NISA Progress 2018

The slow steady grind

A NISA account is a way to invest without paying capital gains tax or taxes on dividends. Pretty much anyone who lives in Japan can open one. For more information, check out our Beginner’s Guide to NISA Accounts in Japan.

Every year I write a progress report so you can follow along and see what I am doing (what mistakes I am making) with my NISA account. You can see last year’s NISA progress report here.

This is my fifth year using NISA, which means that the investments I bought in year one will come out of the NISA wrapper at the end of this month. Right now I am planning to move them into my new NISA account. You can read more about rolling over a NISA account in this post.

In today’s post, I will talk about the following points:

  1. NISA progress 2018
  2. Junior NISA progress 2018
  3. Future plans

Here is how my NISA account looks right now:

 The columns along the top are: [A: current value][B: dividends received][C: sale price][D: purchase price]. The final column shows profit by subtracting the purchase price from the current price, dividends, and sale proceeds.

Very far from ideal. You can see that I don’t have any holdings in my 2015 year, and 2018 is looking pretty bare as well. This is due to my decision to get rid of all my fossil fuel stocks, most of which were in my NISA account.

Let’s take a closer look at 2018:

An ETF, Nissan, and two mutual funds

Unfortunately, most of what remains of this year’s investments are Nissan, which I am also having second thoughts about. I am very concerned about how they appear to be treating Carlos Ghosn, and whether they will succeed without him (I believe he pushed them into developing the Leaf electric car -one of the things I most liked about them as a company).

I guess this just goes to show that I should have done what I advise others to do and just buy index funds 🙂

Fortunately I have managed to do that in my granddaughter’s Junior NISA account. Here is what it looks like at the moment:

We were able to contribute the full amount the first year with some help from family members but they were not able to continue so this year we only added 410,000 yen.

After some market uncertainty this year the account is up just over 30,000 yen overall. All the investments are in this mutual fund:

We’ll continue contributing to this until she’s 20, at which point she can either use the money or hopefully keep it invested for the long term.

As for the future, I am very tempted to abandon my ‘dividend stocks’ fun portfolio and just buy index funds in my NISA account. I plan to continue maxing out my allowance every year.

In my granddaughter’s Junior NISA I plan to take a look at what other funds are available and see if there are any cheaper ones. We’ll probably stick with the 100% world stocks allocation.

How about you? How are your NISA accounts doing?

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6 Responses

  1. I don’t know if the image will display so here are my results:

    株式（現物/NISA預り）
    1550 ＭＸＳ外株 –/–/– 270 -50,220 -7.82
    1348 ＭＸＳトピクス –/–/– 120 -18,840 -8.84
    1681 上場ＭＳエマ 取引注意情報 –/–/– 110 -13,200 -8.13
    8411 みずほ 18/07/13 300 -0.78 -3,210
    1476 ｉＳＪリート 18/08/09 65 +3,965 +3.41

    株式(現物/NISA預り)
    合計 評価額 含み損益 含み損益（％）
    1,108,955 -81,505 -6.85

    投資信託（金額/NISA預り）
    三菱ＵＦＪ国際－ｅＭＡＸＩＳ　Ｓｌｉｍ　先進国株式インデックス –/–/– 8,261 -829.4 -8.34

    投資信託(金額/NISA預り)
    合計 評価額 含み損益 含み損益（％）
    9,111.05 -829.4 -8.34

    TOTAL NISA 2018
    総合計 評価額 含み損益 含み損益（％）
    1,118,066.05 -82,334.4 -6.86

    So at the end I’m at -82334 JPY for a loss of approx 7%…
    I bought everything way too high before summer :/
    I don’t really know what to do except waiting a few years but it makes me feel quite depressed for the moment….

    1. Nothing seems particularly bad there -I find it helps to think that I will be buying things cheaper going forward. After all, as long as we are still saving and investing, we should hope for market falls and lower prices.

  2. You mentioned that your Nisa will come out at the end of this month. Does it come out exactly 5 years (i.e. 60 months) after purchase, or does it come out at the end of the fifth calendar year? If the latter, it seems to make sense to buy your entire Nisa allowance in January to have the longest tax free growth period. Grateful if you could clarify.

    1. It’s the end of the fifth calendar year. So you are right, using the entire allowance in January gives you the longest time in the market (which should be most profitable). Some people prefer to dollar cost average though, or don’t have the full 1.2m in cash in January 🙂

  3. I only started my NISA in the summer and lumped pretty much the whole lot in at once. It’s down 43,000 as of today, but I’ve been steadily buying in my taxable account each month so hopefully will benefit from the downs by buying more. Not planning touching any of it for quite a few years yet, so not overly concerned about performance at the moment. Now trying to decide whether to buy my entire 2019 allocation in January or spread it out a bit.

    1. At the end of the day it boils down to what makes you most comfortable 🙂

      Buying the whole lot in January should be better, but dollar cost averaging can help reduce regret if we get another global meltdown in March…