THE FINANCE GHOST: Lots of lemonade and a lemon — my stocks in 2025

This is the time for reflection, which is why you’ll see plenty of articles about lessons learnt and the insights from the year. It’s cliché for a reason: if you don’t learn from what happened in the markets and how your decisions played out, you cannot hope to improve your investing abilities.

The year 2025 was wonderful for local investors who got on the gold train. If you chose not to back that rally, then platinum group metals left the station later in the year and gave you another chance to make money in local mining. Missing both would’ve been painful in terms of underperformance, though it’s worth remembering that missing out on returns is less of a problem than losing capital. If you’re following a magpie strategy of chasing every shiny thing, chances are good that you’ll do more harm than good over time. This is where it’s important to distinguish between an outright mistake and something you missed out on because a disciplined process led you to the wrong conclusion.

It’s important to distinguish between an outright mistake and something you missed out on because a disciplined process led you to the wrong conclusion

I thankfully had some gold exposure this year, though I obviously wish I had more — hindsight and all that. Other local names that performed well for me were Prosus and Purple Group, both of which are platform businesses operating at completely different ends of the size spectrum. Speaking of platforms, Weaver Fintech proved to be a fantastic addition to my portfolio, more than doubling in value as the market woke up to the buy now, pay later opportunity. There isn’t enough liquidity in that stock to attract meaningful institutional participation, but there’s enough space for retail investors to get involved.

My love of platform businesses extends into my offshore portfolio. You’ll find the usual suspects among the big tech names, along with Uber as perhaps a more unusual choice. Uber is up 35% year-to-date, well ahead of Microsoft (my largest individual position). My thesis about Uber is that there’s plenty of room for average usage to increase. Just one more trip or Uber Eats order per user can move the dial in a platform business that has scaled to the point where the contribution margin (the benefit of an additional sale) is high.

I must also highlight my two US banking stocks as strong performers this year. Goldman Sachs is up 55% and JPMorgan gained 33%. I strongly believe in meaningful exposure to the best names on Wall Street, as it gives me a position that grows in value based on two key drivers: the depth of the US capital pool and the extent of volatility in that market. In the world in which we find ourselves, betting on volatility seems like an ironically safe bet to me.

My offshore portfolio is also where you’ll find by far my most irritating mistake of the year. Lululemon is the dip that just kept on dipping, so the jokes write themselves about the sour experience. If I think through the process, it feels like the mistake lay in anchoring bias. I had missed out on the returns during the best years of Lululemon’s story, so when it started falling, I began looking too hard for an entry point. If I had assessed it without being anchored to where the stock had come from, I might have taken a smaller position — or avoided any exposure altogether.

One of my local frustrations is Cashbuild, which I clearly should’ve sold in late 2024 when I was solidly in the green. The stock has lost a huge amount of ground in 2025, which means I’m now slightly in the red vs my 2024 entry point. I bought it as a long-term play in South Africa, so I’m sticking to that strategy, but it’s hard not to be annoyed with myself. But, again, the discipline to stick to a plan is sometimes more important than the individual results.

And finally, the most negative surprise in my local portfolio: Mr Price. At time of writing, I’m down 12% thanks to the market punishing the share price for the incredibly misguided decision to acquire NKD. In a deal that feels 10 years out of touch, Mr Price tossed a grenade at its investment case and walked away from being a simple retailer with a South African focus. As we head into 2026, perhaps the biggest lesson is just how much better local sentiment has become. If companies are being punished for looking offshore, that bodes well for local capital investment flows.

Roll on 2026!