From the executive editor...

“Big UK value stocks could well be the trade of the next decade”

At the beginning of 2010 we offered you an idea about the asset class we thought should do best over the next ten years. Japanese equities, we said, would be the “trade of the decade”. At the time they were, as Merryn pointed out, unloved, unfashionable,). The Nikkei 225 traded on a average price-to-book (p/b) value of about one. That’s cheap. We didn’t expect it to go nuts in a year but we were convinced (as we usually are) that value always outs and that Japan would be a very good long-term investment. It has been. The Nikkei is up around 200% since (see page 4). That hasn’t made it the trade of the decade. The Dow Jones is up around the same and the Nasdaq by 450%. But it’s not a bad return at all.