RYK VAN NIEKERK: Welcome to this week’s edition of the Be a Better Investor podcast. It’s a podcast series where I speak to professional investors and we discuss how they approach investments and how they pick winners and avoid losers. The idea is to find those golden nuggets from their perspectives and experiences to assist amateur retail investors to become better investors. My guest today is Peter Armitage. He’s the founder of Anchor Capital.
I don’t know. I’ve bought and sold it many times along the way. But it’s amazing. What is that? It’s a thousand-bagger. In those days it was making all of its money out of the Huisgenoot and You magazines. RYK VAN NIEKERK: Naspers was also the very first share I bought. I was in Standard 8. I was delivering newspapers, so when it listed I bought the shares. And when I sold out at R43 I thought I’d made a killing.
That’s a golden question, isn’t it? That’s I think where a bit of the art comes into it. I think probably one of the most important things is to be able to look at things afresh. In other words … if something hasn’t done well in the past year, or has done well in the past year, try not to let that influence your investment decision today.
I really like the Naspers story; I think it’s very cheap. It’s driven by Tencent and there’s just some amazing maths behind it now that they can sell Tencent shares, because they’re selling an asset at R100 and on the same day buying back pretty much that same asset at R50 – and they’re going to do that for the next three years. In the international markets the quality portfolios of US tech companies are all pretty cheap – Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet.
I should have had some time to think about this before. [Chuckling] I’m trying to think of a particular share. I think if you go back to 2008, the markets took a real crash and people just wrote off investments; there were shares trading at two or three PE multiples. I remember buying some Pinnacle shares and some Cipla shares. The Pinnacles, if I remember correctly, were kind of at R4-odd and today [now under Alviva Holdings] are at R20. Cipla went down to R1 or R1.