The Editor's Desk - Tue 27 Jan 2026: Rand strength, gold's surge, and the agriculture crisis

It’s been a milestone morning with the Rand breaking through the R16/$ level, but the real story lies in the contrast between our rocketing portfolio winners and the "dunderheaded" policy hurdles facing our farmers. Join me for today's webinar at noon as we unpick these developments and look at why—despite the bureaucrats—there is still a path to 20% compounded returns..PS. You can book tickets for the post BNC#8 golf day sponsored by Shyft, by clicking here..Don't miss out on future episodes of The Editor's Desk. Subscribe to BizNews Premium and get the podcast delivered to your inbox daily..Listen here.Read the full transcript of The Editor's Desk podcast below. This is the Editor’s Desk, exclusive analysis for BizNews Premium members. Today is Tuesday the 27th of January, 2026. I’m glad to have you with me.This being the last Tuesday of the month, I hope you’re going to be with me at noon today for the monthly webinar. It’s always a lot of fun. In the webinar, we go through our portfolios of the past month, give you an update on how well they’ve performed or what the top and worst shares were, and then primarily spend most of the hour just fielding questions. So, you get to ask your thoughts; my job is to be on top of this portfolio. That’s what I’ve got to be looking at, and as a consequence, I am able to share with you the reasons why certain things have performed the way they have.Today, I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of conversation around Orion Minerals, which is up 110%. It just shows you that if you get that kind of improvement, it makes a big difference to the bottom line. That’s in the Ricardo portfolio, which is now up 11%. You just need one winner like that and no disasters, and suddenly things are looking good. Well, that’s where we are on the Ricardo South African Rand portfolio. Of course, the big question is whether to buy another slice of Orion Minerals today. That's going to be at 44 cents versus the 21 cents that we paid for our original lot; it doesn’t matter, that is what you do. Orion has now jumped all the way up to 15% of the portfolio, having started—as the rest of them did—at 8%.Also today, we can talk a little bit about the Lewis Group, which is already showing a 10% gain. Remember, we've only had the portfolio going since September, so these are good numbers. When you have a look at the latest trading statement, which there is a piece about on BizNews, you can see why Lewis is actually hitting its straps right now. It’s a good time for credit. That will be on the webinar this afternoon at noon. If you miss it, or if you’re only hearing this later on Tuesday the 27th, you can always go and watch that video as a Premium member and pick up the full details of the discussion on the portfolio. If you’re not a Premium member and you’re listening to this somehow—I don’t know how you get it, but whatever—you’d better go and sign up for Premium if you want to come into the portfolio so you can get your seat.On the US Dollar portfolio, we have big stories coming tomorrow. Our top performer, incidentally, is ASML Holdings, and they report either this afternoon/tonight our time, or tomorrow. I think it’s tonight our time that we’re going to have the numbers coming out from Meta, Tesla, and ASML. ASML has been an absolute champion for us; our average cost there on the Ricardo portfolio is $994 a unit, currently sitting at $1,400. That’s the good thing about Rand cost averaging: when the share prices are higher and more expensive, you buy fewer of them, and when the share prices are lower, you buy more.Anyway, we’ll be talking about a few of those stocks. The total value, thanks to ASML, of the Dollar portfolio is up by 5%, but don't check that out in Rands because the Rand has been very strong—it got through 16. I got up this morning for Daybreak—I’m a member of the 5 AM club, as you probably know very well by now—and when I got up, the Rand was at 15.99. That is the first time since 2022 that it has managed to break that 16 Rand to the Dollar level.Now, it’s not unusual. In fact, I did some in-depth reading of Rob Armstrong’s piece, which we’ve got on BizNews today. He is the host of Unhedged at the Financial Times. He has really wonderful insights on investing, and he and Katie Martin do a terrific podcast that we publish from time to time. We have a licence for those podcasts, one a week. So, it’s either Gideon Rachman, Katie and Rob, or the team at Tectonic. We choose between them from the FT to share with you as a members-only option. Rob and Katie are becoming more and more my favourites. Today, Rob wrote a fabulous piece on gold. What I like about the man is he’s out there; he wears his heart on his sleeve and he says he has been loud, persistently and hilariously wrong about gold. He said if there were a prize for being the worst forecaster, he would be very much in the running because at $2,500 an ounce, he said it was a bad idea to buy gold. Now it’s doubled and it still looks stronger.He goes into some detail in the article explaining where the gold price is right now relative to history. In certain respects, it looks quite overpriced; in other respects—certainly from what Rob’s saying versus the S&P 500 index—it doesn’t look too bad when you go back to the craziness that happened in the late 1970s. But Peter Major, who’s much more of a gold and metals expert, has graphs showing us that gold is hugely overpriced. He uses several metrics, including its value relative to the silver price and what he calls the money market price. I suppose you pay your money and you take your choice. As far as Rob is concerned, he’s almost saying, "Maybe I’ve been wrong." Not maybe—of course he's been wrong, because he told you not to buy it at $2,500 and now it’s over $5,000. He can’t exactly double down and say he knows what he’s doing, but he says in his piece—which you must read, as it is good fact-based reporting—that he’s still finding it very challenging to change his mind about gold.We’ve got that on the site, and we’ve got Lewis on the site as well. The story with Lewis is, first of all, we were recommended to buy the stock by Piet Viljoen. When Piet bangs on about something for a long time, you know he knows what he’s talking about. Lewis has been one of his favourites. When we bought into Lewis, the share price was trading at about a 10% dividend yield. It’s not in the shift portfolio; that portfolio is quite comfortable. It’s four years in and is going to conclude in a year’s time. We started it in December 2021, and it’s going to finish in December 2026. That