When a regulatory filing revealed a stake of more than 5% had been built up in Japanese property management firm Storage-OH Co. last October its shares spiked 17%.
The investor that provoked the fevered market response was Shigeru Fujimoto, an 88-year-old former pet-shop owner from the city of Kobe.
In a nation where the norm has been for people to park their assets in cash and deposits that offer almost no interest, he’s built a small fortune. After almost seven decades of stock trading, the octogenarian has accumulated about ¥2 billion ($14 million) of wealth.
He’s also built a following of loyal retail investors who hang off his actions. He’s even written a popular book about his investment strategy.
Fujimoto stands out in Japan not just because of his financial risk taking in a culture that has favored playing it safe, but also because he has proactively accumulated money to pay for his old age while many older people are struggling to live on small public pensions as inflation picks up.
Not even last month’s stock rout, when the country’s shares saw the worst decline since 1987, has put him off.
“When the stock price gets low, then it’s time for me to buy stocks,” Fujimoto told Bloomberg News. “But the question is whether you have the money or the courage to do that.”
Fujimoto trades companies with rising revenue, profit and dividends, as well as those that are implementing share buybacks and shareholder benefits. He also looks at technical indicators like the relative strength index and moving average convergence-divergence.
Calling his investment in Storage-OH shares “the most successful trade,” he currently sees stocks including automobile parts maker G-TEKT Corp. and construction machinery maker Takeuchi Manufacturing Co. as attractive.
Lost Years
Many Japanese, particularly older citizens, have been reluctant to invest in the stock market for decades since the nation’s asset bubble burst in the early 1990s, leaving scars on the national psyche.
Cash savings make up more than half of household assets in Japan — far higher than in the US or Europe, according to a Bank of Japan report released earlier this month.
The Japanese government is trying to tap into that pool of liquidity, encouraging people to shift some of the roughly 1 quadrillion yen held in bank accounts to the stock market by expanding the tax-exempt retirement savings accounts known as NISA.
The drive seems to have had some success. Japanese households poured more than ¥10 trillion of funds into new NISA during the first six months of this year, almost four times more than the same period last year, according to the Japan Securities Dealers Association.
But there’s a way to go — for example, two of the three main contenders for Japan’s leadership election that was won Friday by Shigeru Ishiba have avoided investing in stocks.
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Fujimoto, who doesn’t have a smartphone, car or even a credit card, says it’s a good thing younger Japanese people are getting into stock investing, which he describes as “fun.”
“It’s fun when you think hard, study hard and good results come out and you make a profit, isn’t it?” he said. “It’s fun to study. It’s also fun to see the results.”
He sometimes gets asked if he takes on apprentices, gets name-dropped on social media and is called “Japan’s Warren Buffett” in local media.
Fujimoto, who uses a mobility walker for support after hurting his back earlier in the year, told Bloomberg Originals that he’s humbled to be compared to Buffett, but says the only things they have in common are age and a love of stocks.
“He is just as passionate about stock investing as institutional investors,” Hiroshi Namioka, chief strategist at T&D Asset Management Co., said about Fujimoto. “He has an influence on public and retail investors and Fujimoto’s fans are following him in terms of investment angles.”
Still, Fujimoto is an extreme example of investing in Japan. For the past 10 years he has concentrated on day trading, putting him among only 3% of investors in the country who hold stocks for less than a month, according to a survey in 2022 by the Japan Securities Dealers Association.
Fujimoto’s two clocks: one is set 25 minutes ahead so he can prep for market open/close, and both ring hourly to keep him aware of the time.
This type of risky investing, though, is not something he would recommend to young investors.
“It’s important to hold good stocks for the long term,” he said. “Don’t buy or sell immediately like a day trader. If you hold such stocks for a while, they will surely bear fruit.”
Parakeets and Mahjong
His stock investing began almost 70 years ago at the age of 19 when he got talking to an executive from a local brokerage who frequented the pet shop Fujimoto worked at. The first shares he bought were in companies that became Sharp Corp. and oil refiner Eneos Holdings Inc.
At the beginning, he wasn’t fully committed. The parakeet lover opened his own pet store, later selling the shop to start a Japanese-style mahjong parlor as he believed that was where the money-making opportunity laid at the time.
In 1986, he raised ¥65 million after selling his parlors, and started investing full-time in financial markets. He became a day-trader in 2015.
Fujimoto, who often works with his pet parakeet Pi-Chan sitting on his head, wakes up at 2 a.m. to check the US markets and watch CNBC. He also looks at American Depository Receipts of Japanese companies to get ready for his trading in the local market.
Fujimoto says trading in his late 80s helps him enjoy life and “prevents me from getting senile.” But he’s not without regrets, saying he is “full of dissatisfaction” with his ¥2 billion pot of wealth.
“I’m not putting enough effort into it,” he said. “I need to be careful not to be too greedy but also pursue a return from trading. It’s never good to be greedy.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.