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The 5 o' Clock Shadow with David Shapiro and Viv Govender · Strictly Business

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You're listening to Strictly Business Podcast with Lindsay Williams.
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It's Friday, not Thursday, but it's time for the doubleheader dream team edition of
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the five o'clock shadow, but it's not the five o'clock shadow.
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You get what I mean.
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Viv Govender from RAND Swiss, the award winning RAND Swiss is with us, along with,
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of course,
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David Shapiro from Sassfin Securities.
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And by the way, if you want to get into the Sassfin Securities David Shapiro
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Crystal Challenge.
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Is this your last day to do it, David?
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Last business day.
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It is the last day to do it, isn't it?
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What do we do?
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How do we do it?
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Just go onto the site.
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There is a link.
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It's pretty easy.
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And even if you miss it or something happens, we always open up.
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And we don't want entrance next week, but we're always open-minded.
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We're not that strict.
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So try and get onto the website.
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And, you know...
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Look, even on the weekend you can do it.
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Okay.
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I mean, that's fine, yeah.
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Okay, I'm going to do it.
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I'm doing it this afternoon.
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It's a challenge.
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You must do it, yeah, because it's a bit of a challenge.
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I mean, when you think that everybody says, oh, it's just choose five stocks,
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you say, okay, you've got 10 months.
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Where are you now?
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And I know we're all going to talk about gold and platinum and everything, and
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you're saying, okay, where is this world?
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Crazy world, as you said, when we introduced.
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the show when we started on the conversation so where are we going to be
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10 months time it's not that easy it's not easy at all and viv viv
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unfortunately you're barred from joining because you're far too clever no we we
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don't bar anybody
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he can even come in his daughter's name his wife's name we we're
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pretty open about it anyway for your edification david and i spoke on Monday
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and I said, I was sort of
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I was talking about the much maligned days of when markets opened and then they
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closed and then they opened the
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next day.
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And so what would happen was that there would be a graph.
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It would close at eight, nine o'clock at night, Central European time or South
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African time.
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And then it would open the next day.
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And therefore it would sometimes open higher or lower than the close the
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previous day.
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So there would be a gap on the chart.
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And I was looking at the gold price and I saw it.
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gapping every day.
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Every time I went to bed at half past midnight or whatever, having watched a
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football match,
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I would see the gold price $100 higher than I remembered when it closed in New
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York at 10 o'clock or something like that.
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And there was this theory, Viv, of three gaps, the breakaway gap, the runaway gap
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and the exhaustion gap.
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The third gap being the exhaustion gap, which is people either covering shorts or
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getting in.
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They were Johnny-come-latelys.
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And I saw that this week and on Wednesday night on a podcast with Skulk Lowe, who's
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a fine chap,
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David's on television with him every Wednesday, I think it is, in the
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afternoon.
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And I said, this is the top of the gold market.
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And he said, you cannot call the top of anything because you'll be criticised and
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ridiculed
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for calling that top.
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But I called the top in gold.
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And look what's happened to it now.
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Viv, can we start for a change with you with gold?
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it telling us something that it's gone from 5,625 on Wednesday
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night, Thursday morning, to where it is now pushing to go down back through 5,000,
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Viv?
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In terms of like the gold price, I think it went a bit ballistic.
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I mean, I was looking at the silver price a couple of days ago, also went to like
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$120 an ounce.
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You know what I mean?
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And I think that that was a bit of a over, of course.
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uh that move it was it felt like a frenzy it felt like you know people were just
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kind of capitulating and maybe shots were closing or
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people were just kind of like afraid of missing out on on the rise or whatever it
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was yes and uh so i i in fact we did a
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uh a trade out which was the gold silver ratio and
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uh at that time it was below 45 uh the gold silver ratio uh it's moved you know
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well in our favor but not as much as if you can go and shot a
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gold or silver of course but we were looking at that and thinking that was a
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bit off.
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Now, in terms of the gold price, is this the end of it?
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I don't think so.
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Because once, you know, this year alone, you were talking about it, you know, with
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the Federal Reserve, etc.,
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being in play, the U.S.
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government is going to do things to the dollar over the next couple of years that
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are probably not going to be great for the dollar.
