Crocodiles to CrowdStrike: how Currency’s 2025 picks played out

Look out all you fund managers: the Currency staff equity stock-picking selection has returned an absolutely eye-watering 37% this year. We handily beat the S&P500’s roughly 16% return, and even topped the JSE All Share’s remarkable 35% increase. 

Not only that, but our speculative portfolio trounced the Magnificent Seven (29% increase year-to-date at the time of writing), the MSCI All Country World Index, which has returned 22% so far this year, and smashed bitcoin which had a miserable time of it, falling 7% in value.   

The first thing to note is that we are not fund managers, and we are not providing investment advice: this is just for fun. The second thing to note is that it’s a bit fictitious; we are not putting real money down so we don’t have skin in the game, which makes a big difference. There is also no risk strategy – we are just looking for companies we think will do well.  

But that said, it’s illustrative in its own way, and we are thrilled to beat the major benchmarks around the world, partly because it reflects expectations at the start of the year and suggests some interesting trends along the way.  

The task we set ourselves was to choose one local stock, one international share and one wild card. Six of Currency’s staff members took part and amazingly out of the 18 stocks (or ideas) we chose, only three have been outright dogs. I’ve already (at length!) apologised for my terrible wild card suggestion: leveraged bitcoin stock Strategy Inc (formally MicroStrategy) here.  

The misses 

Reflecting on the other misses which returned negative numbers, it’s interesting how the logic might have been good, but somehow the stocks just never fired. Giulietta Talevi, for example, picked Reunert, the South African industrial and infrastructure group which did extremely well a couple of years ago in its pivot towards renewable energy. Being an Eskom sceptic she figured Reunert would still benefit and it did, sort of. But SA’s disappointing growth rate was a major drag on its ICT and electrical engineering divisions.  

Likewise, Ann Crotty suggested we short the entire US phama sector on the basis that the US health Robert Kennedy would generally be an idiot. He was – backtracking on vaccines, for example – but somehow the sector managed to grow anyway. Ann’s choices were all well considered but amazingly unlucky: she chose Brazilian beef producer JBS on the notion  that the Mercosur deal would have been signed between the EU and South America and JBS would be able to pump its beef into Europe. But then the Mercosur deal wasn’t done. Typical.

She also chose RMBH on the basis that it’s in the process of being wound up and has two activist shareholders on board who’d ensure a decent closing price – but the process is taking longer than expected. 

The platinum play  

However, other pretty logical investment ideas really worked well.  

Vernon Wessels thought there was an outside chance platinum would rebound, so chose Valterra simply on a valuation and corporate restructuring basis. It bounced spectacularly, returning 137%. Vernon said his case for Valterra rested on mispricing. After a 41% fall the year before, expectations were already low. Platinum prices had fallen for two consecutive years and the sector had been written off amid fears that the shift to electric vehicles would erode demand for metals used in catalytic converters. 

That pessimism proved premature. Platinum prices surged in the second half of the year, reaching their highest levels in 17 years just before Christmas and ending 2025 more than 116% higher. Demand for hybrid vehicles – which still rely heavily on PGMs – helped drive the rally. Unfortunately for Valterra, it could not fully capitalise on the gains, as severe flooding at its Amandelbult mine forced production stoppages, reduced sales volumes, and pushed up costs just as prices were taking off. As a result, when measured against its peers Valterra actually underperformed badly: Sibanye-Stillwater has gained nearly 290%, Northam Platinum about 260%, and Impala Platinum roughly 180%. It borders on the absurd to look at a gain of 140% in a stock and think, “it should’ve done better,” says Vernon, but he does. 

Anglo: the contrarian indicator  

The bounce demonstrates once again underlying the golden rule that whenever Anglo American divests an asset, it immediately explodes. Although to be fair, Anglo itself had a solid year, returning 40% and underlining Rob Rose’s investment credentials.  

I redeemed myself somewhat for my Strategy Inc failure, by betting that declining interest rates and low valuations would help the South African property sector rebound. It did, even after a very good 2024. My choice of Resilient wasn’t perfect – Vukile took the honors this year – but all the REITs did well.   

