Last week, the rand slipped past R16.60 to the dollar – its weakest level since July.
If you’ve been following South African financial news, you might be tempted to reach for the usual explanations. Political uncertainty. Load-shedding. The current account deficit. The structural weaknesses that South Africa carries like a weight around its neck.
Risk is one of those investment words everyone uses, but few stop to define. Is risk the chance of losing money? Is it volatility? Or is it simply the uncertainty of not knowing what happens next? The answer matters because once we understand risk, we can measure it and, more importantly, understand where it is coming from.
Read MoreEarnings season can make investing feel like a scoreboard. Revenue beat. EPS beat. Record profit. Guidance raised. Green arrows everywhere.
But behind every impressive headline sits a more important question: how good are those earnings?
Something interesting happened in Silicon Valley earlier this month.
Nvidia, the company that has made billions selling the chips powering the artificial intelligence boom, agreed to spend almost $13 billion buying a company most ordinary investors have probably never heard of.
Read MoreThe internet these days is packed with self-proclaimed gurus and influencers promising to show you the secret to beating the market. But when everyone seems to have the answer, how do you know who is actually worth listening to? This week, we tackle three questions: what a trading guru really is, whether you should pay for a course or mentor, and when paying for investment research can make sense.
Read MoreI recently received an excellent review of two Structured Products done by Finova Capital. They understand the complex details and compare the solutions to determine which is better for you. Two products in focus this month were the Discovery Capital 200+ (closing 10 September) and the Momentum Digital Structured Note (closing 18 September). They may look like close cousins. They aren’t.
Read MoreMarkets have a funny way of making old investing mistakes feel completely new. A new technology arrives, prices surge, investors pile in and suddenly the usual rules no longer seem to apply.
Read MoreSomething unusual is happening in the AI race. The world’s biggest technology companies are spending staggering amounts building AI data centres packed with the most advanced computing hardware on the planet.
Read MoreOver the past four weeks, we’ve explored the three pillars of market analysis: technical, fundamental and sentiment. Fundamental analysis tells us what is happening inside the business. Technical analysis tells us what is happening to the price. Sentiment tells us what investors think and feel about both. On their own, each provides useful information. But when the three start telling the same story, things get interesting.
Read MoreIf someone was slowly, quietly shrinking the value of every rand note in your wallet – not stealing it, just making each note worth a little less every single year – what would you do with your money? You’d move it out of cash. You’d put it into something they can’t shrink. Something with a fixed supply. Something that governments can’t print more of on a Tuesday afternoon when the budget looks bad. That instinct has a name in financial markets. It’s called the debasement trade. And in 2026, it has become one of the most important and most misunderstood investment themes on the planet.
Read MoreWe’ve already explored technical analysis, which helps us understand the market’s medium-term direction, and fundamental analysis, which helps us estimate a company’s long-term value. Now we come to the final, and perhaps most fascinating, pillar of investing: sentiment.
Read MoreWhile technical analysis studies what the market is doing, fundamental analysis asks a different question: why? Instead of focusing on price movements, it examines the underlying business to determine whether it is becoming stronger or weaker, and whether its current share price reflects its true value.
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