Thinking Points
- It seems there are opportunities in difficult-to-access stocks.
- Sapporo Securities Exchange is a small exchange consisting of 58 listed companies; only 17 of which are exclusively listed.
- I compiled a list of the exclusively listed companies with basic valuation metrics and a brief description of each company.
Last week, I wrote about Hokuyaku Takeyama Holdings, which trades on the difficult-to-access Sapporo Securities Exchange (SSE) under ticker 3055. If you haven’t had the chance to read that article yet, you can find it here. The company trades at considerably lower valuation multiples relative to its peers, despite comparable business performance.
Judging by last week’s article, it seems the interest level for difficult-to-access Japanese stocks is higher than I would’ve ever guessed. For one, Geoff Gannon started his article Stocks You Can’t Buy with a shoutout of our Hokuyaku Takeyama article. Then, I got a few emails asking about the company.
I was already in the process of researching another drug distributor, which has an interesting angle to it: The company has a growing segment that currently accounts for a microscopic portion of revenues, yet generates a significant portion of operating income. Additionally, one of its new capital heavy business segments is moving in the right direction, but appears to drag the income statement and balance sheet in the near term. Perhaps I’ll write about this company next week.
Today, we will briefly talk about the Sapporo Securities Exchange.
As I mentioned in the last article, Sapporo is the capital of Hokkaido; Japan’s northernmost prefecture. As you might guess, the Sapporo Securities Exchange mostly lists Hokkaido-based companies. There are 58 companies listed on the exchange: 17 exclusive to SSE and 41 cross listed on other exchanges. Among the exclusive companies, SSE maintains a list of small to mid size Hokkaido businesses that either have significant growth prospects or already have a healthy growth track record. This list is called “Ambitious” and includes 8 of the 17 SSE exclusive companies.
I compiled a list of the 17 SSE-exclusive companies along with basic metrics (forward P/E, P/B, and Equity/Asset) taken from the Nikkei (as of closing December 13, 2017). Additionally, I quickly looked into each company and added a brief description. I will embed the Google Sheet in this article. Here is a link.
In last week’s post I listed out some of the major Japanese brokers that handle SSE listed stocks. Here’s that same list from Minkabu (popular Japanese stock website).
Major brokers that handle SSE-listed companies:
- SBI Securities
- Kabu.com Securities
- Monex
- Matsui Securities
Major brokers that DO NOT handle SSE-listed companies:
- GMO Click Securities
- Rakuten Securities
- Livestar Securities
A fellow Kenkyo reader mentioned to me that he was able to purchase SSE listed companies through Fidelity, though it was a bit of a hassle involving extra fees and local brokers. I would guess that this is also possible through Interactive Brokers.
