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The story
A Financial Services Agency report found that annual NISA purchases by people in their twenties reached ¥1.2648 trillion in 2025, roughly 17 times the amount recorded in 2014, the year the program launched. On the forum, reactions ranged from skepticism about whether the data matches real-world experience, to wariness of future tax hikes, to worries that the sharply risen stock market could crash at any time.
Fri, Aug 21, 15:13 JST
Kyodo News
Annual purchases under the tax-free NISA (Nippon Individual Savings Account) investment program by people in their twenties reached ¥1.2648 trillion in 2025, about 17 times the figure from 2014 when the program began, the Financial Services Agency reported on the 21st. Younger generations are said to feel more anxiety about rising prices and the pension system, a trend believed to be pushing more people to invest as a hedge against the future.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
it's actually pretty fun
Starting risky stocks at 60? How long do you think you're gonna live?
there's no way even 5% of twenty-somethings in Tokyo are doing NISA
Nah, my hairdresser said the same thing, so it's probably true
they said young people are doing it a lot these days
NISA accounts at brokerages are all linked to your My Number (Japan's national ID)
and each year, the tax-free allowance used per NISA account should get reported to the Financial Services Agency
so the FSA can easily tally usage by age group
and Gen Z's pension is looking shaky too
Still better to have time to prepare than get blindsided at the last minute like the junior baby boomers were
A lot of people mistakenly think NISA = stocks, but you can also buy bonds and REITs within your NISA allowance (via mutual funds).
Bonds are lower risk than stocks (since they're backed by things like government bonds).
The Japanese government bond ETF I bought through NISA a year ago is down about 10% now
it just keeps falling as bond yields keep rising
Damn, that's brutal
you'd have been way better off buying individual JGBs (retail government bonds) in a regular taxable account
I really don't feel like buying Japanese government bonds these days…
though a ~10% drop is probably still within what the prospectus disclosed.
You did read the prospectus before buying, right?
isn't a crash coming?
Prices have shot up like a rocket these past two, three years.
And what goes up like a rocket comes down like a rocket.
The whole point of dollar-cost averaging is that a crash doesn't matter
You gotta look at stock charts on a log scale, otherwise it's meaningless lol
they're cooling down the real economy just to prop up stock prices
it's honestly such a dumb situation
Not sure what you mean by 'the real economy,' but listed companies' profits are at record highs, so it's normal for average stock prices to rise
Though that's in dollar terms, mind you
Wait, you seriously don't know what that means?
Real fancy economic commentator you are
Consumption, and the production needed for it — that's the real economy
I think they mean doing index investing within the NISA allowance…
These days investing basically means index investing, so does it even matter?
Since when did you think NISA wouldn't get watered down?
Pretty sure it'll happen eventually
Didn't Kishida let it slip once that they'd start taxing it?
The past doesn't matter much, but
they've also decided to start taking insurance premiums from 2028
apparently it'll be phased in — starting with the elderly, then extending to the working generation too
That was an outrageous perk for the wealthy (though the government probably also wanted to encourage investing). Rich people get hit with progressive income tax that takes half their earnings, yet back then capital gains tax on stock sales was capped at 10% — what a great era that was.
I got a bit of a benefit from it myself.
Even now the cap is 20%, so depending on the amount, it's still more favorable than income tax.
a sign of a huge crash coming?
It's already dropped several times
look at the chart from last month, lol
If you're in your twenties, you can bounce back even from a huge crash
if anything, that's exactly when to buy the dip (averaging down)
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HQEmVjfbEAISkHY.jpg
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Indian stocks that were hyped up so much about ten years ago have ended up like this lol
Looking at the SENSEX and NIFTY 50, Indian stocks peaked years ago.
Meanwhile Japanese stocks, written off as a lost cause ten years ago, broke past the bubble-era Nikkei high of ¥39,000 in 2024, and hit ¥72,000 this June.
I'm in S&P and Oru-Kan (a popular Japanese all-world index fund), by the way.
Couldn't you also say Trump's the one pushing it up?
People whose understanding is stuck at 'feels like' shouldn't be buying mutual funds
Background and Key Points
NISA (Nippon Individual Savings Account) is Japan’s tax-free investment scheme, modeled on Britain’s ISA and launched in 2014 to nudge a historically cash-heavy household sector into markets. Every brokerage NISA account is tied to a citizen’s My Number national ID, which is how the Financial Services Agency can cleanly tabulate purchases by age bracket rather than relying on estimates. Also worth knowing: capital gains on stock sales outside NISA are taxed at 20% today, versus a flat 10% before 2014 and 0% before that — a detail one poster raised to note NISA isn’t a uniquely generous perk so much as a return to an older, laxer regime for the investing public. A major structural change is missing from the thread entirely: in January 2024 the program was overhauled into a permanent scheme with roughly doubled annual contribution limits, which likely explains much of this surge independent of any generational anxiety narrative.
The thread’s real fault line wasn’t whether young people are investing more — the My Number-based data settled that — but whether the boom is prudent behavior or a bubble waiting to pop. Posters diverged sharply between “dollar-cost averaging makes timing irrelevant” and “a market up this fast, this far past the 1989 bubble peak, is due for a crash,” with the Nikkei’s 2024 breakout above ¥39,000 and 2025 run to ¥72,000 cited on both sides.
What outside readers likely miss: NISA isn’t synonymous with stock-picking. It also wraps bond funds and REITs, and posters flagged that JGB (Japanese government bond) funds have actually lost value as yields rise — a reminder that “tax-free” doesn’t mean “risk-free.”
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Breaking News Plus) thread “[Investing] NISA Purchases by Twenty-Somethings Up 17-Fold Since Program’s 2014 Launch, as People Prepare for the Future”.
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