If you have been watching the JSE whipsaw through late January, you might be forgiven for sitting on your hands. But while retail investors doomscroll through headlines, the institutional heavyweights and company insiders have been busy.
The most thunderous signal is coming from BlackRock. The world’s largest asset manager has aggressively increased its stake in AngloGold Ashanti to 10.1%. It didn’t stop there, either. BlackRock also breached the 5% holding threshold in both Northam Platinum and Sibanye-Stillwater. It seems, despite the local noise, global capital still sees value in the JSE’s precious metals sector and is grabbing it with both hands.
Speaking of bullish signals, developments at Glencore are well worth noting. Usually, director dealings are fairly vanilla — a purchase here, a sale there. But director Tor Peterson’s recent activity is fascinating. In late January, Peterson loaded up on millions of call options. For the casual observer, buying call options is a leveraged, explicitly bullish bet that the share price is going to rise significantly above a certain strike price. It’s a far more aggressive stance than simply holding the equity, suggesting Peterson expects significant upside in the near term.
Local asset managers are picking through the debris of 2025, looking for turnaround stories
Closer to home, the divergence in sentiment between our two pharmacy giants is hard to ignore. At Clicks, the mood in the boardroom seems buoyant. CEO Bertina Engelbrecht and CFO Gordon Traill recently put nearly R2m of their own capital into the company, buying shares on the open market. That is a classic vote of confidence.
Contrast this with Dis-Chem, where an associate of co-founder Stanley Goetsch just offloaded more than R35m worth of stock. While founders sell for many reasons — diversification, estate planning and so on — the impression left by a R35m exit is hard for the market to overlook.
Local asset managers are picking through the debris of 2025, looking for turnaround stories. Coronation is showing immense conviction in Nutun (the business services firm formerly part of Transaction Capital), ramping its stake up to just over 20%. That is a huge position, signalling that it believes the market has fundamentally mispriced the company’s cash flows. Similarly, Ninety One is bottom-fishing in the recovery stories, taking stakes of more than 5% in Netcare and the embattled Pick n Pay. Peregrine Capital has taken a 5% bite of Astral Foods.
For a long time, the market has been nervous about the large private equity stakes hanging over food producer Libstar, specifically from Cearus Holdco. That overhang has finally cleared. Cearus has exited its position entirely, dumping a significant 6.56% block of shares.
The buyer? Clients of Allan Gray, who snapped up the liquidity to increase their holding to 14.2%. This is a textbook rotation — the exit of a legacy seller (who just wants out) and the entry of a long-term value manager (who wants in). For investors, this is often a bullish catalyst because it removes the constant selling pressure that keeps a share price depressed.
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