Japan’s only registered high-speed trading firm leaves Tokyo for Singapore

Tokyo just lost its last high-speed trading firm. Dharmacapital Co., Japan’s sole registered high-frequency trading operation, moved all of its staff to Singapore earlier this month, according to people familiar with the matter.

The departure means Tokyo, home to the world’s fifth-largest stock exchange by market capitalization, now has zero locally operating high-speed trading firms.

A move months in the making

The relocation didn’t happen overnight. Dharmacapital incorporated a new Singapore entity, DHARMACAPITAL PTE. LTD., back on April 16, 2026, suggesting the groundwork was laid well before the staff packed up and left Tokyo.

The firm had maintained operational ties to both cities prior to the full move. But as of August 2026, the transition is complete, with the entire team now based in Singapore.

Dharmacapital holds a unique position in Japan’s financial ecosystem. It is the only firm registered as a high-speed trader under Japan’s Financial Instruments and Exchange Act, a designation it has carried since at least 2018. The company serves as a designated market maker across major Japanese exchanges, including the Tokyo Stock Exchange and Osaka Digital Exchange, providing the kind of continuous liquidity that keeps bid-ask spreads tight and markets functioning smoothly.

No public explanation has accompanied the shift. The company hasn’t cited regulatory frustrations, tax burdens, or operational issues.

What it means for Japanese markets

Market makers like Dharmacapital play a critical role in ensuring that buyers and sellers can transact efficiently. They sit in the order book, quoting prices on both sides, and their algorithms respond to market conditions in microseconds.

Dharmacapital can still make markets on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and Osaka Digital Exchange remotely from Singapore. The firm hasn’t announced any intention to stop its Japanese market-making activities. But physical proximity to exchange infrastructure matters in high-frequency trading, where latency is measured in microseconds and even small delays can affect execution quality.

Operating from Singapore rather than Tokyo introduces additional network hops between the firm’s systems and Japanese exchange matching engines. For strategies that depend on being faster than competitors by fractions of a millisecond, that distance is not trivial.

The Osaka Digital Exchange angle is worth watching separately. That platform, which launched as a venue for trading digital securities and security tokens, relies on market makers to provide the liquidity that draws institutional participants. Losing the physical presence of its key market maker could complicate adoption efforts at a time when Japan is actively trying to grow its digital securities market.

Other international high-frequency trading firms like Citadel Securities, Virtu Financial, and Jump Trading have Asian operations, but their primary hubs tend to be in Hong Kong or Singapore rather than Tokyo. Japan’s market structure has historically been less hospitable to the kind of co-location and low-latency setups that these firms prefer, which helps explain why Dharmacapital stood alone on the registry.

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