In 1900, if you had asked a room of serious people in London to name the investment destination of the coming century, nobody sensible would have said Johannesburg.
The city was fourteen years old. The country wasn’t a country yet. The Anglo-Boer War was still burning; the mines were flooded and the miners were gone. Over the next hundred years, the place would endure a depression, two world wars, a revolt on the Rand, the deepest institutional cruelty of apartheid, international sanctions, a debt standstill that locked it out of world markets, a transition many predicted would end in civil war, and a currency that lost value against the dollar with the reliability of a metronome.
And yet.
When Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh and Mike Staunton assembled the definitive database of global investment returns, one finding embarrassed almost everyone’s intuition. In the latest edition of their work, the UBS Global Investment Returns Yearbook 2026, covering the full 126 years from 1900 to 2025, the best-performing equity market on earth is not the United States. It is South Africa: an annualised real return, after inflation, of roughly 7% a year, ahead of the United States and Australia, its closest rivals.
Sit with the arithmetic for a moment. Seven percent real, compounded for a century, multiplies purchasing power thousands of times over. Through everything listed above. The investor who needed the twentieth century to go well for South Africa was disappointed almost every decade. The investor who merely stayed invested got rich anyway.
The hypothesis we’re testing
The belief under the microscope is one every South African knows by heart: things here are too uncertain to invest in. It is said at dinner tables, in WhatsApp groups, in offshore-investment seminars. It feels not just true but obvious.
Here’s what makes it worth testing: it has felt obvious for a hundred and twenty years. There was no decade in which a thoughtful South African lacked excellent reasons for pessimism. In 1902 the economy was rubble. In 1922 the army shelled Johannesburg. In 1948 the country chose isolation. In 1985 foreign banks called their loans and the JSE closed the currency market. In 1994 the airport was full. In 2008 the world’s banks fell over. In 2020 the country was locked in its homes while the rand touched R19 to the dollar.
Every one of those moments produced the same sentence: this time it’s actually broken. And every one of those moments, in hindsight, was a decent time to own productive South African assets, not because the fears were wrong, but because the prices already knew.
The finding
Two things are true at once, and honest analysis holds both.
First: pessimism about South Africa has been a losing investment strategy for over a century. Not because the pessimists misread the news. They usually read it correctly. They lost because shares are priced for the fear of the day, and the companies underneath kept mining, brewing, lending and selling groceries regardless of the headlines. Returns don’t come from things going well. They come from things going less badly than the price assumed.
Second: none of this is a forecast, and the league table itself proves why. In the 2025 edition of the Yearbook, with data to the end of 2024, the United States held the top spot. One blockbuster JSE year later, South Africa reclaimed it. Rankings this close flip with the end date you choose, and the JSE has trailed the world for long stretches within that long run. The professors themselves warn that no market’s history guarantees its future. The lesson is not “South Africa will outperform.” Anyone selling that conclusion is selling something.
The lesson is narrower and more useful: the feeling that it is too risky to invest has been a terrible guide to actual returns, everywhere, but especially here. The discomfort is not a warning signal. The discomfort is the price of admission. A century of South African data says the people who paid it were compensated better than almost anyone on earth.
The residue
The most expensive sentence in South African investing is “I’m waiting for things to settle down.” Things have never settled down. That was never the requirement.