 Ko Sasaki for The New York Times Mayumi Torii says she has earned $150,000 since she started trading in currencies last year. |
Posted on 09/16/2007 6:45:57 PM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
September 16, 2007
Japanese Housewives Sweat in Secret as Markets Reel
By MARTIN FACKLER
TOKYO, Sept. 15 — Since the credit crisis started shaking the world financial markets this summer, many professional traders have taken big losses. Another, less likely group of investors has, too: middle-class Japanese homemakers who moonlight as amateur currency speculators.
Ms. Itoh is one of them. Ms. Itoh, a homemaker in the central city of Nagoya, did not want her full name used because her husband still does not know. After cleaning the dinner dishes, she would spend her evenings buying and selling British pounds and Australian dollars.
When the turmoil struck the currency markets last month, Ms. Itoh spent a sleepless week as market losses wiped out her holdings. She lost nearly all her family’s $100,000 in savings.
“I wanted to add to our savings, but instead I got in over my head,” Ms. Itoh, 36, said.
Tens of thousands of married Japanese women ventured into online currency trading in the last year and a half, playing the markets between household chores or after tucking the children into bed. While the overwhelmingly male world of traders and investors here mocked them as kimono-clad “Mrs. Watanabes,” these women collectively emerged as a powerful force, using Japan’s vast wealth to sway prices and confound economists.
Many bought and sold stakes worth into the millions of dollars through margin trading, a potentially lucrative but risky form of trading that uses borrowed money.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Ko Sasaki for The New York Times Mayumi Torii says she has earned $150,000 since she started trading in currencies last year. |
Ping!
It's called a bubble. If you don't know that, you shouldn't be day trading.
everyone is sweating in Japan because they refuse to turn on the air conditioners because of global warming.
Sounds like a lot of hari-kari going on around here.
Surprising they lost money. One would think they would be long the Yen against the dollar. Doubt they would sell their own currency. Perhaps they were trading it against other currencies. I think the Yen was up against the Australian dollar too in recent weeks. That was the undoing of the GS Alpha fund.
That’s funny (as in “odd”). I made a healthy profit just the other day playing the Y-D game, when the Yen went up to nearly 112.0.
A currency bubble? You don't even know if she lost the money by being long or short, or on what currency.
It's a lesson she'll never forget.
You can trade them? Why am I always the last to know?
Home-based stock market trading was a common thing amongst the spouses
of the Chinese grad students I knew.
Back in the 1990s.
Like Fred Schwed said in his classic “Where are all the customers’ yachts?”, margin trading can be like the innocent family who boarded the 20th Century Limited intending to get off and visit Grandma at 125th street and the next thing they knew they were going through Fort Wayne, Indiana at 75mph.
Is she any relation to C.Itoh? (that was a big Japanese crude trading firm back when I was in the business)
Actually, I think the woman in the photo is Mayumi Torii.
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