ETF investors don’t need to pay too much attention to daily market movements. Indices follow rules. Since ETF issuers take care of the rule following, us investors can basically just sit back and watch our assets grow. Traders and individual share investors rely heavily on performance data to keep track of the success of their strategies, but so far ETF investors haven’t had much access to such information.

However, every so often it helps to see where you are compared to where you started. Perhaps you made a choice between two similar ETFs and would like to compare where you would have been if you had made different choices. Thanks to the JSE, we can all now access the performance data of ETFs in one central place.

The new JSE website features the historical performance data of all JSE-listed ETFs. In addition to the price movement, you can also see all SENS announcements relating to each ETF. SENS announcements will include information about which companies were added to the ETF, which ones got kicked out and dividend payments. 

The minimum disclosure documents (MDDs) we’ve relied on until now are still available from the individual ETF issuers, etfSA.co.za and ETF Central. 

This JSE platform is a great resource for new investors to see what happens to investment products over time. In addition to data on ETFs, you can also view the performance of individual companies within the Top 40, as well as indices that aren’t tied to ETF products. 

Free access to all this data is a great way to see how indices trend over time. Feel free to play around as much as you’d like!