Nikkei drops to three week low

The Nikkei has fallen to a new three-week low after dropping more than two per cent during today's (April 9th) trading session.

It was a bad day for the index, with investors responding negatively to comments made by the Bank of Japan's governor Haruhiko Kuroda, who stated that the central bank may not raise monetary policy any time soon.

This led to a strengthening of Japanese currency the yen, which in turn damaged the stock market. As many of the Nikkei's major stocks are exporters, they tend to thrive when the yen is weak compared to major global rivals such as the dollar.

The Nikkei has now fallen for four days in a row, ending the session at 14,299.69 and slipping back by over 300 points during the session to record its biggest daily drop in almost a month, as well as plunging to its lowest level in the last three weeks.

2014 performance

It has been a difficult start to the year for the Nikkei, which rose strongly during the course of 2013, beating easily the performance of other major stock markets such as London's FTSE 100 and the Dow Jones in New York. But 2014 has been a different story for the index, which is down for the year and has been behaving in an extremely volatile manner in recent weeks.

Since the start of 2014, the Nikkei​ has dropped by more than 12 per cent and is now five per cent lower in the last four sessions alone.

The broader Topix index was down for the day as well, also falling by more than two per cent, ending the session at 1,150.44 in moderate trade. Reuters reports that 2.33 billion shares changed hands today.

A clean sweep of losses for the main Japanese indexes was completed by the JPX-Nikkei Index 400, which was set up earlier in the year and it is comprised of companies with a high return on equity and robust corporate governance. It fell two per cent to 10,467.88.

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