Now I Understand Why Investing Is Not for the Faint of Heart

Since July 2025 I have been running an investing experiment using the Easy Equities Investing App.

I set out to invest R50.00 per month in two different exchange traded funds using a normal investing account and a Tax Free Savings Account.

The fixed monthly amount started in July 2025 with R50.00 in each account and with a 10% increase every year. Not all of the R55.00 goes into the ETF – around R0.25 goes to costs for the Normal Account and R0.24 for the TFSA.

The instruction to Easy Equites for these ETF’s is; “Immediately re-invest any dividends.”

To benchmark the performance I also track what the same amount invested in a Capitec Savings Account with a 5.75% per annum interest rate would yield.

These are all tracked on graphs here: https://myza.co.za/tfsa-v-taxed-investing-month-on-month-comparison/

Frankly when I look at the return on the ETF’s and Capitec the entrepreneur brain in me says; “If I had to use that as capital in my business then we could get a 4x return.” But, this is for a situation where if the money is needed to help create a pension fund for the future, so we stick it out.

Of all the ETF’s in my TFSA only two show any promise (today) – SATRIX MSCI World and Prescient Income Provider Feeder.

In terms of whether the Capitec investment at 5.75% would have been better – of the 17 months investing it would have been better in: July, August, October and November 2026 only.

Of course the danger is always of when one looks at the performance and when one invests. Last Friday was a bit of a downer for the JSE but many pundits are predicting a slow upward trend peaking in April 2027 so no big concerns yet.

The restraint using a TFSA is that one can only choose ETF’s which, by design, are conservative so are normally the shares that react most negatively to a downturn in the market. Like Unit Trusts of old the mindset of managers of these funds is mired in conservative growth. One can almost hear their masters saying; “Don’t rock the boat, stay invested, don’t speculate.”

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