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It's also going to mean that what Trump is also doing into the national relations is
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going to mean that, you know,
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central banks don't want to be involved in dollars as much.
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And quite frankly, there is not that much gold in the world compared to the amount
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of dollars out there.
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And if you wanted to replace the US dollar with gold as your reserve currency,
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the gold price would need to be significantly higher than here for that to
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occur.
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And I think that is what's probably the longer-term trend happening out there.
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At the same time, we also have, and I've talked about this in the past, places like
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India, I don't know how much in China,
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but India definitely has incredible amounts of gold.
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We're talking private citizens in India have, I think, multiple times as much gold
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as the US government does.
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And as that country grows 7%, 8% a year,
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more and more gold is going to be consumed because it's a cultural item that people
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want to buy a lot of, you know what I mean?
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And so that's also going to be a driver into the future.
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So the overall gold price, I think, has still got a way to go eventually.
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But in the short term, I just think this rally would be just too strong.
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I'll qualify my call on the gold price peaking on Wednesday.
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And that was a near-term view.
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I think it comes back to 4,000, 3,900, something like that, but then potentially
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goes sideways and goes again.
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So, yes, fundamentally very good, technically horrendous looking.
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David, big tech results came out this week, and I'm going to start with you and
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then move on to Viv.
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I don't know where you want to start because there were so many, the latest
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being Apple, Blockbuster, Blockbuster numbers.
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Give me the pick, the best and the worst, please.
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I think they're all good.
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And I mean it.
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You can nitpick.
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You know, we can go through line by line and decide which is not going to make it.
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Is this the end of Microsoft?
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because They're under a bit of pressure and they're not going to make their
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returns on investment,
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they're overinvesting and so on.
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But Lindsay, and
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I always tell you I'm an accountant and I like to look at the actual income
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statement and balance sheet.
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I'm not influenced by what people say around.
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I go say, what are the sales?
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What are the costs and so on?
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And then I go to the bottom line and I see how much cash they're putting on the bank,
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the bank.
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And yes, analysts will start to look at it and look at what's likely to happen in the
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future from these results,
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discount them and get to a so-called intrinsic value.
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But in terms of the size and riches, these are enormous businesses doing incredibly
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well.
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What knocked me out was with Google.
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Not Google, sorry.
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Meta.
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You know, when you look at Meta's role.
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Meta's numbers, which were absolutely outstanding.
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And just identifying where things are going,
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where they're taking that company, and the kind of spending that they're making.
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They're forward-looking.
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He's an energetic person.
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So I haven't got all the full details in front of me,
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and I can't really quote the numbers offhand because these are big numbers.
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But look at Apple.
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um up 23 percent uh sales and i'd mention i don't know if it records or you recall
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when i came back
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from uh new york in october the story about buying a phone for your daughter or
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daughter and i told you yes
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well for a friend here and i was saying that yeah and i said i couldn't get with
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you know there were just
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hundreds of people in the uh apple stores you know just buying the 17.
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And I said, don't write this off, you know, which has come through in the sales
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both in China and India and in the United
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States.
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But if you look at Microsoft and their Azure, people getting worried, upset.
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Why?
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Because the growth in Azure, which is their cloud business, grew 39%
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and not 40% as last year.
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Last year, I said, hold on a sec, you know, that grew 39%. What?
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What do you want out of a company?
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So, I mean, without getting too emotional, I just think, hold on a sec, take a step
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back.
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Stop trying to analyze every little bit.
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You know, just look at the big picture and where this is all going.
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It's not going to be perfect.
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You know, it's not going to be in a straight line.
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There are going to be hiccups.
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But overall, I mean, these businesses are just spewing out cash.
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So, I'm not put off by anything that I'm seeing at the moment.
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Okay, Viv, are you put off by anything, either from the Magnificent Seven or from
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the AI, not pretenders,
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but pretenders to their crown of the name Magnificent?
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You saw a lot of numbers, and I also want you to focus, if you would,
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on the companies that are committing more and more to CapEx.
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CapEx, very, very important, not just the numbers.
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Over to you, Viv.
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uh so basically sandisk uh those companies up dramatically this year i think up 90
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and
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after in aftermarket trade last night, it is up a bit higher.
