You have built something. A career, a business, often both. You solve difficult problems for a living, and you are good at it.
Which is why the money question can be quietly frustrating. Your savings sit there, earning something, but you suspect they could be doing more. The gap between how capable you are at work and how uncertain you feel about investing is not a comfortable one.
Ten years ago, investing in the US market from Malaysia was genuinely difficult. Today you can open an account in an afternoon. So the real question has changed. It is no longer whether you can reach that market. It is whether that market deserves your money, and what skills you need before you put money into it.
The short answer: The US market holds close to half of the world's listed company value and the busiest exchanges on earth. That size is useful to both long-term investors and active traders, which is why we teach both. For a Malaysian, the US market adds to what you already hold at home rather than replacing it. "Why now" is about getting properly equipped, not about rushing in.
Start with where the money already is. According to Siblis Research, the US holds roughly half of the entire world's stock market value, with US listed companies passing 75 trillion dollars by mid-2026. Not half of America's value. Half of the planet's.
Size matters for a practical reason. A big market has many buyers and sellers active at the same time, so when you want to buy or sell, someone is there to take the other side at a fair price. In a small, quiet market you can be stuck waiting, or forced to accept a worse price just to complete your trade.
Here is what that difference costs you. On the largest US shares, the gap between the price buyers offer and the price sellers ask is about one hundredth of one percent. On a ten thousand ringgit trade, that gap costs you roughly one ringgit. You can enter and exit without losing meaningful money to the transaction itself, which matters a great deal if you plan to trade rather than only buy and hold.
Not an economy. A group of businesses, and mostly global ones.
A large share of S&P 500 revenue is earned outside America. Estimates range from about 28 percent on Goldman Sachs' measure to roughly 41 percent using Citi's data, depending on how the figure is counted. Either way, owning a broad slice of that index is not a bet on American shoppers alone. These companies sell into Europe, Asia and Latin America, and they report their numbers under some of the strictest disclosure rules in the world.
These are also the businesses behind the software your company runs on, the devices your family uses, and many of the medicines now reaching hospitals. Most of them are not listed anywhere else. If you want to understand why owning businesses differs from holding a store of value, we covered that in Gold versus Stocks in Malaysia: Why Productive Assets Win.
The difference matters, because many people mix the two up and then judge one by the standards of the other.
| Investing | Trading | |
|---|---|---|
| How long you hold | Months to years | Days to months |
| What you study | Company profits, growth, what a business is worth | Price patterns and chart behaviour |
| How you grow money | The business grows, and you compound gains over time | You take repeated, managed positions |
| What it asks of you | Patience and conviction | Discipline and routine |
Neither is better. They suit different people and different seasons of life, and most of our students eventually use both. What decides your results is not which one you pick. Your results come from whether you follow a system, and whether you control your risk on every single position.
No. Adding US shares to your portfolio does not mean giving up anything you hold at home. The two sit side by side.
EPF remains a genuinely strong foundation. EPF declared a 6.15 percent dividend for 2025, with a total payout of RM79.6 billion, and EPF has delivered above 5 percent throughout the past decade. Bursa Malaysia is a healthy market in its own right, with more than a thousand listed companies and 60 new listings in 2025, a two-decade high. Both have earned their place in a Malaysian portfolio.
Here is the part worth noticing. EPF does not keep all of its money in Malaysia. EPF invests close to 38 percent of its assets overseas, and those overseas holdings produced about half of EPF’s investment income for the year. The fund that manages retirement savings for millions of Malaysians already treats overseas investing as normal practice.
So investing abroad is not a leap into the unknown. Careful institutional money has been doing exactly this for years. Going global simply widens the range of companies, sectors and tools you can choose from, on top of the base you have already built.
Over nearly a century, the broad US market has averaged around ten percent a year, based on long-run data from Professor Aswath Damodaran at NYU Stern, with reinvested dividends making up roughly 40 percent of that.
That figure is history, not a forecast. Past performance never guarantees future results, and anyone who tells you otherwise is not being honest with you. Markets fall, sometimes sharply, and there will be years that test your patience.
So history tells you the US market has rewarded participation over long periods. History does not tell you that any price is a good price, or that any moment is a good moment to buy. Those are separate questions, and they are the ones that decide most people’s results.
