This week’s note comes from Cambodia. From long days with family, moments that stay with you, and the kind of perspective that does not come from a screen.
The Savage Take is where our CEO Charles Savage shares what he’s seeing and thinking each week, in markets and beyond.
Still in Cambodia. Vietnam next.
No markets section this week, I said. Then markets did what they do. Cambodia deserves better than to share a page with Trump’s latest tirade. But records are records. More below, briefly.
This edition is Cambodia. All of it. The cranes, the smiles, the temples, the darkness. A country that has every reason to be broken and has chosen, deliberately, to be otherwise.
The S&P 500 broke 7,000 for the first time in history.
The Nasdaq has now posted twelve consecutive positive sessions. Its longest winning run since 2009. The rally that began with the ceasefire on April 8 has not stopped. The Iran shock has been absorbed. Capital repriced. Records broken.
The JSE has followed. The rand is holding near R16.40, well off the R17.00 highs when the Strait was closed. Locally, we remain a price taker in global risk. When it eases, we benefit. We are benefiting.
One new variable: Trump has threatened to fire Fed chair Powell. Markets shrugged, for now. That may not hold.
The ceasefire two-week window expires April 22. Both sides are reportedly in favour of extending it. The Islamabad talks are the hinge. Oil is back below $95. That tells you what the market believes.
The oil price is still the signal. It has not changed.
First thing I did when I landed: bought a SIM. Sixty gigabytes for six dollars. Thirty days. That is not an accident. Cambodia ranks among the cheapest mobile data markets in the world, fractions of a cent per gigabyte. In a country where wages remain low, the deliberate choice to make connectivity cheap is a policy decision. Access as infrastructure. Low cost as strategy.
It set the tone for everything that followed.
Phnom Penh is a bustling Asian city with its own heartbeat. Cranes everywhere. The capital is being built in real time, not renovated, built. Construction as ambition made visible. The streets carry the energy of a place that knows it has somewhere to go and is moving.
Smiles, colour, welcome. A genuine commitment to a different future. You feel it in the people. Not performed hospitality. Something more honest than that. Suosdey. Aw kohn. Hello and thank you in Khmer. Two words that open every door. A city that has come through the worst imaginable and chosen, without bitterness, to face forward.
I could not help but think about what it takes to build a community from near-total collapse. What Cambodia is doing with Phnom Penh is not just urban development. It is an act of collective will.
The contrast from Phnom Penh is stark. You leave a city building its future and arrive at one anchored to its past. Not haunted by it. Anchored.
The Angkor complex stops you. There is no other way to say it. Four hundred square kilometres of temples, hydraulic engineering, and stone carving built by the Khmer Empire between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. At its peak, Angkor was among the largest preindustrial cities on earth, home to nearly a million people, sustained by one of the most sophisticated water management systems ever built. The civilisation that created this was not primitive. It was extraordinary.
The temples tell that story in sandstone. Power, resilience, resourcefulness, ambition. Centuries compressed into stone faces, bas-reliefs, and towers that still reach skyward above the jungle canopy.
My favourite, though I loved them all, was Ta Prohm. The Tomb Raider temple. What makes it singular is not the architecture, remarkable as it is, but what the jungle has done to it since the Khmer Empire fell in the fifteenth century. Silk-cotton trees and strangler figs have grown into and through the stone over centuries. Their roots wrap the walls, lift the lintels, and pour through the galleries like slow water. The trees have not destroyed the temple. They have become part of it. Stone and root, holding each other up.
There is real life in that sandstone. It is magical, spiritual, and a reminder that our own chapters here will likely leave less of a mark on the history of the world than the Khmer did.
Stand in those corridors and the smallness lands differently. Not as defeat. As perspective.
Khmer New Year fell while we were in Siem Reap. A water festival.
The entire city turned into a children's game. Water guns, buckets, hoses, laughing strangers soaking each other in the streets at full volume. Nobody was exempt. Nobody wanted to be. Young and old, tourists and locals, all of it dissolved in the same water and the same laughter.
You are only as old as the company you keep and the mind you let outside. That afternoon I was about eight years old. It was exactly right.
Kunal was in his element. His inner child fully on display, no apology required. What struck me most was where his joy was directed. More for others than for himself. His energy unquenchable, but generous with it. Beautiful to watch.
There is something important in what that festival does. It is not just celebration. It is permission. Permission to cast off whatever weight you have been carrying and be present in the moment, completely, without apology. Cambodia knows how to do this. A country that has carried more weight than most and still finds space for joy.
The greatest privilege of this trip is not the temples or the history or the sixty gigabytes for six dollars.
It is watching my family see it.
There is a specific moment that travel creates that nothing else does. The moment your children's eyes open to a world their own context has made invisible. You can explain inequality. You can describe history. You can talk about privilege until the words lose meaning. And then you land somewhere like Cambodia, and the words fall away.
It happens quietly. In the back of a tuk-tuk. Standing in a corridor at Ta Prohm. Walking the grounds at Choeung Ek. You watch them processing something that will not leave them. That is the gift. Not the holiday. The recalibration.
