America’s Billionaires Love Japanese Stocks. Why Don’t the Japanese?

TOKYO—Japan’s government is on a mission to make buying stocks hot again.

Many of America’s biggest investors are bullish on Japan. Warren Buffett shared that he increased his investments in Japanese companies during an April visit to the country. Ken Griffin is preparing to reopen an office in Tokyo for his hedge fund, Citadel, and investment banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have issued optimistic outlooks for Japan’s stock market.

Japan’s problem is this: There are few signs its estimated 125 million residents share in the excitement.

Burned by dismal returns since the bursting of Japan’s asset bubble in the late 1980s and early 1990s, generations of families here have stashed most of their money in low-yielding savings accounts rather than trying to increase their wealth through the stock market.

Japanese households put an average of just 11% of their savings into stocks and 54% in cash and bank deposits, according to Bank of Japan data released last month. That trails well behind the U.S., where households have about 39% of their money tied up in the market and only 13% in cash and bank deposits, according to Federal Reserve data.

Haruyo Arai, a 62-year-old office worker, began investing in the stock market just last month.

“I was brought up by parents who would say, ‘Don’t dabble in stocks,’ ” she said.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has pledged to double households’ asset incomes, in part by encouraging people to invest in risky assets like stocks. The government is raising caps for Japan’s tax-exempt investment system for small investors, the Nippon Individual Savings Account, with changes set to take effect in January. The Tokyo Stock Exchange has been urging companies to boost their valuations and increase shareholder returns.

Arai cited the upcoming expansion to NISA, along with a desire to save more money for the future, as some of the reasons she decided to begin taking investing more seriously. She has been taking weekend classes at Tokyo-based Financial Academy to learn more about stocks and waking up early every morning to watch a TV news program focused on the economy.

Some believe investors like Arai will prove to be the exception, not the rule. Stocks here haven’t hit a record in decades. There isn’t much buzz among ordinary people about investing in Japanese markets.

“I’ve got the impression that Japanese people don’t really think positively about the desire to make money,” said Takashi Kawaguchi, a 48-year-old office worker who, like Arai, has been learning about investing at Financial Academy.

While the 2023 rally has helped lift Japanese stock indexes to 33-year highs, long-term returns pale in comparison to what an investor would have gotten by investing in U.S. stocks. The Nikkei closed at 32,402 on Friday, still 17% below its record hit in 1989. The S&P 500 has grown more than twelvefold over that time. That has made many investors here turn to foreign markets instead of focusing their bets within Japan.

“The Nikkei might hit 40,000, god knows when,” said Heihachiro “Hutch” Okamoto, foreign equity consultant at retail brokerage Monex. “But most of our investors prefer U.S. stocks.”

To Okamoto’s point, the most popular names traded on Monex daily aren’t Japanese stock indexes like the Topix or Nikkei, brand-name companies like Sony or even the “sogo shosha”—the trading houses that Buffett has invested in. Instead, they are all American names: companies like Nvidia, Tesla, Apple and Amazon.com, as well as funds tracking the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq-100.

And that is just among those interested in investing in the first place. While in past years, everyday investors in Japan made a name for themselves with their forays into the foreign exchange market, the overall trading culture here has been one of hesitation.

“Most people here think investing is very risky,” said Hidekazu Ishida, a special adviser at FinCity.Tokyo, which works with the government and the financial industry to try to boost investment in Tokyo. Being into finance comes off as “kakkowarui,” he added, referencing a word for uncool.

Even some heads of companies are lukewarm about the idea of encouraging more individual investors to buy Japanese stocks.

“I’m neutral about that,” said Takeshi Niinami, chief executive officer of whisky and beverage giant Suntory, when asked if he thought it would be a good idea for more Japanese people to invest in the market. Stock investing is risky, he said. And many Japanese people remain wary of participating in the market, because of the severity of prior downturns.

“I think perhaps increasing interest rates is better for people,” he said.

—Chieko Tsuneoka and Alastair Gale contributed to this article

Chip makers are fighting to assure investors that the artificial-intelligence boom is racing forward. Wall Street might not believe it until Nvidia’s NVDA -0.98%decrease; down pointing triangle Jensen Huang says so.

When Huang steps up to the mic for his company’s earnings call Wednesday, he will have the world’s attention. What he says about Nvidia’s present will preview the future of AI, dictate the path forward for a tech-crazed stock market and influence an American economy increasingly tethered to hopes that the boom won’t go bust.

