RetireJapan

Absolute novice here btw. So I was looking at buying some US stocks with my SBI NISA, my wife was helping me and when it came to choosing the currency she thought it is best to select US $ I thought best to keep it in JPY yen. Anyone got any insight on this? How much does it matter? Won't the value of the stock always be considered and represented in JPY anyway as it is a Japanese broker operating in Japan?

Any other tips for absolute newb that may be overlooking simple things when buying stock and ETFs welcome too! I'm sure I"m going to overlook something and make a mistake.

It doesn't really matter. You're still converting Yen to Dollars to buy the underlying assets.

The Fund Administrator maybe gets a slightly better exchange rate than you would if you converted Yen to Dollars to buy Dollar Denominated Assets, but you're still buying overseas assets with Weak Yen.

I'm a newbie too... but as I understand it, if you buy in dollars (converted from yen either using the broker's real time conversion section - at zero yen commission in many cases - or transferred to the broker from your back in dollars) you control the exchange rate at which you buy the stocks, whereas if you buy in yen the trade incurs the 0.25 yen per dollar or whatever exchange commission that the broker charges for purchases of foreign currency denominated stocks or funds in yen.

If I've go tthis wrong, please one of you veterans correct me! thanks.

UPDATE: I checked with Rakuten user support about the applicable exchange rates. They say that if you buy US stocks in Yen you will incur conversion fee (0.25 yen on the dollar) whereas if you convert yen to dollars in advance using their real-time conversion service, you will get commission free conversion. So if you don't mind the extra chore of converting to dollars yourself, then you incur lower fees that way.

The other thing to consider of course is if you buy US stocks in yen, the broker converts the yen to dollars to buy those stocks and when you sell those stocks the broker again converts the dollars to yen (at 0.25 yen on the dollar commission) and if you buy some other US stock in yen with the proceeds you'll again incur conversion costs and so on. If you provide your own dollars and buy the US stocks in those dollars and then sell the stocks you'll get those dollars in your account ready to be used to buy some other US stocks so in the long run it seems to me providing your own dollars using real-time conversion is key.