About a month ago, we were unhappy that the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange switched off their very useful website. In Zimbabwe data that should be accessible in a straightforward way, thanks to living in the age of the internet, is frustratingly hard to get. In fact, even at the risk of being accused of having an Africa is a country mindset, I’ll just go ahead and say this is the experience in much of the Africa we’ve been to.
Anyway, the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange was the exception. Until they took it away that is. So yes, that’s why we were unhappy.
Turns out though, the data the ZSE had on its website is not so exclusive to it. Last week, we stumbled on lynton-edwards.com, a local stock broker that has data and visuals that are almost just as good as that on the old ZSE website. It’s the same actually, except that Lynton Edwards lists only the top 10 companies.
Take the graph above for example, which is quite visual about the changes in the value of Econet Wireless Zimbabwe stock. See the Econet page too.
If you think this is is quite similar to the old ZSE website, you’re not alone and are probably not wrong. From the way it looks, it’s either supplied by the same company that supplied the ZSE, or that company and Lynton-Edwards just bought it from the same place. I’m not sure it matters at all beyond making it clear that the data and its presentation format is still available somewhere. Someone just needs to pay for it.
The reason we wrote this short post is we loved it when we bumped into this because it’s quite useful to us. It was great knowing all is not lost. We hope those of you that find such data useful as well, will love it too.