🏯 TOPIX FUTURES: JAPANESE BULL SAMURAI IS STILL ALIVELegendary investor Warren Buffett was on a trip to Tokyo, the capital of Japan, two months earlier in mid-April 2023, and the titans of the country's giant energy and commodity conglomerates were there to make their presentations.
As usual, over glasses of Coca-Cola NYSE:KO - one of Buffett's most famous investments, they walked into Warren Buffett's suite at the luxury Four Seasons hotel and individually told the 92-year-old American investor the same thing: Japanese trading houses are cheap and should accelerate their move beyond commodities.
The support of the Oracle of Omaha is an important vote of confidence in the big five Japanese trading houses - Mitsubishi Corporations TSE:8058 , Mitsui TSE:8031 , Sumitomo TSE:8053 , Itochu TSE:8001 and Marubeni TSE:8002
It's also a broad endorsement of Japan, that is considered to have outlived its heyday 30-35 years ago, as well as considered less relevant than Asian counterparts such as China and India.
But there's one big question: Is Buffett betting on phasing out fossil fuels, the trading house products themselves, or a combination of the two? Or something else, like impact of the weak yen!?
Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway NYSE:BRK.B reported in August 2020 that it had acquired about 5% of the shares of five trading houses, that sent their stocks up and raised their total investment value above $6 billion. When the Covid-19 pandemic dampened demand for goods, it pushed down the value of company stocks, four of which traded below book value.
“They were selling, I thought, at a ridiculous price,” - Buffett said to CNBC in March 2023.
Three years after the Covid-19 pandemic (that is now hardly remembered) Warren Buffett's bets on Japan have nearly tripled to over $17 billion.
But even this Growth does not stop Buffett. Staying in Tokyo this spring, Buffett confirmed intentions to buy more shares, and participate in more big deals.
In addition, Berkshire recently unveiled plans to issue its own yen-denominated bonds, which help hedge against the depreciation of the yen against the US dollar as well as depreciation of Japanese stocks in dollar terms.
The technical main chart is dedicated to futures on the TOPIX index TSE:TOPIX widely known, along with the Nikkei 225 index $TSE:NKY .
The TOPIX index is an important stock market index for the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) in Japan, tracking all the local companies of the TSE Prime-market division.
Buffett's mission to Japan marked, as it easy to find in the technical picture of TOPIX ( TSE:TOPIX ) - a significant moment, as a result of the breakdown of the key long-term resistance, with the prospect of further more than doubling the index TSE:TOPIX and its market value.
