Profit margins are being squeezed by decreased spending power of consumers. That is true, but it is also not the full story. Competitive pressures, buyer and supplier power dictate sustainable margins in the medium to long term. photo credit: abooth202 Fin24.com has a story this morning around Shoprite’s results and pricing strategy going forward. The…
Moneyweb has an article describing the failure of the South African insurance industry to provide insurance to the wider population, including lower income markets such as the banking sector has done. There are some interesting points to discuss here, and I’m certainly not saying the industry could not do more. However, there are some fairly…
What do the names Oneway, Bull, Kansvatter, Inthemoney, The Bull! and Millionaire in the making have in common? They’re all optimistic, aggressive names used in the Make A Million competition. They’re also, as of right now, all in the bottom ten out of nearly 300 entrants and have all lost everything but a few rand…
Bodie, Kane and Marcus wrote a wonderful textbook used in finance in universities around the world. I remember reading one of the “boxes” during a lecture at UCT many years ago. It described an ingenious money-making strategy: Start 16 apparently independent investment advisory newsletters. In the first year, 8 of them forecast gold (or oil,…
Peter Schiff on YouTube predicting the current financial market problems while the experts laugh. Telling.
A comment came in today on an old article about the dodgy lending scheme Rudie Visagie was proposing. The reader “trymore” provides some details of a new deal apparently being run by Rudie Visagie. As I stated last time this gentleman’s name came up, I have no personal interest or involvement here at all. My…
[There is an additional post for the 2010 competition on how to not lose money in the make a million competition.] The Make a Million competition is in its fourth year. The aim? Take a personal investment of R10,000 and compete with other “investors” to earn the highest return over a short period of a…
I struggled to find a decent data-set of past economic indicators off the web. I’m sure there’s an easier way, but I had to trawl the horrible formats of Stats-SA and the Reserve Bank to get the mangled data underlying this graph. Seems like Stats-SA is either deliberately obfuscating their data, or they’re working on…