Most people stop at picking a company, and often without a reliable way of picking. Choosing well matters a great deal, but choosing is only the first of four steps, and all four decide the outcome together. We teach the four steps as a framework called STPM:
Those who struggle put nearly all their attention on what to buy, and even there they are usually working from tips, headlines and opinion rather than a repeatable screen. Time and Protect are rarely considered at all. The result is the wrong company, bought at the wrong moment, in a position size too large to survive being wrong. When risk control is ignored entirely, the damage can be severe, as we wrote about in South Korea's margin call storm.
Our founder, Kathlyn Toh, has more than thirty years of market experience and has traded through the dot-com bubble, the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 period. In this short video Kathlyn talks about staying clear-headed through artificial intelligence disruption, war and market uncertainty.
“The fundamentals haven’t changed.” Kathlyn Toh, Founder, Beyond Insights
Her point is a steadying one. Headlines move every day. The reasons the US market matters move far more slowly.
Opening a trading account is the easy part, and it is also the wrong first step. The order below is the order we teach, and the first two steps matter most.
Step 1: Learn a proven system before you risk any money. Learning a system means following a tested method that already tells you what to look for in a company, when to enter and exit, and how much to risk on each position. Inventing your own rules from scratch, with no framework behind them, is not a system. Part of that learning is choosing which style fits your personality, your available capital and the time you can realistically give the market each week, because growth investing, swing trading, trend trading and intraday trading all make different demands on you. Choosing the wrong style for your life is a common reason people give up.
Step 2: Practise that system on paper first. Place trades on paper, or in a broker’s simulated account, and keep a written record of every decision and the reason behind it. You are not testing whether the method works. You are testing whether you can execute the method consistently, under pressure, before your own money is involved.
Step 3: Open an account with a licensed broker that serves Malaysian residents and gives access to US exchanges. Account opening includes a W-8BEN form, which confirms to the US tax authorities that you are not a US person.
Step 4: Fund the account and convert ringgit to US dollars. The buy rate and the sell rate differ, and that difference is a real cost you pay on the way in and again on the way out. Factor it in.
Step 5: Start small, applying the risk rules from your system. Your method should already define how much of your capital any single position may use and the price at which you exit a losing trade. We teach a 1 percent risk rule, which caps what any single position can cost you. Because fractional shares let you buy part of a single share, a few hundred ringgit is enough to begin. Whether you are placing trades on paper or with real money, treat every position as though the money matters, because the habits you build in practice are the habits you will carry into live trading.
Three changes have made all of this far cheaper than it used to be. Commissions on US shares and exchange traded funds dropped to effectively zero at the major brokers in 2019, after Charles Schwab moved first. Fractional shares removed the high share price barrier. And since May 2024, US trades settle in one working day.
One protection is worth knowing about. US brokers are covered by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, which covers up to 500,000 dollars per account type if the broker itself fails, and which treats non-US citizens the same as Americans. That protection does not cover losses on your shares. That protection covers you if your broker collapses. Use licensed platforms only, and be wary of anyone impersonating a known name to ask for your funds.
No. This is the most common worry we hear, and the honest answer is that every style works from Malaysia. The styles simply differ in how much screen time they ask of you.
| US session | Nov to Mar (MYT) | Mar to Nov (MYT) |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-market opens | 5:00pm | 4:00pm |
| Main session | 10:30pm to 5:00am | 9:30pm to 4:00am |
| After-hours ends | 9:00am | 8:00am |
The main session opens in the Malaysian evening, which is actually convenient for most working adults. You are home, the working day is behind you, and the market is opening.
Growth investing needs the least time. You review your holdings periodically and act on clear signals.
Swing and trend trading suit people with a full-time job particularly well. You do your analysis in the evening, place your orders with your exit levels already set, and go to sleep. Your orders execute without you watching.
Intraday trading does require you to be at the screen while the market is open, which means the first hours after the US open, late in the Malaysian evening. Many of our students do this successfully, and the key is treating it as a defined session with a clear start and finish rather than an all-night habit.
Both NYSE Arca and Nasdaq have also been approved to extend towards almost round-the-clock trading, a change aimed squarely at Asian time zones.
If volatility rather than timing is what puts you off, we addressed that directly in our March 2026 Market Outlook.
Five points are worth knowing, and none of them replace advice from a qualified tax adviser.
Gains from selling shares. Malaysia does not tax individuals on capital gains from selling shares. The capital gains tax introduced in 2024 applies to companies and similar entities, not to individuals.
