(Bloomberg) -- Speculators are ramping up their bearish stance on the yen, an indication that some on Wall Street worry that the year’s weakness in Japan’s currency is here to stay. 

Leveraged funds boosted their net-short position in the yen to 65,490 contracts in the week ended Nov. 14 — the most since April 2022, according to Commodity Futures Trading Commission data. 

While the yen strengthened on Friday to 149.7 against the greenback, it remains the worst-performing Group-of-10 currency so far this year. That’s largely because of the Bank of Japan’s still-loose monetary policy, which stands in contrast to other major central banks.

To Brad Bechtel, global head of foreign exchange at Jefferies LLC in New York, it’s likely that speculative traders turn even more pessimistic on the currency from here.

“It is long anything, short yen — really,” he said. 

While the Bank of Japan has loosened its yield-curve control this year, the move has had little impact on the yen. Instead, the currency has mostly remained stuck in a trend of sustained depreciation due to a wide interest-rate gap between Japan and the US. 

Japan’s finance minister, Shunichi Suzuki, said Monday that authorities would respond as needed to sudden moves in the yen. The nation’s top currency official, Masato Kanda, said earlier this month that policymakers were “on standby,” when asked if he was prepared to intervene in the currency market or take other measures to curb the yen’s drop.

--With assistance from Carter Johnson.

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