NISA Progress Report

This one I’m much less proud of…


After our Junior NISA and THEO progress reports, today we take a look at my NISA account.

I opened my NISA account with Rakuten Securities in 2014, so this was my third year using the service.

I’m not particularly satisfied with how I have done, because I am still not 100% clear on what I should be doing.

I started off with a plan to buy dividend paying shares, reinvest the dividends, and eventually take the income and not sell anything.

Along the way I got distracted and ended up making a lot of mistakes. I bought gold miner ETFs when they crashed (they’ve gone nowhere in the meantime) and ‘net-net’ Japanese stocks on the advice of some random newsletter (they went nowhere either, and just used up my 2015 allowance to no purpose). I bought Santander on a ‘dip’, just before the shares went on to lose 60% of their value (they haven’t recovered).

I also made the huge mistake of buying small amounts of foreign stocks on Rakuten, which you can see in the 60,000 yen plus worth of fees I paid over the years ($27 per purchase).

​Today my account looks like this:


So it’s not terrible but it’s not particularly good either. However, this does confirm that just starting, even if what you are doing isn’t perfect, is better than not starting. After all, I have almost 700,000 more yen than I would have had otherwise because of that.

And hopefully I’ll have more of a clue in the future.

I’m somewhat torn now. Intellectually I understand that I’m likely to see better results by investing in broadly diversified ETFs instead of individual shares, but I still like the idea of building up a steady dividend income so I don’t have to worry about selling things.

I will definitely continue maxing out my NISA allowance, but I think I will move towards a hybrid model buying both ETFs and individual shares.

I also have my THEO account which is more diversified, and my wife’s investments are all in indexes, so this is just one part of our overall portfolio.

Anyone else have NISA accounts? What are you doing with them?
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8 Responses

  1. For my first year (2016) I just went 100% “ISHARES MSCI KOKUSAI ETF (TOK)” in NISA (have bonds etc in non-NISA). Still not really confident what the best (lowest fee) index ETFs are though; haven’t taken the time to look through all that’s available.

  2. Started just before the peak of China’s stock bubble crash in 2015.
    Initially it was just purely the S&P500 index tracker (1557) for roughly 5 months, whilst fine tuning a suitable asset allocation.
    Then starting from January 2016, the allocation pivoted to a blend of Topix, MSCI Developed Economies ex-Japan, MSCI Emerging Markets and Russell 2000 indices.
    Currently sitting on a total return of between 9-10% with dividends reinvested.
    Although I’m truly sorry for the losses incurred, it is also a very important lesson in indexing and stubbornly staying the course through thick and thin.
    There also exist two specific ETFs offered by BlackRock, which tracks an index of high yield dividend stocks if that is your main area of interest 🙂

    1. Hi Desmond
      Thanks! Not too sorry about the losses, the experience has been a good lesson -and Santander may well yet recover 😉
      Let me know the details of those ETFs if you get a moment: they sound like a good use of my 2017 NISA allowance.

  3. I just opened up NISA for this new year for my son, and I am thinking of doing a combination of ishares blackrock ETFs https://www.blackrock.com/jp/individual/ja/products/product-list#categoryId=21&lvl2=overview
    I’m thinking perhaps a set amount in each area that I would rebalance each year, such as 20% Emerging markets, 40% “kokusai” which is mostly US (1581, 65% is US), 40% Japan (Topix 1475).
    Wondering about the risk of investing a bit in the Frontier markets 1583 (Kuwait and Argentina are the most heavily weighted).

    1. Can’t really comment on allocations (very personal decision) but one thing to keep in mind is that you can’t really rebalance a NISA or Junior NISA account.
      The best alternative is probably to ‘rebalance’ by buying the asset that has fallen, ie if the TOPIX falls then you buy that next until it reaches its target allocation again.