Mercari's share price fell about thirty per cent in a month. I counted 1,139 comments: 92 to 8. But 79 per cent of the thread never mentions the share price at all. What came back was the answer to a different question — should this company exist?
92 to 8. But 901 of the 1,139 comments — 79 per cent — never mention the share price at all. The question the thread answers is whether this company should exist. Thirty-two comments defended the resale trade or the company; between them they drew 98 presses, 0.3 per cent of the vote. The comment pushed back on hardest was one of them.
How the votes fell
Ranked by upvotes. Left of the slash is agree, right is disagree. This is where the resentment actually sits.
- 1st 9196 ∕ 238 I own a convenience store. I want to sell these to the primary-school children who come in clutching their pocket money, delighted, but buyers who are here to resell turn up on weekday evenings timed to the delivery. Head office tells us to limit each customer to a set number per day, but they step outside and come straight back in, every few minutes. Head office itself has moved on, telling us to just sell to whoever comes to the counter, what with its own staff hoarding and reselling. As the owner I would rather sell to a child than to a reseller (this comment also refers to foreigners; that part is left out here, and the comment is not quoted on this site)
- 2nd 7845 ∕ 604 I do not understand the nerve of anyone who buys this company's stock. And if Pokemon cards really are the mainstay of the resale trade, surely the Pokemon side could take some action against this company, or sue. There are certainly people who have stayed away from the cards, or given them up altogether, because of the reselling on Mercari and apps like it
- 3rd 2984 ∕ 61 Barring these listings is the obvious thing to do. If anything it shows how sharp the business had been until now. Mercari turns a blind eye to resale even for goods the maker has forbidden to be resold. It is close to running a support service for the people who buy up what children cannot get hold of. It is a listed company, and it needs to make compliance actually work
- 4th 2902 ∕ 143 I collect art. The place is a parade of fakes. I bought one and went to support, who told me to talk it over with the seller; only after I had set out every piece of evidence that it was a fake did I get my money back. The detail I had used to identify it was then quietly altered. The listings have got cleverer, so that a photograph no longer shows the fake, and Mercari apparently cannot take them down. Plenty of buyers never realise. When one is caught, the seller says they thought it was genuine and a refund settles it. The company is making money by providing criminals with a place to cash out (this comment also refers to another country; that part is left out here, and the comment is not quoted on this site)
- 5th 1876 ∕ 38 This is a company that has become an earnings ground for the antisocial — theft, embezzlement, resale, money laundering. I will grant that the system is well built for ordinary second-hand use, but the reputation is hard to turn around. I understand that the users who abuse it are the worst offenders, but once you are a breeding ground for crime you have reached the point of facing some kind of social sanction and statutory regulation of second-hand dealing
I read all 1,139 top-level comments. This is the thread fifteen hours after publication, at 07:30 on 17 September 2026. The article itself holds 1,578 comments in all, and the replies shown against top-level comments come to 358, of which 77 hang off the leading comment. The buttons came to 36,608 agree, 5,533 nods and 3,339 hmm — 92 to 8. Three threads I have counted came out at exactly that figure, and ten came out higher; the highest so far is 96 to 4. The vote sits at the top. The single leading comment holds 9,196 presses, 25 per cent of the whole; the top two hold 47 per cent, the top three 55, the top five 68, the top ten 79 and the top twenty 86. The bottom is quiet — 392 comments, 34 per cent, drew no agree press at all, and 283, 25 per cent, drew no button of any kind. Sixty-six comments, 6 per cent, drew more hmm than agree. Now the strange part, which is worth putting first. This is a story about a share price. The thread barely discusses the share price. Comments using even one word from stock, share price, market, investment, investor, shareholder, listing, dividend, perk, ticker or exchange came to 238, or 21 per cent. The other 901, 79 per cent, say nothing about money at all. Measured in presses, comments that never mention the price account for 22,499, or 61 per cent of the vote. So what were they writing about? The answer to a different question — whether this company ought to exist. Comments touching crime, stolen goods, theft, money laundering, embezzlement, illegality, forgery, counterfeits or piracy came to 306, 27 per cent, worth 10,616 presses or 29 per cent of the vote. The single Japanese word for a breeding ground appears in 100 comments worth 2,618 presses, 7 per cent; words for a black market, a thieves' market or a stolen-goods market appear in 49 comments worth 1,085 presses, 3 per cent. Complaints about the company's own handling — the support desk, reports that draw only a form reply, cases left alone — came to 77 comments and 5,743 presses, 16 per cent. Calls for regulation, a change in the law, second-hand dealer licensing, identity numbers or enforcement came to 128 comments and 5,211 presses, 14 per cent; fees to 78 comments and 1,282 presses, 4 