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Shapiroworld by Strictly Business · Strictly Business

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You're listening to Strictly Business Podcast with Lindsay Williams.
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It's Monday, so it's time for Shapiro World with David Shapiro from Sasson
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Securities in Johannesburg.
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David, I picked up an article online, of course, from a publication called
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Currency.
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It's an online South African business publication co-founded by our friend
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Julieta Televi, my ex-boss.
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And it's a good publication.
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They have good full-time writers and they have good contributors as well.
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one of which is David Shapiro, because he appeared in the last few days with
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something about diversification.
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And I read it and I thought, wait a second, this is going to annoy the
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establishment.
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Did you get any feedback from it?
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Because you said basically, you said, you tell us what you said.
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No, I think people get very defensive.
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My whole point was I used a very interesting example and
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I hope I got the school right.
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But when I was on the Stock Exchange Committee back in the 1980s, in the
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mid-80s, we used to run a competition.
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And the whole competition was to try and attract young people,
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matric or thereabouts, and the standard nine, ten,
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to become involved in the economy, understand the stock market, the workings.
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And there was a competition, which I don't think there was prize money.
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It was nothing more than...
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bragging rights and a cup.
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And you would get a certain amount to invest over a six-month period.
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And the idea was to invest.
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And we had these girls team from, I think it was Freiburg Hurschool.
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I remember Freiburg for some reason or not.
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And anyway, what they did is they just took the money and bought Villages.
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Now, you might not even remember Villages.
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Villages was one of these...
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Early mines on the Witwatersrand.
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Yes.
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Near Crown Mines.
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And it was depleted.
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It was mined out.
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Yeah.
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Nothing there.
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Nothing left.
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I don't know.
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There might have been the tailings, the dumps or something there that attracted
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value or they wanted to use the shell.
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Anyway, you know, it just went against the grain.
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And what happened is that six months later, they did nothing.
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They just stood with their… was stuck with their villages, and they won the
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competition.
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But, you know, being on the committee, everybody started.
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We had to say, wow, this just wasn't cricket.
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You know, they didn't build a proper portfolio of dividend-paying stocks and so
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on.
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And at the end of the day, they did what we wanted.
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But that wasn't in the rules.
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They just said whoever makes the most money, surely.
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That's exactly.
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So, you know, I love this.
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and even in the competition I run now, which was the...
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Crystal Challenge, which ended Friday the 31st.
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That was the last day.
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It was a 10-month competition.
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You had to choose five stocks.
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We had three gentlemen, three men who didn't know each other.
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Yes.
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And they all bought gold shares.
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They bought five gold shares, and obviously they won hands down as well,
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just simply on gold.
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There was no diversification.
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Well, wait a second.
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There was someone like Neil Froneman or Bernard Swanepoel who said, well, they
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were diversified.
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They had five different gold stocks.
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Five different gold stocks, yeah.
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But the rules are, oh, I'm going to put a bank in here.
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Let me put a retailer in and everything.
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And they knocked it out.
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So I wrote an article just on that basis saying,
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but these winners, these people don't read textbooks.
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And, you know, they just won because they had an instinct that we never had.
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They just beat orthodox behavior.
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So I think that's, you know, markets can be very unpredictable.
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But what I led to, I said, you know, we all preach diversification.
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In other words, you've got to spread your risks.
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The trouble is that if you spread them too widely, you miss out on opportunity.
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And the point I was trying to make is coming back to artificial intelligence or
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technology counters.
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I'm saying, you know, if you would have done,
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if you would have invested widely spread into 40 stocks, you know,
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and only a few were AI, you wouldn't have got the full benefit of the growth.
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You know, because outside of those technology stocks, growth was very
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stunted.
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There wasn't really anything you could have got into.
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So the whole point is that if you concentrate, if you conscientious do your
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homework.
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And understand where you're going.
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Sometimes these concentrated or convicted bids can be far better than spreading too
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widely.
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I came into this business through being a commodity trader and with commodities,
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a commodity futures trader or rather broker.
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And my attitude always was when I handled a few clients' money, we'd say, right.
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We're getting into gold.
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It's $1,000 an ounce.
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If it goes down 10%, we'll stop ourselves out.
