Two or three times a week, Mitsuo Tsukamoto sits at home surfing the Internet and poring over charts to decide whether it's time to buy or sell on the stock market.
"I used to draw charts manually," the 73-year-old retiree says. "But now, you can check the Internet for pretty much anything brokerage firms can tell you."
Tsukamoto is tight-lipped about how much he trades over the Internet or how often. But the self-confessed conservative investor says his trading has helped pay for his daughter's wedding, her college expenses and repairs to his home.
Although not everyone can claim such success, online trading is catching on among older people.
The number of online trading accounts in Japan doubled over the past two years to nearly four million, the Japan Securities Dealers' Association says.
Online trading accounted for 12.7 percent of all customer transactions in the six months to March this year, up from 6.3 percent for the same period two years ago, it says.
The latest gains in Tokyo stock prices are providing online traders with further incentive.
Minoru Shimura, general manager of Retela Crea Securities Co's planning division, said the number of older online traders was growing as more information on listed companies becomes available on the Internet.
"Those who have money are mostly in their fifties or older," he said. "They are at the stage where their children are grown up and their housing loans are mostly paid off."
Retela, a small private brokerage, signs up an average of 500 to 600 new accounts every month, about 60 percent of which are held by people over 50.
Hiroichi Nishi, general manager at Nikko Securities Co's products group, said he believed many online traders were older people.
"They seem to be nimble investors," he said.
Traditionally Japanese held on to their assets, like land or bank savings, to pass on to their children, who in turn were expected to care for their parents.
But these days more older Japanese plan on spending their savings and taking care of themselves, a Nihon Keizai Shimbun survey said.
The July survey of 800 readers in their sixties and seventies also found that 48 percent of respondents were interested in buying more stocks, rather than continuing to accept the skimpy returns on their fixed assets.
These are the people online brokerage firms like Matsui Securities Co Ltd want as customers.
Planning division manager Tomoko Adachi says about half of the 3,000 new clients Matsui signs up in a typical month are in their fifties and sixties. The company has about 104,000 online trading accounts.
"When we advertise in newspapers, we deliberately use larger print," she said. "We also try to explain things in simple language."
Matsui also offers weekly seminars on how to use personal computers and navigate its Web site. Both events pack 50-seat classrooms.
DLJ Direct SFG Securities has opened a branch in both Tokyo and Kobe equipped with personal computers. The company says its customers tend to be in their forties and fifties.
"They are becoming computer savvy," a DLJ spokesman said. "At the beginning some didn't even know what a browser was."
Online traders are now a growing force in the stock market.
Japan's largest online brokerage, E*Trade Securities Co, said the number of new accounts has grown more than 50 percent each month since the Nikkei average began its latest rise in May.
Last month alone, the Softbank Investment Corp (SBI) affiliate added 7,000 new accounts to the 290,000 it already had.
"The number of elderly customers is increasing, but younger investors are also on the rise," an E*Trade spokesman said.
Hiroshi Sato, director of trading systems at the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE), said average daily trade volume had nearly tripled in the last three years to two million orders, due partly to a surge in transactions over the Internet.
The TSE therefore plans to expand the daily trading volume its systems can handle by 20 percent, to 5.4 million orders, by January.
Between January and last month, when the Nikkei average rose more than 20 percent, the share of trading volume taken by small investors rose four percentage points to 26 percent.
"Small investors used to place one or two orders a day with a brokerage firm, at most," he said. "Now, what I hear from securities firms is that they repeatedly buy and sell."
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