Japanese forex brokers, banks and regulators are not very forthcoming with detailed information about the scale of the retail forex market in Japan. Consequently, when we try to estimate certain [I]worldwide[/I] retail forex market metrics — for example, number of trades per day, average size of retail trades, etc. — we have to rely on estimates (or guesses) for [I]Japan’s[/I] contribution to those numbers.
Nevertheless, we know from many reliable sources that retail forex trading is huge in Japan.
You might recall this [B]New York Times article[/B] from September 2007, in the early days of the financial crisis. When I linked to that article, here in the forum, we had a good laugh at the stories of Japanese housewives trading forex behind their husbands’ backs.
Apparently, there’s renewed interest in forex trading among the Japanese (typically [I]women[/I]), who are turning to forex because they are finding it increasingly difficult to earn a decent rate of return from conventional investments. (It’s traditional in Japan for wives to manage household funds and family investments — which explains all the references to women, wives, housewives, etc., in this context.)
The current issue of [I]Bloomberg BusinessWeek[/I] has [B]this article[/B] about retail forex trading in Japan in 2014.
Here’s a bit of number-crunching: The population of Japan is about 126,660,000 (that’s a 2012 estimate), and the number of retail forex accounts in Japan is 768,000 (as of February 2014). That’s one forex account for every 165 persons (men, women and children) in Japan.
If the U.S. had the same ratio of forex accounts to population that Japan has, there would be 1,886,000 retail forex accounts in the U.S. The actual number of retail accounts in the U.S. is [I]way[/I] less than that.
