Data & South Africa

Data-driven pieces on South African markets, money, and public data.

• Everyone is online. Almost nobody has home broadband.

  South Africa: 82%+ internet access, 17.4% fixed-line home internet. That is not a rounding gap, it is two entirely different products serving the same "online" statistic.

  July 29, 2026

• Two-pot withdrawals: what the numbers actually say

  R57 billion left South African retirement funds in year one of two-pot. The second year’s data says more about how people actually use it.

  July 27, 2026

• I tried to predict gold prices with a trend line. It lost to doing nothing.

  A fitted least-squares line on ten years of gold-in-rand data. Tested against the dumbest possible baseline. The baseline won by 23 points, and the reason why is the actual lesson.

  July 24, 2026

• Your SaaS bill has a hidden 64% swing and it has nothing to do with the vendor

  A $20/month tool cost South African buyers R234 in February 2018 and R385 in February 2024. The vendor never touched the price. This is what budgeting in a second currency actually looks like.

  July 23, 2026

• What ten years of gold prices actually say about the Rand

  Gold returned 215% in dollars over the last decade. In Rand, it returned 273%. The gap is not noise, and it tells you exactly what "gold as a hedge" is actually hedging.

  July 22, 2026

• South Africa’s gambling statistics

  South Africans put R1.5 trillion through gambling operators last year. That headline number misleads. The regulator’s own data tells a sharper story.

  July 16, 2026