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This thing is up to doing almost 1,000% or 1,000 plus percent last year.
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uh you know um remember the stock uh delisted a few years ago relisted uh uh
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basically about a year or so
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ago it's up over a thousand something percent last year and about another i said
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90 plus percent this year so i think combined it probably is up like you know
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i don't even want to know the number at the moment uh but
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the interesting one that i saw there was tesla's results but tesla basically is the
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world's largest car company and what are they doing
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they stop this they're they're moving away from cars they are they are moving their
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factories towards robotics Okay,
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and that is either two things.
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Firstly, it's either, you know, if you take a cynical view, Musk is seeing that
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the demand for Teslas is down for, you know, political reasons,
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and therefore he wants to give another story out there.
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So he says, oh, let's say we're not going to build enough Teslas because, you know,
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obviously we can't sell them, but rather just make these robots,
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and that's going to give us another few years of, you know, hype and whatever.
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Or it's a case of he's seeing that robots are close to fulfilled.
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And that means that you want to be the guy out there with the ability to make these
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robots in a quantity quickly,
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which will give you a head start into the new race.
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And the reason I might believe two instead of one, in that he's actually acting
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rationally,
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is that there's a new video from FIGA.
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And FIGA is one of those guys that make robots.
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You know, they're more into the design stuff than the actual manufacturing.
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But it's a robot basically emptying a dishwasher.
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And normally when you find these things doing these things, they have these kind
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of either the slow kind of, you know, how you talk about this hyper choreographed
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kind of like way of doing it,
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or it's teleoperated, which means that some human being is controlling it.
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And the CEO of FIGURE says, no, this is entirely autonomous.
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Okay, you can watch it yourself.
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It's the FIGURE robot emptying a dishwasher.
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It looks very, very smooth, very, very quick.
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It looks like a slow human, that's true, but a slow human that I'd be happy to have
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walking in my kitchen, you know what I mean?
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And so that's one thing to look at.
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The second thing, I think, you know, I don't know if it's the right point to talk
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about this or not,
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but have you guys heard of a thing called Claudebot?
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No.
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Okay, so this is something that's used, it's spelled C-L-A-W-E-D, Claude, like a
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claw.
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Yeah.
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But obviously, it's a play on the word Claude, like, you know, from Anthropic.
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I think they renamed it Baldspot recently.
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But anyway, it's, if you look at that there, it's a new kind of thing that runs
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off these...
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famously Apple, but you could run it off any kind of like CPU and stuff.
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You, it's almost, what it does, it accesses all your stuff, like your
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WhatsApp, your Telegram, your, you know,
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your email and all that kind of stuff.
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And it uses that when you want to basically work on stuff.
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Okay.
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Also, we have seen a topic has come out with an AI for Excel, an Excel AI.
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Can you imagine, David, how properly integrated Excel AI would be in your life?
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Okay.
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That's the kind of new stuff coming out at the moment.
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And the interesting thing about this that I want to point out, and that's a little
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different, is that they've looked at the usage of the CloudBot stuff,
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and people are using the higher-end subscriptions for AI and not just playing
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around with the free and the low-end
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subscriptions.
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Because think of what that means.
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It means that it's so useful that people are deciding that they want to spend the
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$200 a month, not the $20 a month, or get the free version,
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in order to get advantage of this thing.
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So I think it's a key moment.
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in the whole AI race that, you know, I haven't analysed how that's going to
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affect things going forward,
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but it's interesting that you are seeing that even despite the race,
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we have a change that is this dramatic happening that we'd be in a box of things
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right now at the moment.
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David, before you make your point, I have to ask you,
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would you have a robot in your flat in Corlett Drive overlooking the Wanderers
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cricket stadium?
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Would you, instead of you or your wife emptying the dishwasher,
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Would you have this thing coming out of a cupboard and emptying it for you?
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Would you feel comfortable with that?
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Yeah, I hate the dishwasher.
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I hate washing the dishwasher.
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No, I'm good with a vacuum cleaner, but there's certain things that I detest,
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and that one is putting in and taking out of the dishwasher.
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Now, why?
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I don't know.
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So I've got Linda, who's my robot at the moment.
