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CIARAN RYAN: Online trading has become increasingly popular for South Africans who want to try their hand at DIY investing. The industry is maturing and entering a more responsible phase with the arrival of platforms such as Clarity by Investec .
Clarity puts a lot of emphasis on education and discipline, which is something often lacking with online traders. New technologies, including AI and advanced trading tools, open up some pretty interesting possibilities for traders to make better and more profitable decisions.
Volatility seems to be the enemy of successful trading. But is this actually true or is the real enemy the behaviour of traders and their lack of discipline? Well, to explore this we’re joined now by Tinus Rautenbach, who is the business head of Clarity. Hi Tinus, thanks for joining us again.
Online trading seems to be more accessible than ever before, and it is opening up participation to a broader audience. Give us a quick rundown on the state of the market.
Read: A new trading platform makes its debut
TINUS RAUTENBACH: Hi Ciaran. As we roll into 2026, the ability for retail investors to have access to more markets, more instruments to be able to implement their trading ideas, their trading style in the way that they want to, is more than ever before.
You can now get access not only to your traditional SA investments – you can have exposure to the US, Europe, the UK. And all of that gives you the ability to use different tools with different risk measures, depending on what’s important to you. And so you’ve the ability to now not only go almost from the high risk – and I want to go Bitcoin on the left-hand side, and your crypto-type investments – but all the way down to a bond or a fairly low-risk cash-type investment. You can do that both in local currency and offshore.
And you can have exposure to baskets of investments, ETF [exchange-traded fund]-like, which lowers the risk.
Or you can go single stock and have a go at things like Tesla or Nvidia.
So what’s happened in the market is it has just become easier. It has really become simpler for you to express your view. With that obviously there is some risk, and you need to consider both sides of that coin.
CIARAN RYAN: Now let’s talk about some of the innovations and the AI tools that are available to online traders. What are these? And is there any evidence that they improve trading performance overall?
TINUS RAUTENBACH: So without going into specific tools – because I think there’s a class of tools that can help you – AI is something that can definitely help you with research, and it can help you with idea generation. You can ask AI to help you with how to come up with ideas and how you should diversify, et cetera.
But I’ve also seen some AI tools that tell you ‘Go and buy this stock right now because it’s going to go up now’. There it becomes really risky and there it’s really hard to see how that is a prudent way of using AI in getting better at investing.
So the way AI is improving the way you can do research, and the way that you can prompt it to build a portfolio that is diversified, that gives you a multi-asset, multi-currency, multi-jurisdiction type of portfolio – that’s a really interesting way to use AI.
And for you to then have a slant over it around what you think is the sector that you want to invest in or have exposure in. So, in that sense you’ve got really great tools in AI to be able to do that.
I think the warning flags go up when you start using AI almost as a chat partner, and all of a sudden it tells you what to do.
[For instance] we’ve seen such horror stories in the dating area where AI tells you who to date and how to date – or becomes your date. Depending on how you think about it, you really need to take that with a serious risk flag.
So again, there’s a big spectrum – on the one side being really helpful; on the other side take it with a pinch of salt – and you have to understand where it comes from.
In the same way that you’re not going to take necessarily all your assets and follow your tip when you have a braai and your mate tells you ‘Let’s put all our chips in this bucket’; you’re not going to do that. You are going to step back and say ‘Okay, what is right for me, what is my risk appetite, and how do I want to look at the market?’ And then you use AI to help you implement that.
CIARAN RYAN: So using AI as a research tool, but not following it blindly, I guess, is the key point there.
Now, markets are volatile. They’re always going to fluctuate. There’s nothing new about that. But the outcomes are often shaped by the discipline of the trader, their mindset and the consistency of the way they make decisions. Talk about that. This is something that Clarity is bringing to the market – more accountability. Trying to inculcate this sort of discipline [which] is often lacking from online traders.
TINUS RAUTENBACH: I think your ability to look through the storm and understand why you’re in a position, the reason you started and at what level you want to close that position or take profit, or actually stop yourself out because the market didn’t do what you expected – those are behavioural or psychological disciplines that you need to almost inculcate or build during the easy times.
Because when the volatility comes, that’s when it’s really hard to have those disciplines because it’s easy to feel both on the upside and on the downside. When things are great and all of a sudden your account is better than you expect, is this the right time now to close out or be a little bit greedy – or do I stay in it? Or have you planned the trade and stayed the plan?
Do you actually have a real idea of when you entered, where your exit is and how to exit that transaction?
So volatility is here. It’s everywhere. It’s driven by geopolitics. It’s driven from the weaker dollar commodities. There are so many things driving volatility – and obviously we don’t know what will bring the next wave of volatility.
But you need to have a very clear idea of what your account looks like, why you’re in those positions, and you have to have the discipline to understand when to close certain trades and why you were in them from the beginning.
So there is definitely a discipline process. It’s not all glitz and glamour as you trade your own account. It definitely is also around how you react and how you plan.
CIARAN RYAN: Finally, Tinus, let’s just talk about Clarity and what makes it different. Give us a rundown very quickly on what kind of instruments are available. Are these contracts for differences? Over to you – what do you offer?
TINUS RAUTENBACH: We have slowly but surely expanded our universe of instruments available on the platform. We have a whole bunch of ETFs … that are US-listed, UK-listed, SA-listed, that give you a broad exposure to the market. On top of that you’ve got a whole lot of single-stock investments available, again both local and offshore.
We make it really easy for you to do your FX between your rand account and your dollar account, and we deal with all the complexity of balance of payment reporting in the background.
What we’ve launched recently is structured products … You can buy structured products on the platform. Now, what is a structured product? It is effectively a blend between debt and equity, to give the client a certain amount of either guaranteed return but maybe lower volatility, or a mix of maybe low volatility with debt-like returns – or the other way around, where you might have slightly higher equity exposure above a certain level. So it’s a single instrument that gives you this blend.
And we have a whole lot of different ones – they launch every month or every couple of weeks. These instruments are tracking Euro Stoxx, tracking the FTSE, tracking the S&P, tracking China. So you can express a view using these instruments. They are usually three- to five-year type instruments and give you a really nice blend for something that you just want to buy. You want exposure to that market, but you don’t necessarily want to have all the downside because you have some capital protection in some of these notes.
Each note is slightly different and each of the payouts is slightly different. But it’s a nice, different way of expressing a view and wanting to have exposure to a specific market.
I think we’re in our … seventh structured product on the platform now. And, as I say, they come and go.
Those are the main categories of what we do. We keep on listing new instruments. We are excited – 2026 is a real growth year for us and we’re excited as to how we can help people express their views and, as you said, help with education, help with understanding the market.
We are also looking at how we will use AI to enable that for our clients. We haven’t quite landed that, but it’s in planning.
CIARAN RYAN: We’re going to leave it there. That was Tinus Rautenbach, business head of Clarity at Investec. Thank you very much for joining us, Tinus.
Disclaimer:
“Clarity by Investec is a service offering of Investec Bank Limited (registration number 1969/004763/06), an authorised Financial Services Provider (FSP 11750) and Over-the-Counter Derivatives Provider, a Registered Credit Provider (NCRCP 9), and a member of the JSE Limited. Investec Bank Limited is committed to the Code of Banking Practice. Complaints may be referred to the National Financial Ombud Scheme South Africa, an independent body that handles complaints against South African financial institutions. Copies of the Code and the Ombudsman’s details are available on request or visit Investec COBP.”
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