February 15, 2026

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Distinctly remembering being a little 5-year-old playing in the sandpit under the Cyprus trees in my pre-school creche, I recall being evicted from the pit by a much bigger 5-year-old. Perhaps more importantly I remember my dad impressing upon me that the only way to halt a bully was to stand up to him. Mark Carney’s speech at Davos and its lessons for South Africa Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at Davis in January 2026 is being hailed as a landmark address. It surely has profound implications for developing countries, and hopefully South African policy makers and leaders have watched or read it. Carney stated that the last year has seen ‘a rupture in the world order’ and further proposed that the idea of a fair global system was always somewhat false, in that larger and wealthier powers often...

Divorce and retirement benefits: The story behind the rules

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Divorce is never just a legal process. It is emotional, logistical, and often exhausting. Money always enters the conversation and the outcome. Retirement Savings then arrives like an extra character in a play: important, expensive, and frequently misunderstood. At divorce many spouses instinctively treat retirement money like they do the bank account: ‘It’s ours, so we’ll split it.’ In South Africa, it does not work that way. Not because the law is trying to be difficult, but because retirement funds sit inside a protective framework designed to preserve long-term savings from being casually attached, raided, or redirected. Understanding one’s retirement fund and how pension interest works in South Africa is important. So too is the appreciation of why wording and structure matters and how the introduction of the Two-pot System functions. Recent court developments are also noteworthy. Why retirement savings...

The retirement choices I didn’t know I was making

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This article is about an average employee in an average business, receiving conventional communications about a conventional (and perceived boring by them) retirement fund. In this scenario the HR department sends out and invitation: ‘You’re invited to a member information session where our retirement fund benefit consultants will explain everything you need to know about your retirement fund.’ In the same scenario this employee declines the meeting in the belief that the benefit consultants can’t actually change anything anyway and that this person as a member doesn’t have any real latitude anyway, and in any event it’s about hypothetical outcomes that are still decades away, and none of this contributes to the KPI’s against which the member is measured in their real-world environment. Most employees don’t skip these sessions because they don’t care, they skip them because work is busy,...

Challenging the established world order

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When scarcity usurps conventional ownership Recent comments by US President Donald Trump regarding Greenland have drawn global attention, not because of their novelty, but because of what they reveal. His interest has been explicit: Greenland’s strategic geographic positioning from a military and security perspective, and its abundance of critical mineral resources requires American ownership. Whether or not such ambitions are realistic is almost beside the point. What matters is that they signal a shift in how major powers are thinking. Geography, resources, and control of critical inputs are once again being spoken about openly, and in transactional terms, by leaders of large economies. What makes these developments notable is their visibility – their audacity, which is apparent long before we consider their legality or eventual outcome. They reflect a growing willingness by major powers to articulate strategic interest in assets...

Back to basics in a complex market

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It’s easy to feel bewildered by today’s investment landscape – here’s a 101 as to how to reboot if necessary South African investors have lived through enough cycles to know that the world never stands still. Yet many sense that the current moment feels different – not because of any single event or crisis, but because the backdrop against which decisions are made is becoming less settled. Global trade patterns are shifting. Capital appears more selective. Alliances feel more fluid. Terms like ‘multipolar’ ‘fragmentation’, and ‘strategic resilience’ now sit alongside everyday market commentary. For South Africans, this matters. Ours is not an economy insulated from global change. It is one that often feels those changes early, directly, and sometimes more sharply than others. The question, then, is not whether the world is changing – it always is –...

CEO Editorial – Quarter 4 2025

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Gary Mockler Group Chief Executive Officer ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Recent market outcomes have been strong, but this edition of Trendline is not about celebrating returns; it is about recognising that the environment in which those returns were generated is changing in important and increasingly visible ways. Across global markets, assumptions that have shaped investment decisions for decades are being tested, not through isolated events but through a gradual shift in how power, resources, and economic influence are exercised. Access to critical inputs, the reliability of supply chains, and the growing willingness of major economies to prioritise national interest over established convention are no longer background considerations; they are becoming defining features of the investment landscape. At the same time, markets continue to deliver outcomes that appear reassuring on the surface, with equity returns remaining strong and financial conditions broadly supportive. History...

Market Overview – Fourth quarter 2025

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