Johannesburg — GHANAIAN investors must be smiling - theirs is the only stock exchange to have shown an improvement this year in dollar terms, while Ecuador's Guayaquil Stock Exchange, the second-best performing bourse, has shed a mere 12,43%.

Compare that to the hefty 32% the JSE's all share index has lost in rand terms, and the 62% it has slumped in dollar terms because of the rand's 33% decline against the US currency this year, making it the 47th-best performing index.

Despite the hefty falls on the benchmark indices of stock exchanges in the US and Europe, the all share's performance ranks worse than that of Botswana's domestic companies index, which is the 14th-best performing index, the New York Stock Exchange's Dow Jones index (16), Tokyo's Nikkei 225 (20), the Nigerian Stock Exchange (29) and London's FTSE (39). Unsurprisingly, the worst-performing market so far this year is Iceland, which has shed 96%, followed by Ukraine's over-the-counter market, which is down 86%.