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FOLLOWING the explosive growth of Internet stockbroking in America in 1996-99, it was natural that American online brokers would start expanding into Europe. Natural, too, that their eyes should alight first on good old Britain: English-speaking, Internet-hip and, since the privatisations of the 1980s, home to a broad-based “shareholder culture”. Yet Britain is proving slower to embrace online investing than are continental countries, supposedly so much more leery of the American way of capitalism. Britain is now behind a number of places—notably Germany—in the number of online share-dealing accounts (see chart). Some of the American brokers who plumped for Britain as their stepping-stone to Europe must be wondering if they made the right choice.