Master Sabina is running in this year’s July Handicap.  He ran last year and the year before I don’t believe he should have been left out of the field.  If he had been put in the field two years ago, carrying the weight he would have been carrying then, I believe he would have been the winner, but that is how things go in racing.  In other words, he will now carry a higher weight in this year’s July than he did last year and so that should really count against his chances.  I think that is part of the reason why he is 33/1.  

It is important though, before one says he has no chance, to understand that any handicap basically is designed so that all the horses finish pretty much equally.  The July Handicap does favour the younger horses and at 7 years old Master Sabina is the oldest horse in the race so he is at a disadvantage there as well.  He has really done wonderfully for me.  He has won the Grade 1 Summer Cup twice, he has won R3,8 million in stakes and he has won 9 races.  In other words, he has won more Grade 1 races than any other horse I have ever owned, he has won more money than any other horse I have ever owned and he has won more races than any other horse I have ever owned.  Apart from his mother, Sabina Park, he is undoubtedly the best horse I ever had in my life and it has really been a privilege to have him.  

I don’t think however that the July Handicap suits him, but it is such a prestigious race that one has to line up and take one’s chance and with luck in running one never knows.  The main thing that really does not suit him, apart from the weight, is the fact that he is a bit of a slow starter and Greyville is a very tight track.  That means it becomes extremely hard to come from behind at this track and he undoubtedly will be sprinting at them from behind.  Last year he turned close to last and he improved position until he came 9th.  There is prize money up to 10th place of R50,000, but my real dream is for 4th place or better because there is R200,000 for 4th and that would take his career winnings to R4 million!

Some of you may think it is a bit of a strange topic for me to write on, but actually with three daughters it is always a topic of conversation with my wife.  I am not an expert on men, but I did go to five different high schools and I think that gave me a very good grasp of different types of people and men in particular.  

I think once people get older looks are not necessarily the main criteria, as they are when you are 15 or 16, but obviously everyone wants a husband that does at least look semi-decent and tries to stay half in shape.  What I would be looking at, and it is normally reflected in the person’s shape as well in any event, is for someone who is intelligent, hardworking and motivated.  Intelligence can be defined in so many different ways and as most of you know there are many people who have University degrees who are complete fools and some people who do not have any formal education who are extremely bright.  When I talk about intelligence, I am not talking about what the person’s education is, but I am talking about whether they are curious, inquisitive, an interesting person to speak to who is well versed and knows what is going on in the world in the spheres that interest them.  That is how I would see intelligence. Anybody can study a book upside down and regurgitate it forwards and backwards if they learn hard enough – but that is not going to be enough to really succeed in life, although it may help you to a certain, sort of mid-level and certainly to a few distinctions at school, maybe even at University too.  Somebody who combines intelligence with hard work will usually do well in life and I don’t just mean financially – they might be one of the best journalists in the world, and although they may not be earning a fortune, they will still be somebody great to be married to and living a decent life.  Motivation is so important, because you get so many incredibly bright, super-intelligent people who just are not motivated and as a result never really achieve their full potential.  Those that don’t achieve their full potential often become whiners, complaining about how other people got lucky, or this happened, or that happened, etc instead of really just looking in the mirror and accept they are the person who is lacking in motivation and are really the source of the problem.  

I am sure that everybody will have their own criteria and they will put all sorts of things down – for some people one issue is more important than anything else in the world – although that is usually what they say before they marry and once they are married there is a complaint and I would end by saying that no man, and indeed woman – is perfect and everybody has their flaws in some way or other and sometimes in multiple ways.  

I would certainly think though, if in choosing a person to spend the rest of your life with, you look for somebody intelligent and hardworking, that life would be far better than having a layabout lying on the couch at home, complaining and whining about how life is unfair.  I guess ultimately, the one thing I cannot put up with is laziness.  If you are coming to this planet only once, don’t you owe it to yourself to at least put in some hard work on whatever you do – be it work, sport, social activities, etc – but make a proper effort and so the number one worry that I would have, if a friend or family member of mine was getting married to somebody, would be whether that person is hardworking or not.  That is my criteria, and you may have different thoughts – let me know what you think.

Many people incorrectly assume that the success I have enjoyed is just because of my law practice.  There is no doubt that building a successful business, and keeping it successful by following the rules and trying constantly to ensure that you are the best and delivering the best service will obviously have its own rewards.  I will say however that I think that that is only part of the story and that the other part is the sacrifices that people make.

