It’s not quite the same. In the US, the shares are legally owned by Cede & Co. on the books of the corporation. DTC then has a database that says the shares rea

It’s not quite the same. In the US, the shares are legally owned by Cede & Co. on the books of the corporation. DTC then has a database that says the shares really belong to various brokers, for the most part. Finally, the brokers have a database saying which client owns the shares. This is a legal fiction that you can ignore sometimes, except when you can’t, as in this case. In many other countries, and I’m not sure about the particulars in Brazil, the central book-entry system is the definitive record of who owns shares. There’s no entity like Cede & Co. that is even nominally the owner. (Sometimes brokers are still listed as nominal owners, eliminating one layer compared to the US.) Whoever is in the book-entry system is the owner, at least from the point of view of the corporation. This is more similar to the way ownership of Treasury bonds is recorded in the US. In the countries that I’m familiar with, China has direct recording of ownership for individual brokerage clients, while Denmark has a mixed system where some ownership is recorded directly, but “street name” also occurs. Danish securities owned by foreigners are often held through Euroclear or Clearstream, which does operate more or less like DTC/Cede & Co. in the US.