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We'll put in a stop loss.
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And that was it.
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That was the sort of same theory that you've got.
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You don't mind if you put everything into something as long as you have a conviction
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that it's going
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somewhere and there is some sort of downside risk.
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In my case, it was a stop loss.
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Now, you couldn't have done that with an AI portfolio if you'd have bought it at
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the beginning of the year.
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Because you would have got knocked out with your stop loss by Liberation Day.
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And then you would have seen yourself stranded with no position at all because
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the market went rocketing up to new
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highs.
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So it's a difficult one.
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But David, when do you decide if you are not diversified,
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when do you decide that the asset class or the sector that you've chosen is a loser?
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You know, it's an interesting point because especially now.
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And this is what I've been trying to go through in my mind now.
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The more I look into the market, I say, okay, I want to diversify.
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I have been exposed.
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I mean, I haven't been reckless, not at all.
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But I've enjoyed some deep concentration.
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The problem is that, Lindsay, and this is the point that we need to look at and
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debate.
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Everything today is technology.
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Wherever I went, looking elsewhere, I said, Well,
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where do I go that is not technology or is not linked to semiconductors or some
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form of tech?
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You know, even Apple, the phone, that is our life today, whether you like it or
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not, you know.
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Without an Apple, not an Apple phone, without a smartphone, you're just not part
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of the world.
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You know, you can't communicate, you can't do SMS, whatever.
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And you can't, you know, it's so much part of our lives.
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My point is that, well, what do I go to?
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Procter & Gamble or something and make nappies or pampers?
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I suppose people will say just as much as an SMS, a text message,
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or going to Grok or
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ChatGPT or Copilot is part of your life when you need to find out the history of
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the US Civil War,
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just eating a KitKat or buying nappies from one of these defensive companies.
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That's also part of your life.
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So I suppose there is a case to say, sit down with a group of people and say,
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what can you not do without and base a portfolio on that?
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Yes.
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You're coming to a good point.
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But you've got to have growth.
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And where's growth going to come from?
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Oh, you see, the other thing is that when I look to say, okay, let me diversify from
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AI.
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Where do I go?
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And the thing is that if you go back over the last five years, our behavior,
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our patterns have changed so much.
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You know, we don't eat in restaurants anymore.
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Yeah, we want to get Uber Eats.
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That's what I would say.
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You know, you want to go to the movie house?
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No, or theater?
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Nah, too much trouble.
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We'll stream something at home.
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You know, even presentations.
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You know, we can't get audiences.
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for presentations anymore.
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They don't want to come.
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They'd rather wait and say, we'll watch the recording.
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Do you know what I mean?
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Exactly as they're going to do here, they will listen to the pod, this podcast in
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their own time.
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That's the beauty of it.
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So I think clothing, we stay at home.
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People are not even drinking alcohol anymore.
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socializing.
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Where did that come from?
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I mean, I would have thought the people working at home and having more time on
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their hands, they'd drink more, but no, they're drinking much less.
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It's fallen off a cliff.
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It's extraordinary.
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I hardly know anyone that drinks anymore, myself included.
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The other thing is that I was looking at Rekord and Benkheiser as part of
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investigating that,
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which is Dettol and Disprin and a whole lot of other brands.
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They also do Durex.
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And intimate products have fallen as well.
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Demand for intimate.
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Yeah.
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People aren't mating anymore.
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No.
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Not at all because they don't know how to.
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Well, yeah.
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So if you look at I think there was something in The Economist this weekend.
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I haven't looked at it.
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It's how people are preferring to stay single even though there's a certain
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amount of loneliness you
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know their lives they don't want boyfriends anymore i don't know a man
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always wants a girlfriend but it seems that the woman don't want
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boyfriends anymore i can understand
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that too much trouble too much anxiety well it started in japan of course when
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the birth rate started to
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fall quite sharply and it became of concern to the authorities and now south
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korea is another one where it's not keeping up
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with the In order to maintain the population or even grow it slightly,
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you've got to have 1.8 kids and they're only producing 0.7 or something like that
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per couple.
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People, yeah, you're quite right.
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People don't, people, well, I've never thought that men and women should be
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together anyway because fundamentally we're so different.
