You're listening to Strictly Business Podcast
with Lindsay Williams.
The JSC has closed its doors for another day.
And so it's time for the five o'clock shadow.
And as always on a Thursday,
it's the doubleheader Dream Team edition with Viv Govender
from Rands Swiss and David Shapiro from Sassfin
Securities in Johannesburg.
Now, many, many years ago,
when David Shapiro first started on the JSC,
the old Johannesburg Stock Exchange in the centre of town,
Diagonal Street,
one of the things he would look forward to was...
Because there were so many gold mines
listed, 30 to 40, I don't know how many it was,
but lots of them.
It probably looked forward to reserves updates and trading
updates and results coming out because that shaped the
fortune of the market.
Viv Govender and myself, on the other hand,
probably have grown up looking for
pronouncements from the US Federal Reserve.
GDP numbers, jobs numbers,
inflation numbers very recently have become terribly,
terribly important.
But one of the things started to focus.
market participants'minds.
And that is the set of results from a particular company
that has a 95% monopoly in the production of
artificial intelligence chips.
And we know the name of the company.
It's called
NVIDIA. And its results came out last night
after the market closed, immediate fall of 7%,
8%.
It's 8% in the share price.
Market's recovering today from that.
And it was inevitable that it did.
But one line really struck me,
and that was...
Having blockbuster numbers is no longer good
enough for investors.
And I thought, well, what is good enough then?
Viv, I'm going to start with you on this one.
Numbers, first of all, good, bad, indifferent, better,
worse, what?
In any other company, good.
But this is a company that's added over, I'd call this basically,
well over a trillion,
I think almost $2 trillion in the last few months
here, you know, in less than a year.
So for a company like that there,
you're looking at a situation in which You know,
currently the valuation is what is it about $3 trillion?
And it was it went up 150% over
the last basically year.
So we have that kind of increase in valuations,
even the spectacular numbers that NVIDIA has produced
is not enough to make the market you know, entirely happily.
That being said, the share price is only down a couple percent.
Still, if you had to look at it for the month today, for the last month,
for August alone, it's up 10%,
9.5%, 9.6%.
So yeah, results are, for any other company, great.
But it's all about valuation.
And this company is incredibly expensive at the moment,
with a PE ratio of about 71.
That being said, one more thing to add here.
It's very interesting looking at these things.
Demand is still very strong.
The situation, they have a problem.
The problem is they can't produce enough.
There's some issues with supply.
And also, interestingly enough, Jensen Wong,
the guy that runs NVIDIA.
And this is the weird thing.
I don't know if you guys, I told you guys this before.
But Jensen Wong, the guy that runs NVIDIA, And Lisa Su,
the woman that runs AMD, which is like the second competitor,
are first cousins.
Oh, so it's a family affair, in other words.
But Jason Wong has an incredible life story.
I think at one point in time, he was a boss by cleaning toilets and stuff.
It's all in his bio.
But he's very all in on things.
He hasn't always been right.
He was all in on crypto and he's all in AI.
So what he's also doing is that in fact,
NVIDIA is taking equity stakes in some AI startups as well.
So it's almost turning itself into an AI ETF.
And demand, like I said, is still super strong.
The big question, I mean, literally the $64 trillion question,
I'm not exaggerating when I say the trillion dollar question,
is the fact that, is the question whether or not,
will the next round of these LLMs be
as much better or have as much improvement as the previous
round does?
How many more cranks do you have in this basically,
in this scaling up technology?
If it is, we could add, you know,
These valuations are totally justified.
If we see the next round of,
it was GTPT5 coming out, or whatever they call it,
Orion, Strawberry, whatever they call the new version they're going to bring out.
When Grok 3,
when Llama 3 comes out and whatever it may be.
Are we going to be seeing, you know,
the new version being as much better as
the old version was?
You know what I mean?
Or its predecessor?
If that is true, totally justified.
If it is not, if we are hitting the top of scaling,
if we are picking off all these valuations, it's beat for...
Nvidia, beautiful Microsoft,
a lot of these guys are going to come down very strongly.
David, you said to me on Monday,
and this was repeated because you said it to Wayne McCurry as well,
apparently.
