Beyond 5 Years : A new high of 38 🎌 in a Year & 105🗾 Winners since my debut 98 months ago ! {12th Sep '25}

 

Japan sets another record with Tradia トレーディア becoming the 38th 🎌of the year & the 105th  🗾 earner since my debut there 98 months ago, and also the 89th of the year...pushing the high watermark to 1,273 days with no breaks in between !🚅🦄⛩

Estimated  ¥ balance will rise to an estimated 2,133,087 by Wednesday, a fresh high in tandem with the Nikkei's intraday all-time record of 44,888.02 points! Another record set today is the incredible 42.7% proportion of the year's scorers from the islands...

Beyond 5 Years : Nestlé Feeds the Record to 1,272 Consecutive Days ! {11th Sep '25}

 

After 2 straight limit-UPs, the Tokyo stock exchange has widened the band by 4x for Tokyo Kikai Seisakusho 東京機械製作所 s,the only security to have this privilege today after the past couple of days went without trades until the close, with 68,500 traded today & a scanty 32,700 yesterday. As of 5pm local time, the after hours volume is already 21% more than yesterday with a VWAP of  ¥736.49 & more than those two days combined by 6pm!  Hopefully the fireworks & the furious jostling expected will send the buoyant price to  the heightened limit of ¥967!  Not bad for a 150-year-old company originating in the earliest Meiji Era in 

Beyond 5 Years : A Sime Darby disposal 'mistake' hands me 43x as much profit as anticipated ! {10th Sep '25}

 

Car conglomerate Sime Darby is mistakenly oversold >2x more by my dealer than instructed & I jump @ his offer to pay me >2 commissions as compensation: what was originally just a $15 profit becomes $43 to vrooooommmm the streak on its record-breaking, merry ways!Overnight in Tokyo

, recently bought TKS 東京機械製作所 vindicates my choice on 25th July when it becomes the receipient of a government defense contract, the sector being one of the HOTTEST in now !!

Beyond 5 Years : 🎌 Mitsumura Printing 光村印刷🗾 takes the baton from '25's #61 Straits Trading to reach 88 winners & 1,270 straight days !!! {8-9th Sep '25}

 

Giving up has never been my style & so it was yesterday & today with Straits Trading EXITing completely on 8/9 after 3 rounds since 2021 & receipt of the 2 latest dividends, while handing the marathon baton to 's Mitsumura Printing 光村印刷 [9/9] for 1,270 in a row while becoming the 88th/'25, the 37th& 104th since '17, pushing the ¥ cash balance past 2,000,000 for the 1st time ever! 素晴らしい!!! 4 foreign scalps in a row!!!

Beyond 5 Years : 🎌 Mazda マツダ 🗾 & Dijet ダイジェット工業 🗾 Drive the Record to 1,268 Uninterrupted Days of Trading Gains !!! {5th Sep '25}

 

The local holiday ain't stopping me!!! A magical Japanesedoubleon the day before my birth Anniversary, with carmaker Mazda マツダ SOLD just 5 ticks below the 1st hour's peak while Dijet ダイジェット also vamooses to close out the 1st buy trade after the 'Daiwa Heavy miracle' on Aug 31, '23, corralling the 102nd & 103rd

scalps in 98 months, with '25's tally reaching a record 36, more than the first 5.5 years cumulatively in my Nihon odyssey [ 2017-2022] ! Thus, the streak concludes the week at 1,268 days嬉しい... 感謝の気持ち!!!

This is the first ever Tokyo scoring duo in a day & also pushes the proportion of the year's winners from the islands to an all-time high figure of 41.38% while sending the yen cash balance to over ¥1,948,468, also an unprecedented number, over 1 million more than any such balance since I started investing there !!!

Moreover, the 2nd tier automobile manufacturer joins Subaru & Toyota from earlier this year to complete a trio of Nipponese automakers contributing to my ongoing miracle in my 52nd year of existence in this glorious Life!!!

