TOKYO: Tokyo stocks staged a minor gain on Thursday to snap a two-day slide, as bidding in oil-related and real estate shares helped to offset general profit-taking in heavily-weighted stocks.
Overall, the market remains in a consolidation phase after the Nikkei Stock Average reached a 15-year high just above the symbolic 20,000 mark last Friday, say traders.
The Nikkei Stock Average edged up 0.1 per cent to 19,885.77, for its fifth straight near-flat finish. Trading volume picked up, tallying 2.54 billion shares, the heaviest since March 27.
The dollar continued its recent retracement early, but came well off its intraday low to change hands at Y119.30 as of the Tokyo market close at 0600 GMT — a mildly encouraging sign for exporters.
“It’s apparent that there’s no really active buying by big public entities such as the Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF) and the Bank of Japan after the Nikkei poked through 20,000,” said Daisuke Uno, a strategist at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp. “Their absence has left stocks more sensitive to currency market movement and momentum trading — similar to the way it looked before Oct. 31 (when the BOJ announced its second round of quantitative easing).”
Just as the Nikkei peaked before important regional elections on April 12, the next batch of elections on April 26 may yet spark similar speculative buying, said some traders. The election results have thus far heavily favored Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), and are being viewed as a measure of endorsement for his reflationist economic policies.