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Shame.
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Linda, I know you're listening.
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I like you.
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And the areas here, you cannot believe how much dust accumulates and things like
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that.
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It's not the question of what you like and don't like.
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I'm asking you, would you be happy with a robot as described by Viv Govender?
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Would you be happy with that robot in your house?
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Yes, I've got no problems with that.
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They have an intruder or whatever it is.
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It depends on what it starts to look like because, you know, whatever.
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So.
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Yeah, I think it's progress.
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You know what the point, just listen to what Viv say.
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Yes.
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And it's so important because we criticize the investment.
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And, you know, the amount of money going in, and I'm always critical of that, of
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people who,
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that's how growth is created.
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You know what you're doing?
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You're helping scientists.
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Yes, they might flop here, flop there, but all of this adds up.
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And if we don't make the investment, you never progress.
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And come back to South Africa.
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There's no investment here.
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There is no investment.
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There's no investment in anything, in infrastructure, anything.
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How can a country grow?
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So I don't mind if these businesses keep putting in money and sometimes it's a bit
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of a flop and they don't get the exact
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return on it.
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It would have paid to put it into a seven day account or a 30 day account rather
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than putting it into science.
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And, you know, from my point of view,
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I'm so big on R&D and the eventual benefits that will bring.
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And you just have to go back to Amazon and the early days, how we used to then base
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poor old...
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Jeff Bezos, because he constantly reinvested.
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Yes, he might not have had the best returns, whatever it is you can criticize
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down the road, but just look, you know,
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what he has produced and, and, you know, where these companies are going.
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So, you know, I just, I just shake my head.
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When you, you know, meta Zuckerberg has wasted money, he's gone into certain
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things, but overall,
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something will come out of it.
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He cuts it when it's not going as he's doing at the moment.
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But he will find something else.
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He's taking the credit to him and to Musk.
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The same thing, going into robots.
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So, Lindsay, I find it exciting.
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No, you make a very good point, David.
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You make a very good point.
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I mean, you can spend an awful lot of money.
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I mean, if you look at, for example, Kurs Becker,
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he went into China once and it was a complete flop.
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And then he went in there again.
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And it was a huge success.
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And we know what the story is from there.
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So you just keep on going.
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And as you say, there will be some flops.
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There will be hundreds of millions, if not billions, wasted.
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But the billions that are not wasted turn into eventually trillions, potentially.
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So, yes, you do make a very good point indeed.
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Do you agree with David, Viv?
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Oh, you most certainly.
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Look, I mean, we always talk about A.
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And I think it could be, you know, wrong.
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I don't know if you guys saw this week.
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that some scientist in Spain has a theoretical cure for pancreatic cancer.
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It's been incredibly successful in mice.
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And this is just the kind of stuff.
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I mean, R&D is not just about, you know, what you call this, making your product
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better or whatever.
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It's about making the world better, you know.
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You spend an R&D, the local effects are so large and so grand, you don't even know
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what the eventual outcome is going to be like.
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And I think that, you know, in South Africa, the fact that we're not spending
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Despite the fact that we obviously have some,
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I see there's something weird about South Africa.
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I don't know what it is exactly.
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But if you look at how much above our weight we punch, it's quite surprising.
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You know what I mean?
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Especially in technology, where we've had like first, like the heart transplant or
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whatever.
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Where's the schooling system?
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Where is the weather?
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Where is the biltong?
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Who knows?
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There's something about us that does make a difference in like, you know, how
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things...
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How we think about the world.
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I think it's also the fact that we live in a very diverse country, that you can't
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just be a single-minded drone and do your job.
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You have to think outside the box sometimes.
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And I think that's important.
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And so, yeah, I think that we in South Africa are significantly underinvested in
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R&D and we are wasting, I think, one of our key assets.
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And I don't know if you saw the metric results that came out recently.
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No.
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And it was 80% in KZN or whatever, not pointing to the fact that, you know, I
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think 40%
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of the kids that basically start grade one end up getting a qualification.
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in grade 12.
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So the other kids are kicked out in grade 10 and 11 so that the, I can just say
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this,
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the idiot bureaucrats can say that they had an 80% pass rate.
