The Financial Coach

People, Emotions and Money...“We are not thinking machines that feel, we are feeling machines that think” António R. Damásio

@SchalkLouw Could flows into the AMETF's be a function of some of the manco's moving funds into these to free up capacity for offshore exposure?

There have been some very interesting developments on the South African (locally listed) #ETF front. The locally listed ETFs grew by 26% in market cap over the past 12 months. Somewhat ironically, however, the traditional passive segment ("trackers") did not attract much attention. Actively managed ETFs, on the other hand, gained significant traction in 2026, with that segment growing by more than 109%. In just over two years since their introduction, they now account for more than 8% of the total South African ETF market. Wow! Ironically, the biggest outflows came from #Commodities, despite commodities also being among the best-performing ETFs.

Today was a reminder of how far the policing system has been allowed to fall behind the needs of the people it is meant to protect. This morning Nicholas and I attended proceedings at the Wynberg Court in Cape Town, where the accused in the case relating to the attack on us in Philippi on 19 August 2025 once again appeared. We were there to send a simple message: court cases can take long and the process can be frustrating, but victims and complainants must not give up. After court, we went straight to Philippi East Police Station for an unannounced oversight visit because Philippi East is where we were attacked. What we found was deeply worrying. Philippi East SAPS serves more than 250 000 people across more than 15 informal settlements. Yet out of 26 vehicles allocated to the station, only 3 are currently working. Around 10 vehicles are at garages, while others are waiting to be towed, have been boarded, or are simply unusable. In an area struggling with violent crime, gangs and extortion, this directly affects response times, visible policing and the safety of communities. We then did a spot visit at Lentegeur Police Station near Mitchells Plain. It was a relief to see a station where most vehicles are working, on the road and well kept. We will still do a more detailed visit there soon. After that we visited the Nyanga FCS unit, the Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences unit. This unit serves SAPS stations in Manenberg, Philippi, Athlone, Nyanga, Gugulethu, Samora Machel and Lansdowne. The situation there was just as worrying. The unit has only around 20% of the staff it actually needs. Only 4 out of 11 vehicles are working. Most disturbing was that the unit does not currently have rape kits available to collect forensic evidence from rape victims. We were told this appears to be part of a wider provincial shortage. This is the result of poor leadership and incompetent management by both national and provincial SAPS Supply Chain Management. It means the seven stations served by this FCS unit are left without one of the most basic forensic tools needed in rape cases, where evidence must be collected quickly and correctly. We already know that the national Divisional Commissioner for Supply Chain Management, Lieutenant General Dr Molefe Fani, was recently suspended amid previous corruption allegations relating to his time at National Treasury. He is also one of the key figures linked to allowing access to SAPS for the controversial Cat Matlala matter. When procurement fails, victims pay the price. If Gender-Based Violence and Femicide was truly treated as the national disaster the President declared it to be, these specialised units would not be working under conditions like this. They would not be critically understaffed, they would not be without working vehicles, and they certainly would not be left without rape evidence kits. Oversight is not about boardrooms and presentations. It is about seeing the real conditions under which police officers and specialised investigators are expected to protect communities. The people of the Cape Flats deserve better, and the dedicated SAPS members trying to work under these conditions deserve far better support from leadership and government. I had the privilege of also bumping into this team from the law-enforcement advancement program (LEAP) in Philippi East, their energy was contagious! IC

Asset class returns have been so good for some time now - what if they are telling us that the CPI number is actually a load of rubbish?

"...there’s been a sense of real turnaround in the past few months and he needs to finish the job,” says Calland. Seriously? Ramaphosa: caught between a couch and a hard place currencynews.co.za/ramaphosa-caug… via @currencynewsza

@PolyannaBrey Yep, mid 80's

Has any other lifelong Capetonian ever experienced this type of extreme weather in the month of MAY? It's actually still supposed to be AUTUMN.

Cyril Ramaphosa and the ANC have three options to manage the impeachment process now threatening not only his own future but also the cohesion of his party, the future of the unity government, and the broader stability of the country and its economy. They’re going to try the third. f.mtr.cool/qlwcbvbogw

Shirley's column today: "the ANC deserves every bit of the pain that’s coming its way. It’s being called on its voodoo finances, its mismanagement of the city, and its dearth of delivery. It’s now up to voters to take up the cudgels and try save the city." currencynews.co.za/political-suic…

Is This the End of Cyril? The Answer, Likely, is Yes. For a man who built his presidency on the promise of rooting out corruption, the end, if this is now it, will come amid the bitter irony of having been occasioned by the very rot he had once promised to root out. thecommonsense.co.za/Editorials/end…

@CityofCTAlerts no power in Constantia (near to Groot Constantia) - are you aware of this and if so, what is the prognosis? Thanks

