Japan’s Topix rises from three-day fall

A man looks at his watch as he passes an electronic board displaying a graph of currency rates outside a brokerage in Tokyo.

A man looks at his watch as he passes an electronic board displaying a graph of currency rates outside a brokerage in Tokyo.

Published May 20, 2014

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Sydney - Japanese stocks rose, with the Topix index rebounding from three days of losses, as power producers led the advance and Yahoo Japan surged.

Kansai Electric Power climbed 4 percent to pace gains among utilities.

Yahoo Japan soared 12 percent, its biggest increase in more than 15 months, after the Internet portal cancelled plans to acquire eAccess Ltd. from SoftBank Corp. for 324 billion yen ($3.2 billion).

Sega Sammy Holdings jumped 3.5 percent after a report the manufacturer of gaming machines plans to make casino equipment.

The Topix index added 0.3 percent to 1,153.38 at the close in Tokyo after falling 2.8 percent the previous three days.

Just eight of the gauge’s 33 industry groups slid today.

The Nikkei 225 Stock Average increased 0.5 percent to 14,075.25.

The yen gained 0.1 percent to 101.43 per dollar.

“There’s been some buyback from yesterday’s oversell triggered by the stronger yen,” said Koji Toda, chief fund manager at Resona Bank Ltd. who helps oversee about 18 trillion yen.

“Global economies including the US aren’t bad enough to raise concerns, but too weak to be completely optimistic, so there’s been buying and selling over small reasons in the stock markets.”

The Bank of Japan meets from today amid forecasts by 44 percent of economists in a Bloomberg News poll of additional stimulus by the end of the July gathering.

No change to policy is expected tomorrow, with the central bank buying about 7 trillion yen ($69 billion) of sovereign debt a month since April last year.

 

Stimulus Measures

 

The BOJ’s monetary stimulus and government spending by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe drove a world-beating 51 percent jump in the Topix last year.

The measure fell 12 percent in 2014 through yesterday amid concern the measures won’t be enough to revive the economy and generate inflation.

Futures on the S&P 500 slid less than 0.1 percent.

The US equities benchmark gauge climbed for a second day yesterday as Internet and small-cap shares extended a rebound from losses last week. About 4.9 billion shares changed hands on US exchanges, the second-lowest level of the year.

Of the Topix companies that posted results from April 1 through yesterday and for which Bloomberg had estimates, 55 percent beat analyst predictions for profit, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The Topix Electronic Power & Gas Index climbed 1.9 percent, the most in almost two weeks and the biggest gain among the industry groups.

Kansai Electric added 4 percent to 941 yen, while and Tokyo Electric Power rose 1.3 percent to 383 yen.

 

Yahoo Japan

 

Yahoo Japan surged 12 percent to 459 yen, the largest increase since January 2013.

The company and eAccess decided they didn’t need to combine businesses and that they could cooperate while developing their operations separately, according to a statement yesterday.

Tokyo-based Yahoo Japan slumped 30 percent this year through yesterday.

Sega Sammy gained 3.5 percent to 1,774 yen.

The firm will start sales of casino equipment from as early as 2015, the Nikkei reported, without saying where it got the information.

The Topix traded at 1.12 times book value today, compared with 2.63 for the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index and 1.88 for the Stoxx Europe 600 Index yesterday.

Volume on the Japanese gauge was 4.6 percent lower than the 30-day average today. - Bloomberg News

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