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Well, that only means 80% of those that wrote passed.
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Meanwhile, only less than half of those that actually started in the school
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actually wrote the exam.
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You know what I mean?
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And that is the thing.
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We're wasting all this talent.
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That is quite a tragedy.
19:06
Lindsay, I must tell you something.
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You think Viv is clever, okay.
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I was looking at Crawford's results.
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There are so many Naidus, Govinders and so on there.
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He's going to have a lot of competition down the line.
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Eight, nine, eleven distinctions.
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Yeah, what is it about children in China and children in India, Viv,
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that makes them more diligent than people in, for example, the UK?
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And let me give you an example.
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I've got a friend who's a teacher.
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She's one of these teachers that is on A list,
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so when someone gets sick or someone goes on holiday or extended leave, whatever it
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is, she gets called in to go to the school.
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She says she's teaching year eight, as it is in England, year eight pupils, and
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she's teaching them history.
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And she said,
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what is the predominant religion in Southern Ireland?
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And the kid put his hand up and said, Scottish.
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So the child didn't know what religion was, didn't know the difference between
20:05
religion and language, obviously knew absolutely nothing.
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And this is year eight.
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So there's a huge difference between, for example, European kids, American kids.
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And I don't want to be stereotypical here, but Indian or subcontinent children and
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Chinese children, they want to learn,
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Viv.
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They want to work seven days a week, don't they?
20:24
Not that.
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I think it's also, it would wonder why Jewish kids do so well.
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And why, you know, you find, it's because I think...
20:30
I'll tell you that afterwards.
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I think it's the actual reverence that Jews and Indians give to teachers and to
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education.
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You know what I mean?
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Like, I mean, if you look at the Jewish tradition, it's the guy that studies, you
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know, the holy books the best,
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has a lot of automatic respect.
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I don't know if I'm correct about this, David, but it seems to be like that, yeah.
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So if you're a learned person, even if it's not.
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a poor person, you're going to learn a person that you admired.
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In the Indian culture as well, I mean, there's a saying, it goes basically, it's
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a teacher before God.
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You know what I mean?
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Your teacher is treated with a degree of respect that's insane.
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Now, in a way, that's good, because it obviously gets you the good marks.
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In a way, that's bad, because the one thing I always point out to the world is
21:20
that we always talk about the dumb Americans, right?
21:22
But there's something about that craziness in America that...
21:25
This misbehaving or disobedience or this old, like, you know,
21:30
stupid stubbornness that allows a child to think outside the box and do the things
21:36
that they do, you know what I mean?
21:38
And I think that's one of the things that I forget as well.
21:40
We complain about the fact that our kids don't get the marks or whatever.
21:41
But I think that you can't really push just on education as much as you do,
21:48
because yes, you'll get the best marks, but you won't get the best kid,
21:50
if you know what I mean.
21:52
And so I do wonder, like, you need to have some of that, you need to have a mix of
21:52
it.
21:52
Obviously, the kid needs to study at school, but you need to also have that
21:55
certain degree of.
21:57
you know uh the crazy kid yeah i was just thinking someone especially with young
22:02
boys
22:02
nowadays they people put them on richland they put them on all this kind of garbage
22:09
because they don't want the kid to be too uh high energy in class
22:11
but you look at i mean we've all been like in the real world who are the people that
22:16
really make the biggest difference it's these crazy high energy guys you know what
22:18
i
22:20
mean you'll find some guy that was a terrible student and he owns like 100
22:21
picture shops.
22:23
Like I know one of our clients is like that.
22:24
He owns a bunch of pizza shops.
22:26
He's one of the richest guys around.
22:29
But it's because of the fact that you have a situation in which you have that energy.
22:35
That energy matters more than anything else.
22:37
I do it by education, but I do think that the energy,
22:42
the misbehaving is something that we must have in this country as well.
22:45
David Shapiro was probably a little bit of a cheeky chap when he was in class, but
22:51
he's got some stories about Jewish children.
22:53
I know you're dying to tell us this story, David.
22:54
No, you know what's very, well, first of all, Jewish mothers you don't start with.
22:59
Okay.
23:00
You know, and they push their kids, you know, it's like the tiger moms.
