Letter from the Editor: Be careful what you wish for

Honestly, I miss writing. I particularly miss writing something that doesn’t necessarily have a purpose as I begin, morphing into something interesting and largely unexpected. That’s what is happening here. As I type this, I don’t know what the next sentence will be.

It’s refreshing, if I’m honest. The words flow quickly and there’s an excitement in sitting down and writing something without referring to a SENS announcement, especially from the likes of Blue Label Telecoms with more confusion than a session of parliament.

I’ve always been more interested in the stories behind the numbers rather than the numbers themselves. This is why I’m so passionate about the work I do with Mohammed Nalla in Magic Markets and especially Magic Markets Premium, with a strong focus on the strategy rather than note number 647 of the financial statements. Aside from helping auditors earn a living, those notes don’t add a huge amount of value.

Anyway, this isn’t a Magic Markets sales pitch*. It’s me writing about stuff that I’m passionate about. I just can’t help but be passionate about a great product delivered to South Africans at an accessible price point!

Be careful what you wish for

When I started Ghost Mail, it was a weekly mailer that was purely a fun project that I figured might have a future. I just didn’t know what it would be. Over three years later, it turns out that the project became a daily newsletter with around 100,000 engaged readers every month. That’s a gigantic number, though it all becomes a blur above a certain level.

I can still remember getting excited when 10 new people would sign up in a given week. I took it quite personally when someone unsubscribed, though I eventually got over that feeling.

The best part about the weekly mailer was that I could write about anything. It wasn’t my full-time income at the time, so I could pick anything with a slight finance angle and turn it into an interesting read. I loved it.

Before you get worried, I absolutely love what I do in Ghost Mail on a daily basis, but it’s become formulaic out of necessity. People depend on me to read SENS properly every day and deliver a comprehensive but concise view of what happened on the local market. Like everyone, I make mistakes, but I like to think that I keep them to a minimum.

Sometimes the mailer goes out at just after 5am because I had enough energy to finish it the night before. Sometimes it goes out at 7am because I had to wake up at 6am to write the actual mailer, having finished Ghost Bites at some truly ghostly hour the night before. Sometimes the mailer goes out when the technology decides it would be appropriate to actually work, an issue that is thankfully rare these days.

As I focus again on writing what I “feel” like writing rather than what I “must” write, I thought it would be appropriate to reflect on a wonderful passage in the Terry Pratchett biography. He is one of my all-time favourite writers and the biography was written with no shortage of influence of his signature style. I’m going to try and read the Discworld novels from start to finish over the next 18 months or so. There are a lot of them, but they are worth it. I have spent the past decade feeding my brain non-fiction and it’s time to get my imagination going again.

Pratchett has sadly departed this world, having gifted a lifetime of extraordinary writing to humanity that will stand the test of time. The world would be a much poorer place if he hadn’t made an effort and taken the risks to pursue what he was born to do. There’s a lesson in there for all of us.

Anyway, here’s the passage I was talking about:

“So, what with one thing and another, Terry had reached that precarious point where the business of being Terry Pratchett was threatening to prevent him from doing the thing that had made him Terry Pratchett in the first place.”

Terry Pratchett official biography by Rob Wilkins: A Life With Footnotes

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that. It simply means that it’s very easy to get too busy and stressed to remember why you did something in the first place. For entrepreneurs, I think the risk of this happening is extremely high.

I need to get back to finance-type stuff for the rest of the day, but it felt good to write this. Thanks for reading it. Most of all, thanks for supporting the Ghost Mail story and being part of my efforts to significantly close the gap in understanding between individual and institutional investors.

I’ll attempt to write something interesting and random every 10 days or so. Or every 9. Or every 11. After all, if I put an exact number to it, then I’m already destroying the randomness before I’ve even gotten started.

Until next time.

The Finance Ghost

*In honour of Terry Pratchett, I decided to use a footnote. You’ve now found the sales pitch. I would’ve killed to have access to this kind of research in Magic Markets Premium during my career, especially at R99/month. Don’t miss the opportunity that I never had.