MoF fries in "no pan shabu shabu"
It began when a box of documents was seized last year by Tokyo prosecutors looking into the activities of a financial racketeer alleged to be preying on Nikko Securities. Part of the fallout was the suicide last month of politician Shokei Arai.
The list, detailing more than 140 stock trades, more than a dozen of which were buy-and-sell orders executed on the same day, alerted prosecutors that there was something amiss. The list indicated that the owner of the account cleared nearly 35% in profits in an 18-month period ending February 1996, a time when the Japanese stock market was flat.
"There is no way an individual can make money through quick buy-and-sell orders in Japanese stocks," explains Kei Mizushima, who gave up being a stockbroker to become Japan's most popular writer of stock-market fiction. "The transaction tax and commissions combined are sufficiently high as to make it impossible for an individual to make a profit on same-day buy-and-sell orders," says Mizushima. "This kind of rapid-fire buy-and-sell orders would ordinarily be executed by brokers churning individual accounts for commissions."