23:07
But there's another very interesting point is that studying the Torah, In other
23:13
words,
23:14
the holy books, if you study that,
23:18
the rabbi is nothing more than a guide or a teacher.
23:22
People study it in groups and they learn to debate.
23:26
And the whole thing is around debate, debating points that come up.
23:30
In other words, you're not told what to do.
23:33
You know, you're not told.
23:34
You have to interpret it according to commentary and that.
23:39
And you go into any yeshiva, you know, or a holy school, whatever you want to call
23:44
it,
23:45
you'll find people sitting there in groups debating, you know, debating what happens.
23:51
And that, if you take that through, it's a very, very good way of learning.
23:57
In other words, it's not by rote.
23:59
It's not forced upon you.
24:01
So it's something that they've tried to emulate or copy in schools.
24:06
I don't know with how much success, but it's a.
24:09
It's a wonderful play, time or way of studying things.
24:15
So it's not the fact that they're studying one particular thing, i.e.
24:18
the Torah.
24:20
In fact, it can be applied to the rest of their learnings and indeed in later life.
24:27
The ability to debate, the ability to...
24:30
Yes.
24:31
Understand someone else's idea.
24:32
And yeah, exactly.
24:34
If you're in a group, you question each other's ideas and therefore you have a
24:39
greater outlook on life, I would say.
24:41
Yes.
24:43
OK.
24:45
Is that what you're saying?
24:47
It's it's it's a different education system.
24:49
When I went to school, there were 30 to 40 kids in a class and everyone learned the
24:51
same thing.
24:53
It was reading, writing arithmetic and that was it.
24:55
And you learned the times table and you learned English literature and English
24:57
language, et cetera.
24:59
And it was all set.
25:01
There was no individuality.
25:03
We all had to learn the same thing.
25:05
Whereas today, I think you have to say little David, little Viv, little Lindsay.
25:06
They're very, very different.
25:07
They have different outlooks and they have different skills.
25:11
So let's put them in this class or this group rather than just all in the same
25:15
class.
25:17
It has to be individualized, I think, David, as an educator.
25:19
Crawford is an example of that.
25:21
Maybe, maybe they're progressive.
25:24
Very much so.
25:25
But I was knocked out by...
25:28
They've just come out, I think they write a different exam, and the results came out
25:34
this morning, it was in business day,
25:36
and I looked along the line there, and I said, Viv, you're in trouble, boy.
25:39
You're going to have a lot of youngsters there that are going to come and challenge
25:44
you, and so on.
25:46
But it's marvellous to see, I mean, that you've got this level of students, you
25:51
know,
25:51
that these people are coming out with these incredible results.
25:56
And we've got the schools that can produce it.
25:59
Also, credit to them.
26:02
I just want to point something out here.
26:03
What David is talking about, what these kids are studying, actually, by looking at
26:07
the holy books, they're studying philosophy.
26:09
You know what I mean?
26:11
That's what they're actually debating.
26:13
It always amazed me that if you look at any part in human history until we had
26:17
formal schooling like we have right now,
26:19
that you would never be considered to be an educated person if you didn't know
26:20
about philosophy.
26:22
All through thousands of years of human history.
26:24
If you were to be an educated person, you had to know philosophy.
26:28
How is it that we don't have a philosophy class in school?
26:31
How crazy is that?
26:32
That the one thing that has always been thought to be, because an educated person
26:38
is philosophy, the ability to think,
26:40
and yet no school has like as much focus on philosophy as they do on English,
26:46
science, math, you know, etc.
26:48
It's such a weird kind of dichotomy, isn't it?
26:50
It really is, and if you can be bothered and you're on X or whatever it is,
26:57
get into a site called Philosophy Quotes, and it sends you something per week,
27:02
five quotes per week from modern and historical philosophers.
27:07
And I find it actually very illuminating.
27:11
And you read something that was written 300 BC or something, and you say,
27:17
I can apply this to US politics at the moment.
27:20
It is incredible.
27:21
I agree with you.
27:22
Philosophical quotes to me of philosophical studies are terribly
27:28
interesting.