You said,
you can show me these numbers when they come out.
You said this on Monday, Tuesday, whatever it was.
When these numbers come out,
you can show them to me and I won't have a clue how the
market will interpret them.
It could be 10% up, 10% down.
And was that the case?
Did you have a look at them?
Were they too complicated?
Were they too convoluted?
What happened?
No, they weren't at all.
And they were superb results.
I mean, as Viv said at the opening, any other company.
I mean, if you look at them in absolute terms, I mean,
it's an incredible number.
And particularly when this company has come
from, you know,
over the last couple of years.
And the product's good.
And as he said,
Jensen Wong said, you know,
we're going to be selling lots and lots of these
Blackwell chips later on.
Blackwell, I think.
I don't understand how they made up,
but I do believe that it's a better chip in the
sense that you use less electricity and you can use the
same hardware and process more data and so
on.
My point,
when I look at it,
at the moment it's running two laps ahead of its
competitors.
They might catch up.
NVIDIA might tie up.
But I think it's become an
obsession in the market.
Yes.
You know what I mean?
It's an absolute obsession.
It's almost Trump versus Harris.
You've got two sides that are going at each other.
The bears get angry because they
want the share to come down.
There's massive short positions there.
On the other hand,
there are those that like it and are buying it and
believe in it.
So we're in the middle.
And I think today's performance,
I've been watching it,
and everything is up today.
The markets are incredibly strong.
We've got a good GDP number out of the United States.
Everything's pointing towards the U.S.
economy doing well.
And the one stock that's down is NVIDIA.
Why?
Because of this absolute emotion
around it.
The bears don't want to capitulate yet.
They're going to say, we're going to show you.
We're going to show you.
We're going to go even further, more shorts,
more shorts.
And so we're getting this fight and you just watch on the sidelines and
say, okay.
Whatever, but I think this year,
the other thing, Lindsay,
I listened to quite a few analysts as
well.
Yes.
And the majority are along,
saying buy and weakness, you know,
with a target price 140, 150,
even higher.
And we're not talking about small houses.
You know, it's not some isolated analyst or
Hindenburg there who's trying to make a name for themselves.
But, you know, some of the big houses, you know.
I'm saying the analyst that we talked to as
well from UBS in Singapore
is bullish and continues to remain.
And I listened to UBS this morning as well.
The same thing.
So I said, OK, I'm going along with this.
I'm happy with what I see.
But, you know, Viv is right.
I think there will be a time where we say, OK, we've had enough.
It's time to go look somewhere else.
Yeah, the spoilsports,
the bears in the market, I presume they're talking in their book.
There was one chap that said,
I'm not sure that this momentum can continue.
I'm not sure that they can maintain this monopoly.
And 95% is technically a monopoly.
And I'm not sure that the share price
valuation can be justified.
So obviously saying we think it's going to come down.
But there must be a graveyard somewhere with people that
have shorted NVIDIA over the years.
One, one.
comment for this you'll appreciate and i won't mention
anybody's name because i like the man but i
received last night because i'd made a comment
talking on the radio uh
because uh jensen wrong had sold some shares i
said you know he's also entitled to buy a hamburger and
chips meaning listen you know sometimes you are
allowed to cash in a bit to do something you want to buy
you want to buy a new motor car or something you know
it
depends but i got a a um
you
a podcast or a speech that went on for 30 minutes,
you know, doing the same as the Hindenburg
research, you know,
trying to find conspiracy theories about, you know,
that's what we're up against.
I just, okay.
So that's people out there got incredible
emotions about something.
So it's a company, man.
You know, you don't like it, sell it.
You don't have to get, you know, we don't have to get emotive.
We don't have to get involved physically,
mentally and everything.
It's just another.
It's just another listed business.
Yeah, and let the people enjoy its success.
Stop trying to pick holes in it.
Stop trying to be clever and calling the top of the
market.
It's just nonsense.
Go with the momentum.
And when it turns, you might miss the first few percent,
but then you can start to look at offloading
a little bit.
I don't understand it.
People are so impatient and so petty.
Viv, you're neither impatient nor petty.
