ICM Equities

25/12/2025

“Happy Holidays from our team to yours! We're so grateful for your support this year."

29/06/2025

Stock Market Tips

- be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful
- the stock market is meant to transfer money from the active to the patient
- opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble
- the best time to deploy capital is when things are going down.
- only when ride goes out will you find out who's swimming naked.

03/01/2025

ASSET ALLOCATION
- fundamentally, the only asset classes are ownership and debt.
- desire to balance between aggressiveness and defensiveness. How much emphasis someone should put on preserving capital and how much on growing it. These two things are mostly mutually exclusive. Insistence on preserving capital or limiting the portfolio's volatility, calls for an emphasis on defence which preclude persuing maximum growth. Correspondingly, decision to strive to maximize maximum growth, requires an emphasis on offense meaning preservation of capital and steadiness must be sacrificed to some degree. You can't simultaneously emphasis both preservation of capital and maximization of growth or defence and offence.
- the goal of portifolio construction should be optimization and not maximization. It shouldn't be wealth but wealth persued in an appropriate way taking into account one's wants and needs.
- the goal should always be to attain the best relationship between return and risk.
- ownership assets (equities) typically have a higher expected return, greater upside potential and greater downside risk.
- they is generally no upside on debt
- offensive is usually played through ownership assets and defence is usually played through debt.
- Intestinal fortitude is key in arriving at the right mix of offence and defence.
- as risk increases not only does the expected return increase but the range of possible outcomes become wider and the bad outcomes become worse.
- because of they're contractual nature, returns from credit are likely to prove much more dependable than ownership returns.

31/03/2024

31/03/2024

Business Environment Highlights Open Access Market Zambia has been working to migrate to an open access market regime to facilitate fair and unhindered access and spur further competition in the market The market guidelines and […]

31/03/2024

22/12/2023

Entry point and patience are key in making investments

Entry point speaks to objective valuations which are sometimes informed by the state of banking credit. The tougher the banking rates, the higher the likelihood of better valuations.

Once you are into an investment, you can't give up. You need to have the conviction because often the best investments are are the ones where they continue to go down and the markets continue to be tougher. But once it turns because you had the conviction to stay and remained invested, the upside is of great value. It takes patience and fortitude.

13/03/2023

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was thriving. Credit losses are fairly low. Its deposits TRIPLED from 2019 to ‘21.

How’s that a problem? It sounds great, right?

1. When banks accept deposits from clients, they OWE the client that money. So deposits are liabilities to the bank. Liabilities cost money……”cost” both to serve those clients (branches, tellers etc ) and any interest the bank pays you on your checking account (deposit).

2. To pay for the cost of those liabs, banks turn them into assets: lending deposits as small business loans, mortgages, etc.
If a bank can’t lend deposits responsibly, it often uses excess to BUY loans or “securities,” like US Treasuries & Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS)

3. As mentioned above, from 2019-2021, the deposits tripled! SVB needed to take those funds & acquire “assets” to pay its costs.

4. Much of the $ was from VC-backed companies that needed a place to deposit the $ they raised. Those are big deposits.

5. Deposits were pouring in too fast to lend responsibly. SVB recognized that. Rather than make dumb loans, SVB bought assets guaranteed by the US government - Treasuries and MBS. BUT, it bought long duration. Often 10+ year bonds.

Mistake!

6. When rates rise, fixed income prices fall.
A general rule of thumb is for every one year of “duration,” each 1% interest rate move impacts the price of the bond by:

1% x Duration

A 1% move on a 9 yr duration bond is ~9% +/- on the bond price.

But banks are levered…

7. Remember: banks generally acquire assets by using deposits (liabilities) as the capital source.

And banks like SVB are levered 10:1 or more: owing $10+ for every $1 of shareholder equity.

If you’re levered 10x, a 10% loss on assets is a 100% wipeout.

8. So SVB bought high quality assets, but it bought tons of them with LONG duration at LOW interest rates.

When the Fed raised rates, those assets declined in value…

…1% x Duration.

Those losses, multiplied through the leverage at SVB, caused a big problem!

9. SVB now has a mark-to-market hole in its balance sheet. It’s “just” mark-to-market: as long as its liabilities are sticky (ie, depositors leave their money SVB), it will ultimately be fine.
But that’s a big “if.”

10. Technically, if all the depositors ask for their $ back at once, SVB needs to sell those bonds at the mark-to-market value, crystallizing what could have been a temporary loss. And if those losses are big enough, it may not have enough money to pay out all depositors.

11. But that situation rarely happens. However, once it starts, game theory kicks in: NOBODY wants to be the last depositor at a bank.

12. Which brings us to today. SVB has large depositors. Large depositors aren’t fully insured by the FDIC - they have an incentive to find HIGHLY sound banks. Once a whiff of issue pops up, large depositors run…“bank run.”

13. As a bank’s deposits go in reverse, it has to sell assets. The FHLB steps in to help turn its less liquid assets into more liquid.

15/10/2022

Zanaco Plc, has secured a $50 million credit line with British International Investment Company for onward lending to the small and medium sized businesses. This was done in Washington DC on the sidelines of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund annual meetings on 14 October.

Zambia’s largest bank by asset size and in the top profitability tier, Zanaco Plc, has secured a $50 million credit line with British International Investment Company for onward lending to the small and medium sized businesses. This was done in Washington DC on the sidelines of the World Bank and ...

03/05/2022

Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it. He who doesn't, pays it.

Click here for more inspiring quotes on investing: https://graciousquotes.com/investment/Here are the top 10 investment quotes so you cultivate a winning sys...

18/01/2022

The 6 Fundamental Skills Every Leader Should Practice

1. Shape a vision that is exciting and challenging for your team (or division/unit/organization).
2. Translate that vision into a clear strategy about what actions to take, and what not to do.
3. Recruit, develop, and reward a team of great people to carry out the strategy.
4. Focus on measurable results.
5. Foster innovation and learning to sustain your team (or organization) and grow new leaders.
6. Lead yourself — know yourself, improve yourself, and manage the appropriate balance in your own life.

04/12/2021

1. Why do you need to invest? Because we face an uncertainty future and you need to build a hedge against life's enviable ability to surprise at any moment. 2. How do you invest? A specific percentage of your income either as a lump sum or on a regular basis 3. When should you start investing? The b...