Mitsubishi UFJ Asset Management to Sell 2 Types of Yomiuri 333-Linked Products

The Yomiuri Shimbun

15:19 JST, March 11, 2025

Mitsubishi UFJ Asset Management Co. will start selling two types of financial products linked to the Yomiuri Stock Index (Yomiuri 333) serially from March 26, the major asset management company announced Monday.

Both financial products will be eligible for the growth quota of the Nippon Individual Savings Account (NISA) investment program.

The Yomiuri Shimbun will begin calculating and publishing the Yomiuri 333 — which reflects the price movements of the Japanese stock market — on March 24. The newspaper company aims to encourage investment in Japanese businesses through Yomiuri 333-linked financial products and achieve a positive economic cycle that will help asset creation for the public.

The financial products will be released from Mitsubishi UFJ Asset Management’s “eMAXIS Slim” mutual fund series and its “MAXIS” exchange-traded fund (ETF) series. The first will be released on March 26, while the latter will be listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange on March 27.

The eMAXIS Slim series is popular for its low fees. When the new NISA scheme was launched last year, four of the top 10 investment trusts purchased with NISA at 10 major securities firms were from the eMAXIS Slim series. Two of them ranked in the top.

The Yomiuri 333 is made up of 333 companies chosen from all Japanese firms listed in Japan. The index is designed to have had a base value at 10,000 on Nov. 29, 1985. Its current value is around 34,000.

The key feature of the Yomiuri 333 is the “equal-weighting method,” which incorporates all 333 companies’ stocks in the same proportion. Therefore, the index is not influenced by the price movements of large-cap stocks but reflects the average price movements of the components.