Algunos inversionistas estan apostando que Japon surgira nuevamente
Todo el que tenga un corazon ha sentido la catastrofe en Japon. Pero, mientras haya mercados, los inversionistas han negociado la tragedia, y esta vez no sera la excepcion.
Cerca de $1.2 billones de dinero nuevo ha entrado entre el Martes y Jueves a los ETFs que compran acciones Japonesas, de acuerdo a TrimTabs Investment Research. Los compradores de estos fondos estan apostando a que el selloff de las acciones Japonesas fue emocional y una reaccion exagerada.
Otros estan apostando en contra de Japon, por lo menos en el corto plazo. $45 millones entraron a los ProSahres UltraShort MSCI Japan entre el Martes y el Jueves, cinco veces mas en 3 dias.
Some Investors Are Betting That Japan Will Rise Again
By JASON ZWEIG.
Anyone with a heart has been transfixed by the catastrophe in Japan. But, for as long as there have been markets, investors have traded on tragedy, and this one is no exception.
Almost $1.2 billion in new money flowed from Tuesday through Thursday this week into exchange-traded funds that buy Japanese stocks, according to TrimTabs Investment Research. These buyers are betting that the selloff in Japanese stocks was an emotional over-reaction.
Others are betting against Japan, at least in the short run. The ProShares UltraShort MSCI Japan fund took in $45 million of new money from Tuesday through Thursday, nearly quintupling in size in three days, according to TrimTabs. This fund aims to go up twice as much as the Japanese market goes down on a given day.
Your conscience alone may keep you from investing in Japan, lest you feel you are exploiting other people's suffering in a still-unfolding disaster. Many other factors might give you pause, including an aging population, massive deficit spending by the government, an overvalued currency and the lingering memory of what 20 years ago was one of the most overpriced stock markets ever seen.
But now the market is among the world's most beaten-down. "In 1989, Japan was half of total world-stock market value, trading around 60 times earnings, and everyone loved it," says David Herro, manager of the $7.7 billion Oakmark International fund. "Now it's lost 80%, it's trading at 16 times earnings, and everyone hates it."
Mr. Herro has 23.5% of his fund in Japan—three times its weight in the Morgan Stanley All Country World Index. As he points out, stocks in the rest of the world trade at around 10 times the cash they generate. Japanese stocks are valued at around six. World-wide, companies are priced at roughly twice their book value (the surplus of what they own over what they owe). Japanese stocks are trading right around book value. By these measures, Japan is at about half the valuation of the rest of the world.
Japan hasn't been quite as bad a place to invest as many Americans reflexively assume. While it is easy to cherry-pick periods over which to measure performance, MSCI's Japan index had outperformed its U.S. index over the previous decade as of the end of February, growing at an annual average of 0.82% versus 0.74%.
The panic selling of this week—the Nikkei 225 stock index lost nearly 18% in three trading sessions before recovering a bit—has presented more bargains. Businesses such as Nissan and Nintendo aren't worth 18% less than they were before the quake. If their ability to generate long-term profits has fallen at all, it has declined much less than their stock prices.
The best Japanese companies will survive and ultimately thrive. "It's all about time horizon," says Mr. Herro. "A few weeks or months of negative earnings will not mean much to the value of these businesses in the long run."
Among his favorite Japanese stocks are Toyota Motor, Canon Inc., semiconductor producer Rohm Co. and Olympus Corp. All trade in the U.S. as American depositary receipts or U.S.-listed shares; the iShares MSCI Japan Index Fund also owns them all. Most derive at least half their sales and earnings outside Japan and years ago moved many of their factories overseas, too.
"Japanese companies are getting much better with capital allocation," says Mr. Herro. Rohm, for example, repurchased about $120 million of its own stock last month and another $39 million or so in the first week of March, a smart move when shares are cheap. Olympus—which derives most of its revenues not from cameras but from medical equipment that it sells in the U.S., Europe and Asia—increased its dividend 50% between 2009 and 2010.
Many U.S. investors may have even less money in Japan than they realize. The Japanese and British stock markets are about the same size and stand behind only the U.S. as the world's largest. Yet mutual funds and exchange-traded funds that invest in stocks have about 25% less of their assets in Japan than in the U.K., according to Morningstar.
If the next 20 years in Japan look like the last 20, that small position would be plenty. But Japan is a resilient nation that has reconstructed before; from 1950 to 1960, in the heyday of the "economic miracle" that followed World War II, Japanese stocks returned an annual average of 27% after inflation. The recovery from this disaster is likely to be much less robust. But some very smart investors think good stocks rarely get this cheap.
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