About HonestMarkets – What We Actually Do
HonestMarkets is an independent South African platform that explains investing the way most people wish it had been explained to them from the start: in plain English, with real numbers from the JSE, SARS rules, actual ETF fees, and long-term data — no hype, no hidden agendas, and definitely no products to sell.
We started this site because almost every conversation about money in South Africa quickly turns into someone trying to sell you something: a retirement annuity with 2% fees, an offshore “feeder fund” that quietly keeps half the currency gain, or yet another property seminar promising “positive cash flow forever”.
After years of watching friends, family and colleagues make the same expensive mistakes — chasing last year’s top-performing fund, paying 2–3% a year in hidden costs, or believing residential property always beats the stock market — we decided enough was enough.
HonestMarkets exists to publish the information most financial salespeople would rather you didn’t see: the real after-fee, after-tax returns of the JSE over the past 25 years, exactly how much Regulation 28 actually restricts your retirement fund, why the majority of actively managed unit trusts lag their benchmark, and why a simple Satrix 40 or Ashburton 1200 ETF has outperformed most financial advisors’ “carefully selected” portfolios over the last decade.
We dig into the details that matter to ordinary South Africans: how the R36 000 tax-free savings limit works in practice, what really happens when you use your R1 million discretionary allowance, whether a second bond in Durban North is likely to beat a global ETF after bond registration costs and maintenance, and why trying to time the rand is usually a losing game.
Everything published on HonestMarkets is researched, referenced, and updated when new data becomes available. We don’t accept sponsorships, affiliate commissions, or free lunches from fund managers. The goal is simple: give South Africans the same unfiltered information that professional investors already have — so you can decide for yourself instead of trusting a commission-driven stranger.
If you’ve ever left a bank or advisor’s office feeling more confused than when you walked in, you’re exactly who we built this site for.
