Japanese salarymen rocking currency markets

An employee of a foreign currency company walks past in front of a graph showing recent movements of the exchange rates between the Japanese yen and the U.S. dollar at a dealing room in Tokyo, Japan, August 6, 2019. - Reuters

TOKYO: Popular tales of “Mrs Watanabe” – the canny Tokyo housewife who dabbles in currency trading in between school runs and shopping – barely begin to tell the story of Japan’s retail traders in the foreign exchange market.

With almost 800,000 active forex accounts, Japan boasts the world’s most powerful force of retail traders. It has doubled in size in little more than a decade and spurred some of the most dramatic price moves of recent times, including the January “flash crash” that hammered the dollar and sent the yen soaring.