If you're a big money manager, asset manager,
and you're mainly involved in US equities.
This presents a problem for you, not just NVIDIA,
but also the other mega tech stocks and also some of
the pharma companies that produce weight loss drugs.
You have to be in them,
even though the valuations are quite stretched.
You have to be in them because if you're not in them, your peers are in them.
And when they go up,
you're going to start to fall back in the performance table.
But on the other hand,
if you are in them and they fall and they can fall
because they're so stretched.
then you're leaving your investors,
your clients vulnerable.
It's a double-edged sword, isn't it?
I just wonder.
It was like the NASPERS process days of the JSE
when they were collectively, I think,
something like 25%.
It's a conundrum, Viv.
Look, I mean, not to like talk my own book,
but I do run one of the portfolios I run is an AI portfolio.
And NVIDIA is my biggest position.
It wasn't the biggest when I started off.
I just haven't sold it since I bought it.
And it's turned out to be my biggest position by, you know,
a little bit here.
And it's, you know,
done over 170% in the last year for me.
Because of, yeah, it's done that well.
But I do think we have to be aware of certain things.
I mean, you know.
We always say, look at history.
Most people look at history, look back to the year 2000, or not,
the year 1947,
1950.
Right about there, because that's after World War II.
That's when they look back at history.
They have a 70-year history.
But looking back at the longer term,
where we do have these gigantic
technological revolutionaries,
what I would expect out there is sailing.
Sailing turned a little country off the coast of
Europe, England, into the world's superpower.
If you look at all of history, you would have never thought
it's possible for a tiny little nation, you know,
like it was, to be this dominant over the world, you know,
bigger than the Roman Empire.
And it was all about technology.
If this technology is real,
the valuations and the expectations we have of what a company
can be worth is just out the window.
It could be something like, you know, turning it, you know,
a $10 plus trillion valuation on Nvidia
is not out of the limits if this thing is real.
Because what happens is then you get into
a basically money for IQ kind of situation.
If you have more money, you can buy more chips.
The more chips will give you a higher IQ.
The higher IQ earns you more money from your AI.
That's what it is.
And that becomes a feedback loop.
And the guy that basically provides the chips is the one that's guaranteed to make
money all the
way through.
And I think that's what is happening right now.
That's the belief system they have in the tech market right now.
And
NVIDIA is not like some of these like cryptocurrencies or whatever that
went up in national evaluation, but there's nothing basic.
They do a $50 billion buyback,
$5 billion buyback, share buyback.
They are printing money hand over first.
So, oh, but this is a very profitable business.
The only question is whether that this profitability justifies the
$3 trillion valuation.
So that is the only question I'll ever get.
As a business, it's doing incredibly well.
It's doing incredibly well.
Sorry to interrupt.
One last thing.
This is not going to take five years to find out whether this is real or not.
It's going to happen within the next...
I would say six months to nine months.
By the first quarter of next year,
you will know what GPT-5 looks like.
You will know what the next level of GROK, I think the level four,
GROK-3, GPT-5, CLOB-4, whatever it's going to be.
These things will be out by this first quarter of next year.
The problem we have here,
as the chief technology officer of
Microsoft said this, we are the exponential curve,
right?
The exponential curve is AI.
The problem is that we are limited by hardware.
So we only take...
a reading of this exponential curve every
couple of years because that's when the hardware shifts up to the next level.
And we're going to want to get the next point of that curve.
We kind of know what a good point looks like, what a bad point looks like,
and we're going to see, like I said,
within basically the next six months,
what the next point looks like.
And we'll know for certain, overwiped or not.
It's not going to be a question.
Okay.
David, you wanted to say something.
I just think, you know, listening to Viv,
Yeah, he's right.
I mean, this is nothing new.
But the beauty is that
I don't know how much money Viv has got and how much he
controls.
But I promise you,
for what I and I'm okay.
I've got a nice business.
I press one button, we're out.
You know, that's it.
I don't have to labor over it.
Let's get out.
Done.
That's relative to where
we are.
And that's why I like to
I don't think we have to make decisions yet on the PEs or
anything.
And when it comes back, we might give it back.
