Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.
I didn’t own shares in Rembrandt and there was no particular issue on the go but I had never attended an AGM in person before, so I thought it might be a learning experience. Neither did I arrange beforehand with the company secretary, as I should.
I have to say, the Rembrandt team could not have been nicer. I explained who I was, and they were welcoming to a fault. There were roughly 30 people in the small auditorium, and everybody – I mean everybody, including a group of Japanese investors – was smoking. And I mean really smoking.
Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.
Today the price of one bitcoin is about $44,770, or R655,674. It rose steadily through 2020, gaining pace from November, and is now up about 352% since January last year. But the market was given an electric shock this week with the news that carmaker Tesla had invested $1.5-billion in bitcoin, making it the biggest investment by a mainstream corporation into the popular cryptocurrency. In addition, the company has plans to accept the digital currency as payment for its products, joining the likes of Microsoft, AT&T and Pizza Hut.
Of course, the recent price jump reignited old fears that bitcoin is subject to speculation – Elon Musk has been punting bitcoin all year – and market watchers are now predicting that what we are watching is a repeat of the 2017 bubble. A crash, they say, is inevitable.
Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.
Advocates of the millennial retail traders on Robinhood and other apps who drove up the market capitalisation of GameStop 25 times to $25-billion have praised these young traders as “courageous”, as they sought to build on the work of the Occupy Wall Street campaigns by attacking evil hedge funds where it hurts most – on their home turf and within the markets themselves.
Yet this act of defiance against Wall Street is totally different. These Reddit traders from the group #wallstreetbets have taken some serious scalps and forced major losses, chief among them the hedge fund Melvin Capital, which had to be bailed out. Should we therefore be applauding this as justice being done against the greed of hedge funds?
A desperate person may find themselves part of a cult, but not only does that person have to be desperate enough to join the cult in the first place, they also have to have a very, very strong belief in a giant spaceship and aliens.
Over the past 20 years, Raizcorp CEO Allon Raiz has learnt many tough lessons and overcome many entrepreneurial challenges. He has also had the privilege of learning from the journeys of more than 13,000 entrepreneurs who have passed through Raizcorp. In this series of articles, Raiz shares 20.