President Cyril Ramaphosa has backed the growing campaign for slavery and colonialism reparations, arguing that redress should include direct investment, market access, skills, and technology transfer for Africa. But the demand comes just as the world is moving away from the liberal order that gave weaker states room to appeal to rules, sympathy, and development finance. In a harder multi-polar world built on leverage, South Africa is asking Western partners for investment while having spent years alienating many of them. Read the full article in The Common Sense. #TheCommonSense #SouthAfrica #Reparations #Investment #ForeignPolicy  f.mtr.cool/gfhdqjzbls

Great commentary yet again from BTIG’s Jonathan Krinsky •Party Like It's 1999. In 1999, the best performing Nasdaq 100 stock was Qualcomm (QCOM, not rated), up 2600%. The best rolling 52-wk return for QCOM during the entire dot-com bubble was 2600%, so SNDK is beating that by 1300bps. Interestingly, the second-best stock in 1999 was SNDK up 581%. •More Extreme. If we look at the top 10 performing NDX stocks in 1999, they were up an average of 559%. The top 10 in the year leading up to 3/24/00 were up an average of 622%. The top 10 NDX names over the last year are up an average of 784%, beating both the dot-com periods..

Could we try this in SA @GovernmentZA ?

With real interest rates of over 4% I’m not surprised. Pity about the GDP numbers though.

Why is there no standardized reporting on unit trust/etf fact sheets? Some companies report so much info while others appear to be more opaque? Why does everyone not do the same reporting? @fscasouthafrica

Been saying this for more than 20 years now...we will never be a profession until the "industry" is done away with.

To vaccinate 80% of cattle in SA this year, we need to do in the next 7 weeks nearly double the number we have done in the past 5 months, by the same government officials who caused this fiasco in the first place citizen.co.za/news/south-afr…

Paul Tudor Jones just said something the market really doesn't want to hear. "We're clearly so leveraged in equities in this country. We're 252% of stock market cap to GDP. In 1929, we were at 65%. In 1987, about 85%. In 2000, we got to 170%. And now we're at 252." Every number he listed, 1929, 1987, 2000 ended the same way. "If you think about the periodicity of significant bear markets since 1970, we get a mean reversion about every ten years. That would be a 30 to 35% decline. Well, 35% on 250% of GDP is 89% of GDP. The reverse wealth effect, oh my gosh. 10% of our tax revenues are capital gains; they go to zero." This isn't a perma bear making noise but Paul Tudor Jones called the 1987 crash before it happened and made 200% that year. When he talks about mean reversion, he's speaking from a track record that almost nobody in finance can match and then he said this: "If you buy the S&P at this current valuation, the 10-year forward returns are negative when you buy with the S&P P/E of 22. That's what history shows." He's right, every major study on long-term equity returns shows that starting valuation is the single most predictive variable for 10-year forward performance. At a P/E of 22, history doesn't give you a great answer. "The real problem is, if you look at private equity in 2007 and 2008, that was about 7% of institutional portfolios. Now it's about 16%. Real estate's gone up. Infrastructure bets have gone up. We're so much more illiquid than we were in 2008." In 2008, the crisis was bad because the system was leveraged. Today the system is leveraged and illiquid, pension funds, endowments, and sovereign wealth funds can't hit a sell button on private equity. They can't exit real estate in a week, when forced deleveraging starts in a system this illiquid, the exit doors are half the size they were last time. Jones didn't say a crash is coming tomorrow. He said the conditions that produce the worst outcomes in financial history are more present right now than at any prior peak he's seen in 50 years of trading. He said buying the S&P at these levels and expecting the same returns as the past 100 years is math that doesn't work because those 100-year averages include decades when stocks were priced at 6 or 7 times earnings, not 22. "Valuation matters a lot, and the stock market's really high, and it's going to be really hard to make money from here."

The big change (like a switch in the economy) was in 2007, when the NPA dropped the charges against Zuma for political expediency. From that point, politicians (in the ANC connected inner circle) have been given impunity. Corruption shifted from skimming in the shadows to wholesale plunder in the open. What followed was the destruction of the police (especially investigative capacity), destruction of the NPA, breakdown of the judicial system (especially the magistrate courts) and oversight in general. The effect on the economy by the 2007 NPA decision was hidden by the 2008 global financial crisis but the SA economic underperformance from that time has been catastrophic. Especially in unemployment and poverty levels.

This is the grotesque arithmetic of BEE. Just examine the economic ‘transformation’ achieved by the R300bn distributed by SA miners to ANC-connected entrepreneurs, to the miners themselves, and to the communities living next to mines. WSM's column on @Politicsweb politicsweb.co.za/news/who-are-t…

The man worth R6.4bn, who stuffed R10 million into his sofa only for it to be stolen, and who lives here, is concerned about the "inequality emergency".