JSE recovers a little after global stock selloff

The JSE pushed higher on Wednesday morning, recovering some of Tuesday’s 2.5% loss, once again largely due to the performance of market heavyweight Naspers.

Naspers had fallen more than 7% on Tuesday as investors fled tech stocks, which have been battered by concern about the global economic outlook. This helped precipitate a broad-based sell off on Tuesday, ensuring the Dow turned negative for 2018.

On Wednesday morning, Naspers was up 3.66% to R2,713.11, tracking gains in Hong Kong-listed associate Tencent.

Local issues were back in focus on Wednesday, with inflation for October coming out largely as expected. The data comes ahead of the SA Reserve Bank’s interest-rate decision on Thursday.

Some good news on Wednesday came in the form of a stable rand and low oil price, which was sharply up but still below $64 a barrel.

At 9.30am the all share was up 0.52% to 51,333.1 points and the top 40 0.74%. General retailers had added 1.42%, industrials 1.32% and platinums 0.95%.

Sasol was down 2.3% to $427.58, despite the petrochemicals company saying earlier that headline earnings per share were expected to increase between 12% and 29% in the six months to end-December.

AB InBev was down 1.77% to R1,067.54.

British American Tobacco fell 0.69% to R489.52. The group lost 22.29% last week, as the market braced for the possibility that US regulators would stop sales of menthol cigarettes.

Mr Price was up 2.27% to R230.82. 

Gold was up 0.21% to $1,224.20 an ounce and platinum 0.71% to $846.03. Brent crude was 1.85% higher at $63.51 a barrel.

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Source: businesslive.co.za