27:30
There's a BBC program that goes on at a ridiculous time, like one o'clock in the
27:34
morning, about philosophers, and it's from the
27:36
1970s, and it's really boring, but goodness me, it's insightful.
27:39
Anyway, we're going off a tangent, and this is why the show is so popular.
27:44
You've got to go on to the Monty Python.
27:46
you know of the philosopher's soccer game and football game now that is a proper
27:53
tangent um
27:55
david and viv we've got to talk about now the results that came out this week
28:00
because one of the main reasons i get you two in is
28:02
because of your tech and your ai success and knowledge is is
28:05
it a case that we are now getting different companies doing different things
28:12
and therefore yielding different results for investors
28:14
is there a difference between apple and meta and Tesla and Nvidia, for example,
28:18
and you have to be selective now, you can't just buy.
28:21
This is a theme that I always bring up in every asset class, but I'm going to bring
28:25
it up now,
28:26
given the fact that we've had all these results this week.
28:28
And I'll start with you, Viv, on this one.
28:30
Do you have to be selective with the Viv Govender Rand Swiss portfolio?
28:37
Look, I mean, you do better if you were selective.
28:38
I mean, if you'd gotten sanded with stuff micron like I did, you'd have done much
28:42
better.
28:42
But micron alone also did 200 plus percent last year.
28:44
So, yeah.
28:46
If you buy into the overall sector and don't, you know, just, you know,
28:52
even about it.
28:53
I mean, David mentioned, I think last week was that ETF Sox, right?
28:57
Yes, yes.
28:59
Sox ETF has done 100% in the last two years.
29:02
You know what I mean?
29:04
It is up quite significantly this year as well.
29:06
So I do think you can still, because the underlying trend is so strong, you will
29:13
get, you know, some benefit from that.
29:15
But obviously, you'll do better.
29:17
by picking the winners and yes you're right we might be coming to a point right
29:22
now where uh the actual real winners are going to be emerging so we're going to
29:24
know who is the
29:26
amazon or who's the price.coms of this internet of this particular phase of the
29:29
of the of the market but that being said like i said sanders
29:31
look at sandisk's performance look at the other memory companies have been insane
29:36
and with regards to microsoft i still have belief in
29:38
microsoft because microsoft has the same benefit that google has or alphabet has i
29:42
would suspect that if you
29:44
had We had to look at the combined IQ.
29:46
of these two organizations.
29:48
There's no organization in the world that can come close to either Microsoft or
29:52
Google in terms of the pure amount of
29:54
brains that they've accumulated over the last couple of decades.
29:55
There's so many geniuses just sitting, calculating a salary at Microsoft and at
29:58
Google.
29:59
And if they get under threat and they have the desire to actually go and focus on
30:05
this, there's no way Anthropic can build a better
30:07
AI bot for Excel than Microsoft can.
30:09
You know what I mean?
30:11
There's no way you can have some, you know, to a small company building a better
30:17
AI system that's going to communicate with your Gmail than Google can.
30:21
I think that these big companies still have an advantage that has not been
30:25
replaced yet.
30:27
The one thing I've been nervous about is some of the smaller guys out there.
30:28
I'm hearing very bad news about OpenAI because apparently they are not quite
30:35
catching up with the next
30:37
thing.
30:39
And they are so dependent on the hype.
30:41
Whereas Google and Microsoft can actually go out and get funding from their own
30:43
internal sources, OpenAI has to go and raise funds each time.
30:45
And if they ever have a period in which they are not considered to be the best
30:48
thing around, they're going to have trouble raising the money.
30:50
So I think some of these smaller guys might have problems.
30:52
But I still think if you're just going to be basically saying buy one or two stocks,
30:56
buying an Alphabet is not a bad idea at the moment.
30:58
Okay, David, over to you.
30:59
Have you chosen one out of the companies that released results as we can say,
31:05
I want this one and I don't want this one?
31:08
You know, I must tell you, I was impressed by Apple and I haven't been a big Apple
31:12
holder.
31:13
And, you know, when you see that their sales were up 23%, also services.
31:20
Look, they're slowing down on services was up very strongly as well.
31:25
And I just think that for me,
31:29
it just showed that there's a breakthrough or a turnaround in taste.
