“As we look forward to 2024, our medium and longer term outlooks for Japanese equities remain very positive, driven by the two key themes of corporate governance improvement and the shift to inflation from deflation,” Lazard Asset Management, a global money manager that oversees US$193.6 billion in assets, said in a strategy report this week.
“We would view a near term market pullback in Japan as an opportunity.”
In a sign of how frantic the trade is, daily turnovers of five index-based ETFs tracking Japanese stocks issued by Chinese mutual-fund firms have jumped to multi-year highs. The fund prices’ hefty premiums on their net asset values have prompted money managers to warn of potential investment risks.
The buying binge has driven the size of these five funds to 1.54 billion yuan (US$215 million), according to Bloomberg data.
Take the China AMC Nikkei 225 ETF, the biggest among the five funds, for example. Units worth 536…
