All about investing on the JSE with Simon Brown. Every Thursday.
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US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is selling short-dated paper and buying long in an attempt to force the 10 and 30-year yields lower. Simon Brown explains why fighting a market rarely ends well, and what that trade has already done to gold and the rand. With gold back at $4,630 and the rand at R16, he then works through all five JSE-listed gold miners — Pan African, DRDGOLD, Harmony, Gold…
Absa and Nedbank are the two cheap banks on the JSE, both trading near 1.2 times tangible book while Standard Bank and FirstRand sit close to two. Simon Brown puts them side by side after both reported and finds numbers so similar that valuation stops being the question: the same fifteen percent return on equity, the same credit loss ratio near zero point nine percent, the same capital. What…
Pick n Pay has stopped bleeding customers, but it hasn't started healing. Simon Brown goes deep on the retailer's 20-week trading update, where group turnover rose 2.7% while core Pick n Pay SA supermarkets went backwards. He unpacks the so-called negative stub — a R14 billion market cap against an R18.8 billion stake in Boxer plus cash — and explains why capital gains tax makes those "free" 1,538…
Mr Price and Clicks have both been hammered, and on a chart they look like the same trade. They are not. Simon Brown holds both and spends this episode pulling the two businesses apart to work out which one he actually wants to own. Clicks is on its cheapest P/E in a decade but is losing share in the high-margin categories that pay the bills, with Dis-Chem, Checkers Sixty60, SPAR Health and…
Vodacom has cut its dividend payout ratio from 75% to 65%, which pushes one of the JSE's dependable income names down the list. Simon Brown runs the Top 40 and the mid-cap screen to find where quality local yield actually sits, and shows how Growthpoint, Nedbank, Coronation and Standard Bank can be combined into a home-built income portfolio yielding roughly seven and a half to eight percent,…
Can you find a real edge in prediction markets? Simon hunts the arbitrage — and calls Netflix cheap. In this week's WorldWideMarkets: • 🎲 Prediction markets: where's the edge, and where's the scam? • 🇧🇷 The Brazil election "two-horse arbitrage" explained • 📈 Betting SA's 2026 inflation print with a Bayesian model • 🎬 Netflix halved — Simon says it's now cheap • 📊 Stocks on the move: Bid…
A month after the year's most hyped listing, nearly everyone who bought SpaceX and held is underwater — and with the 180-day lock-up now gone, Simon Brown explains why insider selling is only getting started. He then tours the week's biggest moves: Apple's copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and what it means for hardware and an IPO, Purple Group buying Telescope AI to strengthen EasyEquities, oil…
Wars burn hardware, and rebuilding it takes years. This week Simon Brown works through the defence sector as a replacement thesis — the US fired roughly half its THAAD interceptor stockpile in twelve days against Iran — and settles on Lockheed Martin as his pick, with RTX as a second choice. He weighs the faster-growing but pricier European names (Leonardo, Thales, BAE Systems, Rheinmetall), runs…
This week's WorldWideMarkets is a tour of cheap stocks that each come with a question mark. Simon Brown looks at Microsoft, where a forward PE of around 20 against a mean of 33 makes it look inexpensive — except free cash flow has slipped back to 2021 levels as AI and data-centre capex ramps. He revisits Afrimat, a high-quality cyclical now trading near 10-year lows, and digs into Bending Spoons,…
MercadoLibre is down 40% for the year, and Simon Brown argues the market is mispricing it as a retailer while ignoring the fintech engine — Mercado Pago — that is becoming Latin America's biggest digital bank. Total payment volume now exceeds gross merchandise volume, even as management deliberately halves operating margins to grab market share. This week also marks the death of former Fed chair…
A US–Iran cessation of hostilities, due to be signed Friday, has collapsed the oil price, firmed the rand back toward 16.00 and let gold hold key support — and Simon Brown argues markets are heading back to where they sat in late February, just with fewer rate cuts on the table. This episode also unpacks the most hyped IPO in history opening softer than expected, South African inflation surprising…
