The JSE was little changed on Tuesday, while its global peers were mixed, with the local focus shifting to the medium-term budget policy statement (MTBPS).
Finance minister Enoch Godongwana will deliver his maiden medium-term budget speech on Thursday at 2pm.
Godongwana is expected to maintain the fiscal path set by the former finance minister Tito Mboweni; however, analysts will be keen to see just how much of an improvement there has been in SA’s fiscal position after recent good revenue collection from inflated commodity prices.
“Godongwana will need to remain fiscally prudent, containing government debt levels and expenditure, all while continuing to support the Economic Construction and Recovery Plan,” said IG senior market analyst Shaun Murison.
Meanwhile, local attention is also on Eskom, as stage 4 load-shedding is set to continue throughout the week. The power utility announced a third consecutive week of load-shedding on Monday due to generation capacity shortages.
Eskom blames has blamed this week’s outages on generation capacity shortages and a decrease in Zambia’s power generation at the weekend, affecting the Southern African Power Pool, which Bloomberg reported on Monday.
At 9.45am, the JSE all share and the top 40 were little changed, with the former at 67,988.72 points. Banks had gained 0.27% and financials 0.25%. Precious metals had lost 0.6%, resources 0.22% and industrials 0.11%.
Earlier, the Shanghai Composite gained 0.25% and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng 0.13%, while Japan’s Nikkei lost 0.75%.
At 9.32am, the rand was little changed at R14.9144/$, while it had weakened 0.21% to R17.2904/€ and 0.13% to R20.2283/£. The euro was unchanged at $1.1595.
Gold lost 0.13% to $1,821.97/oz, while platinum gained 1.29% to $1,051.34. Brent crude was 0.35% weaker at $83.38 a barrel.
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