After celebrating its ten-year anniversary as a multi asset online trading firm, online brokerage ThinkMarkets is officially launching trading in Japan via its proprietary mobile app ThinkTrader.
ThinkMarkets is a premium, multi-asset, online brokerage established in 2010 with offices in London, Melbourne, and Tokyo and hubs in the Asia-Pacific, Europe, and South Africa.
With an existing user-base in Japan that has been using the ThinkTrader app for charting and analysis, the firm’s foray into the world’s largest FX market has the potential to play a transformative role for the local industry. Earlier this year, ThinkMarkets announced the acquisition of a Japanese financial services entity, awarding the firm with a license to operate in Japan by the Japanese Financial Services Agency (JFSA).
With over 500,000 downloads worldwide, the ThinkTrader app, enables ThinkMarkets’ clients to use powerful analytics on mobile and tablet devices. The official launch in Japan marks yet another achievement for the rapidly growing globally regulated online brokerage firm. The milestone sets out ThinkMarkets as one of the very few international brokers to attempt penetrating the largest retail FX market in the world by volume.
“Our trading app ThinkTrader is a unique proposition for the Japanese market. With its streamlined user interface, sophisticated charting capabilities and ultrafast execution speeds, we are confident we will meet the high expectations of clients in Japan,” commented CEO and co-founder, Nauman Anees.
“Coupled with our exceptional customer support, our proprietary technology enables us to scale our offering into new markets quickly and efficiently,” he added. “We couldn’t be more excited to welcome new our new clients in Japan to the ThinkMarkets trading family.”
The Japanese market is one of the most rigorous and well-regulated financial systems in the world. It has a highly sophisticated local forex market. An estimated 800,000 active forex accounts currently exist in Japan. It has more than doubled in size in the last decade. Most forex traders in Japan are middle aged men who have entered the market due to decades of ultra low local interest rates. Banks pay savers next to nothing in Japan, creating enthusiasm for office workers to trade at home in the evenings, or on the go using mobile apps.
Popular markets for Japanese traders include high yielding currencies like Turkish lira, Mexican peso and South African rand. The go-to strategy is the carry trade, made famous in the 1990s, which involves selling yen using borrowed money from a margin trading account to load up on high yield currencies. A small coterie of Japanese private traders have now built up such huge nest eggs that they are transacting almost as much as smaller banks. According to the Financial Futures Association, margin trading accounts for almost half of all spot transactions on the Tokyo market.
As a regulated company, ThinkMarkets operates with several financial licenses around the globe and delivers some of the industry’s most recognised trading solutions, including its award-winning platform, ThinkTrader. ThinkMarkets provides quick and easy access to a wide range of markets including forex, equities, CFDs on equities, cryptocurrencies, commodities, indices, futures and more.
