Cough, cough....Japan? Conservative lending practices? I think, I can´t confirm this opinion. Japanese lenders are very happy to provide you with loans - especially mortgages...
Don't all trades have an element of timing? Some people were short housing in 2004 and got creamed, others shorted it in 2005 and took some heat, others piled on in 2006 or 2007 and had a much easier time of it. Timing is part of being a decent trader.
Japanese banks will provide mortgages to foreign non-residents? If so, then I stand corrected. Admittedly, last time I checked was quite a few years ago, so maybe things have opened up since then.
We should watch this closely for if he pukes the position - that may provide an entry point in the stock for a trade.
This sounded too counter intuitive especially for a closed society (by western standards)...so i checked online and with my sources....a foreign non resident cant get a mortgage in japan...no way period. Even if you are a foreigner and have been staying in japan for 5 yrs, its extremely hard to get a mortgage unless u have j-wife.
I remember a few years back I used to watch the market a bit in the pre-market hours. Particularly some specific stocks, I was always amazed to see some prints in the L2 or order book window that were completely out of line to the fair value of the stock(close of the stock adjusted for the ES or NQ futures action and fair value). Like I sometimes saw $20-$30 stocks with prints $1 off on no news One day I wanted to try to make money on this and put a bunch of low bids on ETFs in the pre-session, most of the time nothing happens but one time I did got filled in one ETF. I immediately went to the ask but didn't got filled. When the market opened I sold the ETF at the market price. I believe I made something like $100 or something but it got me wondering about using this additional market making strategy to make some money I became a professional data subscriber shortly after and NYSE real-time data would cost me $1,500 a year so I never pursued the strategy. But I wonder if someone has had similar experiences
What he probably is confusing this with are mortgages denominated in JPY, but originated by local mortgage lenders outside of Japan.
Why not wait until the yen collapse actually happens before buying your yen property? Then you can pick up the property for dirt cheap in the future if you are right. But if you are wrong and the yen doesn't collapse you're not going to lose anything in the meantime. The thing is, taking out the yen mortgage is great, but even in the collapsing yen scenario you're holding a depreciating asset (in non yen terms) if you're just buying a yen property. You could of course bet against then yen by taking out a yen mortgage on a non-yen property. I was looking into this a few years ago until I thought for a moment how risky it actually was. The 2.5% yen mortgage payments were so tempting, but of course when I considered the possibility of the yen actually strengthening...agghh, not good! And that's exactly what happened. This was in 2007-2008 and the brokers offering this product to buy a UK property wanted something like a 50% deposit. You hear a lot of stories about Polish guys who took out CHF mortages to buy Polish property and then they're left with enormous mortgage payments when POL/CHF pair collapses.