RetireJapan

I was curious about these Offsale Auctions that most of the major brokers offer in Japan.

This is more of casual after-hours trading, that does not require one to access the futures market directly. It seems to follow the Japanese IPO lottery system.

It seems to mainly be designed to prevent wild swings in prices when a large amount of stock is sold.

The average discount rate seems to be around 10%.

Has anyone ever bought stock this way?

* I am asking out of curiosity I do not own any Japanese stock or single company shares.

https://www.rakuten-sec.co.jp/web/domes ... _auction/
https://seesaawiki.jp/w/hatenatv/d/%CE% ... A%AC%C7%E4

I enjoy these, and buy quite often through Rakuten. I posted on here about them probably about a year ago, and there was some limited discussion.

The actual discount rate is usually only 2-3%, but they have to announce in advance that they're going to be doing it, so I suppose there could be a trend in how prices tend to move up until that day, but I've never bothered to research that far. Another thing to note is that there are no fees charged when buying and selling these.

I've probably bought 30+ times through this system, and off the top of my head, I'd say the breakdown probably looks something like:

65% - make small (~Y2000) profit within a day. Because there's a discount the opening price tends to be higher than what you bought it for, so you can usually just sell for 1-2% under previous close, vs the 3% you bought for.
10% - hold longer and make more profit
20% - hold longer and more or less break even
10%- lose money (Y2000+)

So overall I'm sure I'm up a bit, but have no idea how much, how it would compare to index funds, etc. Since I tend to sell them pretty quickly they never are making up a very large share of my overall portfolio.

I like it because it exposes me to companies and even industries I would otherwise never have heard of, and the prices are low enough that I'm not going to lose all that much. One company that came up earlier in the year was a biotech company located about 500m from my house, and I'd never heard of it, it went down about 50%, but then they made discovery, I sold at about 150%, and they've continued to rise since then.

They way I do is, check the Rakuten app to see if there are going to be any sales the next day, and if there are I "research" within the app- look at the chart, read the summary, and then make a judgement if I would buy. If I think it's a good buy, I have a look at this blogger to see his opinion: http://bunbai.cocolog-nifty.com/blog/ Then if he's also on board, I will see what happens in the overnight markets. If overseas gets really clobbered I often won't bother, but if markets were up I'll buy in the morning.