In this week’s Savage Take, Charles reflects on saying goodbye to Cam before turning to the markets, where rising yields, oil prices, US debt and uncertainty around AI are reshaping the investment landscape. A week of grief, markets and a reminder that sometimes, patience matters more than chasing returns.

From Charles 

On Sunday, six weeks after her dreadful death, we finally said goodbye to Cam.

It was spectacular.

A spectacular tribute to a young life so well lived. But as beautiful as it was, it was just as hard.

What struck me most was the bravery of it all.

The bravery of her family. Her friends. Her school. The broader community. Everyone who came together to celebrate her life while still trying to understand how it could possibly have ended so soon.

Grief has no timetable.

Six weeks might sound like time has passed. In truth, it has simply been six weeks of sitting with something that still makes no sense.

My favourite analogy from the memorial was that grief is like glitter.

You may try to clean it up. You may think you have found every last piece. But over time it will always find a way of appearing again in places you thought you had cleared.

As the years pass, perhaps it becomes less dense. Less visible. Less present in every moment.

But it never disappears.

There will always be small pieces of it. In unexpected places. In spaces reserved only for her and the memories she left behind.

Cam was just 17, but her impact was larger than most of us manage in a lifetime.

She shone brighter than most of us ever dream of shining.

She was strong. Determined. Opinionated. Curious. Unafraid to challenge the people around her.

Including me.

She read The Savage Take. She enjoyed investing, and she enjoyed EasyEquities.

She loved asking for guidance. She loved telling me what she thought even more.

Particularly when she believed we could do better.

I loved that about her.

And thanks to her, our platform will carry pieces of her glitter too.

It was my privilege to have known her, even in the small way that I did.

For those who knew and loved her best, the grief of losing her will always be there.

Like glitter.

But so will the privilege of having had her in their lives.

Regardless of how tragic the ending, that truth remains.

She lives on in all of them. In who they are, how they love and what they do next.

And I am certain that, even knowing how much it would eventually hurt, every one of them would still choose to have known her.

Every single time.

The Week That Was 

There is no elegant bridge from the death of a 17-year-old to markets.

I am not going to manufacture one.

But life keeps moving, even when parts of us are not ready to move with it.

Markets do too.

This week brought us back to many of the themes that dominated the first half of the year.

Higher interest rates. Rising oil prices. War. Debt. Artificial intelligence. Fear.

I do not like this market backdrop one bit.

The front end of the US yield curve experienced its biggest weekly spike in more than a year, while longer-term yields reached levels last seen two decades ago.

The US Treasury increased the size of its long-dated bond buybacks, but the market looked straight through the intervention.

Donald Trump believes the United States should pay the lowest interest rates in the world, "regardless of their formulas."

Unfortunately, the formulas are the problem.

The US federal debt has now passed $40 trillion. The annual budget deficit is running above $2 trillion. More than $10 trillion must be refinanced in the short term, while many of the traditional foreign buyers of that debt are actively trying to diversify away from America.

The numbers do not care about politics.

You solve a problem like this through dramatic spending cuts, significantly higher revenue or extraordinary economic growth sustained over many years.

None looks particularly likely anytime soon.

The Federal Reserve meets this week. A 25-basis-point increase could create a short-term rally in the dollar and some relief at the long end of the bond market.

But we should not lose sight of the wood for the trees.

The path of least resistance for US yields still looks higher.

The path of least resistance for the dollar, over time, still looks weaker.

Oil On The Fire

The energy story is no more comforting.

Oil moved another 3% higher after fresh attacks forced the closure of Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline, one of the most important routes available to bypass the Strait of Hormuz.

Brent is trading close to $110 a barrel.

The conflict continues to move through cycles of escalation and attempted diplomacy. Direct discussions between Gulf states and Iran offer some hope, but each new attack on a pipeline, refinery or vessel reminds markets how fragile global energy supply has become.

The consequences extend far beyond the oil price.

Higher energy costs mean higher transport costs, higher food prices, renewed inflation and even more pressure on consumers already carrying the burden of elevated interest rates.

There are winners in this environment.

Global refining margins have exploded, which could allow Sasol to reduce debt far more quickly than expected if current conditions persist for another quarter or two.

Its longer-term challenges remain well understood.

In the short term, there may be proper upside.

AI Blinks

Then there is AI.

Only a few months ago, the market's greatest concern was whether the world could build enough data centres, produce enough semiconductors or find enough electricity and copper to satisfy the demand.

This week, the question changed.

Should we be building it this quickly at all?

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for a slowdown in the deployment of the most advanced AI systems, warning about agents moving beyond human control and causing catastrophic harm.

Some see sincere alarm.

Others see a regulatory strategy designed to protect the leading closed models from open-source competition, particularly as China pushes open source as the future of AI.

There is truth in both.

The intervention matters because it is no longer coming only from politicians, academics or people standing outside the industry. Some of the biggest names building these systems are now asking whether the world is moving too quickly.

That opens the door to a significant increase in regulation.

It also introduces a question the market has not wanted to ask.

What happens to the AI investment story if development slows?

Slower deployment means less immediate capital expenditure. Less capital expenditure means fewer chips, fewer data centres, less power infrastructure and potentially less demand for everything from memory to copper.

Asian semiconductor and memory stocks were hit hard on Monday.

For much of the last two years, the AI story has carried the S&P 500 earnings-growth narrative. It has also played an increasingly important role in the global growth outlook.

If that story even wobbles, markets wobble with it.

Time To Be More Defensive

Elevated interest rates, oil near $110 and growing uncertainty around AI capital expenditure are a dangerous combination.

Together they threaten global growth, the consumer and the earnings expectations supporting some of the world's most expensive companies.

Add the seasonally weakest period of the year and it is sensible to become more defensive and take some chips off the table.

That does not mean abandoning markets.

It means recognising that price and risk matter. That diversification matters. That preserving the ability to invest tomorrow sometimes matters more than chasing the last bit of return today.

The rand also looks extraordinarily strong.

Perhaps unsustainably so.

There will always be opportunities.

Right now, patience may be one of them.

The Savage Take

Markets rise and fall.

Interest rates eventually turn. Oil shocks pass. Technologies survive their moments of fear and find their place in the world.

None of that felt particularly important on Sunday.

What mattered was the life of a 17-year-old girl and the extraordinary impact she had on the people around her.

What mattered was the courage of those people in showing up.

What mattered was the privilege of having known her.

The grief will keep returning.

Like glitter.

But so will the memories.

And so will she.

The world is not waiting.

What you do next is the only thing that matters.

Stay Savage,

Charles

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