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I mean, your marriage is testament to the fact that men and women can get on
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together because it's lasted for so long.
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But generally, the majority of people of different genders don't like each other or
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rather.
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can't get on together but anyway that's another story i'm just rambling but that's
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what i'm getting at is that we've got to now
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decide okay i'm getting out of this what do i get into you know those those uh
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companies that um
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are valued very highly well they're under a bit of pressure the other thing is like
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you
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know the the advertising and i think so many brands are coming under pressure
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because advertising or
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marketing has changed you know it's now influences.
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that you go on to TikTok or you go into Instagram, you go on to those kind of
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things to find out what products.
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So everything is being turned upside down.
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Anyway, what was the… I'm going through the exercise.
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What was the reaction from the old school establishmentarians?
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Oh, no, no.
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They didn't like it.
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I got one snotty really, which I had to reply to.
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Basically, a chap who said that.
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You know, it's pathetic that I'm still working at my age.
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What's that got to do with it?
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Yeah, basically saying that.
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And I must have been a pretty useless student or something to that effect
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because of,
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you know.
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And I came back and I said, you know, you're not wrong.
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I wasn't the greatest student.
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I prefer to draw, to caricature my lecturers, and I prefer to play.
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football for Wits, you know, as a left winger, much more than I enjoyed studying.
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And I said, yeah, you know, you're dead right.
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But here I am making money for my clients.
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Also criticizing.
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I know what they said.
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I said, you know, you're criticizing my stock picking.
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That's why.
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It must have been a useless stock picker.
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I said, that's legendary.
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I said, because I came in my own competition near the bottom.
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And I said, my wife, who thinks PE, a PE ratio is something to do with a gym class.
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You know, beat me by hundreds of places.
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So, you know, you touched a raw nerve there.
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You were pretty right.
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So anyway, but I think the establishment get very upset when you challenge their,
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you know, this spreadsheet way of this is the way you conduct yourself.
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Well, there's so many.
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There's so many in South Africa.
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I mean, the financial services industry in South Africa is very well developed,
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highly sophisticated.
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well regulated and all those things but there is a certain group of people that
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say local is lecker and i was speaking to a chap who i
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speak to quite regularly and he's been a proponent of diversifying offshore getting
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as much money offshore
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as possible and he's been pilloried for it because it seemed it's deemed to be
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unpatriotic
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anti-south african but it's of course a lot of nonsense david so i would imagine
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that uh you know that
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That sort of attitude would have come through with the replies you got to your
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article.
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Yeah.
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You know what it is?
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I think people are scared to get to be wrong.
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You know, they're scared of being wrong, so they overprotect themselves.
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They haven't got the courage of their convictions to say, this is where I'm
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going, this is where I want to focus on.
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And I think that's the you've got to have the confidence in Marcus to say, look,
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this is where I want to be.
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You know, I've never been anti-South African in the sense that if there were
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South African
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companies that could stand up on a world, you know, like our rugby team.
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But I mean, we haven't got those in the market.
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You know, there's none of our companies here that can stand up to anything that is
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quoted on, you know, quoted.
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on the NASDAQ or anything like that.
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They just don't match the kind of skills or they haven't got the same kind of
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growth.
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South Africa has been left behind.
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It hasn't been left behind in terms of young people leaving South Africa and
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working for these companies overseas,
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but actual development of companies within the borders of the republic, that simply
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hasn't happened.
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Now, let's talk about the companies that you've spoken about because what's
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happened is you had AI and there were just a few companies that dominated.
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now It's splintering everywhere.
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And this is where diversification comes in because you're going to say to yourself,
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what about the auxiliary services?
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It's like an airline starts up.
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Do you buy the airline or do you buy the companies that service the airline or the
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hotels at the airport, that sort of thing?
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So have you got the problem now, David,
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where you have to look at AI and choose which sector of AI is the future?
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That's very, very difficult, I would imagine.
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That's the danger, is that there are too many businesses coming on that we don't
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know enough about.
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And that's where I get nervous, because until you know who's in charge, what
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they're doing,
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and have had a decent look at them, I think remain very cautious.
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So I'm with you in that sense that you don't want to just keep buying every new
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IPO
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that comes onto the market.
