Nice positive market this week (+2.5%) – Naspers carrying the can again and trading above R3500 per share. Tiger Brands took a beating from the Listeriosis findings (-13.5% for the week). Exxaro plummeted >13% on Friday after a management breakfast and the release of an HSBC report downgrading the stock. The Rand well below 12/US$ after our Q4’17 GDP growth number surprised, printing at a whopping 3.1% for the quarter. The US added 313k jobs in February. Hundreds of thousands of job seekers returning to the market, but they still managed to keep unemployment at the 17-year low of 4.1%. Ethiopia (population 88m) is the largest country in the world without a stock exchange and is one of about 40 countries without a stock exchange out of roughly 200 nations in the world. But they do have a commodities exchange (dominated by soft commodities).
