MARC HASENFUSS: I love the smell of profit in the morning
Fartcoin is worth more than the combined market value of gaming giant Sun International and fintech business Capital Appreciation
16 January 2025 - 05:00
byMarc Hassenfuss
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I spent nine days in splendid isolation in a remote part of the Cederberg, where the only other person I saw for days was my wonderful wife.
The vista was Zen calm, and I spent hours watching the shadows disappear in the morning and return in the evening.
Gary Snyder would have been in his element. But we were kept on our toes by the many creatures, including a dog-mauling leopard (thankfully, we never chanced upon it).
Still, we had to deal with surreal red Roman “spiders”, an angry bee swarm, a baboon spider on the balcony rafters that looked big enough to take out a bird and, probably the most imposing, an armoured cricket tucked among the dishes stacked for washing up.
Then there were the large locusts, sporting Eastern Province rugby colours, that got the usually stoic Dexter, our stout Jack Russell/mastiff cross, badly rattled.
There were some heated arguments about pest control, my wife preferring the catch and release option (Tupperware container at the ready) over bludgeoning with the baseball bat.
My son arrived on Christmas day, and not a moment too soon. By that time my wife and I had started bickering about how many lemon slices to wedge into the gin and tonic. There were two particularly sweltering days when the temperature topped 40°C.
And predictably, on those two days my trusty bakkie suffered two punctured tyres. There is nothing quite like jacking a car up in soft sand and lugging around heavy off-road tyres.
In between these exertions, I did get time to reflect and reassess my investment strategy. I’ll be frank in not being able to claim any great scores over three decades of investing. Intense self-scrutiny would put that down to a lack of patience. And, of course, not learning from my mistakes — something I only seem to manage when I have a bat and ball in hand.
I famously took profit on Naspers when it more than doubled from R18 to R42. I did the same with Richemont some years back — and with Hosken Consolidated Investments (HCI)and Sasol (both during their respective Covid collapses). There are still perplexing questions. Should I not have taken profit at Brait and Kore Potash?
Perhaps I am best suited for investments I can practically not exit — such as unlisted whisky business Capevin, which appears to be reaching an intriguing juncture with Campari emerging as a significant shareholder (alongside Remgro).
So entering the new year, I am trying my level best to invest in counters I won’t get shaken out of by short-term setbacks. So far, I have started building holdings in AB InBev, Reinet, Grindrod, Prosus (a post-list purchase) and Sasol with Bidcorp, HCI, Remgro, African Rainbow Minerals, Oceana Group, AECI and the JSE on my watch list.
I’m now 16.5% up on Sasol. This is certainly a better short-term outcome than I could have reasonably expected. But I will resist capitulating.
While I’m positioning myself in earnest for the long-term winner (with my Nasdaq-verskrik son scoffing “At your ripe old age?”), there are developments that can sorely test such a resolve.
Our Hot Stocks cover story illustrates some seriously impressive returns from selected local stocks; Argent Industrial, with an 80%-plus gain, was the one that really caught my eye.
But that’s pedestrian compared with statistics released around the top-performing meme coins for 2024. According to data from kryptocasinos.com (I kid you not), Just a Chill Guy was the top-performing meme coin with a 52,004% increase. Second-placed Andy managed a 47,000% increase, and Degen was a distant third with a 42,318% gain.
Just a Chill Guy was the top-performing meme coin with a 52,004% increase
My meme coin touchstone remains Fartcoin, which I see now carries a market value of $710m, or R13.5bn. That’s twice the market value of perennially profitable industrial sector stalwart Hudaco, and almost the same market size as heavyweight asset manager Coronation.
More succinctly, Fartcoin is worth more than the combined market value of gaming giant Sun International and fintech business Capital Appreciation.
Maybe I’m being too dismissive about Fartcoin. The authoritative Wikipedia notes: “Fartcoin is a meme coin on the Solana blockchain created by an anonymous developer on October 18 2024 in reference to the discussion of the ideal meme coin by a fine-tuned AI large language model called Truth Terminal. The rise of Fartcoin surfaces the ability of AI to relate to humans through culture and humour by garnering organic attention and virality on social media platforms and the impacts of combining AI with speculative financial instruments such as cryptocurrency.”
Well, alrighty then! Not surprisingly, when my entrepreneurial daughter and her creative boyfriend — fresh from their matric rage holiday — got wind of some of the astounding meme coin gains in 2024, they set about planning their own meme coin using our beloved Dexter to cash in on the (bizarre) clamouring for canine coins such as Dogecoin, dogwifhat, Shiba Inu, Ski Mask Dog, CorgiAI, Winnie the Poodle and so on.
I think their Dexibooi on Motorbike coin — as envisaged in the accompanying illustration — has enormous potential ... once they lay their hands on the $60,000-odd needed for launching.