Or you said it, I think, Lindsay.
Give it back a few points.
Are we gone?
Okay.
You know, we're up so much.
I promise you, Viv bought these at 10 cents.
I mean, $10 at the moment, relative,
because it's split a couple of times, 120.
He's got a margin there that's as big as the Indian
Ocean.
very good okay so we're sticking with we're not panicking we're not
being naysayers we're not being uh
predictors of doom and gloom we just stay with the
thing it's a brilliant company there hasn't been a company like it in the
last few years i can't even think of a comparison i can
think of you know the microsoft and the apples of this world yeah
brilliant but this thing has captured the imagination like no
company i've ever seen in my career now
then david let's cut
come back down to earth and talk about the jse
uh today blue label impala i can't remember san
lem or santan had a trading update but one i had one yeah
the trading updates on numbers but anyway i don't really want to talk
about them too much i want to talk about one that you know quite
well because it was it's split the original
company founded by your mate brian joffey
as split and we got bid vest in south africa bid corp the
international operation food distribution etc
What a set of numbers.
I mean, they said in the opening, you think, oh,
goodness me, these numbers are not going to be good.
It said because of this, this, this, and the economic that,
and this, the other.
In other words, really quite gloomy stuff.
And then they say we increased our revenue by
15.1%.
Incredible numbers for a company like that.
There's a story there.
And, you know, I mean,
I know Brian very well from my
old Greensight days and everything.
And I grew with the company.
And when I say I grew, I wasn't.
I was an outsider looking in.
There's a story I'll tell you about it.
But what we learned from this
operation, from both Bitvest and
Bitcore, was management.
I was talking to Wayne last night, the DNA,
the DNA of management,
good practices all the way.
And that's exactly how they've run this operation.
Bernard is a superb manager as well.
This is not complicated.
What they do is they get food and they deliver it
to a restaurant.
I mean, how difficult is that?
They get cheese or they put…
little sugar things, you know, they get those made,
those things that you tear open and put into your coffee.
It's not a complicated business.
It's just a very,
very well-run business.
So you're not going to get AI-type returns out of
this, but you're going to get solid,
good numbers on a persistent basis.
And a dividend, which I think was up 16%,
wasn't it?
Yeah.
And it's a nice dividend.
It gives you a very good return.
The other point is even if you look at Bitvest,
the DNA exists in that business.
They don't do anything stupid.
The last stupid thing that Joffrey did was he bought
Adcorp Ingram 10 years ago
at 75.
Still hasn't made his money back.
But, I mean,
that's the last silly thing they did.
But they all get out of it and they'll work their way
from it.
And I just say that tongue-in-cheek.
But I think that's the point that I
really want to bring across.
It's.
you know well breweries was like that in the same
way you know what i mean sab they just got
solid good manager and they train up these
people and they've got the same culture that goes
right through the business so i think if you
wanted to explain it that's the best way to explain it
yeah good
and the other thing is about these numbers before we move on to
market prices is that the growth was
organic they didn't go out buying companies in germany or the
netherlands or whatever
It was purely internal growth.
And again, that comes down to management, David.
Totally.
Absolutely.
You know, they don't do something.
If it doesn't fit, they leave it alone.
If it's not the right price, leave it alone.
And even
Bitvest, which is now expanding offshore,
if you see the businesses, they kind of bolt on businesses.
You know.
They're not going into anything new.
It fits into the existing operations,
whether it's cleaning toilets in a building or whatever,
the Steiner-type
health situation.
So it's a good operation,
and I wish people could learn from it,
and I wish other businesses could learn.
And you also have to understand management as well.
Joffrey was there to build a legacy.
He wasn't there.
to fill his bank with options or to fill his
back pocket with options.
He did well.
I'm not complaining, but it was, you know,
he wanted to build a legacy.
And I think that legacy continues.
Okay.
Well summarized, David.
Thank you for that.
Now I shall summarize the markets.
Where the dollar round is nice and steady ahead of what is
essentially a long weekend in the United States for America.
Incidentally,
this week has been relatively quiet outside of NVIDIA
because We've been sandwiched between two public holidays,
one in London on Monday and one in the United States the
coming Monday this weekend,
where everybody gets in cars and gets on aeroplanes.
