“If you went underweight Japan for the past 29 years, you would have done extremely well,” Belita Ong, chief executive officer of Dalton Investments, told Bloomberg. “Today, it trades at a remarkable discount.”
For example, EWJ, which tracks the MSCI Japan Index, shows a 14.1 price-to-earnings and a 1.3 price-to-book, compared to the S&P 500’s 17.4 P/E and 2.9 P/B.
Japanese markets were also strengthening on some political relief as testimony to Parliament about a cronyism scandal surrounding Japan’s premier produced damaging revelations. However, testimony revealed little that would harm Prmie Minister Shinzo Abe, Business Times reports.
“Share prices are rising partly because of investors’ relief that there was no surprise in the testimony,” Hiroaki Hiwata, strategist at Tokyo Securities, told AFP.
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