was what we said. If you recall, we had the Web Trader portfolio, which did unbelievably well. We started with 2.25 million Rand (or $200,000) and it ended at over 10 million Rand. That was with a 20% compounded return every year. It really is to say to the tribe, to the community: just hang in there, find the right stocks, invest, and just hang in there. Don't try and trade the market. It’s time in the market, not timing the market, that matters.That’s really been the whole idea of these model portfolios: to show you that if you play the Warren Buffett way, you buy shares that you think you can hold forever. It doesn’t mean you have to, because if circumstances change—like the great economist John Maynard Keynes said—then you must change your mind. That’s the way the world works. You can’t just be married to some idea, certainly not in this world that we live in today.Oh, how I wish the people in the Union Buildings would listen to that and just say, "Okay, we have this National Democratic Revolution, which was acquired by some Soviet ding-dongs from the 1920s who felt that this was the way that we could change Africa after colonialism." Actually, it’s just been one huge disaster time and time again; it’s been a bugger-up. But of course, there are always people for whom that’s all they know. They haven’t yet come to Confucius’s saying where true knowledge is not just to know what you know, but to know what you don’t know.That is the one thing that our friends in Beijing can do for our friends in Pretoria at the Union Buildings: just give them a little book of Confucius. On page one: "True knowledge, true wisdom is not just to know what you know, but to know what you don't know." Because we keep dawning on with this crazy approach of "let’s control everything." We’ve had GDP per capita going backwards now for over a decade. What does that mean? It means that people on average in South Africa are getting poorer. It means that those entrepreneurs—around 10% of the population—are now saying it’s impossible to have a go in South Africa, or at least to have a go legally. A lot of them are ducking and diving, but there are a heck of a lot of them who are taking their money elsewhere.Go and look at Mauritius. It’s full of South Africans who could be creating jobs in South Africa. But no, they’re living in Mauritius now because they've farmed their money out; it’s too high risk and they're sitting in an environment where the government is hostile to business. Not to big business, because big business and big government are always going to sit around the table together. They love the status quo; they don’t like change. It suits them just fine. Their share options keep going up. The JSE doesn’t get all the exciting new listings because the big companies are doing just fine with the status quo. It’s the little guys who can’t get the funding or the traction to build great companies that would be listed on the stock exchange. You need entrepreneurs for that. If entrepreneurs find an environment that is hostile to them, well, they’re also not that crazy; they give up and go somewhere else.That’s the reality of the world we live in. 10% of people are entrepreneurs. They are the people you should be nurturing and finding a welcoming environment for. They are the people you should encourage by saying, "So you had a go and it didn’t work. Don’t stay on the ground. Stand up and try again." Because that’s how you get a Brian Joffe, a Steve Jobs, a Mark Zuckerberg, or an Elon Musk. You get these people who are prepared to sacrifice.That’s the thing the bureaucrats don’t get. Bureaucrats don’t understand that the difference between them and a successful entrepreneur is that the entrepreneur has a relatively small chance of being super successful. In South Africa, eight out of ten small businesses close within the first three years. So, you’ve got a very low survival rate. Secondly, they work long hours and they put their houses up against the possibility that they’ll be part of that 20% that actually succeeds. Meanwhile, the bureaucrats are sitting in their comfy offices, knocking off at 4:30 in the afternoon. They aren't going to lose their jobs because it’s very hard to fire someone in the public sector, and they’re going to have a lovely pension—a defined benefit. If you work for 40 years, you get 80% of your final salary. If you’re in the private sector, you get a defined contribution; you put your money in, take your chances, and hope the stock market doesn't crash in between. It’s a very different mindset.If there was a little bit more humility in the Union Buildings—an ability to say, "Oops, what we were trying didn’t work, let's try something different"—there would be an immediate change. Right now, on the foot-and-mouth disease, we were doing a lot of work on that. Go and watch the interview with Piet Le Roux that I did yesterday. Piet is with Sakeliga. They take on the government where they see the greatest stupidity of the state and force them in the courts to come back to reality and rationality. "Sakeliga" means "Business League" in Afrikaans. So what are they doing in agriculture? Why are they going there on the foot-and-mouth disease story?In a nutshell, Piet Le Roux says this is an area of massive overreach. The government wants to control foot-and-mouth disease, but it’s not controlling it. It’s like saying, "You can’t put out the veld fire because we have the right to put it out. You must let it burn through your whole farm and destroy your livestock because we control it." Then they forget to provide the solution. You need to vaccinate, but there’s only one source of vaccines because the government says only they can provide them—but they don't provide them. So, there are no vaccines. You can't get them somewhere else. What do you do? You go through a forced destitution. It is absolutely crazy.John Steenhuisen, the leader of the Democratic Alliance, is the Minister of Agriculture. He seems to be incapable of getting those around him to understand exactly what is happening at the moment. The farmers are cutting him some slack because they say he is not making all the rules. Well, maybe it’s time for him to start making rules. And the first rule is very simple, says Piet Le Roux: allow farmers to access vaccines as and where they can so that they can at least protect their own assets. Seriously, is there any other way of addressing this?Well, I’m going to leave it there for today. Thanks for trusting us with your time. I’m Alec Hogg. Until tomorrow, cheerio.

The Editor's Desk - Tue 27 Jan 2026: Rand strength, gold's surge, and the agriculture crisis

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