Property vs Investment Portfolios
The latest Lightstone property report came out recently, detailing property price inflation across South Africa. The chart below comes from this report, and shows property price inflation by province for 2025: Chart: Lightstone Property Price Inflation 2025 Surprisingly, the province with the highest price inflation was Limpopo — my assumption is that this […]
Make Fewer Mistakes. Keep More Money.
I recently listened to a podcast featuring Barry Ritholtz discussing his new book, How Not to Invest. Ritholtz runs a U.S.-based wealth management firm that manages over $10 billion of private client money. What I respect about their business is that it wasn’t built by acquiring other advice businesses (we see a lot of that today locally). […]
You can retire (but you have to give something up)
I had a fascinating conversation with an older financial advisor the other week. He’s in his late 50s, winding down his practice. He was tired. He explained to me that the challenges in this profession never really change. You may have a mature practise, but the issues are the same as when you started. The […]
The Rand
The rand briefly broke through R18 earlier this week and is currently sitting just above it as I write this. Looking back five years, the rand has essentially retained its purchasing power. Looking back over the past five years, what’s striking is how little it’s moved. If you had asked someone in 2020 […]
Why Pilots Study Crashes
Pilots spend a lot of time studying crash landings — not because they expect to crash, but because when things go wrong, preparation makes all the difference. Investing works the same way. Big crashes are very rare, but when they do happen, it helps to know what has worked in the past (typically doing nothing […]
Less is more
A few years back, The Wall Street Journal profiled Steve Edmundson, the investment manager for Nevada’s $35 billion public retirement fund. The headline was: “What Does Nevada’s Fund Manager Do All Day? Nothing.” That’s him the picture below Here’s how the article opened: Steve Edmundson has no co-workers, rarely takes meetings, and often […]
8 years of market turbulence
Over the past 8 years, global markets have delivered strong annual returns — around 8% to 10% per year. Any investor would be happy with that result. But those returns didn’t come in a straight line. There were multiple points where it felt like the market was on the verge of collapse — […]
Market Recap
Let’s take a quick look at how markets are doing, both locally and abroad. Year to date: The JSE is at all-time highs and up over 10% for the year (in rands). In contrast, the US market is down more than 7%, impacted by renewed uncertainty around tariffs and political noise. The MSCI World […]
The Geometry of Wealth
How much is enough? It’s one of those questions that comes up all the time. With clients. With friends. In your own head some days. And depending on who you ask, you’ll get very different answers. I recently listened to a podcast of Brian Portnoy talking about his new book The Geometry of Wealth— it’s […]
Nobody Knows
2025 was off to a great start. We were coming off two strong years of returns. Inflation was coming down and no longer an issue, the US labour market was at close to full employment, and corporate earnings were beating expectations. There was even growing optimism that rate cuts would start sooner rather than later. […]
