AI is changing how we invest, work and learn. But access is only the beginning. In this edition of The Savage Take, Charles Savage explores the power of starting early, the impact of fees, and why time remains an investor’s greatest asset. Plus, a look at market movements, Tesla’s latest Roadster reveal and the extraordinary growth and valuations shaping the AI industry.

From Charles 

Mika is sick again.

This time COVID, followed by a secondary lung infection. Just as she was hitting her stride at school and finding her fitness and form in the pool. She has put more into that sport than most people would. Every time a medical setback has knocked her down, she has come back to fight for her place. She has talent. But what she has more of is guts, determination and the will to return.

I doubt she sees the grit she has built. As her father, I see it every time she starts again.

This setback has cost her something she has prized for years. A place in the first team at their premier tournament. Teams are chosen on form and fitness, and as deserving as this father feels she is, she will sit this one out. I keep asking the same question, out loud, to nobody. Can this kid not just get a break?

There is nothing I can fix here. A father waits and watches.

We are living through the most extraordinary technical change of our working lives. Yet so much of what matters still comes down to things we have always understood. Health. Family. Being there. Finding the strength to try again.

AI In Our Corner Of The World

Inside EasyGroup, AI stopped being a presentation topic a while ago. It is part of how we work.

Tens of thousands of clients have now described an investing idea in plain language and had a basket built from it in seconds. One of our teams publishes its monthly update in two versions. One for a person to read. One structured so an AI colleague can work with it properly. Some work that once needed a meeting, a specialist and a week now starts with a good question and gets done before the meeting would have happened.  A colleague shared a piece this week about buoyancy. Every few months a new model arrives. Some products get better without anyone touching them. Others stay exactly where they are or quietly sink.

That is a useful test for everything we build from here. When the next model lands, does this rise?

Some of what we do today will not be worth doing in two years. I would rather retire it ourselves than wait for someone else to do it to us.

On Friday I stood in front of about a hundred boys at KES and talked about money.

I built the evening with AI. Which was its own small proof of the point. The maths was simple. R500 a month from age 17 to 57 grows to about R5.88 million, assuming growth of 1% a month, equivalent to approximately 12.7% a year. Wait just ten years to start and you finish with roughly R4.1 million less. An illustration. Not a promise. Markets fall, returns vary and inflation eats into what those future millions can buy. But the lesson about time stands.

I ran their first rugby team as a fund manager, using the national rankings as our benchmark. In our simplified example, mid-table meant earning the index. Then we looked at what happens when you pay for star performance and get an average result.

Then I told them what has changed.

EasyEquities broke down the door. You no longer need to be wealthy to own a slice of the kinds of businesses Warren Buffett owns. AI has taken away much of what was left of the excuse. No time for research. No analytics tools. No grasp of portfolio science. Too much jargon. Nobody to learn from. No way to keep up with the news. You now have a tutor awake at 2am who can walk you through Buffett’s thinking and explain it like you are fifteen. As many times as you ask. It can also be confidently wrong. Check its work. You are still the manager. I put the costs on the screen too, without waiting to be asked. Trust starts there.

R0 to register. No minimum investment. Standard brokerage of 0.25%, with a 1c minimum. On a R1,000 purchase, that is R2.50 in brokerage before VAT and other applicable charges. The R25 monthly Thrive fee, where it applies, is waived for these boys because of their age. Other costs exist, including some deposit methods, so read the cost profile.

But the cost I wanted them to understand was the one that looks small enough to ignore.

Using the same monthly-compounding method, reducing the illustrative rate from 12% divided by twelve to 11% divided by twelve turns R5.88 million into R4.30 million. A difference of about R1.58 million. At 10% divided by twelve, you finish with R3.16 million. Small differences in what you keep. Enormous differences in where you finish. Fees are the points you concede every game. Then came the question: what do you think my parents are paying? A question worth taking home. Ask what they pay. What they get for it. And what that cost becomes over twenty or thirty years.

But cutting costs is defence. A great first team needs attack as well.

Build a strong pack. Low-cost index ETFs can give you a foundation spread across hundreds of companies. If you want to pick a few stars alongside it, do the work. Knowing and loving a company is a start. Understanding the business and the price you are paying matters too.

Then strengthen the squad every year.

Raise the monthly amount when your income rises. R500 a month stays R500 in the first illustration. Increase that contribution by 5% each year, keeping the same assumed monthly growth, and the result becomes about R9.21 million. Increase it by 10% a year and it passes R17 million. That second path asks a lot more of you. By the final year, the monthly contribution is over R20,000. Your earnings have to grow to support it.

Which was part of the point. Invest in your ability to earn as well as in your portfolio.

Pay yourself first. I challenged them to work towards investing 20% of what they earn. The habit matters, even if the starting percentage has to be smaller. And train all year. Skills compound too. One small lesson a month is 120 lessons over ten years. A framework to think about. No promise of beating the market.

Then came the Buffett challenge.

