“South Africa -- like a lot of emerging markets -- is especially prone to this stuff because the politics are a lot stranger than developed markets have traditionally been and thus more subject to headline risk,” said Paul McNamara, a London-based fund manager at GAM UK Ltd.
News-reading algorithmic traders may have been further confused by reports on the wires of a U.S. congressional aide saying that Zuma was lost. But this Zuma wasn’t Jacob -- but rather the code name for the seemingly failed mission by Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. to launch a military satellite. (Musk, coincidentally, was born in South Africa.)
