With 2023 quickly drawing to a close, we check in on the year-to-date performance of JSE stocks and compare this year to last year.
Overall, 2023 has been a better year for SA stock pickers. Even though the headline All Share Index is only up 7% year to date versus a 4.2% return in 2022, the distribution of stock returns has been more favourable this year.
The median stock in the All Share is up 11% year to date, and 56% of stocks are ahead of the index return vs. 42% in 2022. The chart below shows these distributions, showing how the 2023 distribution lies to the left of 2022.
Source: JSE, Mergence
Looking at the left-hand table, we observe the top five performers thus far. It’s intriguing to highlight that three out of this year’s top five were acquisition targets.
Conversely, on the right-hand table, four of the bottom five performers also faced a challenging 2022.
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This year has produced some strong mean reversion, as a number of energy stocks reversed last year’s strong performance, and gold and select deep value names staged a strong recovery. But in aggregate, 2023 exhibited momentum in cross-sectional returns; on average, last year’s winners continued to perform better than last year’s losers if you held them into 2023.
In fact, just holding the top 10 performers of last year would have delivered an average return of 11.3% vs. a loss of 5% for last year’s 10 worst performers.
Notes on snippet:
1.Our universe for this analysis was the constituents of the JSE All Share Index as of the end of 2022.
2. All performance data is as at 6 December 2023.
Our Market Snippets aim to provide concise insight into our investment research process. Each week, we highlight one chart that showcases our research, motivates our current positioning, or simply presents something interesting we’ve discovered in global financial markets.
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