Why Swix existed?
During the late 1990’s and into the early 2000’s many JSE listed companies moved their primary listings to London and did inward listings on the JSE. These were large important companies such as; Old Mutual, South African Breweries, Billiton, Dimension Data Holdings & Anglo American. The Reserve Bank gave them “grandfathering” exemptions treating them as local for exchange control purposes. This meant their JSE index weightings were based on full global free-float. But only a fraction of those shares actually traded locally making the index impossible to replicate.
So in 2004, FTSE/JSE launched the SWIX (Shareholder Weighted Index), weighting companies by shares actually registered on the SA share register (via Strate).
How it was used?
The SWIX became the preferred benchmark for SA fund managers as it was a fairer picture of what local investors could actually buy. But then by 2016, Naspers concentration got so extreme they launched the Capped SWIX as well.
Why it’s gone?
Over time, corporate actions, delisting changes, and the unwinding of those legacy grandfathering treatments narrowed the gap between the All Share Index (ALSI) and SWIX. By the early 2020s the differences were marginal. The JSE ran a two-phase harmonisation process. Phase 1 (March 2024) applied SWIX weighting methodology to the vanilla indices. Phase 2 terminated all SWIX indices on 31 December 2025.
The new reality
The vanilla FTSE/JSE indices (Top 40, All Share, etc.) now use the same shareholder-weighted methodology the SWIX used. So the SWIX approach won, it’s just been absorbed into the standard indices. ETFs have transitioned: 1nvest switched benchmarks to the All Share, and Satrix’s SWIX Top 40 becomes the Satrix SA Inc AMETF (STXSAI) tracking a proprietary Satrix SA Inc. Index.
ETF blog
At Just One Lap, we are big fans of passive investment using ETFs. In this weekly blog, we discuss ETFs on the local market and the factors you need to consider when choosing an ETF. If you have wondered how one ETF differs from another, this is where you can find out. We explain which index each ETF tracks, what type of portfolio could benefit from holding each ETF, and how the costs will affect your bottom line.