One important qualification for active traders. LHDN uses a test called the badges of trade to decide whether your activity is investing or a business. Factors include how frequently you trade, how long you hold, and whether trading is your main source of income. If your activity is judged to be a business, gains can be taxed as business income at normal income tax rates. This affects frequent traders rather than long-term investors, and it is worth discussing with a tax adviser before you scale up your activity.
Income from overseas. Income you receive from abroad, including dividends from foreign shares, stays exempt from Malaysian income tax until 31 December 2036, under the exemption extended by the Ministry of Finance. One condition attaches to that exemption: the income must already have been taxed in the country where the income arose. US dividends satisfy the condition, because the 30 percent withholding described below is tax paid at source. Gains from selling US shares are less straightforward, because the United States does not tax non-residents on those gains, so ask your tax adviser how the condition applies to your own situation.
US dividend withholding. This point is often reported wrongly on local sites. Malaysia does not appear on the United States tax treaty tables, so the US withholds 30 percent of your dividend before the dividend reaches you. The W-8BEN form confirms you are not a US person, but the form does not lower that 30 percent for Malaysians. Anyone who tells you the rate drops to 15 percent is mistaken. Note that this applies to dividends only, not to your gains from selling shares.
Estate planning. If you hold more than 60,000 dollars of US assets, your estate can face US estate tax of up to 40 percent. This point is rarely discussed and is worth planning for properly.
Here is something that surprises most people. You do not need to be right most of the time to do well in the market.
That belief, that a good trader wins nearly every trade, is probably the single most damaging idea a new trader can hold. It leads people to hold losing positions far too long, because closing a losing trade feels like admitting failure. It leads people to take oversized positions, because they are certain about this one. Both habits destroy accounts.
The research on untrained traders is sobering, and we would rather you heard it from us. A study of Brazilian day traders by Chague, De-Losso and Giovannetti found that among those who persisted beyond three hundred days, 97 percent lost money. A study of the Taiwan Stock Exchange over fifteen years found that fewer than 1 percent of day traders made money reliably after costs.
Notice what those studies measure. They measure people trading without a system, without position sizing, and without risk rules. They do not measure what is possible with proper training. They measure what happens without it.
What actually changes the outcome is less dramatic than most people expect. You keep each position small enough that a loss cannot seriously hurt you. You decide your exit before you enter. You accept that a meaningful share of your trades will lose, and you make sure your winners are larger than your losers. Do that consistently and you do not need a high win rate to build wealth. You need a controlled one.
Kathlyn’s conclusion after thirty years is blunt:
“Consistent success in trading is 90 percent psychology and money management, and just 10 percent mechanics.”
Kathlyn Toh, Founder, Beyond Insights
Which is encouraging, if you think about it. The mechanics are not what stands between you and competence. Psychology and money management can be taught, structured and practised, and that is precisely what a proper education covers. Kathlyn has written more on why this trips up so many capable people.
We have been honest about how people struggle. We should be equally honest about the market itself.
Three things are worth holding in mind. First, concentration. Roughly a third of the S&P 500's value now sits in seven companies, so a broad index fund is less diversified than the name suggests.
Second, price. US shares are historically expensive against company earnings. Expensive markets can stay expensive for years, so this is not a prediction of a fall. It does mean less room for error if profits disappoint.
Third, the current earnings story leans heavily on one unproven bet. Goldman Sachs Research forecasts global artificial intelligence investment above one trillion dollars in 2026. Allianz Research points out that companies are committing hundreds of billions of dollars to a technology cycle whose returns remain a matter of active debate, because a single data centre can absorb billions before earning a dollar of revenue.
None of this argues against the US market. All of it argues for the Protect step: size your positions properly, know your exit, and treat global exposure as one part of what you hold.
Not because of a rally you must not miss. That kind of pressure produces poor decisions, and it is not how we think at Beyond Insights.
The real answer has little to do with where prices sit today. The barriers that kept ordinary Malaysians out of global markets have quietly fallen away, nearly all within the last seven years. Commissions went to zero in 2019. Fractional shares removed the price barrier. Settlement dropped to one working day in 2024. Exchanges are extending trading hours specifically to serve time zones like ours. And the exemption on foreign income runs to 2036, which gives you a long planning horizon.
Doing this from Kuala Lumpur in 2019 meant real friction and real cost. Today the friction is largely gone. What remains is the part that was always the hard part, which is knowing what you are doing.