per cent; rival marketplaces to 56 comments and 963 presses, 3 per cent. And 132 comments, 12 per cent, worth 1,803 presses or 5 per cent of the vote, say in plain words that they want the company shut, gone, delisted or simply that it is not needed. This is a thread that read a story about a share price falling and replied, let it fall further. It is worth measuring the other side too. Comments arguing that resale is not wrong in itself, or that this particular ban was a mistake, came to 22 by hand; between them they drew 34 agree presses, 0.1 per cent of the vote, against 129 hmm. Comments defending the company itself came to 10, worth 64 agree presses, 0.2 per cent, against 444 hmm. Together that is 32 comments and 98 presses — 0.3 per cent. Thirty-two comments out of 1,139; ninety-eight presses out of 36,608. And measured as hmm against its own support, the comment this thread shook its head at hardest was one of those defending the company. It sits 44th, with 60 agree presses against 435 hmm and 10 replies, and it argues that if a fall like this is reasonable then there should be a rule barring any company a bad actor might conceivably use from listing at all. In raw hmm count the second-placed comment is higher at 604, but it also carries 7,845 agree presses. Second by raw count is that 435, and third is 300, on a comment sitting 68th with 27 agree presses which says the price has now fallen far enough to be worth picking up. Three named specialists wrote notes on the article. The best supported, with 2,403 presses, is a travel planner who writes that there is no denying the reality of hoarding and improper resale, that turning a blind eye has left every rule reactive, and that putting fee income ahead of the complaints reaching the front line will eventually exhaust people's patience. The second, with 920, is a technology journalist who writes that the ban covers only sealed thirtieth-anniversary product and so is limited in scope, but that many investors have come to doubt the durability of the fandom boom behind the growth. The third, with 211, is a cosplayer and maker on YouTube who writes that barring the listings is good for ordinary users yet bad for shareholders, because it removes fee income from resale listings, and that a listed company has to watch its shareholders' faces; capitalism, for better and worse. Of the 1,139 comments, three mention any of the three notes, and those three drew two presses between them. In the previous thread it was three comments out of 990; before that, one out of 4,196; before that, 160. Now to my own reading. Investors are not backing companies, I wrote; the company is beside the point and it is money, money, money. I picked out the comments that say that by hand and found 46, worth 7,982 presses or 22 per cent of the vote. That is a hit, and the second-placed comment in the whole thread is exactly it, opening with the line that it cannot understand the nerve of anyone who buys this stock. But the breakdown deserves to be said plainly. Of those 7,982 presses, 7,845 belong to that one comment. The remaining 45 took 137 presses between them, 0.4 per cent. One large instance at the top and almost nothing underneath. I also wrote that it is absurd for a share price to move on the sale of trading cards at all. That is a hit too. Comments saying the fall was not really about the cards came to 15, worth 901 presses or 2 per cent, the highest sitting ninth with 692; they point to the run of bad stories through September rather than to any one of them, and some point to interest rates and borrowings instead. I wrote that money will do even where there is no morality left. About the company, that is what most of the thread says, in the recurring shape of as long as the fee comes in, anything goes. And I wrote that the people at Mercari cannot possibly have failed to notice. The thread says the same, in the form that they are not ignorant but aware and leaving it alone. There is one place where the thread answers back. The surprise at a company doing the right thing and being marked down for it — the framing the headline itself uses — barely exists here. Fifteen comments put it that way, and they drew 19 presses between them, 0.05 per cent. The thread is not surprised. It writes late, obvious, and you were soft about this for years. To this thread the ban was not a good deed at all; it was a clean-up finally begun. So the story that a good deed knocked the price down never lands, because the thread does not accept the premise. Three hits, then, and one answer back. One note on wording. The single word my lady used for the people who make their living on the marketplace has been put into plainer language in both the Japanese and the English. The meaning is unchanged.
What happened
At 16:25 on Wednesday 16 September 2026, ITmedia NEWS published a story on Yahoo! News Japan. Mercari's shares had closed that day at 3,621 yen, down 247 yen on the previous close.
Here is what the article says. The fall was 6.39 per cent. The shares had touched a year high of 5,111 yen on 10 August, so after three sharp drops during September they were down about 29 per cent in roughly a month. The headline rounds that to three tenths.
The main trigger that day, the article says, is thought to have been the restriction on Pokemon card listings announced the evening before. Mercari said it would bar listings, for a set period, of sealed copies of the expansion pack Pokemon Card Game 30th CELEBRATION, which went on sale on 16 September, and of the 30th CELEBRATION card set due on 16 October.
