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When the currency margin trading trend rose to 55 percent all the way 1.9 million as of March, then that is only indication that the weather is mighty fine. And in Japan, it can’t go better than that.

For beginners, currency margin trading enables investors to make large bets with relatively small amounts of money.  The number of currency margin trading accounts in Japan rose even as retail investors took a hit from the yen’s surge last year, a private survey showed on Friday.

As reported in Reuters: “In a sign of the damage retail investors suffered in the wake of the yen’s jump late last year, the amount of investor assets or collateral parked with margin brokers fell to 595.1 billion yen ($6.35 billion) as of March, a survey by marketing research firm Yano Research Institute showed. That was a fall of 14.5 percent from a year earlier, the first decline since Yano began conducting its survey of over-the-counter foreign exchange margin trading in 2002.

The number of trading accounts, however, rose 55.3 percent from a year earlier to 1.92 million as of March, Yano Research said.

In a finding that underscored an increasing shift towards short-term trading by retail investors, the survey showed that total trading volume for the year to March jumped to 1,641.6 trillion yen, up from 609.4 trillion yen a year earlier.

Margin industry sources and currency traders say such trading volume does not necessarily translate directly into trading volume in the interbank foreign exchange market.”

Source: Reuters