Beyond 5 Years : 🎌Ono Pharma 小野薬品工業 goes ONE beyond the 🗾Century, allowing the Pharma sector to MATCH the 🗾 Brokerage sector's 4 Earners !!! {4th Sep '25}

 

Little easier than extracting teeth ... However '84's storied super stock becomes the 101st Japanese scorer since my debut in Jul '17 & also allows the nation's pharmaceutical sector to match the brokerage sector's FOUR winners & raise

cash balances to a hitherto unseen 1,736,888 by Monday as another unwanted long local weekend approaches, with at least 8still on deck to be sold...not bad considering my maiden tentative purchase of 150k ninety-eight months ago! Another 1st is the even 40% of all '25 scalps from those faraway isles!!!

Ono Pharma 小野薬品工業 thus joins Eisai エーザイ,  Mochida 持田製薬 & Takeda 武田薬品 just as Daiwa Securities 大和証券 this year joined Nomura 野村證券, Okasan 岡三証券 & Maruhachi Securities 丸八証券in the winners' circle.

Beyond 5 Years : Sime Darby re-appears after nearly 2 years to further the Record & I SCORE a Live one in 🗾 ! {2nd Sep '25}

Today is one of those wafer-thin net gain days with car conglomerate Sime Darby re-appearing for le premiere fois since Nov 2023, thanks to my remaining hundred shares averaged-down at just over $1.72 during the big sell-off triggered by the last quarterly report to bring the running cost to $1.934. As if to balance the scales, the stock recovers most of that big drop with a stellar quarter announced just days ago, where lucky buyers who scooped up shares in the low $1.60 range are raking it in!

In Japan, the subject of yesterday's blog entry Hob ホーブstuns with a limit-UP just a day after, becoming the 3rd best % Gainer out of over 4,000 securities on a day the Nikkei drops a significant 371 points & losers outnumber  gainers 2,516 to 1,574! I now sit on a 28.7% paper gain, after already securing the 50 yen dividend in June, that could enlarge significantly if the multiple stop high patterns of 2022 & 2023 [ read previous post ] are repeated!!!

Other 🗾 paper gainers : Econach, Ono Pharma, Nippon Felt, Ichikoh, Tradia, Mitsumura, Dijet, Shinto, Fujisash, Kawase 

Will 🎌 Japanese strawberry farmer Hob ホーブ repeat its crazy rocketing moves of 2022 & 2023?

Three years ago, the stock was ramped from ¥909 to ¥4,515 including 5 limit-ups from 30th Jun till 6th July, then dropping to ¥1,573 on 12 Aug, before being ramped once again to ¥4,000 on 29th Aug on volume that equated to a frightening 3.72x of its outstanding shares [ & 6.21x of its free-float!] . After further flurries of activity that ended that upmove almost exactly 3 years ago to the day, it bottomed out at around ¥1,650-1,680 between January & August 2023 before being driven up again on 1st September to 4 consecutive limit-ups that peaked at ¥3,935 before crashing anew for the next 5 weeks, including successive huge volume days on 15th & 19th September that amounted to over double its paid-up scrip each day!

Over the last 2 years, the price would bottom with the broader market on 5th August '24 & 7th April '25 at ¥1,550 & ¥1,480 respectively. It seems that the 3rd Anniversary of the first gigantic ramp in '22 & 2nd Anniversary of the echo ramp in '23 may provide an occasion [ with an estimated 56% probability ] for another round of 'money games' with festive September arriving once again, perhaps purposely timed 3 weeks before the farming company's shareholder meeting in Hokkaido. Its market cap, based on one of the lowest share counts in the world of only 762,000 shares, is only 49% higher than the ¥1 billion minimum set by the Tokyo exchange as a criterion for continued listing. The management has projected a 66% increase in net profit for 2026, which provides another tailwind for such a rise.

