South 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.
It’s one of the most confusing things happening in markets right now. There’s a war raging in the Middle East. Oil prices are surging. Inflation fears are climbing. Global markets are rattled. And gold – the asset people have run to in every crisis for thousands of years – is falling?
Read MoreOver the past weeks, I’ve spoken about the Strait of Hormuz and how the war is threatening oil and aluminium supply. But there’s another, less obvious story unfolding – one that could ripple through global food prices, farming economics, and agricultural stocks. That is a significant share of the world’s key fertilizer ingredients flows through this chokepoint: roughly 44% of global sulphur, 31% of urea, 18% of ammonia, and 15% of phosphates.
Read MoreMost companies listed on the JSE are worth something because of what they earn, what they own, or how fast they’re growing.
But one JSE small cap trading at just 101c a share is worth something almost entirely different: a court case. Randgold & Exploration Company Limited (JSE: RNG) has spent years pursuing a massive legal claim against JSE heavyweight, Gold Fields (JSE: GFI). If it wins, shareholders could make a fortune.
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