In other words, some people, when they first start earning extra money, get themselves a fancier car, a better house and give themselves the luxury holidays.  I never made those choices – I decided to invest everything into growing my business bigger and when the business started producing dividends, to put those dividends into other businesses and other shares.  

Friends told me I was gambling when I was investing money in Google when the Rand/Dollar exchange rate was R7,20 to the Dollar and when Google’s price was the equivalent, in today’s terms, of about $200.  I say in today’s terms because that had a two for one stock split since then, so that the shares that now cost $990 actually, compared to the price I paid for them, would be now be just under $2000.  The Rand price also almost doubled during that time.  The share price of Google essentially has multiplied by approximately 4 times since I first bought Google and I continued to buy since then.  In other words, the first few Google shares I bought have multiplied close to 10 times in Rand terms.  That has obviously made me a lot of money, and while that money would have originally come from my practice, a lot of the money that I have made has come from good investments. A good investment does not mean it has to be a share – now it is probably not the right time to begin investing in shares – the market is looking very expensive and South African shares have not moved much for 3 or 4 years.  I don’t think it took incredible vision or foresight to know 6 years ago that Apple was obviously a success story, that Google could not miss and that Amazon was going to become the biggest retailer in the world, but many of my friends at the time said I was gambling.  I don’t think I was – I think they were absolute guaranteed winners in my opinion.

The bigger point I am making though is somewhat different.  That is, instead of investing that money in those shares or in certain businesses that I have invested in as well as property, I could have gone on luxury holidays, I could have improved my lifestyle substantially and I could have spent more of the money on myself.  I did not, and that is probably one of the biggest differences between those who become successful and those who don’t – the ability to say that I will not reward myself right now, I will not look for instant gratification and money now, now, now, but rather be prepared to invest it again, to re-invest it and put off the material rewards until much later so that in the meantime I can continue to grow bigger and to make more money.  That is of course if you are judging success on a money basis – it is not the only basis to judge success and for people who truly want to make money, law is not exactly the right profession!  Other businesses will always be a far better way to make a lot of money than selling your services on an hourly basis – whether you do it as a doctor or as a lawyer, and quite honestly, for those who sell their services on an hourly basis, lawyers probably finish close to the bottom of the pile – in other words, accountants and specialist doctors all earn more money than lawyers generally.  You can do well as a lawyer but you won’t become truly rich like those who sell cigarettes, furniture and cellphones.

For many years one of the great things about golf is that it has been dominated by men who are in their late thirties, even in their early forties.  A new generation of players have emerged and one thought they were the new sensations.  The amazing thing is that the 21 year old stars of one or two years ago are already been replaced by the new 21 year old stars.  No sooner did we all think that Jordan Spieth was the best player on the entire planet, than Jason Day popped up.  After Jason Day it was Dustin Johnson and already this year we have seen big wins by Justin Thomas who is 24 and the players’ tournament was won by a 21 year old, Si Woo Kim.  

What is more worrying, while a lot of people gave Tiger Woods so much criticism for having back injuries, which started round about the age of 38, is that many of these players in their mid-twenties are already having back problems – Jason Day has had his share of  back issues and now so too is Rory McIlroy.  It does appear that the days of big, fat men slowly waddling over golf courses while smoking cigars are over, and to win these days you have to be lean, mean and do lots of work and gym – but that is extracting a price too – and I think we will see a lot more early retirements in future.

In short, the game is chewing up and spitting out the players, just like rugby does – where it is very rare for anybody to play in let’s say three World Cups even though, if you think about it logically, it only requires playing at the top level for 8 years.  Golf used to be a sport where you could play at the top level for 20 or 25 years and I think in the modern era we will discover that somebody’s peak is probably going to last for a much shorter time frame and that no sooner does one star arrive than the next year another batch of 5 or 10 stars arrive.  They might even have to start making exemptions for the big name players to keep playing.  In other words, I don’t think some of the famous names will automatically get their card to play again the next year based on being on the top 125 in the world.  As it is, of the older generation, very few even qualify these days for tournaments and most of them, like Ernie Els, get cut on Friday afternoon almost every week – in other words, they don’t qualify anymore to play in the top 72 players that play on the weekend, because their scores are no longer good enough.   

