WATCH: Stock picks — Standard Chartered and AngloGold Ashanti

Nic Norman Smith from Lentus Asset Management chose Standard Chartered as his stock pick of the day and Greg Katzenellenbogen from Sanlam Private Wealth chose AngloGold Ashanti. 

Standard Chartered is listed in the UK, but is an Asian focused bank.

Norman Smith said: “So as one can imagine with the negativity around China and there as been a substantial drop in its share price. This is one of the leading banking franchises and emerging markets and is trading at 0.4 times book value, it got as high as four times book value when emerging markets were in vogue. One should be buying stocks and markets when there’s a lot of negativity and bad sentiment and that’s certainly the case for emerging markets and China in particular. I think this is a relatively low-risk play to to get access to that at a very attractive valuation.”

Katzenellenbogen said AngloGold is not something that will play out over the next month but investors should start preparing themselves over the next few months to take some exposure to gold.

“We’ve had trillions of dollars and euros printed around the world and that money is slowly being withdrawn from from the system. The US economy is growing at 4%, 4.5% and it is probably as good as it gets. The fact is that you have a strong US economy and yet the US continues to print and issue a lot more debt, in fact for 2018 the debt was about $800bn, close to $1-trillion, so at the moment the dollar is strong but over time you’ll probably find that dollar may weaken and that will be very bullish for gold.”