Non cercate il futuro nello specchietto retrovisore (parte 2)

Oggi Recce’d pubblica quattro nuovi Post. Siamo preparando un nuovo Longform’d dedicato al tema dei tassi di interesse, dei rendimenti delle obbligazioni, e della Federal Reserve: verrà pubblicato … quando sarà stato completato. Non sentiamo l’urgenza di scriverne oggi (anche se si tratta del tema intorno al quale ruotano, e ruoteranno tutti i mercati finanziari di tutto il Mondo per tutto l’anno (ed oltre) per ila ragione che ne scrivemmo già quattrodici giorni fa, e che ne abbiamo scritto anticipando i fatti di queste settimane fino dallo scorso mese di agosto 2020.. Per questo siamo tranquilli: i nostri lettori hanno già oggi le idee chiarissime su ciò che sta per accedere. Ai nostri Clienti, durante questo weekend, abbiamo spedito una nuova Lettera, all’interno della quale (insieme con la analisi delle performances ottenute) spieghiamo anche le cause autentiche delle tensioni senza precedenti nel mondo delle obbligazioni nel primo trimestre 2021.

Abbiamo messo in grande evidenza già la settimana il ruolo della Banca del Giappone in questo 2021.

Mentre le altre due maggiori Banche Centrali (Federal Reserve e BCE) appaiono inchiodate a terra dalle loro stesse scelte del 2020, e non possono fare altro che ricorrere a parole e concetti già spesi, senza successo, in occasioni precedenti, la Banca del Giappone si è staccata, e procede per una strada diversa.

Nell’articolo che vi suggeriamo di leggere questa settimana, il Financial Times mette in evidenza gli aspetti di questa “svolta ad U” della Banca dal Giappone che vanno a toccare direttamente gli investitori finali, come siamo noi e come siete voi lettori.

Come abbiamo scritto qui nel Blog, e poi in questo weekend anche nella Lettera al Cliente, le Banche Centrali sono le prime a sapere che la situazione che stiamo affrontando non ha precedenti, e che proprio per questo le garanzie offerte dalle Banche Centrali agli investitori oggi hanno un valore vicino a zero.

Come Recce’d ha scritto mesi fa, oggi le mosse delle Banche Centrali devono essere seguite con ancora maggiore attenzione da noi investitori, perché sono le mosse del nostro principale avversario. Cosa che avrete sicuramente chiara, se avete seguito attraverso il Blog il nostro lavoro dei mesi scorsi.

The Bank of Japan’s decision to abandon its ¥6tn ($55bn) annual target for exchange traded fund purchases and to cease buying those tracking the Nikkei 225 or Nikkei 400 raises questions about the future direction of Japan’s ETF market.

The central bank made its widely expected announcement to abandon the target on March 19, adding it would only now buy ETFs tracking the Topix. However, it said it would retain the ¥12tn upper limit to what it can purchase annually, which it introduced last March as a support measure in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The BoJ’s total ETF holdings hit ¥47tn last month and the unrealised profit from these purchases reached ¥13tn at the end of January. It became the largest owner of Japanese stocks in early December last year, surpassing Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund. This article was previously published by Ignites Asia, a title owned by the FT Group. Government officials, scholars and market participants have long been urging the BoJ to wean itself from the scheme, calling it “unsustainable” and “with huge demerits”. They have criticised the massive purchasing drive for distorting financial market pricing and trading. Now some question what the BoJ will do with its ETF holdings.

“What is the BoJ going to do with the ETFs they have bought so far? That is always the trillion-dollar question,” said Jackie Choy, Morningstar’s Hong Kong-based director of ETF research for Asia. “We have not heard what they would do with the existing holdings. They’ve launched a lending facility, effectively making it more liquid, but that’s not selling the ETFs,” Choy added. The central bank rolled out a lending facility in June last year through which it can temporarily lend its ETF holdings to market participants.

But the programme has struggled to attract investor interest. Driven by purchases by the BoJ, some of Japan’s broad market ETFs have regularly seen the largest inflows of any locally domiciled products in Asia. Last year, these included Nomura Asset Management’s Nomura Topix ETF, Nikko Asset Management’s Nikko Listed Index Fund Topix ETF and Daiwa Asset Management’s Daiwa ETF Topix. The central bank bought ¥6.845tn of ETFs last year. The largest five ETFs tracking domestic stocks reached ¥4.29tn in AUM combined by the end of last year, according to data from the two Japanese securities exchanges.

Among them, the Next Funds Topix ETF and Next Funds Nikkei 225 ETF, which were both launched by Nomura AM, topped the list, with ¥1.44tn and ¥773bn in assets respectively. Nikko Exchange Traded Index Fund Topix, Daiwa ETF Topix and Nikko Exchange Traded Index Fund 225 ranked third, fourth and fifth, with ¥670bn, ¥668bn and ¥361bn in respective AUM. The BoJ has acknowledged that its buying activity may have had a negative impact on other investors in the ETF space, because how and when it will clean its balance sheet of the ETFs remains the primary concern among global asset allocators when investing in Japanese equities.

Whatever the BoJ decides to do with its ETF holdings, it will “definitely not” offload them, at least not in the near future, John Vail, chief global strategist at Tokyo-based Nikko Asset Management, told Ignites Asia. “They may slow the pace of buying, but I personally don’t think that they will offload the ETFs they already hold,” Vail said. Nikko AM surveyed top investment strategists in Japan two weeks ago and the vast majority did not think BoJ would release its holdings in any way that would affect the market for at least the next 10 years. The central bank’s ETF shopping spree has not done much to encourage greater competition among ETF providers. “As far as I know, the BoJ has been buying ETFs from funds based on their market share,” Morningstar’s Choy said. “So they are doing it on a proportionate basis to avoid favouring any fund.”

Yasunori Kasai, Asia director of trading desktop at Refinitiv, a London Stock Exchange Group business, said that, if anything, the BoJ’s policy direction change offered hope that the central bank might start to diversify. “The BoJ tends to buy ETFs that target the entire market, like [those tracking the] Topix index or Nikkei index, and may not have bought many [environmental, social and governance] or thematic ones. But the GPIF and the general market are moving towards the sustainable finance market,” Kasai said. Kasai added that he had observed that the central bank was purchasing some ETFs with exposure to companies that invest in sustainable development and human interests, although those holdings were still minuscule.

Scrapping the ¥6tn target should not have come as a surprise to market participants. There have been signs that the BoJ was looking for more flexibility in its ETF purchasing scheme since the beginning of the year. “It’s only been a handful of times they’ve stepped in this year. The BoJ is not even close to hitting the ¥6tn target this year so far,” Nikko AM’s Vail said. Although it is not an explicit rule, the central bank has tended to step in whenever the Topix index has lost more than 0.5 per cent in the morning session, analysts at Nomura wrote in a February 19 research note. However, the BoJ did not purchase ETFs on February 18 or February 19 even as the Topix index lost 0.54 per cent and 0.76 per cent on these two days, they said.