Support our award-winning journalism. The Premium package (digital only) is R30 for the first month and thereafter you pay R129 p/m now ad-free for all subscribers.
MARC HASENFUSS: I love the smell of profit in the morning
Fartcoin is worth more than the combined market value of gaming giant Sun International and fintech business Capital Appreciation
I spent nine days in splendid isolation in a remote part of the Cederberg, where the only other person I saw for days was my wonderful wife.
The vista was Zen calm, and I spent hours watching the shadows disappear in the morning and return in the evening.
Gary Snyder would have been in his element. But we were kept on our toes by the many creatures, including a dog-mauling leopard (thankfully, we never chanced upon it).
Still, we had to deal with surreal red Roman “spiders”, an angry bee swarm, a baboon spider on the balcony rafters that looked big enough to take out a bird and, probably the most imposing, an armoured cricket tucked among the dishes stacked for washing up.
Then there were the large locusts, sporting Eastern Province rugby colours, that got the usually stoic Dexter, our stout Jack Russell/mastiff cross, badly rattled.
There were some heated arguments about pest control, my wife preferring the catch and release option (Tupperware container at the ready) over bludgeoning with the baseball bat.
My son arrived on Christmas day, and not a moment too soon. By that time my wife and I had started bickering about how many lemon slices to wedge into the gin and tonic. There were two particularly sweltering days when the temperature topped 40°C.
And predictably, on those two days my trusty bakkie suffered two punctured tyres. There is nothing quite like jacking a car up in soft sand and lugging around heavy off-road tyres.
In between these exertions, I did get time to reflect and reassess my investment strategy. I’ll be frank in not being able to claim any great scores over three decades of investing. Intense self-scrutiny would put that down to a lack of patience. And, of course, not learning from my mistakes — something I only seem to manage when I have a bat and ball in hand.
I famously took profit on Naspers when it more than doubled from R18 to R42. I did the same with Richemont some years back — and with Hosken Consolidated Investments (HCI) and Sasol (both during their respective Covid collapses). There are still perplexing questions. Should I not have taken profit at Brait and Kore Potash?
Perhaps I am best suited for investments I can practically not exit — such as unlisted whisky business Capevin, which appears to be reaching an intriguing juncture with Campari emerging as a significant shareholder (alongside Remgro).
So entering the new year, I am trying my level best to invest in counters I won’t get shaken out of by short-term setbacks. So far, I have started building holdings in AB InBev, Reinet, Grindrod, Prosus (a post-list purchase) and Sasol with Bidcorp, HCI, Remgro, African Rainbow Minerals, Oceana Group, AECI and the JSE on my watch list.
I’m now 16.5% up on Sasol. This is certainly a better short-term outcome than I could have reasonably expected. But I will resist capitulating.
While I’m positioning myself in earnest for the long-term winner (with my Nasdaq-verskrik son scoffing “At your ripe old age?”), there are developments that can sorely test such a resolve.
Our Hot Stocks cover story illustrates some seriously impressive returns from selected local stocks; Argent Industrial, with an 80%-plus gain, was the one that really caught my eye.
But that’s pedestrian compared with statistics released around the top-performing meme coins for 2024. According to data from kryptocasinos.com (I kid you not), Just a Chill Guy was the top-performing meme coin with a 52,004% increase. Second-placed Andy managed a 47,000% increase, and Degen was a distant third with a 42,318% gain.
My meme coin touchstone remains Fartcoin, which I see now carries a market value of $710m, or R13.5bn. That’s twice the market value of perennially profitable industrial sector stalwart Hudaco, and almost the same market size as heavyweight asset manager Coronation.
More succinctly, Fartcoin is worth more than the combined market value of gaming giant Sun International and fintech business Capital Appreciation.
Maybe I’m being too dismissive about Fartcoin. The authoritative Wikipedia notes: “Fartcoin is a meme coin on the Solana blockchain created by an anonymous developer on October 18 2024 in reference to the discussion of the ideal meme coin by a fine-tuned AI large language model called Truth Terminal. The rise of Fartcoin surfaces the ability of AI to relate to humans through culture and humour by garnering organic attention and virality on social media platforms and the impacts of combining AI with speculative financial instruments such as cryptocurrency.”
Well, alrighty then! Not surprisingly, when my entrepreneurial daughter and her creative boyfriend — fresh from their matric rage holiday — got wind of some of the astounding meme coin gains in 2024, they set about planning their own meme coin using our beloved Dexter to cash in on the (bizarre) clamouring for canine coins such as Dogecoin, dogwifhat, Shiba Inu, Ski Mask Dog, CorgiAI, Winnie the Poodle and so on.
I think their Dexibooi on Motorbike coin — as envisaged in the accompanying illustration — has enormous potential ... once they lay their hands on the $60,000-odd needed for launching.
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