We represent a lot of people at our firm, De Broglio Inc Attorneys, who suffer from various forms of paralysis.  As one helps people with conditions that one has never had, one does one’s best to get them monetary compensation and to make sure that they can get all the medical treatment they need going forward.  One can never really appreciate what it is to be in their position, just like nobody who has run a law firm, involved in this work, would ever understand the true financial pressures, stress and unpleasant clients that the owner of a law firm has to deal with.  I am not equating the two at all, but what I am really saying is that until you walk in somebody else’s shoes you never really understand them even if you think that you do.  

My example is really a bit of a pathetic one, but I recently had an arthroscopy on my shoulder and they gave me a nerve blocker in my arm.  I could not believe how heavy my arm became, how it simply flopped at my side, when it was not in the sling, and I could not do anything about it.  In particular, you become very aware that your mind controls your body because you focus very hard, for example, on trying to move your fingers and however much I focused and however hard I tried, I simply could not do anything other than twitch my left thumb about half a centimetre.  No other fingers at all would respond in any way.  It is incredibly frustrating to not be able to move a part of your body and when you touch that part of your body, to not even sense or feel it. My finger for example flopped in my soup bowl, but I never felt it until my children pointed it out to me.  The effects for me lasted 24 hours and it was on the one arm only – can you imagine people who have to go through the rest of their lives like that?  It takes so much adapting and so much bravery.

A staff member of mine recently sent me an article she had found on the Internet asking me what my opinion of the article was.  My opinion of the article was that it was simply public relations blurb – in other words, a press release or type of a press release issued by a firm of estate agents.  That is certainly how it reads and I think it contains a number of statements that will be hard to back up factually.

It is one thing to claim property prices are going up and the article said in South Africa prices are going up 11% a year – it is another thing altogether to detail in which market they are going up.  I can personally vouch for the fact that in the high-end market in Johannesburg prices have been stuck in a terrible rut for years.  In fact, nobody selling in Blair Atholl is selling at a profit and, from my own personal experience and that of friends, they are in fact selling at a 15% to 25% loss over a three year period. So, in that respect, the article suggesting that the overall property market is up 11% a year is nonsense.  

I do believe in property at certain times, but it would also depend on the three golden rules of property which are location, location, location!  The fact of the matter is most high-end developments are not selling very quickly at the moment and the growth that I have seen and am aware of is in the below R1 million market.  You cannot of course take price growth in that particular area and then extrapolate it to the whole market or suggest, once those houses are worth more and more, that the increases will continue at the same rate.  There is clearly a demand in that particular market at the moment, but that does not mean that that particular market, as those houses grow in value, will continue to grow to the same extent – it might be for example that the demand will continue to remain in let’s say the R500,000/R600,000 range.  

If I was buying a new property right now I would really be looking at Cape Town.  Cape Town is a market that has shown the most substantial increases in the last few years and while it can often be dangerous to chase a trend, I just don’t think the returns in Johannesburg have been good – and they have not been good for a long time, other than in a few ideal locations.

At the end of the day, I am not an economist and most economists and financial experts seem to get most things wrong most of the time, so I have no idea whether they would be right or not, but based on my own experience right now, if I was not buying in Cape Town, I would probably rather rent a property and invest my money elsewhere, although the stock market is looking very highly priced for now.

I was reading a book recently by Rokelle Learner about coping with narcissists.  The title of the book is “The Object of my Affection is in my Reflection” which indicates that narcissists tend to love themselves too much.  There is of course healthy narcissism which is your right to feel satisfied, special and unique, to want to win, to be the best and to be celebrated.  Where narcissism becomes a problem it is when people exaggerate their belief in being entitled and are also extremely boastful about their achievements, on a grandiose scale.  It is similar to an e-mail that I received recently, which I had some of my staff comment on, without telling them who it came from where somebody wrote to me saying, “All I want to know is what have I done wrong to deserve the immature gesture of blocking me on WhatsApp?  I am truly and deeply hurt by these actions you have taken against me!”  It should be noted that in fact my telephone number had changed.  The aggression shown in that e-mail to me would be a sign of unhealthy narcissism and the book suggests a number of ways for you to avoid raising entitled and over-indulged children.  

