Rational Perspective

JOHANNESBURG — Ronnie Apteker is well known as an… See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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To read the full transcript of this interview, sign up for our premium section at Biznews.com/premium-signup. Premium subscribers also now have full access to The Wall Street Journal. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

JOHANNESBURG — It was almost exactly a year ago t… See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

My introduction to Cape Town Opera came via a soiree at Bonhams, the London Auctioneering house which operates at the very top end of its market. The patronage of mining mogul Mick Davis ensured an evening of high quality South African voices followed by a well supported fund raising auction. Opera is an acquired taste…….with those who’ve been bitten prepared to travel a long way to enjoy its unique treats. But with its Italian heritage, opera is not the kind of thing you’d expect to find in a developing country with very different musical roots. At least I didn’t before meeting the American who runs Cape Town Opera at my office at WeWork on London’s South Bank. Elise Brunelle served South Africa’s largest permanent non-profit performing arts organisation for almost a decade as its financial manager before taking over as the acting managing director in February succeeding Michael Williams was poached by the Buxton International Festival, one of the leading events of its type in the UK. Williams had been wit

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Last week's Russian malware scare underlined, for me, how vulnerable our homes are to attacks from hackers. Our devices create new vulnerabilities and manufacturers seem unconcerned with the risks. In this episode, former Facebook network security lead and internet security champion Jim McCoy explains why our homes are so vulnerable to attack. He also outlines on how we can protect ourselves and our families from these growing threats. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

At £958 a pop, seats in the Queen Elizabeth conference centre for the annual London Value Investor’s Conference aren’t cheap. But after a day full of insights and specific investment ideas from the best in the value investing business, I didn’t hear any complaints. Superbly facilitated, the full day conference is built around keynote addresses from leading proponents of the value investment craft who share their best ideas. In the seven years since the conference started, around 100 stocks have been picked by the presenters. Although there were a few dogs among them, most of the recommendations have worked out well, some spectacularly so. Clearly, times are tough in the value camp. Worse even than during the dot com boom. Back then criticism of this approach of buying stocks when they were cheapest, cheap resulted in even the Oracle of Omaha Warren Buffett was being publicly labelled a has-been. Opinions swiftly reversed after the Nasdaq bubble burst, with shares like Amazon losing over 90% of their value.

The world was first introduced to the term “cigar butt” shares in what Warren Buffett regards as the best investment book ever written. Published in 1949, Benjamin Graham’s masterpiece is called The Intelligent Investor. And Buffett reckons it provided the skeleton around which all his other investment knowledge was built. Graham, who changed his surname from Grossbaum in recognition of those anti-Semitic times, likens some shares to a mostly smoked cigar. They are shares in companies whose circumstances have changed significantly for the worse so have been shunned by most investors. But often this neglect can push the unloved orphan’s share price below what is realistic, providing an opportunity for the smart analyst to see value where others don’t. Hence the analogy with a cigar butt that still has a couple of good puffs left. Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private sector coal miner, was one of many coal companies that hit the wall after the mineral’s price plunge. Shareholders in Peabody were wiped

JOHANNESBURG — South African Energy Minister Jeff… See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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JOHANNESBURG — South African FinTech 'InvestSure'… See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The performance of Dawid Krige’s Cederberg Capital China-focused fund has been astonishing, with a 75% return last year. That confirms the tightly focused portfolio’s ranking in the top one percent worldwide since it was launched seven years ago. I met Krige earlier this year and was immediately struck by the old adage of an apple not falling from the tree. I got to know Niel Krige, Dawid’s father, through our numerous media engagements when he was the managing director of Momentum, one of South Africa’s top three life assurers. Niel, who left the corporate world for a professorship, is a qualified actuary who aced all his degrees cum laude. The last time we saw each other was in Omaha for the Berkshire Hathaway AGM – the cathedral of value investing, a passion shared by his over-performing son. The younger Krige’s talent is now being recognised on a bigger stage. His keynote was second up at the annual London Value Investor conference last week, where he shared his two best ideas. I caught up with him ove

Rational Perspective host Alec Hogg had his first direct exposure to Deepak Chopra this week when among the full house of 2 900 who were in the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank. The unusual flavour of this episode is the consequence of a conversation with the brilliant Claudius van Wyk, who has met Chopra and is a great admirer of his work. Chopra, a 71 year old who looks 20 years younger, is a best selling author whose books have made him a household name worldwide. A licensed physician, he has become a massively disruptive force in traditional medicine by preaching the benefits of meditation, sleep and reducing stress over pharmaceuticals. Van Wyk is probably the pre-eminent living expert on Holism, a concept promoted in the 1920s by South African polymath Jan Smuts, who was the Prime Minister of his country, an Allied Field Marshall in World War Two and the only non British chancellor of Cambridge University. Smuts is one of a handful of foreigners (Mandela, Gandhi and Lincoln are others) whose

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JOHANNESBURG — Internet search giant Google is ho… See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Compared with the complexities of the portfolio he now manages, US president Donald Trump’s domain of real estate is simplicity itself. With more than 200 nation states and seven billion people, our world is a complicated place with an infinite number of moving parts. This complexity tends to deliver a minefield of unintended consequences for those who under-estimate or are ignorant of this reality. Trump is finding this out the hard way as one seemingly idea after another, things that looked perfectly do-able on the campaign trail, have bombed, usually ending up in another senior aide being blamed and fired. But Trump is finally starting to realise this isn’t reality TV. After trumpeting by presidential tweet inanities like “trade wars are good and easily winnable”, the president is discovering simplistic conclusions rarely work in the real world. Latest humiliation is the realisation that the proposed trade war with China will hurt America and its allies far more than the intended target. So once again a

DUBLIN – There’s no doubt that South African schools face a lot of challenges. In a global benchmarking exercise, South Africa placed 75th out of 76 countries on the quality of its education system. Part of the problem is a persistent inequality in resources dating back to apartheid. The corrupt and abusive South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU) must also shoulder part of the blame, as a high-level ministerial report outlined. The Institute of Race Relations, right-leaning local think tank, believes that desperate times call for desperate measures. They are proposing a school voucher programme to try to a force change in the troubled system. School vouchers are a controversial idea in many parts of the world. In this interview, Marius Roodt explains the IRR’s campaign and what it hopes to achieve. – Felicity Duncan See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

JOHANNESBURG — Earlier this month, there was a flurry of coverage about South Africa's 'first cryptocurrency' ATM having been installed at a Spar grocery store in Randburg by a company called 'Vendibit'. Headlines from several publications published earli See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

JOHANNESBURG — When it comes to a South African r… See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.