To share this with Sarah and Mika. To have Kirra as our guide through a world she has chosen to inhabit rather than observe. These are the experiences that stack into something you can call a life well lived.
Travel does not just create perspective. It strips away the comfortable version of yourself and leaves something more honest in its place. I am grateful for every uncomfortable moment of it.
You cannot come to Cambodia and not go.
Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge killed somewhere between 1.7 and 2.2 million people. Roughly a quarter of Cambodia's entire population, gone in four years. Doctors. Teachers. Anyone who wore glasses, spoke a foreign language, had soft hands. Families separated, then forced together in work camps. The purported goal was an agrarian utopia. The result was one of the most efficient genocide operations of the twentieth century.
Choeung Ek, the killing fields outside Phnom Penh. Mass graves still visible. Bone fragments still surfacing after heavy rain. A stupa filled with more than five thousand skulls. The killing tree, where children were killed, now covered in colourful bracelets left by visitors.
Tragic. Chilling. A reminder that the twentieth century was brutal.
Peace is a privilege. We forget that too easily.
What struck me most was not the horror, though the horror is total. It was Cambodia's relationship with it. They have not buried this. They have built museums, memorials, and curricula. They carry the memory deliberately, as a warning, as an act of respect for the dead, and as the foundation on which the new Cambodia insists on being built differently.
Community comes from shared experience. Cambodia is rebuilding theirs from a dark and powerful history, but also from a beautiful, rich, and proud past. The Khmer Empire and the killing fields are part of the same story. What you do with that contradiction says everything.
Cambodia has chosen to build.
After the temples and the killing fields and the water fights and the tuk-tuks, Koh Rong.
White sand. Palm trees. Slow living. A different pace entirely, the kind that only an island can impose. A reader’s paradise.
The book I chose: Capitec: Stalking Giants by TJ Strydom.
The timing is not subtle. A week after the Finance Ghost poll put EasyEquities in the same sentence as Capitec, I am sitting on a beach in Cambodia rereading the origin story of the company people are comparing us to.
Capitec built its model in post-apartheid South Africa, moving into a gap that competitors had written off as unserviceable and uneconomical. Millions of people excluded from formal financial services, deemed not worth the effort. The incumbents were not just slow. They had chosen to leave that market behind. Capitec looked at the same gap and saw something different. They moved in with simplicity, low cost and radical transparency. Their lived experience proved the cynics wrong. And once they did, others followed.
That is the bravery. Not just the risk of building something new. The courage to insist that a market everyone else had abandoned was worth serving with dignity.
The founders of Capitec deserve a standing ovation from every South African. What they built changed the financial lives of millions of people. That is not a small thing. That is a legacy.
We stand on their shoulders. And in a beautiful twist, EasyEquities now lives inside the Capitec app, a partner to the very giant we were inspired by. Not competitors. Companions in the same mission. That is something to be proud of on both sides.
And here is what I genuinely believe: we are building something more durable. Something better for the country and its people. Because we are building in a different era, with different tools, on top of everything proven before us. The financial fabric of South Africa has a real opportunity to be changed. Not in the next results cycle. In part over the next decade. But certainly over a hundred years from now.
My only regret is that I will not be here to sit under the shade of the trees we are planting.
Read the book. Whether you own EasyEquities, hold Capitec, or simply want to understand what it actually takes to build something that changes how an industry works in a country that needed it changed.
Sixty gigs for six dollars. Cranes over Phnom Penh. Silk-cotton trees holding up temples a thousand years old. Water fights in the streets at New Year. Five thousand skulls in a stupa. A family seeing all of it together.
Cambodia is not one thing. It is all of these things at once, held together without pretending the contradictions do not exist.
That is not easy. Most countries cannot do it. Most people cannot do it.
What I keep coming back to is the choice. Not the circumstances, which were brutal, and not the history, which was glorious before it was catastrophic. The choice to rebuild. To keep the memory and build the future anyway.
Travel is my greatest privilege. These weeks. The memories you stack up. That is a life well lived.
Next stop Vietnam. A bucket list destination since I was twenty. More from there.
The world is not waiting. What you do next is the only thing that matters.
Stay Savage,
Charles
The Savage Take is published weekly.
Opinions are Charles Savage’s own. Not financial advice.
Any opinions, news, research, reports, analyses, prices, or other information contained within this research is provided by an employee of EasyEquities an authorised FSP (FSP no 22588) as general market commentary and does not constitute investment advice for the purposes of the Financial Advisory and Intermediary Services Act, 2002. First World Trader (Pty) Ltd t/a EasyEquities (“EasyEquities”) does not warrant the correctness, accuracy, timeliness, reliability or completeness of any information (i) contained within this research and (ii) received from third party data providers. You must rely solely upon your own judgment in all aspects of your investment and/or trading decisions and all investments and/or trades are made at your own risk. EasyEquities (including any of their employees) will not accept any liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage, including without limitation, any loss of profit, which may arise directly or indirectly from use of or reliance on the market commentary. The content contained within is subject to change at any time without notice.