In the previous chapter, we established the basic regulatory framework that allows Indian residents to invest abroad, which is the Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS).

Under LRS, an individual in India can legally remit up to $250,000 per financial year for permitted purposes, including investing in foreign stocks, ETFs, and other financial assets.

But then the follow-up question: who actually monitors this system?

After all, when money leaves India and gets invested in a company listed thousands of kilometres away, it does not move through an unregulated space. Multiple institutions oversee different parts of that journey.

So, global investing does not fall under a single regulator. It operates under two parallel regulatory frameworks working together.

One set of regulators governs the movement of money out of India. Another set governs the financial markets where the investments actually take place.

For an Indian investor buying US stocks, that means interacting with regulators in both India and the United States.

In India, institutions such as the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), and the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA) play key roles.

In the United States, the system is overseen primarily by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA).

Each of these regulators supervises a different layer of the system, from capital flows and brokerage conduct to the functioning of stock exchanges and listed companies.

Understanding what each of them does and, just as importantly, what they do not do helps make the structure of global investing much clearer.

So before we move deeper into how global investing works in practice, let us first understand who these regulators are and what exactly they oversee.