Japanese men in their 30s and 40s are the biggest drivers of the bitcoin boom.
Forty percent of bitcoin trading between October and November was conducted in yen, according to a Nikkei report.
Japanese investors, mostly men, came to dominate trading after regulators started to shut down cryptocurrency exchanges in China.
"More than a few Japanese investors positively value volatility," Muraki [of Deutsche Bank] said in a note on Thursday. He continued: "Japan’s investment style is typified by a combination of low-risk, low-return deposits and high-risk, high-return investments."
Many Japanese investors are engaged in leveraged trading, using borrowed funds.
"We think that retail investors are shifting from leveraged FX trading to leveraged cryptocurrency trading," Muraki said. "Japan accounts for a high 54% of global foreign exchange margin trading (leveraged FX trading), so Japanese retail investors are major players in FX markets."
The majority of trading in Bitcoin has recently come from Japan as more traders, typically men in their 30s and 40s, branch out into cryptocurrency trading alongside foreign exchange trading. Most traders use credit to buy cryptocurrencies which indicates an appetite for high risk, high return investments. Japan has fewer regulations with regards to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency trading and the government is more open to it than China and South Korea which have recently shut down cryptocurrency exchange platforms and restricted investment.
If your student has a background in finance and/or fintech, he/she may like to give his/her interpretation of the current situation regarding the popularity of cryptocurrency trading.
You could encourage your student to talk about attitudes to risk: are investors becoming less risk averse? Do investors in their thirties and forties behave differently to investors in other age groups?