And the winner is … 

Because the world is weird, Currency’s star stock-picker was our style, food and culture guru, Sarah Buitendach who just knocked it absolutely out of the park. Her quixotic choice of Zimbabwean crocodile-skin producer Padenga – chosen on the basis that speciality, high-end goods are always going to perform – was our best performer by miles. The company, literally, struck gold, buying into a Zim gold mine just at the right time.  

Sarah says she spent last December in Harare and so figured her wildcard should be something Zimbabwean. Her cousin Mike mentioned the new Vic Falls Stock Exchange (versus the old ZSE) which at the time had only 14 companies listed, so it wasn’t exactly hard to research them. “Frankly when I saw that Padenga is a company that started out doing croc skins for high-end luxury brands, and has segued into gold, that was me sorted. I’m nothing if not on brand,” she says (smugly).   

Giulietta was thinking along the same lines betting on Brazilian high-end airline company Embraer, which, er, took off this year. The aerospace outfit had another fabulous year on top of a really fabulous 2024. Giulietta says the thesis that air travel demand is almost insatiable held up, as did the expectation that countries would fall over themselves to heed Donald Trump’s defense spending diktats. For the third quarter, Embraer’s Defense & Security segment posted revenue of $278m – a 27% jump year-on-year.  

Buy the shovels, not the mine  

Sarah’s choice of Padenga was no fluke; she also bet that internet security would just get bigger and bigger. That led her to punt internet services company Crowdstrike, which had a thumping 2025. 

She picked it after a big US Treasury security breach, while earlier in the year airline Qantas suffered one too. Crowdstrike itself had a big outage in the middle of 2024, but, she says, “by the time I was looking it was already in recovery and given that they’re one of the favourites in this arena, I thought why not.”  

Crowdstrike is also AI-adjacent, which underlines an age-old great investment idea: don’t buy the gold mine, buy the shovel supplier.  

We had a lot of pretty solid performers too, including some South African perennials: Naspers and Sasol. They didn’t do badly (at all – Sasol has risen 17% against the odds and Naspers is 32% ahead), and there is a safety in large-stock investing. It’s not a terrible strategy to look for solid rather than spectacular performance, which is often volatile. Internationally, though, you might have hoped that Sygnia’s popular 4IR fund and fund manager Blackrock would have done much better (gains of just 7% and 4%, respectively). 

Good bank, bad bank  

The two choices in financial services showed just how complicated it is to invest in banks. Vernon chose Nigeria’s Access bank, the country’s largest lender by total assets. But its share price has been dragged down by the cost of its aggressive African expansion and a hefty capital raise. Access is clearly suffering from a bout of strategic “indigestion”. It now carries one of the highest cost-to-income ratios among Nigeria’s tier-one lenders, and profit margins have slipped to about 25%, down from above 35% a year earlier. This is what happens when you spot an opportunity before it is capable of delivering on its potential, says Vernon.   

On the other hand, my choice of Latin American bank Nubank really hit its straps this year. I chose it after interviewing executives at SA’s version of digital bank Tyme, in which Nubank has actually taken a stake. Nubank is larger and getting bigger fast: it now has 127-million customers across Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, and banks roughly half the population of Brazil. Its low-cost, no physical branch, tech model is just blasting through the business model of traditional banks, and in the third quarter this year, the company posted record revenue of $4.2bn and net income of $783m, with a return on equity of 31%.  

Ignore the politics 

Overall, it’s hard not to notice just how different expectations of the year differed from the actual outcome. At the start of 2025, most observers were fairly bullish. That turned into shocked pessimism after Trump launched his tariff wars in April, which itself morphed into buy-the-dip bullishness. From an equity investment point of view, it’s been fabulous.  

Every year, of course, will not be like this. But the performance does illustrate just how much investment capital the world is producing at the moment which is looking for a home. The political tone of the year might have been negative, but it was far outstripped by people’s desire to secure a better life, the growing global strength of financial infrastructure, and the increasing participation in our investment universe. All of that bodes well for our investing future – scrappy politics be damned.    

_{Top image: Rawpixel/Currency collage.}