Charles Savage went quiet for a month, and it had nothing to do with markets. In his latest letter, Purple Group's CEO connects a R105 billion year of client growth to a family loss, a power cut in Mozambique, and a question worth asking about how you're actually spending your time.
The Savage Take is where EasyEquities CEO Charles Savage shares what he’s seeing, learning and thinking about each week, in markets, business and the bigger shifts shaping how people build wealth and ownership.
I haven't written The Savage Take for a month. Not because I had nothing to say. Quite the opposite.
In early August I wrote an edition called No Markets. Just Life. My daughter had lost a very close friend. She was seventeen. I wrote about life and death, grief and love, about being a father, about the questions I couldn't answer and the things I thought I had learned.
And then I didn't publish it.
I wasn't sure I had the right to. The truth is, I'm still not sure. Some things belong to us to tell, and some things don't, and grief has a strange way of blurring that line. So I sat with it. And somehow a month passed.
Today is the 31st of August, the last day of Purple Group's financial year. Another year gone. They seem to go faster now.
That's partly a function of age and the way our brains experience time. Each year becomes a smaller proportion of the life already lived, and memory compresses the familiar. So it shouldn't surprise me. But it does, and if I'm honest it creates a little anxiety, because time passing quickly is wonderful when you're building something and terrifying when you're living something.
Year-end has a way of shifting the lens backwards. You stop staring at today and suddenly see twelve months at once.
What did we do? What did we build? What did we get right? What did we waste? What could we have done? What should we have done?
Death forces much the same perspective, only far more brutally. It zooms you out. It reminds you that the days we casually spend are the very thing we are going to run out of.
And so, after a month of not knowing what to write, this edition was sitting there all along. It is about life. And markets. And time. Because that is what investing is ultimately about too.
If you compressed the last twelve months at Purple into a highlights reel, it would read like the credits of a Hollywood movie.
Client NAV should close the year above R105 billion, up around 30% on the same time last year. R105 billion. There was a time when R1 billion felt enormous. Now we are compounding on big numbers, and that is an extraordinary outcome.
But the applause doesn't belong to us alone. It belongs to our customers and our partners, because they kept showing up. Through Trump tantrums and war, through inflation and an interest-rate cycle shifting beneath them, through good markets and ugly ones. They deposited. They invested. They stayed invested.
And month after month, the numbers tell the story. Retail deposits were higher than the comparable month last year in every single month of FY2026. Every one. Retail averaged R1.442 billion a month against R907 million last year, growth of 59%. EasyEquities Retail alone averaged R1.2 billion a month, up nearly 66%. Total monthly flows averaged R1.951 billion, up almost 44%.
Twelve months. Twelve green ticks. That isn't a campaign, it isn't one good month, and it isn't a market bounce. It is behaviour. Millions of people choosing their future selves over their present selves, one deposit at a time.
There were plenty of other highlights. The Telescope acquisition. AI moving from something we use to something that is rearchitecting who we are, how we work and what we can become. New products, new markets, new partnerships, new possibilities. And plenty I will leave for the results, expected around 11 November, when I look forward to unpacking the year properly.
Before that there is the small matter of EasyEquities turning twelve in October. Twelve. That went quickly too. There are new launches and upgrades coming, more things we are building, more things we are changing, more things I can't wait to share. There is so much to look forward to.
But not today. Today I want to pause. Tomorrow there is another mountain to climb.
Before I pause, a word on the month itself, because August did its best to test the very patience I have just been praising.
In the US, records kept falling. The S&P 500 crossed 7,800 for the first time during August. By Friday 28 August it sat at 7,711.76, up about 3% for the month. The Nasdaq was up about 4.1% and the Dow 2.1%.
Then the Fed reminded everyone who holds the pen. Kevin Warsh struck a harder note on inflation at Jackson Hole than the market wanted to hear, and traders pushed the probability of a September rate hike to nearly 60%. The mood can change in a single afternoon.
Gold remained elevated but ended the final full week under pressure after Warsh's comments. Bitcoin, never one to be left out, finished Friday near $77,800 and was up roughly 24% for August. Oil went the other way late in the month: renewed US-Iran fighting pushed Brent back above $90 a barrel on the final day.
At home, the All Share had a strong month of its own, closing Friday at 118,173, up about 6% from the end of July and clawing back ground toward the 129,339 record it set in March. The rand was around R16.13 to the dollar on the final day of the month.
A month, in other words, that lurched from record highs to rate fears and back again. Noise, mostly. The behaviour we kept seeing was simpler: deposit, invest, stay invested, and let time, not timing, do the work.
Which is rather the whole point.
