The talk of the town yesterday was clearly China, after shocking news broke over the weekend of even more drastic clampdowns on tech companies in that country. The knock-on effect for the JSE is significant, as Naspers-Prosus attributes almost all of its value to Chinese giant Tencent.

Despite each of Naspers and Prosus losing over 7% of their value yesterday, the ALSI was flat. This was thanks to heroics in the mining sector and particularly PGM miners, as the market devoured the Anglo American Platinum dividend announcement.

For that reason, Amplats gets the lead story this morning.

Merafe also joined the mining party, with the ferrochrome business reporting great production and revenue growth from its venture alongside Glencore. Ferrochrome is used primarily in stainless steel products, in case you're wondering.

On the property front, Liberty Two Degrees managed to grind out a dividend for the six months to June 2021 despite ongoing pain in the office portfolio in particular. Don't get too excited about retail vacancies either - negative reversions prove that leases are being signed at much lower rates than before. This isn't a Liberty problem, but an industry-wide issue.

Then we have Tiger Brands, which finds itself deep in the Koo. It seems as though this food safety issue isn't a major problem, but the company has clearly learnt its lesson from Listeriosis and is taking it very seriously.

We are in a busy week for US earnings and the ongoing news around China will be watched closely by the world. It's a timely reminder that there are market opportunities everywhere you look.

Some investors have truly made a fortune on the JSE this year and we are only in July!

If you haven't listened to the latest episode of Magic Markets, you'll find it here. I co-host this podcast with top macroeconomics analyst Mohammed Nalla and we covered a variety of topics in the latest show. One of those topics was Bitcoin - I'm surprised at how strongly it bounced off $30,000 but I remain nervous of pump-and-dump strategies at play.

Good luck in the markets today,

The Finance Ghost