Things are changing fast, keep up!

We all saw this coming: Joe Biden stepped down and nominated his vice president, Kamala Harris, to contest the presidential election in November. Donald Trump selected J.D. Vance, a 39-year-old hillbilly, to be his running mate. What effect will this have on your investments? To answer this question we have to understand American politics and […]
The more things change, the more they stay the same

Things have been happening these past few weeks. In Cape town we have seen heavy rains, wind and snow. An assassin’s bullet grazed Donald Trump’s ear and investors have been selling big tech companies in the USA and buying smaller undervalued companies. To top all of this, Microsoft, banks and airports experienced a massive outage […]
Why are my offshore funds underperforming?

If you have been wondering why your offshore equity fund is underperforming the S&P500 index, then consider the following explanation: the S&P500 index represents the 500 largest companies in the USA at any given moment. Currently, three companies are battling it out for the honor of being the largest, with the order changing almost daily […]
What will happen after the election in the USA?

If you have not received a call from Cyril Ramaphosa offering you a cabinet post, then you are one of only a few. It seems he just couldn’t let anyone go, but with this new arranged marriage called the GNU, he had to accommodate his ten wives and offer them a fat ministerial paycheck compliments […]
By the time you read this

Things had fallen back into uncertainty regarding the GNU as we entered the last weekend of June, but this has now been resolved. The uncertainty caused the rand to go back above R18/$ and the JSE to fall below 80 000 points. We are now halfway through the year and have just started the third […]
Have we dodged another bullet?

It took a few days, but last week we saw share prices in South Africa shoot up and the rand strengthen to below R18/$. We are experiencing a relieve rally after a decade of corruption and unabated looting of state coffers by a majority-led ANC government. Now that there is no outright winner, the newly […]
Back to the future

When Warren Buffett went shopping as a young man, he would always take out the dollar he was about to spend and look at it, knowing that he could turn that one dollar into two by the end of the year if he invested it. So by delaying the immediate gratification of a non-essential purchase, […]
Advice to a 30 year old investor

What would you advise yourself if you had one opportunity to go back 30 years? One thing is for sure, you will be very wealthy today because investing with hindsight is very easy. If we take some examples of what happened over the last 30 years, we see that inflation in South Africa averaged around […]
Reactions to the 2024 election

The day after the much anticipated elections we woke up to a gloomy, rainy day. Voting day was marred by various problems relating to ID scanners and in a day and age where we can ask a computer almost anything, and technology is so advanced that cars can drive themselves, the IEC couldn’t get their […]
Small and big problems

In the absence of big problems, we tend to imagine our small problems are big. We are at a possible inflection point in our country’s history with our national elections upon us. South Africa has been remarkably fortunate, in spite of our somewhat troubled past, with regard to changes in political power. We have not […]