In March 2020, the single best investment skill you could have had was courage. The market had collapsed. Everything was cheap. The only question was whether you could override the fear response long enough to buy. 2026 is different. The market isn’t in freefall. Most assets aren’t universally cheap. Nor are the opportunities obvious.
Read MoreIn September 2024, the Financial Sector Conduct Authority approved a two-tier reform – the JSE’s split of its Main Board into two segments – Prime and General – with simplified Listings Requirements taking full effect in early 2026.
Read MoreEvery investor knows what brokerage costs. It’s on the contract note, in rand and cents, impossible to miss. What almost no retail investor calculates, and what can dwarf that brokerage fee many times over, is liquidity cost. The price you actually pay to get into a small cap, and the price you actually receive to get out of one, when very few shares change hands on any given day.
Read MoreSouth Africa recently received one of the most significant trade gifts in its post-apartheid history.
China, the country’s largest trading partner by a wide margin, has implemented a zero-tariff policy covering 100% of tariff lines for South African exports. Agricultural goods, processed products, beneficiated minerals and manufactured items can now enter the world’s second-largest consumer market without paying a cent in import duties.
In 1877, the rains never came. Across huge swaths of the world – southern Africa, India, China, Brazil – crops failed. Rivers dried up. Food shortfalls spiralled into one of the deadliest catastrophes in modern history. Historians estimate that tens of millions perished as harvests collapsed on multiple continents simultaneously.
Most people today have never heard of it.
But scientists now believe the same type of event – a Super El Niño – may be forming again. And the latest data suggests this one could be historically stronger than anything since that 1877 event.
The big names get all the attention. Every headline is about BHP, Naspers, Standard Bank, Anglo American. And that’s understandable. They’re big, liquid, and well-covered. But some of the most interesting investment stories on the JSE are hiding in plain sight, well below the radar of most institutional investors. Here are three small caps worth watching right now.
Read MoreIf you’ve followed the JSE long enough, you start to recognise a pattern. A company generates decent profits. It pays reliable dividends. But the share price never really goes anywhere – because the stock is thinly traded, institutions can’t get meaningful exposure, and the market quietly forgets it exists. That’s the Clientèle story. And now, after years of trading at a stubborn discount, the company has decided to do something about it.
Read MoreOn April 20, President Trump did something that hasn’t been done since the Cold War era: he invoked the Defence Production Act to declare America’s energy grid a matter of national defence.
Read MoreSulphuric acid doesn’t generally make headlines. It doesn’t trend on social media. It’s not the kind of thing that comes up at the dinner table. But it’s critical to the modern economy: copper mining, fertiliser production, nickel extraction, oil refining, and more.
Read MoreThere’s a lesson that South African companies keep having to relearn the hard way: European regulators play by different rules. And they play for keeps. FirstRand – one of South Africa’s finest financial institutions, and a company that has spent years carefully building a presence in the UK consumer finance market – has just been handed a bill so large that it has decided to walk away entirely.
Read MoreMarch 2026 is a month South African investors will not forget in a hurry. In just 31 days, the JSE shed more than R3.4 trillion in market value. That’s the worst monthly destruction of wealth on our stock exchange since the 2008 global financial crisis.
To put that number in context: at the start of February, South Africa’s listed equities had reached a record high of R26.6 trillion.
For the past decade, coal has been the fuel the world was trying to forget.
Climate agreements, green energy targets, ESG mandates, net-zero pledges — the entire direction of global energy policy pointed one way: away from coal.
Get the latest trading and investing recommendations straight to your inbox!
Privacy: We never share your email address You can unsubscribe at any time