And this is a signal of the end of the US
holiday season.
Labour Day on Monday,
everyone starts drifting back to work from the Hamptons and the
Bahamas.
That's my theory anyway.
OK, dollar round, 1777,
British pound against the round, 2338.
Euro round, 1968.
Euro dollar, 1.1075.
That was 1.12 a couple of days ago.
So the euro losing ground against the dollar.
You know why?
Why is that?
Because of GDP?
Because they talk about rate cuts, yeah.
They talk about rate cuts, I think,
shortly in the euro.
So I think that's why it's weak and slow.
Okay, thank you for that.
British pound against the dollar, 1.3160.
Bell price, that's doing all right.
It's up 20 bucks to 25.22.
Platinum for once.
And Palladium for once going up $13 up for platinum to
$9.47.
And Palladium $9.70 up
$36.
The oil price now suddenly jumped again.
We had that bit of a flurry because of the eastern
Libyan oil fields being shut down
temporarily.
And I thought, well, that was just a flash in the pan.
And they're sitting around the table and resolving their differences.
Two governments, of course, in Libya.
Brent Crudeau, $80.22,
up bang on 2%.
And West Texas crude, $76.43,
up just over 2.5%.
And what else have we got?
Copper had a bad day yesterday,
and it's having another one today, 1.9% weaker,
just below $4.14 per
pound.
Nothing else really to speak of there.
S&P 500 futures really looked
terrible after the NVIDIA results yesterday.
I think they went down to something like,
I think they went down to...
55.20 or something.
They're now back up
56.53, which is up three quarters
of a percent.
The US 10-year Treasury bond yield,
3.89 percent.
And the South African 10-year yield,
9.32 percent.
Also jumping a bit.
And as for Bitcoin, well, it's back above
60s, just below 61,000, up around about
3 percent.
Viv, apart from all your AI stuff,
do you have a domestic portfolio as well
on behalf of clients?
You have to because you do Regulation 28 business,
you have to have something local.
That being said, you know,
we do get out of the Regulation 28 space when you have living in New
Zealand, so we tend to go much more offshore.
Yeah, of course.
And why wouldn't you?
Historically, that would serve you well.
David, on the movers on the JSC,
I'll come up with mine in a moment, but maybe you start.
What have you seen?
Any themes today?
Not really.
I think it's been very, very quiet.
You know, just before,
I wanted to see a comparison because just as before we came
on air.
Yeah.
In fact, yeah,
I can't believe this unless I haven't updated.
For me,
it looks like the value traded was around about
$10 billion.
But I'm not sure because that's what I saw before the
closing auction.
So I'm not sure if this is updated.
But very, very low levels of activity.
And, you know,
what has dominated in a big way,
Lindsay, has been the financials.
I know Bitcoin is up again today.
It had a very good run yesterday,
up another 3% on that.
But if I had to identify anything,
it's an incredible run in banks and financials,
supported by some of the miners as well.
The miners yesterday were horrible,
2.5% down for the resources index.
And the bottom five was populated by the diggers.
But today,
the Bitcoin story is an interesting one.
Because when I see a stock rally 4.5%
like it did yesterday on its results, you think, ah,
it's maybe a few shorts in the market.
It's just a flash in the pan.
But there's been buying.
People have gone through those numbers, to my mind.
And they've said, OK,
let's load up on this dividend.
Great story.
organic growth it's just doing well overseas unlike
some south african companies over the decades but anyway bid
core up three and two-thirds percent today sun them
3.2 percent higher pan-african resources up three
anglo gold up for two and three quarters i think it went
ex-div yesterday so back up today sun international
up 2.7 percent downside serious down
three percent impala platinum another two and a half percent weaker
investec plc has lost two and a half percent
quilter down Nearly 2%.
The volume yesterday, David,
was 21 billion.
So maybe people just said, right,
we've got to square our books up ahead of the long weekend.
And that is why today's volumes are so low because everyone's given up.
I don't know.
Again, what?
Yeah, exactly.
It has updated.
Nothing great.
15 billion.