Current conditions matter less, and they change monthly. Briefly: company profits have grown faster than share prices, so shares are slightly cheaper against earnings than in late 2025 even though the market is higher. The Federal Reserve has a new Chair, Kevin Warsh, who took office in May 2026. We covered his arrival and the energy shock behind recent inflation separately.
The ringgit has also strengthened against the dollar, which matters more than it sounds. When the ringgit rises, your US gains shrink when you convert back to ringgit. That is a genuine cost, not a footnote, and it is not something to try to predict. It is another reason to think in years rather than months.
Beyond Insights has been teaching Malaysians to invest and trade with a system rather than a hunch since 2008. More than 8,500 students have come through that education, and we are the pioneer of investing and trading psychology bootcamps in Asia. Kathlyn Toh has traded her own capital for over thirty years, through the dot-com bubble, the 2008 crisis and COVID-19.
One graduate summed up the feeling that brings most people to us: "I don't have 20 years to waste." If that lands with you, the next step is not to act faster. The next step is to learn the structure properly, before any money is at risk. Individual experiences vary.
Our free three-hour online preview, Global Investing and Trading Made Simple, covers:
The people who do well are rarely the ones who moved fastest. They are the ones who understood what they owned, and why, before it mattered.
How can a Malaysian invest in US stocks?
Learn a system first and practise on paper before risking money. Then open an account with a licensed broker that serves Malaysian residents, complete verification including a W-8BEN form, fund the account in ringgit and convert to US dollars, and set your risk rules before your first order. Commissions at the major brokers are effectively zero, and fractional shares let you own part of a high-priced share.
What are US market hours in Malaysian time?
The main US session runs from 10:30pm to 5:00am Malaysian time between November and March, and from 9:30pm to 4:00am between March and November. The session opens in the Malaysian evening, which suits most working adults.
Can you trade the US market while working full time in Malaysia?
Yes. Growth investing needs the least time, and swing and trend trading suit a full-time job well, because you analyse in the evening and place orders with exit levels already set. Intraday trading requires being at the screen during the US session, which falls late in the Malaysian evening, and many people do this successfully by treating it as a defined session rather than an all-night habit.
How much money do you need to start investing in US stocks?
Far less than most people assume. Fractional shares let you buy part of a single share, so a few hundred ringgit is enough to begin, and commissions at the major brokers are effectively zero. Starting small with real money teaches more than a demo account, provided you have learned a system and practised on paper first.
Is it too late to start investing in the US market?
Being late to a particular rally matters far less than most people assume. What matters more is whether you have a method for choosing what to buy and when, and whether you control your risk. Those skills work in any market condition.
How does the KLCI compare with the S&P 500?
They hold different companies with very different mixes of industries. The KLCI leans towards banking, plantations and utilities, while the S&P 500 leans towards technology, healthcare and global consumer businesses. They do different jobs, which is why holding both widens what is available to you rather than forcing a choice.
Do Malaysians pay tax on US stock gains?
Malaysia does not tax individuals on capital gains from selling shares, and income received from overseas stays exempt from Malaysian income tax until 31 December 2036. However, LHDN can treat frequent, systematic trading as a business, in which case gains are taxed as business income. The US also withholds 30 percent of dividends, because Malaysia has no tax treaty with the United States, and a W-8BEN form does not reduce that rate. Please consult a qualified tax adviser.
Do you need a high win rate to make money trading?
No, and believing otherwise causes real damage. What matters is the size of your wins compared with the size of your losses, and controlling how much you risk on each position. A trader who is right less than half the time can still build wealth if the losses are kept small and the winners are allowed to run. This is why risk management is taught before strategy.
What is the difference between investing and trading?
Investing means holding businesses for months to years, guided by company performance and value. Trading means working with shorter price movements over days to months, guided by chart patterns and strict risk control. They suit different people, and most experienced market participants eventually use both.
Does investing in the US market mean taking money out of EPF?
No. Overseas investing adds to a strong local foundation rather than replacing it. EPF itself had close to 38 percent of its money invested overseas in 2025, producing about half of its investment income.
Is my money protected if a US broker fails?
US brokers are covered by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, which covers up to 500,000 dollars per account type if the broker becomes insolvent, and treats non-US citizens the same as Americans. That protection does not cover losses on the value of your shares.
Beyond Insights is an education and training company. We are not financial advisers and we do not advise on which securities you should buy or sell. All investing and trading involves the risk of losing capital. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Student experiences described are individual and are not a promise of any particular outcome.
Written by the Beyond Insights Education Team.
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