Nikkei 225 in trading?

<p><br>Whoever asked this question is either new to the Nikkei, has a very short memory, or else has no access to past market activities. The current market is in the 13,000 range now, but there were months in recent memory when it was below 8,000. I'm no stock expert, although I do play with my TV. But from a purely layman's POV, there seems to be all sorts of room to fall, just yet.</p>

<p><br>It is an index similar to our NIFTY 50. Nikkei 225 consists of large cap stocks of Japanese companies. It is an indication of movement of share price of top companies like Toyota, Honda, Suzuki, Toshiba, Sharp, Sansui etc.</p>

<p id="isPasted">The Nikkei became inflated back then due to too much easy credit, too much speculation, too much confidence. Real estate values inflated too.</p><p>The Nikkei didn’t bottom out until 14 years later in 2003. I bought in then on the advice of Frank Cappielo. Japan has faced many economic challenges including an aging population. high unemployment, high levels of debt, shrinking population, disenchanted youth, and huge institutions that were treated as “too big to fail” (sound familiar?). The decade after the crash is known as “the lost decade” and a whole generation of young Japanese were unemployed and thus never socialized to acquire job skills such as getting to work on time.</p><p>Interestingly, all of the Japanese experiences that seemed to be bizarre at the time (real estate bubble, stock market bubble, underemployed youth, zero percent interest rates) have been repeated by the USA a few years later.</p>

<p id="isPasted">By index, I assume you’re referring to the Nikkei 225 or TOPIX index, which is most often used to measure Japan’s equities performance.</p><p>Japan is still largely an export-based economy, with the largest firms such as Toyota, Honda, Sony generates a significant proportion of it’s revenues from overseas, most notably China and the USA. Even more traditional Japanese companies such as Mitsubishi Chemicals have a significant presence abroad. So when the Japanese YEN strengthens, Japanese earnings abroad and export volumes will decrease, as a dollar earned overseas will transfer to fewer yen back home, and export revenue in foreign currency will transfer into fewer yen as well.</p><p>As the index is a measure of broad stock performance, and a stock performance is often correlated with expected revenues and profits, a strengthening yen is supposed to cause a decrease in the index.</p><p>However, a strengthening yen is often indicative of something else - the yen, for many reasons which I’m not too familiar with, is often seen as a safe-haven currency, which is during periods of macro uncertainty as measured by the volatility index (VIX), when uncertainty and risk-averseness increases, investors start buying the Yen, hence driving up it’s value.</p>

<p><br>Could you be thinking of nisei? Nikkei (??) usually point to people of Japanese descent who emigrated to a foreign country. Unless you’re talking about the newspaper, ??.</p>