So quite a bit came through right at the end.
But it was, you know, that's,
I think that's just the order of the day.
That's what we see every day.
So when you look at volumes.
There's a lot of squaring towards the end of the day
as you get the balancing.
But volume is incredibly low.
And that's why you see these wide movements.
Lindsay, the other point on BitCore,
when you actually look into the JSC
and you want to build a portfolio,
because remember, pension funds, you're still getting all those
contributions that come in on a monthly basis.
It's so difficult to put together a portfolio.
It really is.
And I think one of the
obstacles is the volatility that
we're seeing in the mining industry.
It hasn't bottomed yet.
It's still trying to find a bottom.
So if you look through South32's numbers today,
you look through Impala's,
you've still got a very there are a lot of
difficulties there.
They're talking good,
but it goes through BHP numbers as
well.
So our market is kind of being tossed
aside by that, you know, one day up,
one day down in resources.
But to put a portfolio together is so difficult.
Just briefly staying with you, David, closing indices, if you would.
Yeah.
So the
All Share Index ended up about
a quarter percent,
8,4239.
The resource index came back from being all over the
place, up a half a percent as well.
even though some of the big miners were in negative
territory.
You know, Anglos, Glencore, African Rainbow Minerals,
Amplats, Impala were all negative,
but still managed to creep in the half a percent.
And I think the gold shares kept the precious
metals and mining index up.
There were gains in Anglo Gold, Goldfields, Harmony,
and so on.
Banks, yeah.
0.4 of a percent,
nothing dramatic there.
And industrials,
hardly better.
Consumer discretionary down.
And I think the reason for that is that if you
look at ABM, they have Richmond, Process, British American,
Placo, NASPAS all down,
all in negative territory as well.
So all the big ones, offshore-based, were down.
So that's what we're getting.
It's all over the place.
You mentioned some of the gainers,
but they don't really have a lot of...
in a sway in the overall index.
Viv, earlier on, just to end this, Viv,
you mentioned Britain, a tiny little island,
and advances in sailing, et cetera,
and off they went and they dominated at one stage.
In those days,
the British Empire was represented by pink on a
map or a globe,
and 40% of the world was administered
or owned in a way, people can own countries,
owned by Britain. It's not a particularly...
a glorious moment in British history because there was a
good deal of brutality meted out to other countries.
But the fact is that Britain has always been fairly innovative
until along came Tony Blair,
Boris Johnson, Liz Truss,
Rishi Sunak,
and now the awful Sakhir Starmer dragging us
backwards and never to
recover.
I mean, unless someone extraordinary comes along.
You mentioned sailing.
Now, I don't know if you follow this sort of thing,
but occasionally you'll see a snippet on the news.
The America's Cup started in
1851.
It's the oldest international sporting event in
history.
It started then and it's been going on since then.
I don't know if you've seen the technology of the New Yorks.
I used to watch it just out of
interest.
And you see the crew on the deck of this catamaran and
they're pulling ropes and sails are going one way and they have to do a sort
of a U-turn round a...
a buoy in the middle of a choppy ocean.
And it was great.
But now you can't see any crew.
They've got these like almost like hydrofoils on the
side,
which are programmed with AI to get around this
buoy.
So it's all now.
I mean, okay,
you have to have a skipper and you have to make a few decisions,
but it's all computer generated, Aviv.
It's everywhere, your AI.
Yeah, look, I mean, that's another thing you have to understand,
that everything stopped today.
Absolutely stopped today.
There was no more progress from where we are right now.
In the next 10 years, the developments in the world,
just based on the current technology,
would still be revolutionary.
We'd still be seeing such incredible changes in how the world works,
just based on the stuff that we have available right now.
So yeah, the stuff is coming out in ways that are weird.
But what do you want to mention?
I don't think we've mentioned this yet.
I don't know if we talked about it.
Have we talked about the two-pot system yet?
No, no, we haven't.
On Sunday.
Is that when it starts?
It starts on Sunday.
And I wanted to ask David,
because I've been seeing estimates out there.
somewhere around about the 70 billion round range in terms of withdrawals.
Anywhere between
25 to 70.