Interestingly, Hob ホーブ  also saw a 71% ramp up from  ¥5,110 to a record high of ¥8,770 in between the last week of August & September 2005 shortly after listing, a 3-day ramp of +78% in May 2013 & a 2-day ramp of +44% during the 1st two days of Oct 2014. The next big push occurred in the last fortnight of Jan 2018 with a +83% in 3 days, followed by a  -24% reversal on the last day of that move. Then came a +106% upmove in 21 calendar days between late July to early August 2019, which deflated by -42% in a month before another +62% jump in mid-October of that year & finally climaxed with a +101% soaring in mid-December months before the pandemic breakout the following year. A more than doubling was also seen right after said pandemic selloff climaxed, with 2 consecutive limit-up days on 9th & 10th Apr 2020.

The monthly candlestick chart may be suggesting a possible bullish pennant breakout that could foreshadow a challenge of the ¥4,515 peak in '22, if not the all-time high of ¥8,770 two decades prior. No harm engineering a lofty stock price to keep shareholders happy ahead of their annual general meeting on 24th September!

Disclaimer : I have already bought my shares shortly after recommending to clients in May this year for ¥1,828

Beyond 5 Years : A Food Giant's local subsidiary steps in on ex-dividend day to Feed the Record! {2nd Sep '25}

 

A day after the Independence Day break, Nestlé M'sia, whose Swiss parent company's CEO was dismissed overnight due to an illicit affair, steps in to preserve the stupendous streak a SIXTH time at a price not far from my medium-term target of $100 pronounced months ago! A satisfactory price to partially sell on ex-dividend day while reveling in the TEN paper gainers still holding their ground in !!

The points record thus attains a till-now-unseen 1,348 points !

The main Japanese stock index is at an interesting juncture

 

Above are my estimated probabilities of the Nikkei index 1) rising 2) staying largely rangebound within 1,000 points of 42,000-43,000 & 3)dropping sharply by breaking the uptrend line in green. The first scenario would likely be less than 35% in probability if not for the reverse head & shoulders formed from March to June. The 3rd scenario would be less than 50% if not for the market heading into the treacherous Sep-Nov timeframe which saw big selloffs in 2008, 2011,2012,2015,2018, 2022, 2023 & 2024. The 'double bottom' legs of last August & this April has, conversely, likely strengthened the odds in favour of the bull.

The bullish scenario [ breakout from bullish pennant ] will likely materialize if US unemployment & other economic data predispose the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates by at least 0.25% thus obviating the need for the Bank of Japan to raise its own base rate to above 0.5%. Conversely,  on-the-fence data from the US would likely increase the likelihood of 2) while 3) will be spurred by either black swan events or the abovementioned data coming in far worse than market projections. 38,500-39,600 will be the first line of defence in the bearish scenario while the upside target is 45,600-45,800 as surmised in an earlier post.

However, another idea struck me today that today's market environment may be paralleled obliquely by the high inflationary periods in the 1970s where the market bottomed in Dec 1970 & again in Oct 1971 before rising 95% throughout 1972, peaking in Jan 1973 & then descending sharply in a 2-year bear market that climaxed in Dec 1974. The Fed funds rate dropping from 5.5% in 1971 to a nadir of 3.5% in Feb 1972 help spark the huge rally throughout the latter year. Although direct comparisons can't be made with the 2020s, the same rate has fallen from 5.5% from 2023/2024 to the current 4.5% and looks more likely to fall than not, being projected to be closer to 3.75% by next year, potentially sparking a less spectacular rise further into record territory. 

In light of the abovementioned probabilities, I have raised my cash allocation to over 35%, a record high for my Japanese portfolio but am eyeing many still undervalued, barely moving ultra small-to-mid cap stocks as I predict the broad theme would likely be foreign funds [ & speculators + NISA investors ] shifting from mega caps & tech outperformers of years past like Tokyo Electron to underperformers, similar to how money flowed out of  NTT, banks & securities firms when their prices peaked in Apr 1987 & spurred most the secondary market  to significantly higher levels by 1988-1989. Or, relatively more recently, how tech & telecom stocks peaked in Jan-Mar 2000 before many smaller companies' equities rose to peak from Jun-Nov of that year even as the Nikkei dropped sharply from 20,833 on Apr 12 2000 to 15,667 by Aug 4 2000.