How Jeff D. Opdyke became a successful international investor is an Everyman tale that began thirteen years ago when he discarded conventional wisdom. At the time, Wall Street’s pros insisted that average investors buy domestic mutual funds that invest overseas. But Jeff ignored their tepid advice. Instead, he opted for the intrepid, opening bank and brokerage accounts from New Zealand to Hong Kong in order to buy the local stocks he wanted to own, not those that some fund manager deemed worthy.

Jeff did so with great insight: People are people no matter whether home is in Madrid, Memphis, or Mumbai. They drink beer and buy homes and the furnishings and appliances to put in them. As hundreds of millions of people around the world strive to move into the middle class, the companies that meet these basic needs are becoming the great investment opportunities of today and tomorrow. Only a fraction of them, however, trade on American stock exchanges.

So, armed with simple tools available to you and me (the Internet and an e-mail account), Jeff found companies intimately tied to their local economies but capable of expansion—to America, perhaps, or more important to Asia and other regions of explosive growth. One such company is Fisher & Paykel, a New Zealand–based maker of appliances that over the course of a dozen years has produced a steady stream of dividends and special distributions and has gained more than 17 percent a year for Jeff.

How to find companies like Fisher & Paykel is the heart of this book. You can indeed make the world your oyster by diversifying your portfolio, and Jeff provides indispensable insight and practical guidelines for every aspect of investing directly overseas. He shows how to research and track companies, set up foreign brokerage accounts, handle tax issues, convert currencies, and fund accounts.

Why venture beyond the United States to begin with? Because America is really just one small island. For every American public company, there are four beyond our shores—many of which are small to midsize and have huge potential for growth, which you’ll never find by trading in America alone.

If you’re ready to take the next step in building a truly diversified portfolio, you will gain a wealth of invaluable insight and information from Jeff’s engaging first-person accounts of his trial-and-error—but, ultimately, highly successful—globe-trotting career in search of worthy stocks.

The opportunities for investing overseas are indisputable. The World Is Your Oyster is your travel guide: pinpointing five of the best reasons to go global, detailing various ways for investors of every temperament—from timid to adventurous—to cross financial borders, focusing on how to invest directly in hot spots from China to Turkey to Eastern Europe, and revealing how the Internet and other twenty-first-century technology has opened a world of direct overseas investment opportunities for you.

JEFF D. OPDYKE covers investing and personal finance for The Wall Street Journal and is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal Sunday supplement syndicated in eighty newspapers nationwide. He is also the author of The Wall Street Journal Complete Personal Financial Guidebook and Love and Money.