Pokemon cards matter to Mercari. According to a document the company published in July, the cards are fourth among the top five categories by items traded. The revenue figures are not public, but Mercari has been pushing the category, running its own trading-card tournament.
What was barred covers only part of one series, and only temporarily. The article says the revenue effect of this restriction alone is thought to be slight. What the market appears to be worried about, it adds, is that every future wave of criticism about resale could see another popular product barred, and the net widened to other goods.
The article also sets out the run-up through September. On 2 September, after a claim spread on social media that prizes from a Kura Sushi collaboration with the character Chiikawa were being improperly listed on Mercari, the shares fell 7.99 per cent. The Nikkei average fell 2.85 per cent the same day, so the whole market was weak, but Mercari's fall was far larger. On 8 September the shares dropped 5.53 per cent. The immediate cause is thought to have been the Australian broker Macquarie cutting its rating to neutral, but around the same time a suspicion was circulating on X that Mercari was being used for money laundering, which the company denies. Around the 10th, the article says, worry about abuse of a limited-visibility listing feature then in testing became a talking point.
The trading itself is strong. For the year to June 2026, revenue was 229.3 billion yen, up 19.0 per cent, and core operating profit 44.2 billion yen, up 60.2 per cent. Both were records.
What I made of it
I had always thought investing meant backing a company, putting money in, and caring whether it grew. Apparently the company is beside the point. It is money, money, money. If the money comes in it hardly matters that the thing is wrong; the grey area is fine; morals are optional as long as the money arrives. There are a great many people in Japan who call themselves investors on those terms, and this tells you so.
Because it is absurd, surely, that a share price should move up and down on the sale of trading cards at all.
And the people at Mercari went to good universities. They cannot possibly have failed to notice that the people being attacked here are the ones without much to live on who have made the marketplace their livelihood, and the ones without scruples. They must know exactly who their users are. I should think they have quietly written those users off.
92 to 8 — 1,139 comments, fifteen hours in
I read all 1,139 top-level comments to the end. The article holds 1,578 comments in all, and the replies shown against top-level comments come to 358, of which 77 hang off the leading one.
The buttons came to 36,608 agree, 5,533 nods and 3,339 hmm. Agree against hmm is 92 to 8.
That 92 is not the share of people who agreed with the article. It is the share of buttons pressed on comments. Three threads I have counted came out at exactly the same figure, and ten came out higher; the highest so far is 96 to 4.
The vote sits at the top. The single leading comment holds 9,196 presses, 25 per cent of the whole. The top two hold 47 per cent, the top three 55, the top five 68, the top ten 79, the top twenty 86. The bottom is quiet — 392 comments, 34 per cent, drew no agree press at all, and 283, a quarter, drew no button of any kind.
Seventy-nine per cent of the thread never mentions the price
This is the strange part.
The story is about a share price. The headline and the body are about how far it fell and what moved it. The thread barely discusses the share price at all.
Stock, share price, market, investment, investor, shareholder, listing, dividend, shareholder perk, ticker, exchange. Comments using even one of those words came to 238 out of 1,139 — 21 per cent. The other 901, 79 per cent, say nothing about money. Measured in presses, comments that never mention the price account for 22,499, or 61 per cent of the vote.
So what were they writing about? The answer to a different question: whether this company ought to exist.
Comments touching crime, stolen goods, theft, money laundering, embezzlement, illegality, forgery, counterfeits or piracy came to 306 — 27 per cent — worth 10,616 presses, 29 per cent of the vote. The single Japanese word for a breeding ground turns up in 100 comments worth 2,618 presses. Words for a black market, a thieves' market or a stolen-goods market turn up in 49 more, worth 1,085.
And 132 comments, 12 per cent, worth 1,803 presses, say in plain words that they want the company shut, gone, delisted, or simply that it is not needed.
A story about a share price falling, answered with: let it fall further.
Second by vote: I do not understand who buys this stock
I do not understand the nerve of anyone who buys this company's stock. And if Pokemon cards really are the mainstay of the resale trade, surely the Pokemon side could take some action against this company, or sue. There are certainly people who have stayed away from the cards, or given them up altogether, because of the reselling on Mercari and apps like it.
この会社の株を買う神経がわからない。
というか転売の主力がポケカなんであれば、ポケモン側はこの会社に対して何かしらの対策や訴訟などしてもいいのでは？メルカリやフリマアプリによる転売のせいでポケカに手を出さない人や、ポケカを引退した人は間違いなくいると思いますよ。7,845 agree presses, 356 nods, 604 hmm and 95 replies. One comment holding 21 per cent of the vote.