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You know, and that's where the danger is.
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So you've got to continue to do your work.
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Look at the results.
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Look at the earnings numbers that come out and all the incumbents, all the big
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companies still holding forth.
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In other words, still dominating the industry or still doing well.
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So, Lindsay, that's a very important point, you know,
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that it does breed a lot of stuff that might not be successful.
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There's going to be a lot of...
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fall out along the way.
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So I stick to the main ones, you know, but it doesn't mean, you know what I keep
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saying,
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you can't just press the snooze button, you know, you can't just wake up and press
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the snooze button.
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You've got to still be very vigilant, agile, and conscientious, you know, about
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this.
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So it's not a gimme, it's not just, oh, well, you know, anything that's got AI
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attached to it is going to win.
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Well, that harks back to the late
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1990s where anything to do with a dot-com had to be good.
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I mean, it's a completely different era, of course,
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and AI is a proper industry that's going to continue to be with us for the rest of
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certainly our lives, and for everybody's life,
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I would imagine, in the future in various forms.
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And how can we possibly predict what AI is going to be?
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in one year's time, let alone in 20 years' time, in a generation's time.
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But, David, people have been talking a lot about the bubble, and there have been
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people from august institutions on Wall Street,
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investment banks, saying, well, we think there could be a bubble here.
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And then at the end of last week, people said, oh, we're going to sell this because
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so-and-so said there might be a bubble.
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And then on Friday, the market was down about 1.5% the NASDAQ or something, and
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then I looked at my screen at
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9, 10 o'clock at night.
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And it was only down 0.2%.
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And I thought, yeah, people said, what are you talking about?
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There's no bubble here.
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It's not a tulip.
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It's not the South Sea bubble.
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This is real.
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And if you choose the right company, as you've just highlighted, then just carry
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on with it.
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Is that what you're doing?
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Until I'm not exiting now, that's the thing.
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I just, I'm watching very carefully.
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It's very hard.
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I think that valuations are stretched.
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And there might be some companies that but you know what can happen in a situation
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like that is that they
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go nowhere and earnings catch up over a year or two or something like that rather
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than just being sold
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off and falling in a heap.
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And the worry and I'm coming back to what I've been saying earlier.
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Okay, I'm going to take profits now, Lindsay.
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I'm going to say I'm getting out now.
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So where do I go?
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What do I do with my money?
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And is there anything else that can offer me the same prospects?
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And that's where I'm struggling at the moment.
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You know, with people calling it a bubble and saying, you know, we need to take some
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profits, that's fine.
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But I'll go into cash if you want to, that's fine.
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But I don't think there's anything else.
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And now I'm coming on to another important point.
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Yes.
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Do not think if this bubble bursts that you're going to be
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spared.
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A shower, you know, I think that's the best way I could put it.
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In other words, if that bubble bursts, believe me, everybody gets hurt.
19:32
And we've seen that.
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Oh my goodness, the unravelling of the various financial gearing that's going on,
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if there is a burst of the bubble,
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is going to be enormous.
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You can forget about gold, you can forget about bonds, everything will get
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slaughtered.
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That's what I'm saying.
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Don't think you're going to be protected.
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Don't think your little holding of 5% in gold is going to save you.
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No, it's not.
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It's really not.
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It's going to exacerbate the situation, in fact.
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That's it.
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If this bubble bursts, everybody, it's a tsunami, everybody gets wiped out, you
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know, taken away with it.
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So I think that's where perhaps, you know, people, oh, well, if I go into banks,
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believe me,
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the fallout as we saw in 07, 08, and as we saw in 2000, and, you know,
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when the bubble burst in 2000, the internet bubble, everybody goes.
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And it's, you know, that's the danger.
20:31
So don't think there's...
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There is protection out here.
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There may be a little bit of air that's let out of the bubble, maybe 7% to 10%,
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something like that,
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maybe as high as 15% in some stocks that have come late to the party.
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But the good quality ones will stay there.
20:47
I just want to ask you one more question before we wrap this up, David.
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And that is if AI brings back your father somehow and he sits down with you and he
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says,
20:56
show me your portfolio, please, son.
