First European Stock Investment

I bought 40 shares of Bekaert - a Belgian firm that mainly focuses on steel wire products (including tyre wires) as well as some high tech materials and coatings. They also have a research lab in China. The firm is 40% family owned and pays a decent dividend. An online acquaintance said he was investing and I think he is worth following on this. Yes I bought the shares on the Belgian Stock Exchange. With Interactive Brokers this is fairly straightforward. I just asked online for permission to trade Belgium which was instantly granted. I then placed the order in the usual way. Interactive Brokers then extended me a loan in Euros to cover the purchase. I didn't bother paying for Euronext data. You can trade an exchange without paying for the data through IB. Yahoo provide the data with a fifteen minute lag, which is good enough for long-term investing. If you are interested in European stocks the Yahoo UK site has far more information than the US finance site. I don't know why they can't link this info through to the US site. After all the UK site knew which stocks I'd most recently requested quotes for on the US Yahoo Finance site!