For all of that, one of my personal highlights of the year is much smaller. This. The Savage Take.
It started with a simple question from someone in the audience during a presentation I was giving to the Capitec team.
“Charles, do you ever share your thoughts on markets, business and living? Because I think your clients would benefit from them.”
Honestly, I had never considered that the things rattling around in my head were worth sharing. Sometimes it takes someone else's sight to find your own. I'm so glad they asked.
Because I've discovered that writing is healthy. It forces you to frame what you're thinking, to work out not just what you think but why you think it. And that matters more than ever, because there is so much noise in the world. The clutter is incessant. Everyone has an opinion, everyone has a platform, everything is urgent, everything wants your attention. Writing forces you to stop amongst all of that and think. What actually matters? What do I believe? Why? And am I prepared to stand behind it?
I've also realised that sharing those thoughts matters. Not because I'm always right, I'm certainly not, but because if one insight changes the behaviour of one person, causes them to invest for the first time, make a different decision, have a difficult conversation, try something new or simply think differently, then something good may follow. And if one becomes two, and two becomes ten, perhaps in time many more. That's compounding too.
I wish I'd started writing younger. I had less to share then, but I suspect that's missing the point, because the discipline of writing doesn't just document your thinking, it builds it. And perhaps more importantly, it holds you accountable to it. Once you've written down what you believe, it's much harder to pretend you never believed it.
Twenty-one editions later, The Savage Take has become something I never expected. A conversation with all of you, certainly, but also a conversation with myself. A place to cut through the noise, to frame what I'm thinking, to challenge it, sometimes to change it. And occasionally, as happened this past month, to write something and decide not to publish it. That too, I've learned, is part of thinking. Sometimes writing helps you find the answer. Sometimes it simply helps you understand the question.
After everything that happened, Sarah and I took our daughter to Mozambique. A place we all love. Away from the noise, the questions, the phones and the impossible pressure of having to grieve while the world watches. A place amongst some of nature's finest gifts, where time is measured mostly by the passing of tides.
The plan was simple. To think, to be with my family, to give my daughter space to mourn, to be angry, to cry, to talk, to say nothing at all.
Then life intervened. The power went out. Not for an hour. For three days.
At first it felt like a problem. Then it felt like a gift. Because when the power goes, so does everything that runs on it. The signal. The screens. The noise we had come to escape.
What remained was older than all of it. Puzzles on the table, cards by candlelight, conversations that ran long because there was nowhere else to be and nothing else to reach for.
We talked. We actually talked. About everything and nothing. With nowhere else to be and nothing else competing for our attention.
I have spent my career talking about the time value of money. Somewhere along the way I forgot the value of time itself. No notifications, no performance, no social speak. Just time. Time to think, time to be still, time to sit with the people in front of me rather than the ones inside a device.
I have spent years building things that live on screens, and I believe in them still. But three days without a single one reminded me of something I had let myself forget. The best parts of life were never on the grid.
Time with your children compounds too. So does time with your wife, your friends, your parents. The conversations you have, the places you go, the memories you make, the things you say while you still have the opportunity to say them. Money isn't the only thing that compounds. Life does too. And unlike money, nobody knows the maturity date.
I had come away carrying something heavy. That young woman. My daughter's grief. Her family's unimaginable loss. The fragility of all of it. And somewhere in the dark, with no screen to hide behind, one thought settled. Death is the reminder. Life is the privilege.
We don't earn the morning. We're given it, or we're not. To wake, to think, to work, to build, to invest, to talk, to hold the people we love, to sit in the dark and laugh over a hand of cards. None of that is small. It is everything.
If you died tomorrow, would you be content with the life you lived? If someone you love died tomorrow, would you be at peace with the things left unsaid, the moments postponed, the love assumed but never spoken?
And one more question, harder than the rest. Do the people we love know that they are safe with us? Because love should never frighten. It should never control. It should never own. And it should never destroy.
Love more freely. Listen more carefully. Say the things you've been meaning to say. Protect the people who trust you. Tell the people you love that you love them. Love them more than all the stars in the sky.
And when the noise returns, when the screens light up and another financial year starts tomorrow, remember the blackout. Remember that the privilege was never the signal. The privilege was simply to live.
There is so much to look forward to. Results in November. A twelfth birthday in October. New products, upgrades, AI, Telescope, another year of building. Another mountain to climb.
But today, pause. Because the years are going quickly. NAV will compound. Revenue will compound. Our investments will compound. But the years will too. And they are going frighteningly fast.
Until next time...
Be kind to one another.
Be grateful for today.
And never assume tomorrow is promised.
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.
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