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Rand regains poise after heavy sell-off

Johannesburg - The rand held its ground against the dollar on Tuesday after a heavy sell-off last week, with investors taking looming strikes in the mining sector in their stride.

The local currency has regained its footing after stumbling to a five-year low of R10.9620/$ last week, a move some market players felt was overdone.

The rand was trading at R10.8395/$ by 15:53 GMT, in line with its New York close on Monday, having been trapped in a narrow 4 cent range for most of the session.

This was despite plans by the AMCU union to launch strikes at the world's biggest three platinum producers this week, a move finance minister Pravin Gordhan says will further hurt the ailing economy.

But market players appear to have priced in the impact of the strikes, a relatively common occurrence in Africa's biggest economy over the last 18 months.

"The local data and the talk of strikes is obviously not good but the market has been hearing about strikes for forever now, and there's perhaps not as much of an impact as before," a trader with a Johannesburg investment bank said.

"If there were to be any violence I'm sure there' would be a lot more negative interest, but right now it seems to be less concerning to the market as a whole."

Government bonds weakened slightly and yields ticked up as investors await what could be a fairly hawkish central bank policy statement next week.

The yield on the heavily traded 2026 bond inched up a basis point to 8.385% while that for the shorter-dated 2015 paper added 2.5 basis points to 6.3%.


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Rand - Dollar
18.92
-0.1%
Rand - Pound
23.90
-0.0%
Rand - Euro
20.44
+0.1%
Rand - Aus dollar
12.35
+0.0%
Rand - Yen
0.13
-0.1%
Platinum
909.30
+1.4%
Palladium
1,015.00
+1.3%
Gold
2,220.40
+1.2%
Silver
24.86
+0.9%
Brent Crude
86.09
-0.2%
Top 40
68,346
+1.0%
All Share
74,536
+0.9%
Resource 10
57,251
+2.9%
Industrial 25
103,936
+0.6%
Financial 15
16,502
-0.1%
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