTEQTYNET99996 (U.S. Treasury TIC + Federal Reserve staff estimates), monthly from January 1985; the rolling sum starts in December 1985 once a full 12-month window exists. Recent months are preliminary and routinely revised. TIC is published monthly, typically about six to eight weeks after the observation month. This chart checks FRED every morning and evening in New York, including after the usual release time; a successful check can leave the latest month unchanged. The next release date below comes from FRED and may change.

Recession bands: NBER US business-cycle peak-to-trough dates, drawn as shaded vertical bands: Jul 1990–Mar 1991, Mar–Nov 2001, Dec 2007–Jun 2009 and Feb–Apr 2020. Foreign buying tends to hold up or even accelerate into US recessions — the 2008–09 and 2020 episodes both saw continued net foreign accumulation on a 12-month basis.

Reading the chart: the line is the trend; sharp vertical moves usually reflect one outsized month entering (or dropping out of) the 12-month window rather than a genuine regime shift. Zoom in (scroll / shift+drag) to isolate individual episodes.

Data: chart data (JSON) · source series (CSV) · FRED series page