in the 'New Japan' story

The strong performance by Japanese small caps this year is encouraging fund of fund managers to continue buying into this part of the market. Peter Metcalfe, manager of the Premier Enterprise unit trust of investment trusts, is pursuing this strategy of a small and mid cap bias, as is John Husselbee of Henderson Investors. So far this year the MSCI World Index Small Cap is up 17% on a dollar basis, whereas in the second and third quarters of last year the index fell by 4.3% and 20% respectively, representative of their overall poor performance in recent years. Metcalfe says: "Smaller co...