Foreign Investors: Cumulative Net Buying (weekly, since 2021)
Use the range slider below to focus on a period. The cumulative line is computed over the full history.
Read the slope, not the level. Foreign investors account for a large share of Japanese cash equity turnover, so changes in direction here tend to mark supply-demand turning points. The cumulative total since 2021 stands at +¥18.30tn, with the latest week (2nd week of August 2026) at +¥0.21tn. The cumulative value depends on the chosen starting point, so the absolute number is not meaningful on its own. This is weekly data and therefore slow — it will not explain any given day's move.
COT Speculator Net Positions (weekly)⭳ Source data (CSV)
Click legend entries to toggle markets (double-click to isolate one).
Non-commercial (speculator) net positions from the CFTC's Commitments of Traders report, across eleven markets: S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, Nikkei 225, yen, euro, sterling, gold, silver, copper, crude and natural gas. The useful signal is a reversal out of a crowded extreme — the more one-sided the positioning, the fewer marginal buyers (or sellers) remain to act on confirming news, and the sharper the unwind when it turns. Note the lag: positions are measured on Tuesday and published on Friday, so the data is always three business days old. It is not a timing tool.
Nikkei Futures: Net OI by Trading Participant (weekly)
Click legend entries to filter firms (positive = net long, negative = net short). Click "Nikkei 225" to overlay the index on the right axis.
JPX publishes weekly futures positions by named trading participant — unlike the CFTC's anonymous categories, you can see which firm is on which side. Comparing against zero is useless, though. Over the last 52 weeks, HSBC was net short in all 52 (averaging −31,604 contracts) and SMBC Nikko net long in all 52, while the Nikkei moved substantially in both directions. These are structural positions arising from structured-product hedging, the other side of client flow and index arbitrage — not house views. Compare each firm against its own baseline: a firm that normally sits at −31,000 and now reads −5,000 has effectively bought back a large short, even though the sign is still negative. Full explanation
Nikkei 225 Options Put/Call Ratio (daily)
This series accumulates daily.
Put volume divided by call volume. 1.0 is not the neutral line. Institutional downside hedging is structural, so the measured average is 1.57 for large contracts and 0.91 for mini. Judge the reading against its own recent range. The ratio also moves on its denominator: on 28 July 2026 the Nikkei fell 3.95% and the ratio fell from 1.995 to 1.387. Put volume rose from 21,148 to 35,728 (×1.7), but call volume rose from 10,603 to 25,764 (×2.4) — more. Sharp declines trigger profit-taking on puts, cheap calls bought for a bounce, and the closing of calls that are now far out of the money, all at once. Without both raw volumes you can read the day exactly backwards. Full explanation
Reading them together
No single series settles anything. In practice it helps to work in order: check where US speculative positioning is crowded, then see which domestic firms are on the other side, then use the put/call ratio to gauge hedging demand. Contradictions show up quickly that way — if speculators are heavily long while domestic participants are shorter than their own baseline, one of the two has to give first. See JPX participant positioning, the put/call ratio and gamma exposure for the detail.