It will say for example if your children got bad marks you should allow them to tolerate discomfort – you should not run to your child’s rescue on every single negative encounter they might have.  Of course there are things that you need to involve yourself with, but you cannot assure them that everything is OK all the time and somebody else is to blame.  You must be reasonable about what your dreams for your child are – it is not for them to achieve your dreams and your frustrations as to what you have not achieved in your life.  You must not invest more in a result than your child does – if they are not investing any time in something – there is no point for you to try and make up for it by investing lots of your time.  

You need to make sure that your child gets time to play freely with others to learn social skills and that your real goal is to raise an independent adult – some single children in particular are brought up as narcissistic brats as they never learn to play or deal with others.  You want to teach your child to think for himself/herself and how to be able to disagree respectfully with somebody in a position of authority, if they have the basis to do so, and to be able to withstand criticism from their peers.  

What you don’t want is some child who feels that whatever they want they should be given – more TV time, more devices to play with, a grandiose sense of self-importance and entitlement while demanding that others treat them with adoration and respect, regardless of their behaviour.  In particular, narcissists often lack empathy – they are unable to recognise and experience how other people feel and to a large extent what the book is basically saying is that narcissistic parents produce narcissistic children – so if you over-accommodate your child, if you over-parent your child, if you are a helicopter parent who sits over your child and helps them with every single thing all the time and told them not to worry about anything, you might well produce a narcissistic child.

I am probably not surprised that we don’t have hospital ratings in South Africa.  Many of the hospitals, in particular the State hospitals, deliver atrocious service and even worse treatment.  That is a reality, I am not being mean and I am not being nasty.  Medical negligence cases are going through the roof largely because of how much negligence there is in these hospitals although there is much more touting in that field now also.  It could so easily be resolved if, as is the case in the UK and in America, there were more ratings of the actual hospitals.  In both of these countries they rate hospitals according to various procedures including pneumonia, heart failure, sepsis, stroke and respiratory failure and determine what percentage of clients die or have complications from these common procedures and conditions.  

This allows you, for example, to research which hospitals have the lowest rates and choose to go to them instead of the most dangerous hospitals.  The results are astounding – showing, even in countries like America and England, a substantial difference in the death rate between different hospitals – so, for example, as one hospital that has made the top 50 in America advertises, based on the data, that if people had been treated with the same standard and care at their hospital, 176,000 people less across America would have died in the last year.  In other words, they have high standards and if other hospitals had similar standards, far less of the patients would die.  

One of the sad things that perhaps none of us really want to face or accept is that your risk of dying is completely dependent, not only on what disease or complications you are suffering from, but very importantly on the standard of the healthcare you get.  In many instances, the more money you have, the better healthcare you can afford, but in South Africa the success rates or failure rates of the various hospitals and groups are not published or revealed – in fact, I would not be surprised if they are not even tracked in the first place.  Instead of always criticising personal injury attorneys, and some of the criticism may be justified, the Minister of Health could start by establishing tracking standards and publishing the results – let us know what the worst hospital in South Africa are so that not only can people avoid it, but the problems can be tackled.  I have a very good idea as to which the worst ones are in the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan area, including Soweto.

I have always struggled to understand the whole luxury watch market.  I have a number of friends who are forever explaining to me how they have bought a Rolex at a discount and that they can actually resell the Rolex that they own for more money than they just paid a dealer for it.  In other words, and this is all based on the allegation that they know some amazing dealer somewhere and as a result of that can get more for the watch when they resell it than what the dealer has just sold it to them for!

To me it does not make sense, because it is obvious that the dealer had to make a profit in selling it to them and they can’t be selling it “below cost”.  I came across an article recently on Barron’s that confirmed my suspicions but took them even further.  They explained that websites like www.watchwarehouse.com sell men’s watches at huge discounts - sometimes up to 40% off the listed price and while I am mentioning Rolex, some of the models that I saw have been advertised at 26% off, etc.  The problem is that basically nobody will now believe the retail price because everybody knows you can get the watches at a discount elsewhere and whatever that minimum price is that you can find on those websites becomes the maximum value for the watch.  It is not realistic to assume, unless you are dealing only with fools, that you can sell the watch second hand to somebody else for more than they can buy it for new!  

