STOCKS UP ON GROWTH PROSPECTS

STOCKS rose yesterday with risk-on sentiment remaining intact on optimism that global growth is recovering as economies reopen after coronavirus lockdowns.

The JSE all share index advanced 1.77 percent to 51389.12 points, while the Top40 index rose 1.8 percent to 47440.06 points, led by Northam Platinum and Impala Platinum with prices of the metal nearly 1 percent higher by 5.25pm.

Northam climbed 12.99 percent at R111.71, to a two-and-a-half month high, while Impala was up 10.8 percent to R120.85.

“Global... stocks continued to trend higher as investors became more optimistic about the pace of the economic recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic and gave little attention to the ongoing US-China confrontation over Hong Kong,” Hussein Sayed, chief market strategist at FXTM, said in a note.

President Cyril Ramaphosa on Sunday announced a further easing of SA’s lockdown from June 1, allowing the vast majority of the economy to return to full capacity.

The government published guidelines yesterday for how sectors will operate under much relaxed restrictions.

The rand gave up earlier gains having touched its strongest level since March 27. It traded at R17.4390 to the greenback at 5.42pm, down 0.43 percent from its previous close of R17.3760.

In fixed income, the yield on the 2030 government bond was down 5 basis points at 8.935 percent.

Meanwhile, Nigeria’s central bank yesterday unexpectedly cut its benchmark lending rate to 12.5 percent from 13.5 percent, the central bank governor said, to stimulate growth in Africa’s largest economy in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. It is the first rate cut since March 2019 and the largest since 2015. I Reuters