Personal Finance and Investing

It stands for “American Depository Receipts” which is a block of shares of a foreign based company held by a depository bank, usually a foreign branch of that bank, like the Singapore branch of Chase, for instance.

The bank buys a block of shares of a given firm on the overseas exchange and those shares are held in trust. Individual shares (or an ADS) of the underlying securities are then available on a US exchange. It’s important to remember that the price of a given ADS may not directly correlate to the price of the share on the offshore stock market, even considering currency exchange rates.

Investopedia has a good article on these instruments;

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/adr.asp