With the August / September earnings season behind us, it’s helpful to look at share price moves over the past 30 days on the JSE to see how sentiment has shifted.

The winner over this period is clear: PGMs. The winds of change aren’t just blowing in that space, they are positively gusting! There have been other positive standout performances, like Caxton and CTP Publishers and Printers, as well as Purple Group.

On the negative side, a couple of insurance names have had a tough month (like Discovery and Santam), while Sun International continues to struggle with casino demand. There’s been plenty of volatility in the local market, but these moves were particularly interesting to me.

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Transcript:

With the wild earnings season in September behind us, it’s good to look at the market and see where the ducks have been quacking. The Top 40 is up 8.4% over 30 days, an extremely strong run that you definitely shouldn’t just annualise and extrapolate, or we would all be very wealthy. Having said that, the year-to-date increase is 36%, which means that the JSE has put in an exceptional performance this year. These are returns on ETFs, so this is an investable return, not just what the index has done!

There’s one sector that has provided more ducks than anywhere else: mining. The Resources index is up almost 20% in the past month. Again, you can buy the index via ETFs by the way, which means you can have it in your tax-free savings account. Or, you can do some stock picking, with names like Sibanye Stillwater, Northam Platinum, Impala Platinum and Valterra Platinum all featuring strongly. The winds of change are blowing in PGMs at last. This also means that poor Anglo American has kept its unenviable reputation for unbundling companies that go on to rally strongly. Perhaps it’s time to separately list De Beers and unbundle it, as that might be the last hope for mined diamonds!

Jokes aside, there have been some notable moves among mid-caps on the JSE as well. The market responded positively to STADIO’s strong results, but that was nothing compared to the rally enjoyed by Caxton and CTP Publishers and Printers in recent weeks:

Caxton released results in mid-September that reflected 12% growth in normalised HEPS and 16.7% growth in the dividend. They managed this with revenue growth of less than 1%, so this was a story of incredible efficiencies with operating costs up by just 0.1%. It’s rare to see operating leverage coming through for a company with such a tepid growth rate!

The share price is up 17.5% in the past month, a good example of a typical value play, which means a really cheap stock (in terms of the valuation multiple) that is doing better than the market expected. This isn’t to say that things are easy at Caxton, or even that they are going particularly well overall. The company finds itself on a difficult growth treadmill, so this is a particularly commendable performance that was enough to get value investors excited. It’s all about finding stocks with low expectations that then do better than the market thinks they will.

I don’t have a position in Caxton unfortunately, but I do have one in Purple Group. It seems like a rather appropriate thing to check my return on the EasyEquities app, which is of course the key business inside Purple. The price is up 38% in the past month, which means I’m now sitting on a 122% increase in my position. Lovely!

Being patient on this one definitely paid off as I waited for the valuation to come back down to earth. Along with the excellent strides they’ve made in the business and particularly the extent of annuitised income vs. reliance on brokerage fees, Purple eventually got to a point where I was ready to jump in. I’m glad I did!

Why the jump in the past month? It’s certainly not been driven by news, with Purple’s last SENS announcement being in April this year. Based on the absolute cracker of an interim period that they had in the six months to February 2025, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a trading statement in coming weeks dealing with the full year to September 2025. The market isn’t blind to this either, with EasyEquities rallying at a time when the broader market is rocketing in value as well.

I’m in this one for the long haul, as it feels like a company that has plenty of growth runway.

And as always, the market has winners and losers. Among the companies that had a far less inspiring start to spring, we find some financial services names featuring prominently, like Discovery down 9.6% and Santam down 8.9%.

Santam released results right at the beginning of September and the numbers were actually really good, with a big jump in net underwriting margin from 6.5% to 11.3%. The interim dividend was up 10.3%. Discovery also released an update in September and their earnings were excellent, with HEPS up 30% for the year to June. So, why the bearishness in the market?

I’ve heard theories around a cooling off of growth in certain products and a concern around the sustainability of the current margins. But even then, it’s pretty weird that Santam has suffered such a negative move, with a year-to-date return of -2.9% vs. Discovery up 4% and OUTsurance up 12%. For traders looking for interesting volatility in the local market and perhaps some pairs trading opportunities, that sector is dishing up some pretty big short-term moves.

Here’s another one that really caught my eye: Sun International, down 8.5% in the past month. The casinos are struggling, with income headed in the wrong direction. The Resorts and Hotels part of the group isn’t exactly a rocketship either, but at least it was in the green. Still, this is a company that reported dividend growth of 6.8%, yet the share price took a knock even after you adjust for the dividend that was paid in September.

Yes, there are some adjustments that would typically be made for stocks trading ex-dividend after results, but those adjustments don’t fully explain these recent moves. We’ve seen some major shifts in sentiment, which is a timely reminder that markets are always forward looking. That’s certainly the only good explanation for the recent rally in PGMs, as they released mostly crummy results in their recent financial periods.

What will the end of the year hold and can the Top 40 continue its march to the top-right-hand corner of the page, with the South African market showing a spectacular performance thus far this year? Heading into the final quarter of 2025, there’s all to play for.