WorldWide Markets with Simon Brown

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is selling short-dated paper and buying long in an attempt to force the 10 and 30-year yields lower.

Simon Brown explains why fighting a market rarely ends well, and what that trade has already done to gold and the rand.

With gold back at $4,630 and the rand at R16, he then works through all five JSE-listed gold miners — Pan African, DRDGOLD, Harmony, Gold Fields and AngloGold Ashanti &mdas...

Absa and Nedbank are the two cheap banks on the JSE, both trading near 1.2 times tangible book while Standard Bank and FirstRand sit close to two.

Simon Brown puts them side by side after both reported and finds numbers so similar that valuation stops being the question: the same fifteen percent return on equity, the same credit loss ratio near zero point nine percent, the same capital. What separates them is that Nedbank has commi...

Pick n Pay has stopped bleeding customers, but it hasn't started healing. Simon Brown goes deep on the retailer's 20-week trading update, where group turnover rose 2.7% while core Pick n Pay SA supermarkets went backwards.

He unpacks the so-called negative stub — a R14 billion market cap against an R18.8 billion stake in Boxer plus cash — and explains why capital gains tax makes those "free" 1,538 stores a lot less free...

Mr Price and Clicks have both been hammered, and on a chart they look like the same trade. They are not.

Simon Brown holds both and spends this episode pulling the two businesses apart to work out which one he actually wants to own. Clicks is on its cheapest P/E in a decade but is losing share in the high-margin categories that pay the bills, with Dis-Chem, Checkers Sixty60, SPAR Health and Woolworths all circling. Mr Price is on 1...

Vodacom has cut its dividend payout ratio from 75% to 65%, which pushes one of the JSE's dependable income names down the list. Simon Brown runs the Top 40 and the mid-cap screen to find where quality local yield actually sits, and shows how Growthpoint, Nedbank, Coronation and Standard Bank can be combined into a home-built income portfolio yielding roughly seven and a half to eight percent, growing ahead of inflation. He also unp...

Can you find a real edge in prediction markets? Simon hunts the arbitrage — and calls Netflix cheap.

In this week's WorldWideMarkets:
• 🎲 Prediction markets: where's the edge, and where's the scam?
• 🇧🇷 The Brazil election "two-horse arbitrage" explained
• 📈 Betting SA's 2026 inflation print with a Bayesian model
• 🎬 Netflix halved — Simon says it's now cheap
• 📊 Stocks on the...

A month after the year's most hyped listing, nearly everyone who bought SpaceX and held is underwater — and with the 180-day lock-up now gone, Simon Brown explains why insider selling is only getting started.

He then tours the week's biggest moves: Apple's copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and what it means for hardware and an IPO, Purple Group buying Telescope AI to strengthen EasyEquities, oil climbing back...

Wars burn hardware, and rebuilding it takes years.

This week Simon Brown works through the defence sector as a replacement thesis — the US fired roughly half its THAAD interceptor stockpile in twelve days against Iran — and settles on Lockheed Martin as his pick, with RTX as a second choice.

He weighs the faster-growing but pricier European names (Leonardo, Thales, BAE Systems, Rheinmetall), runs through the main defenc...

This week's WorldWideMarkets is a tour of cheap stocks that each come with a question mark.

Simon Brown looks at Microsoft, where a forward PE of around 20 against a mean of 33 makes it look inexpensive — except free cash flow has slipped back to 2021 levels as AI and data-centre capex ramps. He revisits Afrimat, a high-quality cyclical now trading near 10-year lows, and digs into Bending Spoons, the Italian...

MercadoLibre is down 40% for the year, and Simon Brown argues the market is mispricing it as a retailer while ignoring the fintech engine — Mercado Pago — that is becoming Latin America's biggest digital bank. Total payment volume now exceeds gross merchandise volume, even as management deliberately halves operating margins to grab market share.

This week also marks the death of former Fed chair Alan G...

A US–Iran cessation of hostilities, due to be signed Friday, has collapsed the oil price, firmed the rand back toward 16.00 and let gold hold key support — and Simon Brown argues markets are heading back to where they sat in late February, just with fewer rate cuts on the table.

This episode also unpacks the most hyped IPO in history opening softer than expected, South African inflation surprising lower at 4.5% with chu...

The World Cup kicks off Thursday — so which stocks actually win?

Simon Brown ran a data-driven hunt and the answer is counter-intuitive: skip the obvious bets. His own scrape of stadium-adjacent hotels found accommodation available everywhere, with 84 of 104 games unsold, so hoteliers have no pricing power and the retail uplift is marginal. The real edge sits with the kit makers — Adidas and Nike both screen cheap again...

Simon Brown unpacks a US personal savings rate of just 2.6% — one of the lowest on record — and why it matters more as a fragility gauge than a crash signal.

He covers the collapsed Iran deal and its effect on oil and South African fuel prices, the SARB's prime rate hike to 10.5% and why he thinks the MPC has it wrong, and the near-10% surge in Naspers and Prosus on news that WeChat is putting AI at the centre of its ap...

SpaceX comes to market on 12 June at a $1.75 trillion valuation — 94 times sales, where Amazon trades at four. Simon walks through where to actually buy it (Robinhood, Charles Schwab, Fidelity), why xAI is a rounding error in the AI race, and why Tesla is likely to be rolled into SpaceX within two to three years.

Plus the Dow Jones turns 130, Moody's lifts South Africa's outlook from stable to positive, Balwin delists at belo...

Global bond yields are spiking to multi-decade highs across the US, UK and Japan, and Simon Brown argues this looks a lot like the emerging market debt crises markets usually call doom and gloom.

He unpacks the Pick n Pay sell-down of Boxer shares, the Eastern Cape floods threatening the citrus crop, and the absurd Cerebras IPO trading at 150 times sales.

Plus an update on JustOneLap's institutional-grade research project, results ...

Boxer just posted ShopRite-level operating margins — so why is Pick & Pay, which owns 65% of it, trading at an implied negative enterprise value?

Simon Brown unpacks the R10bn valuation paradox and whether it's a genuine opportunity.

He also walks through his new AI-powered research workflow, using Claude and ChatGPT to produce and fact-check full initiating coverage reports on Balwin Properties and Raub...

Hyperscaler results from Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet produced numbers that almost don't seem real — combined remaining performance obligations of $1.46 trillion and Q1 capex of $112 billion.

Simon unpacks where that money is going, why copper is the quiet beneficiary, and which JSE stocks give exposure.

Berkshire Hathaway is sitting on $380 billion in cash, roughly 38% of its market cap — a meaningf...

US markets hit all-time highs this week even as $166 billion in Trump tariff refunds start processing — a windfall for retaile...

US results season opens with Goldman Sachs and Johnson & Johnson both beating expectations — but the more interesting story is what those results don't show yet: the full impact of Middle East conflict and Trump's drug pricing pressure.

Simon also unpacks South Africa's looming fuel crisis and makes the economic case for working from home, a new 100% offshore ETF listing on the JSE from ETFSA, and an ASP Isotopes update f...