About this site

Die Meerkat publishes deep thinking on companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and on the structural forces that shape their operating environment.

The work is grounded in financial statements, not press releases. Every claim is traceable to a primary source: an annual report, a SENS announcement, a regulatory filing, a set of audited accounts. Where the analysis requires assumptions, they are stated explicitly. Where management tells one story and the numbers tell another, we follow the numbers.

The author is a CA(SA) with a focused background in financial management, reporting, and institutional investment management. The publication is anonymous by design — not to avoid accountability, but to ensure that the analysis is judged on its rigour, not on who wrote it.

What it means to be uncompromised

South African financial media operates under constraints that are rarely acknowledged. Newsrooms depend on advertising revenue from the companies they cover. Analysts at brokerages produce research on the same firms their corporate finance divisions advise. Asset managers who appear on business television hold the stocks they are discussing. None of this is illegal. All of it shapes what gets written and what doesn't.

Die Meerkat has no advertising. No sponsorship. No corporate finance relationships. No commission arrangements. No revenue from any company it covers, directly or indirectly. The publication is funded entirely by readers who find the work useful.

Anonymity reinforces this. An anonymous author cannot be pressured by an employer, frozen out by a management team, or excluded from an investor day. There is no career to protect, no relationship to preserve, no access to lose. The only incentive is to be right — and to be honest when the answer is uncomfortable.

This does not mean the analysis is infallible. It means the errors, when they occur, will be errors of judgment rather than of incentive.

What we publish

Company deep-dives. Forensic analysis of individual JSE-listed businesses — the kind that starts with the annual financial statements and ends with a view on what the equity is worth and why the market may be wrong.

Structural research. South Africa's economy runs on infrastructure that is failing — energy, water, logistics, regulation. These forces affect every listed company. We analyse them with the same rigour we apply to balance sheets.

Portfolio. Die Meerkat maintains a public portfolio — not as a model to replicate, but as an illustrative guide to what can be achieved on the JSE when careful stock selection is combined with a global perspective. South Africa offers a concentration of mispriced opportunities that larger markets have learned to arbitrage away. But no JSE portfolio exists in isolation. Global indices, foreign-listed competitors, commodity cycles, and currency dynamics all shape the opportunity set. We write about international markets when they are relevant to the local thesis — which is often.

To get in touch: editor@diemeerkat.com