From 1965 to 2024, Berkshire Hathaway compounded at 19.9% a year. Apply that annual return to R500 a month for forty years and the R240,000 you contribute becomes about R46.9 million, before fees and taxes. Same R500. Same forty years. An extraordinary difference. An illustration, not a replay of historical rand returns. Not a promise. But certainly a reason to pay attention. Nobody should build a financial plan around matching Buffett. But look at what has changed. He built that record in a world where access to information, tools and markets was far more limited. Today, much of what once sat behind an expensive desk is in our pockets. The cost is down. You can start with any amount. The tutor is awake at 2am.

I believe that should change what we expect of ourselves.

Few will match him. Access was never the hardest part. Temperament. Judgement. Patience. Decades of doing the work. Those demands remain. He bought his first share at 11. These boys are 16 and 17. They cannot buy back those five or six years. But they can decide what happens next. I challenged them to start building their own record.

Start small. Start now. Lean in every year.

I came away humbled. These are bright, open-eyed young men, many whose circumstances have been far from easy. They asked sharper questions than I hear in plenty of boardrooms. I love getting out of the office to tell this story. And I love it most with an audience that has the one asset no adult can buy back.

Time.

So here is the commitment. We will take this to more schools. More boys. More girls. And we will connect the lesson to a practical way to start, including an account opened with a parent or guardian where needed. A talk without a way to act is entertainment.

The first amount does not have to be R500. The point is to begin.

The Fortnight in Markets

The AI enthusiasm met a harder set of questions this fortnight.

For the week to Friday 16 October, the S&P 500 fell 1.9% and the Nasdaq lost 4.5%, their worst weekly performances since June. Friday did plenty of the damage, with Micron down 5.6% and Intel down 5.8%. The Dow, meanwhile, finished the week 0.7% higher. That distinction matters. Investors were selling some of the biggest technology winners while other parts of the market held up better.

AI can change the world and still disappoint someone who paid too much for it.

Oil remains the other story, with Brent above $100 and the Strait of Hormuz still a concern. For South Africa, expensive oil feeds into transport costs, household budgets and inflation. A firmer rand helps, but it does not make the problem disappear. The JSE All Share closed Friday at about 110,934, up 0.69% on the day. The rand was around R16.46 to the dollar and gold near $4,194 an ounce.

From here I am watching whether the selling stays concentrated in the recent winners or spreads, and whether oil gives inflation another push just when nobody needs it.

Tesla Flew

On Thursday night Musk unveiled the latest version of the second-generation Roadster, nine years after the original reveal. The demonstration included the car climbing a curved ramp, hanging upside down and launching into the air before using compressed-air thrusters to right itself and land. Musk claimed a 0 to 60 time of under a second.

Whatever you think of the man, that is quite a thing to put on a stage.

Earlier in the month he said he needed a live audience to vouch that it was not AI. That line says plenty about where we are. But a demonstration and a business are different tests. Can you build it reliably? At what cost? For how many customers? And what does any of that justify paying for the company?

Tesla reports on 21 October. The car got its moment. Now the numbers get theirs.

The Anthropic Numbers

Two sets of reported figures are driving this story. They need to be kept apart.

Reuters reported in September that a confidential IPO prospectus showed Anthropic’s 2025 revenue had risen twelvefold to nearly $4.6 billion, alongside an operating loss of more than $8 billion. It also reported at least $518 billion in cloud and infrastructure commitments over a decade, much of it subject to contractual obligations that limit the ability to walk away. That is a future commitment across many years, rather than a single year’s expense. But it tells you how much demand the company is preparing to serve. Then came this week’s investor presentation. Reuters reported third-quarter revenue of $16.8 billion, up about 45% from $11.6 billion in the second quarter. The Financial Times reported that the company was profitable on an adjusted basis. Extraordinary growth. Yet slower than the more-than-doubling between the first and second quarters.

That is what expectations do. Grow 45% in a quarter and the market can still ask what went wrong.

At a $2 trillion valuation, investors would be paying roughly 30 times that quarter’s revenue multiplied by four. That is a way of illustrating the price, not a forecast of the next twelve months. There is an extraordinary business being built here. There are also extraordinary expectations and commitments attached to it.

The technology can deliver and the investment can still disappoint. If you hold AI exposure, know what you own and what you paid for it.

The Savage Take

We broke down the door. We brought the cost down. AI has taken away much of what was left of the excuse.

Buffett built an extraordinary record with tools far less powerful than those we now carry in our pockets. Matching him is another matter. But surely we can ask more of ourselves with what we have.

The boys in that hall on Friday have the tools and the one asset no adult can buy back. Our job is to get the first lesson in early and make the first investment possible, while compounding still has decades to work. Then help them understand that the first investment is only the beginning. Keep learning. Grow what you earn. Increase what you invest. Give it time.

Markets will wobble. Valuations will be argued over. A car will fly and investors will argue about what it is worth.

I will follow all of it. But closer to home, I will be watching Mika find her way back. She does not need a lesson from me about showing up. She has given me enough of those already. Grit compounds too. I wish building hers had cost her less.

The world is not waiting. What you do next is the only thing that matters.

Stay Savage, Charles

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