The $5 trillion chip maker has provided the key building blocks for AI since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022 set off a race for dominance among OpenAI, Anthropic and established Silicon Valley giants. Now, as Nvidia backstops sprawling data-center projects and an exotic money pipeline to boost chip demand, the company’s influence is arguably bigger than ever.

But there are signs of trouble ahead. Political pushback to AI is growing. A bond selloff propelled borrowing costs to their highest levels in years. The hyperscalers that include some of Nvidia’s key customers—once cash-printing machines—are relying more on debt. OpenAI recently told investors its revenue rose by a tepid 18% in the second quarter while its losses deepened.

Nvidia is increasingly stepping in to shore up potential weak points across the market. Earlier this month, the company teamed up with six of Wall Street’s biggest firms on a $500 billion AI-financing plan, pledging to backstop lending to customers that can’t afford its chips otherwise. The chip maker last week also took a stake in Cloverleaf Infrastructure, which arranges power for data centers, and struck a $6 billion deal with startup Poolside aimed at developing a powerful open-weight AI model.

After watching shares in other chip makers and the so-called Magnificent Seven tech companies swing wildly in recent months, Wall Street is hoping Nvidia can beat expectations—again. The countdown is on.

“It’s kind of becoming more and more like the World Cup final than the Super Bowl at this point,” said Brian Mulberry, chief market strategist at Zacks Investment Management. “It’s just gotten to be that big.”

The company has smashed analysts’ earnings estimates for each of the 14 quarters since the AI boom kicked into high gear. Nvidia posted 210% annual growth in net income in its last three-month period, according to FactSet, making Wall Street’s 126% projection look pedestrian.

Expectations for a blowout second quarter have risen rapidly over the course of this year. All Nvidia will have to do to beat this target: outrun 95% annual earnings growth to more than $51.5 billion. Analysts project the chip maker will report record sales of $92 billion for the period, up from a forecast of $78 billion at the start of this year.

In July, big-tech earnings sparked volatility. Concerns about runaway capital spending spread across the sector after Alphabet’s and Tesla’s results, driving a $890 billion wipeout that contributed to the unwind of hedge fund Situational Awareness. Microsoft posted the largest one-day gain in market capitalization by any company, ever, after a quarter proving that it could still show investors the money. SpaceX rocketed higher after a record-breaking initial public offering, only to see $1 trillion in value evaporate.

Surging memory prices and borrowing costs have fueled fears that those and other companies will be unable to keep plowing more money into supplies including Nvidia chips. Shaia Hosseinzadeh, founder of OnyxPoint Global Management, has recently bought dips in AI-infrastructure stocks when Wall Street has strained to absorb massive debt issued by Silicon Valley.

“The macro data is really quite robust,” he said. “Of course, there’s a level at which everything breaks.”

Investors have kept pumping money into the AI trade despite concerns around chip consumers—and to the benefit of chip producers. That is why Nvidia’s outlook for semiconductor demand could send ripples through counterparts such as Micron Technology and Sandisk, developers of the data centers in which their chips reside, and a supply chain of power producers, contractors and other specialists that underpin the globe-spanning AI build-out.

“We joke internally that we’re all Nvidia analysts now,” said David Lefkowitz, head of U.S. equities at UBS Global Wealth Management.

The irony is that investors have tended to sell Nvidia stock immediately after blockbuster earnings, with shares falling each trading session after its four past quarterly reports. Some are betting that will be the case this time around, too.

The options market is pricing in a 5.3% swing, higher or lower, in Nvidia shares during the session following earnings, according to Option Research & Technology Services. That is higher than the 4.8% average move in Nvidia’s stock over the last 12 months after the company reports quarterly results.

In recent days, some of the most actively traded Nvidia options have been put contracts tied to the stock falling from its Friday value of $214.75 to $205 and $210 apiece, according to Cboe Global Markets data. Put options give the right to sell a stock by a set price and typically represent a bearish wager.

Many analysts remain optimistic. Frank Lee, global head of tech hardware and semiconductor research at HSBC Global Investment Research, recently raised his price target for Nvidia shares to $360 from $325, citing, among other things, Nvidia’s strategic partnerships with suppliers and its role as a top contributor to open-source AI.

America’s Billionaires Love Japanese Stocks. Why Don’t the Japanese?

Japan’s government wants cash-hoarding households to invest more

Nvidia’s earnings will test Wall Street’s confidence in the AI boom.