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The story
The thread kicked off with a post lamenting that the poster only used the old NISA (Nippon Individual Savings Account) for its final 8 months, leaving their unrealized gains disappointing. Other users quickly piled on with their own numbers: one claimed +128% under the old NISA, another said continuous max contributions since the system launched in 2018 had brought them to +224% (about 5.38 million yen in unrealized gains), and yet another said they’re maxing out monthly contributions of 300,000 yen under the new NISA. The discussion expanded into differences in “deposit power” (how much cash you can actually put in), the pros and cons of dollar-cost averaging, the benefits of daily versus monthly contributions, and the risks of picking individual stocks — with many commenters agreeing that the sheer size of your investment matters more than anything else.
What people said
I lost this one…
New or old NISA?
Counting the new one too, I've got about 300,000 yen in unrealized gains
800,000 yen under the old one
For the new one I'm contributing 300,000 yen a month
LOL, a max-contribution elite
No wonder it's growing
How much do people who max out their contributions even earn?
Like 20 million yen a year?
Feels rough even on a 10-million-yen salary
I learned the hard way just how great deposit power really is 😭
If I'd gone all-in from the start I could've hit +10,000,000 more
Seriously, there are way too many traps out there 😢
I only did it for 8 months, but if I'd started way earlier it would've grown that much, huh
Same here, I started partway through so I could only put in 800,000 yen
400,000 yen a year — for what exactly?
The old Tsumitate NISA (installment NISA)
The cap was about 30,000 yen a month, right?
So if I'd put in 240,000 yen over my 8 months, that means I only gained 216,000 yen?
I'm still down 176,000 yen by that math!
You're probably just not cut out for investing
Oh, really?
I only put money in for the last 8 months
Guess I'm just an idiot who got in late
Invested amount: 2,399,992 yen / Current value: 7,789,017 yen / +5,389,025 yen / +224.54%
Just blindly dumped 33,333 yen into the S&P 500 every month and here we are!
This is literally the only thing keeping me going!
Stop it
I surrender 😎✋
I've heard individual stocks mostly underperform All-Country index funds ("Orukan"),
are you going for shareholder perks or something?
I just bought them because I was bored
Since Tsumitate NISA only lets me put in 1.2 million yen a year, I figured I'd let the rest play around in individual stocks instead
Total
3,190,452
+108,703 ( +3.52% )
Furukawa Electric
409,052
-90,947 ( -18.18% )
Kyuden Holdings
1,228,200
+141,750 ( +13.04% )
Hamamatsu Photonics
935,400
+154,600 ( +19.80% )
Kyushu Railway
332,800
-55,200 ( -14.22% )
Tokai Kisen
285,000
-41,500 ( -12.71% )
That's basically it
You're in the red on a few of these but still buying, huh
Quite a few are negative but you're still winning overall, huh
If I'd put the same amount into every stock I'd be losing overall
It's only working out because I put more money into Kyuden and Hamamatsu Photonics
Don't touch individual stocks…
That return rate is insane
Also, I didn't know you could buy individual stocks under the old NISA
Like if I put in 1 million yen and it becomes 1.1 million
that's 110%, right?
How do I reset that 1.1 million as the new 100%?
If you set it to automatically reinvest when you buy, it'll do that on its own
You could also just take profits once and rebuy the same stock
It grows compound-interest style
With the S&P 500, you've been getting around 15% annual returns lately, so it's like multiplying by 1.15 every year
And within your NISA allowance, it stays tax-free no matter how many times it multiplies
There are roughly 23 trading days a month, so that's a baseline of about 2,300 yen a month — if you can put in 10,000 yen a month, you could buy 100 yen a day across four different funds
Then just sit back and watch the price movements and your asset value
Keep it up for 3 years and you'll have tens of thousands of yen in unrealized gains on top of a few hundred thousand in principal — that's nothing to scoff at
Sorry, but why daily?
Why not monthly?
Because you can capture the daily ups and downs at the smallest possible unit
I mean, 10,000 yen a month is fine too — it's basically a rounding error, but buying daily lets you buy more when it dips and less when it rises, in finer increments, and that adds up
I'd guess it's worth about a 0.5% edge per year, though that's small enough to get wiped out by a single day's price swing
Different person here, but I really recommend daily buying because it keeps your mental state stable
I switched to daily purchases myself around my second year of investing
Especially when the index drops, you end up feeling more happy that you got to buy more today than upset that it dropped
During COVID I actually switched back from monthly to daily buying
Re: #105
So even if it's just a rounding error, it still helps and keeps you calmer, huh
Alright, I'll give it a try, thanks
I put in 40,000 yen a month, so I guess I'll switch that to about 1,300 yen a day
40,000 yen a month? What are you, some kind of elite?
Look at the past price charts and brace yourself — there will be phases where it drops by double-digit percentages
Even through every "XYZ Shock!" crash or times it got cut in half, it's bounced back each time and kept hitting new all-time highs — that's where we are now
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
The old NISA system (both the General and Tsumitate/installment types) stopped accepting new investments at the end of 2023, with the new NISA system taking over starting in 2024. Under Tsumitate NISA, the annual contribution cap was 400,000 yen, so the earlier someone started maxing it out, the more their assets tended to grow thanks to compounding. The thread’s disagreement centered on how to interpret “deposit power” (how much money you’re actually able to put in) — some pointed out that income level determines who can and can’t max out their contributions, while others argued dollar-cost averaging itself is a trap. There was also a mistaken assumption among some posters that Tsumitate NISA was mutual-funds-only; in reality, the General NISA allowance could also be used to buy individual stocks, which surprised several commenters in the thread. A few posters shared examples of profiting from individual stocks, but since the results were driven by which specific stocks they happened to hold, readers should keep in mind that this isn’t a reliably repeatable strategy.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “[Bad News] I Seriously Took a Huge Loss on the Old NISA…“.
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