With so many shifts taking place globally and locally every day, your investment strategy needs to consider the volatility of our world markets and its affect on the Rand. Don't stress too much about all of these short term changes, and try to take a long term view - PWH Wealth Group's philosophy!
These interesting observations are from an article by Robert Laing, "Jittery Day for Rand and Other Currencies":
The rand swung wildly in the early hours of Thursday, jumping from R13.68 to R13.72 to the dollar at 3am, in what is likely to be a jittery day for currencies.
"Major currencies were on tenterhooks on Thursday on the eve of Washington’s deadline to impose tariffs on Chinese imports while the yuan held steady after the central bank this week sought to stem its recent tumble," Reuters said in its foreign exchange report.
The rand was trading at R13.71 to the dollar, R15.98 to the euro and R18.13 to the pound at 6.40am.
Asian markets were gloomy ahead of the JSE’s opening, with Tokyo’s Topix down 1.15%, the Shanghai composite index down 0.88% and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index down 0.87%.
Naspers’s 31%-owned Tencent was down 0.16% at HK$382.40. In Sydney, BHP was down 0.64% at A$32.84 and South32 was down 0.28% at A$3.56.
On the economics front, Statistics SA reported May’s electricity consumption figures which appear to have increased very slightly. Stats SA’s electricity figures show that this country’s electricity consumption peaked at 20,403 gigawatt-hours in August 2007 before tumbling to 18,232 gigawatt-hours at the height of Eskom’s rolling blackouts in December 2009 - an indicator of the economic slump experience. In April, Stats SA reported total electricity generation at 19,014 gigawatt-hours, indicating the economy has still not recovered to where it was before the 2008 global economic crisis. Electricity consumption tends to grow in winter, the most likely reason that May’s consumption is higher than April’s. We are still waiting to see more positive signs indicating real economic growth...
To recap, our advice is to weather the short term economic turmoil with a a sound long-term investment strategy.
In a nutshell, the PWH Wealth Group gets up in the morning to ensure our clients can sleep peacefully at night!