Bank Of Japan “Bought The Dip” Over Half The Time In The Last 4 Years

Jon Economy

A year ago, we noted that The Bank of Japan (BoJ) was a Top 10 holder in 90% of Japanese stocks. In December, we showed that BoJ was the biggest buyer of Japanese stocks in 2016. And now, as The FT reports, the real “whale” of the Japanese markets is stepping up its buying (up over 70% YoY) entering the market on down days more than half the time in the last four years.
Since the end of 2010, The FT notes that the BoJ has been buying exchange traded funds (ETFs) as part of its quantitative and qualitative easing programme. The biggest action began last July, when its annual acquisition target was doubled to 6tn. Since then, the whale designation has seemed pretty obvious: the central bank swallows a minimum of 1.2bn of ETFs every single trading day (tailored to support stocks that further ‘Abenomics’ policies), and lumbers in with buying bursts of 72bn roughly once every three sessions.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on May 5, 2017.