31:33
The fact that they did well in India, they're well in China as well, you know,
31:38
because there's been criticism about that.
31:40
Yes, underlying goods are costing a bit more in order to put them all together.
31:43
But when I watch my kids, when I watch the people around me.
31:49
And this is what's so interesting.
31:52
I like to have a big screen in front of me.
31:54
That's it.
31:55
You know, I like to operate like I'm at Houston Space Center.
32:02
But when I look at younger people,
32:09
everything is on their phone.
32:10
Everything.
32:11
And their whole life is dictated.
32:14
It's almost a link.
32:15
They cannot survive with it.
32:17
And so.
32:19
I was impressed with that.
32:20
I've got to go through it.
32:21
I'm sure the shares will be down now because for some other reason.
32:25
But the way I'm approaching it is almost, you know, looking at the backbone, which
32:32
is ASML,
32:34
NVIDIA, Taiwan, Semiconductor, Micron, those kind of companies.
32:37
So I still believe in the backbone.
32:39
And then, you know, the platforms that are monetizing all of this, you know, cloud,
32:45
advertising.
32:48
whatever, which is Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta.
32:53
The one that's eluding me, and this might kill me,
32:58
is the software houses.
33:02
They've been under huge pressure, ServiceNow, Adobe, Salesforce, and so on.
33:06
And I can't believe that you can actually adopt these, put them into your business,
33:12
because very few companies have really adopted AI.
33:15
I mean, I'm talking across a broad spectrum.
33:18
And you're going to need expertise.
33:20
And I believe that there's going to be opening for these, but they haven't done
33:25
anything up to now.
33:27
But I mean, you can go down the chain.
33:28
And also, if you listen to the power side of it,
33:33
there are massive gaps there as well.
33:36
So if I'm going in and constructing a portfolio, it's across all these segments.
33:43
And the one thing that, you know, with SanDisk, which is what...
33:47
Verve has been talking about.
33:49
I mean, no one took this into consideration that you're going to need
33:55
memory, which is the Micron side, the Samsung side,
33:57
and certainly SanDisk.
33:59
SanDisk was, you know, you'd go to a shop and you'd put the little disc into your
34:03
camera and you'd
34:05
store your pictures on that.
34:07
You know, I mean, they're much bigger than that.
34:09
But I like to go across the chain.
34:10
If I've got to put it together, I want the whole supply chain.
34:14
Thank you very much, gentlemen.
34:15
I'll leave you on this now because Viv was talking about philosophy and the teaching
34:21
of philosophy in schools,
34:23
or rather the lack thereof.
34:24
Okay, I'll give you from philosophers from philosophers quotes, which I get every
34:28
week.
34:29
The first quote was as follows,
34:32
neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the
34:37
making of genius.
34:39
Love, love, love.
34:41
That is the soul of genius.
34:43
And that came from Wolfgang I'm Amadeus Mozart, 1756 to 1791,
34:47
whose birthday it was earlier this week.
34:49
And the quote that I'll leave you with, I think this is all aimed at Trump,
34:55
actually, in the Trump administration.
34:57
Men, be kind to your fellow men.
34:57
This is your first duty.
34:59
Kind to every age and station.
35:01
Kind to all that is not foreign to humanity.
35:05
What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?
35:08
And that was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712.
35:11
to 1778 in his book Emile Orr on Education. There you are, gentlemen.
35:18
We've been talking about money and this and that, and I will end on money,
35:22
actually, because that's my duty.
35:24
This looks a little bit like 1987, a sort of mini version.
35:27
It started on the Wednesday and Thursday in 1987, October the 19th, and
35:32
I think we're getting something like it now, with the gold price down 5.6%,
35:38
the silver price down nearly 14%, you
35:41
the other stocks getting whacked a bit i won't ask you to comment on on that but
35:48
it's got a feeling
35:50
about it viv governor is from rand swiss the award-winning rand swiss and david
35:55
chapira is from sas and securities and don't forget to
35:57
go to the sas and securities website to enter the crystal challenge because i'm
36:01
going to be doing that and i'll beat you all
36:03
thank you gentlemen The views and opinions expressed in these podcasts are those of
36:08
Lindsay Williams and
36:10
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36:29
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36:36
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