Japanese Investors Keyed Into Mobile Stock Trading

Philip Morton, Investors Offshore.com

05 March 2001

Whilst the popularity of online trading in Hong Kong has seen tremendous growth, Japan has been relatively slow to embrace Internet stock trading - it's only really caught on in the past year - but one area where it can be seen to be advancing in leaps and bounds is in trading from mobile phones. Amongst the major online brokers operating in Japan, as much as 20 per cent of their business is being conducted by individual investors placing stock orders via their cell phones.

Nomura Securities and Daiwa Securities are Japans' two broking giants. They have 70,000 and 60,000 mobile phone trading clients respectively. Investors are able to do pretty much the same as they can on the Internet, and the limited keys on a cell phone doesn't appear to impede trading. Investors can buy indexes, foreign stocks, money market funds and covered warrants. In addition, they can check real-time stock quotes and charts and submit orders. In fact, investors who submit their orders via mobile phones are said by brokers to be the most active traders, often executing orders five times a day.

Yuji Kusunoki, director of marketing at DLJdirect SFG Securities in Tokyo, an online broker owned by DLJdirect Asia Holdings and the Sumitomo group, said: 'Of all data services provided on mobile phones, stock trading is among the most compatible. All you have to enter is just numbers. Investors plan their strategies the night before, and implement them as they watch the stock movement during the day.'

As is the case with Internet stock trading, trading services on mobile phones are becoming increasingly sophisticated as brokers begin to compete with one another. Tokyo-Mitsubishi TD Waterhouse Securities recently launched "Newslink," an e-mail service that can be tailored to fit investor's needs. Amongst its offerings, investors can receive news five times a day on the movement of the Nikkei index, plus news on bonds and upcoming company flotations where bargain shares might be on offer.

Several explanations have been proffered as to why stock trading via mobile phones has seen such phenomenal growth in Japan. It could be as simple as Japanese employees not wanting to use their employer's computers to conduct their personal trading business. Or it could be the growth in Internet access via mobile phones - remember, the Japanese are way ahead of the field when it comes to electronic gadgetry. It might even be a question of economics - with mobile phones costing much less that computers, investors can retain any surplus yens for the actual business of stock trading.

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