Author: Harry Scherzer

Many South Africans have viewed offshore investment as an informal insurance policy to protect their wealth, so they would move their money abroad, buy into the S&P 500 or a global tech fund, and wait for market returns plus a weakening rand to do the rest. For a long time, that delivered easy wins. Today, not so much. With surging geopolitical conflict, fluctuating interest-rate expectations and a more complicated domestic fiscal picture, relying on offshore equity and the rand to do the heavy lifting leaves too much to chance. Even a 10% dollar return means little if you lose 2-3%…

It’s no secret that the rand is incredibly volatile. Anyone who listens to the currency reports at the end of a news bulletin knows how big the swings (mostly in the wrong direction) any time there’s a major economic event at home and abroad. In fact, an IMF report found that, between 2010 and 2019, the only currencies that were more volatile were the Russian Rouble and Argentinian Peso. More recently, it was calculated that there was a 37% fluctuation in the currency’s value against the US dollar between February 2022 and February 2023. Those fluctuations aren’t just interesting footnotes at the end of…