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And he says, well, this is the portfolio.
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And he says, okay.
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What's their multiple?
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What's their PE?
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You know, you spoke about PE with regards to your wife.
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Your dad told you about price earnings ratios, didn't he?
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When he sat you down on his knee and said, this is what this stock is and this is how
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we value it.
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If he looked at your portfolio now, he'd probably be a little bit disappointed in
21:24
his teachings.
21:26
Because there are no gold shares.
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Well, because there's no gold shares, first of all, but just analyzing the
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companies that you're in,
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because some of them are extremely highly valued by traditional methods.
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By traditional, they're highly valued.
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But you've got to look at what their sales prospects are, what the industry is.
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I just find that sticking to...
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Too closely to multiples can sometimes be a very detracting feature.
22:01
Just think about Capitec in our own context here, or Richemont,
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or any of these companies where the purists would always say, oh no, too
22:13
expensive, I'm not clicks,
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another company.
22:17
At the end of the day, you missed out and it keeps getting more and more expensive.
22:19
So I'm not really...
22:22
driven by a lot of those parts.
22:24
I like to look at the company.
22:26
There's so many factors that we put together.
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And those you can only do by doing what the chef said I shouldn't do anymore,
22:35
is work.
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In other words, I should be walking on the beach with a dog and grandchildren rather
22:42
than looking at my screen.
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But I think just even talking to you and you know the conversations we have with
22:49
Viv,
22:49
those are so important.
22:51
to understand markets,
22:52
because you go through so many things on a day-to-day basis,
22:58
so many iterations of how the market's performing, who's up top, why they're top,
23:05
why did they fall,
23:07
and so on.
23:09
And I can't look at pure ratios.
23:11
There's so many other things that kind of influence what you do in the market.
23:13
So it is different this time, in other words.
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You could go back 50 years.
23:18
and say to somebody, I'm not using these metrics anymore.
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And that person would say to you, well, that's ridiculous.
23:25
These things have been in place since stock markets were first formed.
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Is it different this time, David?
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Can you value an AI stock differently?
23:34
It's money.
23:35
It's the flow of money.
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That's what's different.
23:38
It's quite crazy just how much money and liquidity there is around, which we never
23:44
had in the early days.
23:46
You know, I always tell the story of Warren Buffett.
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When he first started to analyze companies, if he wanted information,
23:53
he had to write to the SEC or to the New York Stock Exchange and say, please send
24:00
me the balance sheet of ABC,
24:02
whatever company.
24:04
And a week later, it would come in the press, I mean in the post.
24:06
And he'd sit down there and he was able to analyze it and say, oh,
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this company is trading at a deep discount to its intrinsic value.
24:13
You can't do that anymore.
24:16
and so I think That's what's changed.
24:20
I think the traditional measures are still there.
24:24
I look very carefully at the...
24:26
income statement and at the balance sheet, balance sheet for debt,
24:30
income statement for sales and margins and so on.
24:35
The ratios are put to them.
24:37
I wouldn't buy like Palantir, which is at a 200 PE or something like that.
24:42
There are companies which are way ahead of where they should be.
24:46
But if it's a 30 or a 25 and it should only be down at a 20 or something, that
24:52
doesn't bother me.
24:54
That fine tuning doesn't bother me.
24:57
But I certainly wouldn't buy.
24:59
I remember when Curo was trading here in the hundreds and 200ps. Then you say
25:05
that's crazy,
25:07
that's silly.
25:09
Okay, so you're selective when it comes to so-called overvaluations.
25:11
You've mentioned two South African companies, Capitec and Clix.
25:15
And everybody said, no, don't buy Clix.
25:17
If you want a retailer, buy
25:19
Diskem or buy some other company that is not a pure Clix play opposition.
25:26
clicks play but something that's cheaper but no you would have lost a fortune in
25:32
comparison
25:34
and we lost a fortune on capitec for those very reasons yeah yeah and capitec is is
25:40
now i don't
25:42
know when i looked on friday i think it was back as being the biggest bank you
25:47
know on the jse i i must i must check
25:49
whether it's still popped
25:51
out uh you know overcome first round or standard bank And it just continues to
25:55
grow.
25:55
Its customers love it.
