A lot of misinformation out there

There are some people saying the BOJ is selling stocks in April. There was some kind of mistranslation there.

What's happened is that the BOJ was supposed to start unloading some of its stock holdings in April but at today's meeting they decided the won't sell stocks. Instead they will hold onto the stocks for longer and the scheduled completion of the sales has been extended to March 2026 from Sept 2021.

Those stock buys originally were from a 2002 program to buy financial shares for stability and it was to be wound down. Now they will be extending the sales to 2026 and selling about 300B yen annually.

Here is the statement.

There is another rumor that they are just shifting to buying stocks from bonds and that the monetary base is the same. That's not true either. The monetary base for bond buys stayed at 80T yen (as expected) but buying for ETFs (at 300B) and JREITS (0.09B) was introduced.

USD/JPY is somehow down on all of this to 122.31, a handful of pips from where it was before the decision and well off the post-announcement spike of 123.50.