About 85 per cent of traders are men, mostly in their 30s, 40s and 50s, according to estimates from Gaitame
Popular tales of “Mrs Watanabe” — the canny Tokyo housewife who dabbles in currency trading in between school runs and shopping — barely begin to tell the story of Japan’s retail traders in the foreign exchange market.
With almost 800,000 active forex accounts, Japan boasts the world’s most powerful force of retail traders. It has doubled in size in little more than a decade and spurred some of the most dramatic price moves of recent times, including the January “flash crash” that hammered the dollar and sent the yen soaring.
Contrary to the enchanting notion of “Mrs Watanabe,” most of the traders are middle-age men, who’ve been driven into the market by years of ultra-low interest rates. They toil in offices by day and trudge home to moonlight in foreign exchange, hoping to build a family nest egg in a country where banks pay savers next to nothing.
“A lot of individual investors don’t realize that they’re doing something extraordinary,” says Yasushi Takagi, a 44-year-old financial writer who started forex trading in his early 30s to supplement his earnings. “They bet heavily on high-yielding currencies like the Turkish lira, the Mexican peso and the South African rand, while many players outside of Japan wouldn’t touch them.”
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