25:58
Its results are very attractive.
26:01
It's going into new areas, but it's very expensive.
26:06
But the growth has been outstanding.
26:09
Many years ago now, I lived just on the edge of Robertson in the little Karoo.
26:15
And I used to go into Robertson on a Saturday morning to go to the bank.
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In those days, you used to go to the bank.
26:21
I did anyway.
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I quite liked it because ABSA was empty.
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But you'd be driving through the town and there'd be a queue two blocks long of
26:32
people
26:33
going to Capitec.
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It would be workers, agricultural workers, whatever it is, who got paid weekly in
26:41
cash or whatever.
26:43
And they were going to Capitec.
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They weren't going to any of the big banks.
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And I'm not singling out ABSA because I'm an ABSA client and they've been good to
26:48
me.
26:48
But it was extraordinary.
26:52
I should have known then.
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I think it was about 600 grand a share at the time, maybe less.
26:59
And the customers love them.
27:00
And the reason is that it's very simple.
27:03
The offering is very simple.
27:05
And as opposed to the old traditional banks where you walked into these marble
27:12
halls and knocked on the door of your
27:14
bank manager.
27:16
So it is.
27:17
It's now valued at $457 billion.
27:22
which is ahead of first round, which is 451, and Standard Bank at 424.
27:28
So here you are.
27:29
And you know, our good old Ned Bank is, I don't know where it is.
27:33
Ned Bank's down 119.
27:38
And Absa's, I think, even, where's Absa?
27:40
I can't find it.
27:41
It must be bigger than Ned.
27:41
Sorry, 175.
27:42
It must be bigger, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.
27:44
175.
27:45
But I mean, it was an offshoot of the Bank of Burland, I think it was.
27:52
And EPSA was Trust Bank and Forks Trust.
27:55
The amalgamated banks of Southern Africa, in case a lot of people wouldn't know
28:00
that.
28:00
But it excluded Burland, which is now Capite.
28:03
Capite, silly.
28:04
David, okay, this is a really good lesson.
28:07
I'm going to promote this on X later on once it's up.
28:10
David, very quickly, football.
28:12
Arsenal last season would have lost that game against Sunderland.
28:16
They were really, really tough, and they look resilient and play attractive.
28:20
classy, skillful football at the same time.
28:23
So you must have been pleased with that.
28:24
But on the other hand, City were just out of this world.
28:29
They were superb.
28:30
Yeah, they were superb.
28:32
They frightened me.
28:33
I think they were so slick and so fast.
28:37
And Liverpool were just lost.
28:40
They just didn't know what to do.
28:42
And it was rather sad to see Liverpool.
28:47
And Doku.
28:49
He was brilliant.
28:50
Isn't he great?
28:52
He was superb.
28:53
I mean, you couldn't catch him.
28:56
They found him from a little French team called Rennes.
28:58
He was still?
29:00
A little Belgian guy just plying his trade in Ligue 1, in the middle of Ligue 1, and
29:06
suddenly City come along,
29:08
pluck him from virtual obscurity.
29:10
And now look at him.
29:11
He's a star for the Belgian national team, and he's probably going to be player of
29:16
the season.
29:16
He is today what...
29:17
Salah was last season, at the moment anyway.
29:21
Yeah, you can't read him.
29:23
I mean, he's left and right.
29:24
He's just brilliant.
29:27
And fast, incredibly fast.
29:30
And O'Reilly, whatever his name is, that tall, longer looks, you know, with a funny
29:36
haircut.
29:36
Nick O'Reilly, yeah.
29:39
He had Salah kind of all bottled up and superb.
29:44
I thought they were very good, yeah.
29:48
Unfortunately, we've got a two-week break now, David, because it's the
29:52
internationals again, so there's no football again.
29:54
So, yeah, I hate that.
29:56
It has to be done.
29:58
Yeah, I'm sorry to have disappointed you.
30:00
Anyway, David, I'm going to dash.
30:02
Thank you very much for your insight.
30:03
As I said, I'll put it up on later on, advertise it anyway.
30:07
David Shapiro is from SAS and Securities in Johannesburg, and that was Shapiro
30:11
World.
30:13
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30:19
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