"I am a relatively new investor and a new subscriber to your service.

"I still hold fairly substantial amounts of my pension fund in Japan funds. I resisted selling on 'bad news' but now I'm wondering if that was the right decision. I thought the weakening Yen might help things and the Nikkei seems to be trending up but the fund value just keeps going down!

"What is going on here? Is it time to just take the losses and get out?

"Many thanks for your excellent audio commentaries."

Eoin Treacy's view Welcome to Fullermoney and thank you for raising these important issues. Let me first state that despite the fact Japan is a relatively cheap market and has reasonable medium-term recovery potential, it is not a Fullermoney secular theme.

We have pointed out for quite some time that a weak Yen was likely to act as a bullish catalyst for the Japanese stock market because it would help to reverse a headwind for the country's embattled export sector and boost corporate profits.

No one predicted quite how the Bank of Japan would be shaken from its somnambulance but it has been and the Yen has retraced the last six months of its advance against the US Dollar and even more against other currencies. At present investor attention is focused on the Fukushima reactor crisis and the amount of time it will take Japanese productivity levels to recover. Very few are currently focused on the improving terms of trade offered by a weaker currency. This will change as the current set of crises is overcome.

For a British Pound based investor, much is likely to depend on the shape of the Yen's decline. If its depreciation continues to be as abrupt as it has been over the last month, the stock market's performance is unlikely to offset the currency move. However, if the Yen enters a slower more prolonged process of devaluation, which I suspect is the more likely outcome, the stock market is much more likely to rise faster than the currency falls, particularly as attention begins to refocus on corporate profits.