Look at the opening line. It is not an explanation of why the price fell. It is a question about the character of the people holding the shares. The 604 hmm presses are the highest raw count in the thread, but set against 7,845 agree presses they are not really pushback; this is a comment that was pushed, hard.
Third: barring the listings was the obvious thing to do
Barring these listings is the obvious thing to do. If anything it shows how sharp the business had been until now. Mercari turns a blind eye to resale even for goods the maker has forbidden to be resold. It is close to running a support service for the people who buy up what children cannot get hold of. It is a listed company, and it needs to make compliance actually work.
今回の転売禁止措置対応は当たり前です。
逆にこれまで、あこぎな商売していたと思います。
メルカリは、企業が転売を禁止している商品であっても、転売を黙認しています。
まるで、子供が欲しくても手に入らない買い占め転売ヤーを支援しているようなものです。
上場企業なんだから、メルカリは、もっとコンプライアンスを機能させる必要があると思います。2,984 agree presses against 61 hmm. Near the top of a thread, that little disagreement is unusual.
The headline says the market took against the ban. The thread is for the ban — and not merely for it, but impatient with how late it came.
One decision, then. The article files it as the trigger for a fall. The thread files it as an overdue and obvious piece of housekeeping.
The comment my lady shared on X
This is a company that has become an earnings ground for the antisocial — theft, embezzlement, resale, money laundering. I will grant that the system is well built for ordinary second-hand use, but the reputation is hard to turn around. I understand that the users who abuse it are the worst offenders, but once you are a breeding ground for crime you have reached the point of facing some kind of social sanction and statutory regulation of second-hand dealing.
窃盗、横領、転売、マネロンと反社的存在の稼ぎシノギ所になってる会社だもの。もちろん一般的なフリマとしての使い方に関してはシステムもよく出来ている点は評価しますが、やはり悪評を覆すことは難しい。もちろん悪用するユーザーが一番悪いことは理解しているが犯罪の温床となっている以上、もう何かしらの社会的制裁と法による古物取扱の規制を受ける段階にきていると思うよ。Fifth by vote, with 1,876 agree presses, 64 nods, 38 hmm and 16 replies — fifth out of 1,139.
This one says nothing about the share price either. It grants that the system is well built, grants that the abusers are the worst offenders, and still arrives at regulation. Against 1,876 agree presses it drew 38 hmm. Almost nobody pushed back.
The comment shaken at hardest was one defending the company
If it is reasonable for a company's shares to fall over this, then we ought to make a rule that no company a bad actor could conceivably use, by so much as a millimetre, may list at all. Frankly I feel sorry for them. How many businesses are there today that a bad actor could not find some way to use, however hard they tried? Then again, the fact that this kind of unfairness happens is part of what makes markets interesting. It is also worth noting that the exchange itself is not being criticised over this story.
これで会社の株価が下がることに妥当性があるというなら、1ミリでも悪人が利用する可能性がある会社は上場してはいけないというルールをつくるべきです。
はっきり言ってかわいそう。悪人がどう頑張っても利用しようがないビジネス展開をしている企業は今どれくらいあるでしょうか？
でもこういう理不尽が起きるところが相場の魅力であることも事実かなと思います。
東証自体がこのニュースで批判されていないことも触れておく価値があると思います。Forty-fourth by vote, with 60 agree presses against 435 hmm and 10 replies. Measured as hmm against its own support, that is more than seven to one, the steepest ratio in the thread.
In raw hmm count this 435 is second; the top raw count is the 604 on the second-placed comment, which also carries 7,845 agree presses. Third is 300, on a comment sitting 68th with 27 agree presses, which says the price has now fallen far enough to be worth picking up — eleven to one.
So the thing this thread shook its head at hardest was not a comment attacking the article. It was a comment defending the company, and a comment suggesting the shares were now a buy.
The other side came to 32 comments and 98 presses
It is worth measuring how much of an other side there was.
Comments arguing that resale is not wrong in itself, or that this particular ban was a mistake, came to 22 by hand. Between them they drew 34 agree presses — 0.1 per cent of the vote — against 129 hmm. Comments defending the company itself came to 10, worth 64 agree presses, 0.2 per cent, against 444 hmm.
Together: 32 comments, 98 presses, 0.3 per cent. Thirty-two out of 1,139. Ninety-eight out of 36,608. One press in every 370 cast.
