The Bank of Japan said it will establish a new program for buying exchange-traded funds to offset any market impact as it resumes selling stock holdings in April. The Topix index soared, and then pared gains.

The new program has an annual budget of 300 billion yen ($2.5 billion), in addition to the 3 trillion yen the bank already spends on ETFs each year, the BOJ said on Friday. It will start from April, when the BOJ plans to resume selling shares it had purchased from banks. The BOJ also said it would extend the average maturity of holdings of Japanese government bonds to 7-12 years.

“This is unexpected, but compared to the previous so-called QQE, the size is considerably different,” said Soichiro Monji, chief strategist at Tokyo-based Daiwa SB Investments Ltd. “At 300 billion yen, it’s on the scale of margin of error. The impact to the stock market will not be big.”