Here we are again, halfway through 2025, and the South African equity market is charging ahead. The JSE is up a whopping 14.65% year to date and the rand is holding strong at under R18 to the dollar. The S&P500 is having a very hard time keeping its head above water and is up less than 1% for the year to date. The main driver of the South African market is the Resources sector, which is up 48%. Over a 5-year period the S&P500 is still outperforming the JSE, but for now all the funds investing in SA equities are rolling out their marketing campaigns.
If you are into soap operas, then you should not miss the implosion of the Trump/Musk bromance. It started around Wednesday last week and if you are a Tesla shareholder, you saw your investment go down 14% in one afternoon. There was just no way for the richest man on earth, and the most powerful man on earth, to keep their massively inflated egos from clashing. As an investor this should not take up too much of your time, it is just part of the day-to-day flash fires ripping through the media houses. What is of more importance is solid growth, earnings, and even inflation numbers coming out of the US economy. The Magnificent Seven companies are still raking in substantial amounts of money and it seems that the big new thing is to secure enough power generation capabilities for the ever-expanding AI data center developments.
Here in our beloved South Africa we saw interest rates coming down and the expectation is for another rate cut soon. If the second half of the year can build on the first half, we will be happy investors come end of December. All we have to do now, is to resolve some of those nasty geopolitical issues, minimize the impact of some political riffraff and let sanity prevail.
