EDITOR'S NOTE
Letter from the editor
Getting our priorities right
The markets will go up. That is a statistical fact. What we don’t know is
when. Does it matter? Market corrections are healthy and necessary.
Yes stocks are down and if you sell, you will have realised a loss.
It’s worth remembering that without the threat of losses, gains cannot be
made, as The Reformed Broker points out on thereformedbroker.com. The
only reason stocks can go up is because they can also go down. It is this risk
that keeps investors in check and that keeps people from paying an infinite
amount of money for shares in a business.
Overall stocks are down 12% compared to the market high reached in
May. This is still correction territory, rather than a bear market, which is
technically called only once stocks have fallen 20%.
To my mind, the more horrifying story of the last fortnight was the
destruction by the Islamic State of the 2000-year old Temple of Baal
Shamin, and more recently the Temple of Bel, both part of the ancient
Syrian city of Palmyra.
We cannot confidently say, as we do with markets, ‘it will recover’.
It appears to be part of a systematic campaign by ISIS to destroy Palmyra
piece by piece. Wherever the group has taken power they have destroyed
the monuments, works of art and religious shrines of those they oppose.
Theirs is not only a religious war, but a cultural war.
George Clooney, who plays the American professor Frank Stokes in that
wonderful movie The Monuments Men, puts it well: “You can wipe out an
entire generation, you can burn their homes to the ground and somehow
they’ll still find their way back. But if you destroy their history, you destroy
their achievements and it’s as if they never existed."
This month in the Moneyweb Investor we are looking at the opposite,
building businesses up, brick by brick. Investment cannot only be concerned
with the world of markets, currencies and big-name investment houses.
Where would investors be without the courage of entrepreneurs with
good ideas?
Yusuf Randera-Rees, founder of black business incubator Awethu is simply
inspirational. He is driven by a desire to provide talented entrepreneurs
with the bridges to take their businesses from informal to formal. He
didn’t start with a commission of enquiry. He put R60 000 of his savings
on the line and invested in six entrepreneurs. And then he used those
lessons, revised his model and started again. Read the story and watch the
accompanying interview.
Staying with the small company theme, in a low growth market Stuart
Theobald looks at five small cap companies that have exciting growth
prospects and still offer value.
And last but certainly not least, we talk to Christo Wiese, who is about to be
inducted into the World Retail Hall of Fame. He shares with us his thoughts
on retail, on building a business brick by brick, and on leadership. Don't
miss it - any of it.
Sasha Planting