I know what you’re thinking – it’s called the exchange rate, and we’ve all watched on in horror as the rand plummets against both the U.S. Dollar and the Pound.

Sure that’s a decent indicator, but that’s not what we’re focusing on here.

Back in January the International Monetary Fund cut South Africa’s economic growth outlook for 2016 to 0.7%, which just happens to be the lowest ever in our history.

Still that’s not the shocking bit, according to Sasfin Securities’ deputy chairman David Shapiro, who says he was blown away when ‘he looked at a graph of the five-year performance of the JSE in US dollars’.

Here’s MyBroadband:

Someone who bought into the JSE would have shown a return of around 60% in rand terms. The US’s S&P 500, in comparison, was up by around 55%.

However, when the JSE’s value is converted into US dollars, the JSE’s returns are down 25%. That means there is an 80% gap between the JSE and the S&P 500 when measured in a hard currency.

“This shows how far down the tubes we’ve gone,” said Shapiro, highlighting that the rand has declined by 120% over the last five years.

The graph [above] shows that an investor would have made a 28% loss over the last 12 months if they invested $10,000 in the iShares MSCI South Africa ETF.

The ETF, listed on the NYSE, provides investors exposure to large and mid-sized companies in South Africa through targeted access to 85% of the South African stock market.

Not really the kind of thing that inspires investor confidence, now is it?

[source:mybroadband]

[imagesource:here]