My watch is an IWC Portuguese Chronograph and it too is listed on the website, although the price has gone up since I bought it a number of years ago.  The exact model that I have was not for sale on the website, but most of the prices were much cheaper than the retail price, so for example the black version of the watch that I have normally retails at $6000 is available on this website for $5,168 – much less than listed in the shops.  It is still more than what I paid for the white face version of the same watch, but it does show that people who like to talk about trading their Rolex’s, etc, are to a certain extent living in a dream world or relying on finding somebody more silly than they were, in terms of believing that they really were buying something for less than at cost.  Apparently, they source most of these watches from the very same dealers who sell them in the shops for the higher prices – by calling up authorised dealers and getting them for example to agree to a 40% discount before on-selling it on the websites or by the various companies at a 30% discount and pocketing the 10% difference.  

Apparently there is an excess inventory at the moment, around the world of luxury watches and so everyone has been forced to turn a blind eye to this practice of trying to get rid of excess stock by heavy discounting.  In short, if you have the money, now is the time to get that expensive watch you have been looking for noting that the websites do have much cheaper watches like Fossil.  They also have Mont Blanc pens from 20% to 25% lower than we see them retailed for in the shops.  Another famous website that deals with reselling watches is Chrono24.  One watch you will struggle to find on most of these websites, and it will be a disappointment to those who own them, are Tag Heuer – and that is because those types of watches are typically shunned by collectors and not actually sought after.  You will hundreds of those listed on Ebay.  While marketed as an up-market watch it is seen by collectors as being more mainstream and not exclusive.   

A lot of my friends, who know I am a big Tiger Woods fan, gave me a lot of grief about Tiger being arrested for being under the influence. One must remember that under the influence does not necessarily mean alcohol – it can be drugs or prescription drugs in the form of medicine. I try to remind them that most sport stars generally tend to have quite a few problems largely because they often come from underprivileged backgrounds and then suddenly have huge amounts of money hoisted onto them and have not necessarily always being brought up the right way. I am not talking about Tiger Woods at all in this instance, but whatever sport you are looking at – whether it is rugby, cricket, etc – there have always been scandals, people who have taken bribes, people who have alcohol problems or abused women, etc.
In fact, it seems that when one looks at that category as a business, in other words, to say some people do sport as a business, they seem to have a far higher percentage of bad behaviour amongst their stars than in the ordinary business world.

I think most people are flawed in some way or other – we are not perfect. To think that people, simply because they can hit a ball beautifully with a gold club, or curve a soccer ball with their feet, now suddenly have class, manners and know how to behave is a mistake. At the moment, for example in golf, the number one player in the world has previously been suspended for using cocaine and allegedly for involvement with other players’ wives. Soccer players seem to avoid that most of the time, because in many cases it is just run of the mill news to hear of some exposé of yet another soccer star with prostitutes or having affairs and those of us who follow cricket in South Africa will never forget the cases involving Hansie Cronje and the bribes, etc.

I guess, by the same token, when I listen to pop music, I don’t consider pop stars poets. Some of them have catchy lyrics, sometimes written by themselves and sometimes not, but the vast majority of them don’t write poetry and should not be confused with poets and the vast majority of sport stars should not be confused with role models.

If you are talking about role models, we are talking about people like Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama, Margaret Thatcher and in my mother’s case, Mother
Theresa, although there have been a lot of revelations about her in recent years. I
guess the point I am making is that one should not confuse one’s admiration for the
way somebody either sings or plays sport and to allow you to then, because they do
something like that so well, think that that person is a role model and is classy and
sensible in every way. In some cases they might be, in other cases, just like
everybody else, they are flawed human beings and when they are held up to more
media exposure than the rest of us, then it all comes crumbling down.

I am quite unimpressed by the app that the Sunday Times has produced.  At a time when media really struggles to sell journalism – in other words, you need people to pay for writing, they need to make it far better.  The app for the Sunday Times requires you to log in – which is not unusual for anything – but it does not allow your username and your password to be remembered.  That is absolutely bizarre and it leads to a situation where, again and again, you must re-enter your username and your password.  I don’t know who they hired to design an app for them like that, but that is an absolutely ludicrous system and it is an extreme irritation that every time I want to read something from the Sunday Times or The Times I have to enter my en tire e-mail address as well as my password.  We have phoned them and complained about it and they said they will look into it – but I wonder how long it will take before they do have it fixed?