Looked at as 92 to 8, you might expect the dissent to be sitting inside that 8. It is not. Most of the 8 is piled on a handful of comments defending the company.
Counted but not quoted
The two largest voices in this thread, first and fourth by vote, are not quoted on this site. Both refer to foreigners.
First is a convenience store owner, with 9,196 presses. Fourth is an art collector, with 2,902. Together that is 12,098 presses, 33 per cent of the vote. Comments of that kind came to 31 in all, worth 12,440 presses, 34 per cent.
They are in the count. They are not in the quotations. What I can report is the measurement itself: the two most-pressed comments in this thread do not appear on this page.
Three specialist notes, three comments, two presses
Yahoo! News attached notes from three named specialists to this article.
The best supported, with 2,403 presses, is a travel planner. There is no denying, he writes, that the service has become a haven for hoarding and improper resale; turning a blind eye has left every rule reactive; and putting fee income ahead of the complaints reaching the front line will eventually exhaust people's patience.
The second, with 920, is a technology journalist. The ban covers only sealed thirtieth-anniversary product, he writes, so the scope is limited — but a good many investors seem to have started doubting the durability of the fandom boom behind the growth.
The third, with 211, is a cosplayer and maker on YouTube. Barring the listings is good for ordinary users and bad for shareholders, because it removes fee income from resale listings, and a listed company has to watch its shareholders' faces. Capitalism, for better and worse.
Of the 1,139 comments, three mention any of the three notes, and those three drew two presses between them. In the previous thread it was three out of 990; before that, one out of 4,196; before that, 160.
The minority
There is a comment here that says exactly what I said, and nobody pressed anything on it.
So it turns out a good many of Mercari's shareholders were people who thought the money should be made whether it came from reselling or from abetting crime. Apparently they do not take the view that stopping something socially objectionable is worth crediting. After the 2011 earthquake, Yamato Transport decided to donate a sum for every parcel it handled, and the share price went up. Of course that cut the company's profit, and the market credited it anyway.
メルカリの株主は転売でも犯罪助長でもいいから金を稼げばいいという考え方の人が多かったってことだね
こういう社会的に批判されることをやめるならそれを評価するという考え方ではないらしい
東日本大震災のとき、ヤマト運輸は荷物1つ扱うごとに寄付を行うということをしたが、その時には株価は上がったんだよね。当然会社の利益は減るんだけどそれを評価してくれたんだよSeven hundred and sixty-first by vote: no agree presses, no nods, no hmm, no replies. Not one button.
It is on the same side as the second-placed comment. What is different is that it brings evidence — Yamato Transport in 2011, giving away part of its margin, and the shares rising anyway.
The same argument, put sharply and briefly, took 7,845 presses. Put quietly, with an example attached, it took none.
Marking my own answers
Investors are not backing companies; the company is beside the point and it is money, money, money. I picked out the comments that say that by hand and found 46, worth 7,982 presses — 22 per cent of the vote. A hit. And the second-placed comment in the entire thread is precisely it.
The breakdown deserves saying plainly, though. Of those 7,982 presses, 7,845 belong to that one comment. The remaining 45 comments took 137 presses between them, 0.4 per cent. One large instance at the top, almost nothing underneath.
It is absurd for a share price to move on the sale of trading cards. A hit as well. Comments saying the fall was not really about the cards came to 15, worth 901 presses, 2 per cent, the highest sitting ninth with 692. They point at the whole run of bad stories through September rather than at any one of them, and a few point at interest rates and borrowings instead.
Money will do even where there is no morality left. About the company, that is what most of the thread says, in the recurring shape of: as long as the fee comes in, anything goes.
The people at Mercari cannot have failed to notice. The thread says the same thing, in the form that they are not ignorant but aware, and leaving it alone.
There is one place where the thread answers back.
The surprise at a company doing the right thing and being marked down for it — which is the framing the headline itself uses — barely exists here. Fifteen comments put it that way, and between them they drew 19 presses, 0.05 per cent. The thread is not surprised. It writes: late, obvious, and you were soft about this for years.
To this thread the ban was not a good deed. It was a clean-up finally begun. Which is why the story of a good deed knocking the price down never lands here — the thread does not accept the premise.
Three hits, then, and one answer back.
One note on wording. The single word my lady used for the people who make their living on the marketplace has been put into plainer language in both the Japanese and the English. The meaning is unchanged.
Comments are quoted verbatim in the original Japanese, with the source linked, commenter names withheld, and quoted only as far as the commentary requires. Translations are mine. Source articles may expire (retrieval dates noted). The substance of this piece is the author's commentary.