Diversification out of the Yen

Been still flying between Kagoshima and Tokyo. A few nice things about the business trips is that I rack up miles and the second is that I get a small stipend for travel expenses. The amount has added up to a nice little allowance over the salary.

In other news, since approximately November, I've been diversifying myself out of the yen since the yen has skyrocketed after financial crisis and the earthquake last year. The elder Japanese were great savers and have a lot of forex based assets and which may have returned among other things. Personally, I had a feeling that with the YEN-USD trading at about 75 at one point, I thought it would be prudent to start converting yen into other currencies, mainly AUD and CAD. I sold yen about 78 to the AUD and about 79 to CAD. The AUD has rocketed upwards recently which has been a nice upside.

Economically wise, I am not sure at all where the market will be in the next 2~3 months. The Greek debt payment is coming up on a few weeks and the economic conditions in Europe doesn't look really good. There is also a lot of money printing going on driving up the price of the stock market

Semiconductor consumption in China is growing like crazy right now and I think that domestic consumption will increase as affluence increases. Labor in China is still fairly cheap but they are growing fast in terms of technology. Both China and Korea are putting a lot of pressure on Japan since the expensive yen is hampering exports from here.

Japan will have to diversify out their manufacturing, but I think their biggest weakness is that they're not very good at dealing with international business. LG and Samsung are growing like crazy right now and their investment into R&D is huge (easily in the billion dollar range). I think that both China and Korea are going to have some pretty huge growth potential in the future.

As for the US, I think the only thing they really have going for them right now is Silicon Valley as their manufacturing is pretty weak compared to the capacity in Asia. Once Asia has figured out to climb the value chain and get into software, the US is pretty much doomed.