I want to tell you about a mistake I’m watching a lot of income investors make right now, without even realising it. For years, the playbook was simple. Find a stock with a fat dividend yield, buy it, collect the cheque, repeat. Easy money, especially while interest rates kept falling and every income-hungry investor was chasing the same handful of high-yielding names.
Read MoreThe US and Japan have just intervened in the currency market together for the first time since 2011. Here’s why it could affect your investments too.
Read MoreWalk into any conversation about safe income investing in South Africa and two names come up immediately: RSA Retail Bonds and fixed deposits. Both are widely regarded as safe. Both pay a fixed interest rate for a fixed term. Both are readily available to retail investors. Most people treat them as essentially interchangeable and pick whichever has the higher number on the day they invest.
That’s the wrong framework. Because once you look at what each product actually pays – after SARS takes its share, at different marginal tax rates, across different terms – the comparison produces results that most investors have never seen laid out clearly.
And there are specific investor profiles where the conventional choice is almost certainly costing money.
South Africa’s inflation rate was 3% in February 2026. A 21-year low. The SARB was projecting rate cuts. The economy was, by any reasonable measure, in the best monetary policy position it had been in for two decades.
Read MoreRecently, Stats SA delivered a number that made for a good headline: South Africa’s GDP grew 0.5% quarter-on-quarter in Q1 2026 – ahead of the 0.3% economists expected, and the sixth consecutive quarter of growth.
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