RetireJapan

Hi everyone,

Just joined the forum as I could finally find a place of discussion for foreigners living in Japan that want to get to the "personal" part in "Personal Finance" So glad I could find this, really.

I would like to ask you about LINE Smart Invest since I couldn't find a comment about it in the forum (However, I could learn much more about all the available stuff from NISA, iDeCo and more generic stuff like ETF, but finally, strictly for the Japanese market).

My knowledge is very basic, I haven't got into investing (yet) and I saw quite a lot of options (which got me pumped into research more and more), and I could see that this "Smart Invest" looks "simply" like ETFs where you acquire some stocks of a given set of companies that fall into a certain theme, and removes quite a lot of complexity into, but now that I could read a little bit more what available options are there, it really doesn't look that attractive anymore as there are quite some companies that seem to be quite underperformers...

What are your thoughts into this? Wanted to ask to the savvies

Completely unrelated but is there any thread that covers what should be the first steps in getting dirty (like opening a NISA account, or an iDeCo account once you've seen a good candidate for them..)

Have you read the free guide on the site? The one you get by signing up to the mailing list? That's a fairly simple step by step.

Hey Ben, thanks for the reply! I've "only" read the free pdf from William Bernstein plus the NISA and iDeCo posts related there (the whole "start here"). Do you mean to that?

This actually:

Thanks! Just did but it seems that the confirmation link from the email doesn't seem to work, maybe you can check it?

Edit: It seems that I got subscribed to the newsletter despite the error message, but didn't receive or see any of those guides

Thanks again.

PM me your email address and I'll send it to you directly

You have a PM

There is also this recent thread viewtopic.php?f=2&t=679

As for Line, it could be fun to play with, but for your real savings I'd stick to a major online broker, mutual funds, NISA, and iDeCo.

I also looked at the Line Smart Invest. As mentioned, it is a theme based investment, but it is not a 100% clear if this are real Funds.

There are two options. A regular investment plan, that starts at 500 JPY per week, and has management fees of 1% per year (for more than 3000 Man, 0.5%, and there is a free campaign until April 2020).

The other one is a purchase into a theme directly, which has purchase and a sell fee of 0.5%, but no management fee.

There are themes like AI, Theme Parks, 5G etc. The baskets contain relatively few Japanese stocks (the few I checked where between 3-10).

Considering the management fees, my feeling is, that this is maybe nice for people who want to start really slow, small and convenient, but imo an index fund of a broker like SBI or Rakuten ist still the better option. There you can also start with NISA or iDeco, which Line Smart Invest doesn't offer.

Thank you everyone for your views on this! Yep, I agree that it is a really accesible way to do things and tok be honest, what got me into looking to invest in the first place.

However, after educating a bit myself I really have no further interest on it as the available options really don't give you that much control compared to the "real thing" plus all the benefits of using a tax exemption account (NISA and iDeCo)

My own self comment I would have like to have read when I first read about LINE Smart Invest:

Congratulations! By reading this, you are making a great step towards financial freedom and taking better care of your adulthood finances. However, I don't believe that LINE Smart Invest is the best bet you have now that you are taking the time to educate yourself about this whole world. Read about what NISA and iDeCo is, and why it benefits you. Read about index funds and why overall it performs better than most of the majority of investors (and why your should take it). Then keep de-mistifying investing overall, inform yourself how stock works, what ETFs are, what is Vanguard (and how it works and why people overall like it), read about SBI and Rakuten Securities specifically for Japan, and also read about eMAXIS funds. I know it is is scary at first (is nonetheless your hard working earned money!) but the best thing you can do is exactly to give the importance it has and avoid delegating it to somebody else. Start small, get used to it, don't try to either "beat or time" the market (people more prepared than you already fail(ed)to it!) and just down to business. Good luck and happy investing!

I would love to start throwing some sources to all the parts of the above comment but I'm a bit too lazy and also I'm on my phone