No one knows what it's going to be.
Yeah.
No one knows.
Yeah.
And 70 billion in a market that does about 15 billion in a day
in terms of sales.
Yeah.
It is a wholesale.
That's going to be a very
I think that's going to be front-loaded as well.
It's going to happen mostly in the first month.
I don't know if you'd expect or not,
but I think next month might be very bad for
the South African markets.
If you're forcing 50,
70 billion rounds of the sale to a market that does
15 billion in one day in total volume.
That's a terrible thought.
We're trying to understand what it does to because
it's going to affect those pension funds where
they have a low level of worker or
low-income workers.
The smaller pension funds.
who need the money rather than an older established
type pension funds but no one can give me any
kind of clear indication of what it's going to do
to the stock market uh i'll sit on a pension
fund and they're very well kind of buffered
or cushioned uh
made a little bit of a provision but it's hardly going to dent
them at all this is a multi-billion one
and uh so i think for the larger ones are okay but
but i think it's going to be released
into the economy,
mainly for foodstuffs or whatever.
My big fear,
and I say this tongue-in-cheek mainly because I
read there was an article, I don't know if you picked it up,
from Capitec about the huge
levels of sports betting.
And it's just something that really upsets me.
It genuinely upsets me because every
time I'm a sports lover, I watch.
You know, I watch the sports all the time,
and the only thing I see are sports betting
adverts from, you know, from different, and they're glamorous,
they make it glamorous, with a bit of booze on the side.
you know, cognacs and so on.
And everything's glamorous.
And it's not that glamorous.
There's nothing glamorous about losing a bet, David, let me tell you,
and trying to claw it back and being in the pocket of your
bookmaker.
I used to bet informally,
and I would invariably lose.
You can't win really, unless you're very, very lucky,
or very skillful,
or have insider knowledge on what's going on.
But I remember the chap said to me,
I phoned him up and said,
I can't pay for another few days till I get paid.
He said, No, no worry.
But he said, Lindsay, pay and the pain goes away.
And also know your limits.
But these companies like Paddy Power in the UK,
they come across as really friendly, have lovely ads,
and it's very funny.
They don't use the glamour thing.
They use the humour thing.
But you look at the football that you and I watch religiously,
David,
about 50% of the premiership clubs have
a sports betting company.
I hate it.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, look,
there's a reason you put the casinos way out of the
distance, middle of Las Vegas, Sun City.
Yes,
it's fun to go and gamble for a weekend
or so, right?
But you can't have it available every day, all the time.
That's when you get into real trouble.
You can go and say, okay,
I'll blow you a certain amount of money at
the back of the day at Wild Coast or something, you know what I mean?
Or go to Las Vegas or go to Sun City,
and you have this long trip.
You do it, it's over, you come back.
But when you start having casinos in the city,
Why is that having the thing on your phone?
Yes, exactly.
This is very dangerous.
It's a very dangerous thing.
You can play slots on your phone every night.
You can play poker on your phone every night.
It's not a day out or a weekend out with the family and having
a hundred grand flutter on the slots or something.
This is an addiction on that phone.
And I'm sure half the people you watch are sitting in a restaurant
with their phone.
I'm sure some of them are playing the slots.
There was an advert.
That's what I was going to say.
There was one advert where...
Both of them, the male and the female,
the lady excuses herself,
goes to sit on the toilet so that she can finish her bed.
And the chap,
her date is doing the exact same thing.
And that's what it is down to.
It becomes an obsession.
And believe me, there's nothing glamorous.
And it's all over the place.
It's in your face.
And Capitec raised concerns.
And there's nothing.
There's no, you know,
kids can pick up their parents'phone and do what they like.
because you don't have to be
18 or whatever it is.
But anyway, it's...
Well, it's a good point you brought up, David.
I should maybe do an extended program about the
extent of sports betting in South Africa, which can ill afford it,
let's face it.
Gentlemen, thank you very much for your time as always.
Another great chat.
I really enjoyed it today.
David Shapiro is from SAS and Securities.
Viv Govender from Rennes, Swiss.
Both from Johannesburg.
And that was the 5 o'clock shadow.
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