In March the average prudential balanced portfolio returned 0.86% (February: 2.06%). Top performer is Investment Solutions (1.92%), Metropolitan (-0.19%) takes the bottom spot. For the 3 month period Sanlam is top performer outperforming the ‘average’ by roughly 1.4%. On the other end of the scale Metropolitan underperformed the ‘average’ by 1.2%.

Interest rates in the US are still extremely low and money is still pumped into the system on a large scale through the Fed’s asset purchase programme, even though this has been reduced from a peak US$ 80 billion per month to now ‘only’ around US$ 65 billion. This is still a lot of money made available on excessively easy terms, representing around 5% of US GDP, for every 12 months it continues. To put this into a Namibian perspective, it would be like the Bank of Namibia pumping around N$ 7 billion into our financial system every 12 months, to raise its total assets by one third in the coming year!