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© KYODONo. of individual shareholders in Japan tops 70 mil for 1st time
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sakurasuki
Policy works as planned, JGovt create NISA program that get rid of 20% capital gain. People start to invest, that simple.
dagon
Hopefully these Boomer pensioners sitting on some considerable Bubble Era cash won't be wiped out by a market fluctuation that leaves the whales to sail on to greater heights after they are bailed out.
Sh1mon M4sada
Hopefully, investments, high value manfacturing, decoupling from China continues from current momentum. Japan has enough automation and AI know how to deal with unfavourable demographics.
JeffLee
Well, that blows apart the countless posts on JT claiming that the stock gains are only benefiting a tiny minority.
Actually we are all stockholders, at least indirectly. The biggest investors are pension funds. And Japan's fund, which collects surplus revenue from the state pension system (yes, folks, the nenkin system is in surplus) is the 2nd biggest money pool in the world.
dagon
Then why are there constant features in the media, and which you can see anecdotally around the town, of pensioners living with Depression Era food strategies with unbelievably insufficient pensions to survive even with Japan's inflation which is less than other nations?
It obviously has not kept pace with the cost of living for many.
Rakuraku
JeffLeeToday 07:20 am JST
No wonder it is in surplus with an average pension of 150,000 JPY! Many people line with less than 100,000 This is by far the lowest in the G7 countries.
Many Japanese pensioner live in misery and it gets worst and worst as pensions have increased much less than inflation (whereas in most of countries there is an indexation mechanism ).
Didn’t you notice the surge of people in their seventies and even eighties working these days. The increase compare to 5 years ago is very obvious.
factchecker
Can you blame them? No returns on your savings and with the Japanese peso at dismally low buying power it's too expensive to move cash out of the country.
JeffLee
Really? Canada's maximum pay out on its nenkin equivalent is C$713, about 81,000 yen a month, and it has more young working immigrants (supposedly to fund its system) than any other G7 country, with a cost of living that seems nearly double Japan's. Japan's system isn't great but it's something.
Lots of people in Japan don't pay the 16,000 yen a month into the pension system, so they end up with very little. Many people on this board have admitted as much. They moan about something they refuse to take part in. That's their choice. If they don't like the lack of support, they've got no one to blame but themselves.
kohakuebisu
"70 million individual shareholders" sounds like a nonsense figure then! How many different shares would a properly diversified portfolio own? There is plenty of advice out there that says you shouldn't have more than 5 to 10% in a single stock. This would mean many people owning at least 10 different companies and possibly many many more.
Rappakalja
Often on TV "the man on the street" discuss investment the same way as taxi drivers, looking at it very short term. I fear many of the new shareholders, and even new NISA holders will jump on the sell button as soon as the markets start showing a bit of more volatility.
kohakuebisu
The return on kokumin nenkin is low, but you get it at 65, the UK is soon to be 68, and Japanese women live to 88. 23 years of 780,000 is a lot if all you pay in is 15000 a month. Millions of women spend decades as dependent spouses who pay in nothing.
If men are subsidizing women's pensions, perhaps people should be less trigger happy when calling Japan an "extreme patriarchy". Housemakers are a relative "winner" in Japanese society, and many women are not unhappy to do it. My own view is that its better than a lot of the BS jobs (RIP David Graeber) out there.
dagon
+1 just for mentioning the late, great David Graeber.
Fantastic anthropologist/economist and 'Debt' is a masterpiece.
obladi
The volume of funding for Japanese startups is growing rapidly too. Let's go Japan!
rainyday
The headline figure is extraordinarily misleading. The number of Japanese individuals who are shareholders is nowhere near 70 million.
Any investor with an indexed or heavily diversified portfolio (which is most investors) is going to be counted hundreds of times using this method.
Also, individuals invested in NISA accounts are not shareholders. Rather they are beneficiaries of managed funds which hold shares in many companies. The individual with a NISA account doesn’t own any shares or have any of the rights associated with them (such as voting, attendance at shareholder meetings, etc). The fund is the shareholder in investee companies and only it can exercise those rights.
As the article notes, actual individual investors only own abot 16.9% of the shares in listed companies. That number was about 20% in 2010 and has actually been decreasing rather than increasing. This means that what this 74 million number is mesuring is just increased diversification of portfolios rather than more individual people actually owning shares.
Sven Asai
Maybe it better reads the 1st out of few super rich shareholders holds more than 70 mil shares. rofl
fxgai
The 70 million number is rather misleading isn’t it. The number could get above the total population before long.
NISA can be used to buy individual listed stocks too, not only funds.
Indeed many might be holding just mutual funds though.
NISA NISA NISA, it’s just a complicated tax break system.
If one invests via NISA and makes 10,000,000 yen profit, one can keep the 10,000,000 yen profit.
If one invests in a taxable account and makes 10,000,000 yen profit, one can still keep almost 8,000,000 yen profit.
rainyday
Ah, you are right about that. I did mine through a bank, which only allowed me to invest in funds (which was what I wanted anyway). But yeah on looking it up you can also invest in stock directly.