Investment Strategist
Cape Town, South Africa
Joined July 2021
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Daniel King retweeted
Estimated 6% rise in court cases when judges are given, and trained in, use of AI #Pakistan
What happens when you roll out custom generative AI to half a country's judges?
New paper on Pakistan's courts with @ProfSultanEcon and @gochristoph.
In line with wemustactnow.ai -- we provide early empirical evidence on the impacts of transformative generative AI.
Daniel King retweeted
Manufacturing production decreased 4.3% on an annual basis in May, its biggest contraction in just over a year, highlighting how the sector remains under pressure from higher input costs partly triggered by the war between the US and Iran.
tinyurl.com/ypc7b9su
Daniel King retweeted
If the AI bubble bursts will it cause a recession? With a booming stock market and enormous IPOs, artificial intelligence is transforming financial markets. The Economist’s top economics and markets experts discuss whether it could all end in a global crisis: bit.ly/4f2LtiE
Daniel King retweeted
[IN COURT - ACCUSED]
Picture 1: Suspended Ekurhuleni Metro Police Department (EMPD) Deputy Chief Julius Mkhwanazi
Picture 2: Suspended EkurhuleniHead of Legal and Risk Services, Advocate Kemi Behari.
Picture 3: Ekurhuleni Head of Department for Human Resources, Ms Linda Gxasheka.
Picture 4: Former Ekurhuleni City Manager Imogen Mashazi and Suspended EkurhuleniHead of Legal and Risk Services, Advocate Kemi Behari.
#MadlangaCommission
Daniel King retweeted
Crime Intelligence’s Major General Feroz Khan has amassed a R39-million property portfolio, which includes luxury homes in George, Houghton and Umhlanga, and last year declared to the police that he owned 30 cars. news24.com/southafrica/news/…
Daniel King retweeted
You heard of the "China Shock," but what about the "China Squeeze"—limiting the traditional pathways to economic development for poorer countries. #PIIECharts
Read: piie.com/publications/workin…
Daniel King retweeted
IS THE ECONOMIST ALWAYS WRONG?
Scandalously, in some circles @TheEconomist has a reputation as a contrarian indicator. This week we fessed up to getting a big call on oil prices from April wrong.
Obviously our goal is not perfectly-hedged (and perfectly boring) predictive accuracy: often it is to stimulate, provoke, and challenge. But I did want to test that wider allegation, so I ran a series of LLM scorers across our full leader database since 2000 (7,000 leaders in all.)
You can see the results in the chart below: each dot is one of the 1,400 leaders where we identified concrete and falsifiable predictions that were central to the argument. Higher = more accurate, further to the right = more contrarian.
We do well, unsurprisingly, when aligned with conventional wisdom. We often do worse when truly out on a limb. But actually, on average, we are a bit likelier to be right than wrong on our somewhat-out-of-consensus calls. All round, a respectable performance.
And as @ecurrnomics points out an accompanying leader, there is no shame at all in being beaten by the market: as good free-marketers we believe deeply in the aggregated wisdom of prices.
Take a look at my piece here, which includes a canter through our best and worst calls of the last quarter-century: economist.com/interactive/fi…
Daniel King retweeted
The administration now controls who gets access to the best models economist.com/business/2026/…
Daniel King retweeted
More central banks than ever expect to increase their gold reserves, a sign one of the key forces behind bullion’s record-breaking rally remains intact despite this year’s pullback bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Daniel King retweeted
Can't get a recession with profit growth like this. Instead could hiring pick finally pickup again?
Daniel King retweeted
US 10-year Treasuries are offering about the greatest amount of yield versus the S&P 500's earnings yield going back to 2003. Either earnings have to keep outperforming, or bonds will start looking like an increasingly attractive alternative.
Daniel King retweeted
The "conversation" is increasingly about token "costs", but it's not the full picture. Model routing is the low-hanging-fruit approach to dramatically reduce costs, and companies will have to adopt it as their agent-driven consumption grows (using tools like @RaylineAI)
But the full picture is ROI. CFOs are in a great position for that, but in my experience running product strategy at @LiveRamp, the real magic happened with the CFO, CTO, and CPO working together. The CFO sets the constraints: what percent of revenue is going to R&D? What level of profitability do we need to hit? What are our topline targets? The CTO/CPO must work within those lines. The CPO assigns the value to the R&D initiatives working with sales/marketing, and the CTO mobilizes the engineering resources to get the job done.
Increasingly, those engineering resources are not just payroll/headcount, but also tokens (and a lot of them). So the critical need is for the CTO and CPO to make that token spend both optimal (via routing) and traceable (by tying usage to initiatives) so the token spend is legible to the business (CFO & CEO).
Without traceability of token spend to make it business-legible, rockstar CFOs will (and should) shoot down the spend.
Daniel King retweeted
CHART OF THE DAY: The cost of the most important nitrogen fertilizer is back to pre-war levels in the US, benefiting from ample natural gas supply in America. Urea prices are sharply down too in Europe and Latin America, but remain elevated in most of Asia.
Daniel King retweeted
This century the US has embarked on wars of choice and borrowed more to pay for them. That might not end well. ft.trib.al/5CPYMsA
Daniel King retweeted
SOUTH AFRICA’S CONSUMER FOOD PRICE INFLATION IS AT ITS LOWEST LEVEL IN 14 MONTHS
Although fears of high fuel prices resulting from the Middle East war persist, and indeed it remains an upside risk to South Africa’s consumer food price inflation going forward, the near-term data continue to paint a comforting picture.
The figures released by Statistics South Africa this morning show that the consumer food price inflation slowed to 2.8% in April 2026, down from 3.4% in March. This is the lowest level in 14 months. There was a broad deceleration across the various food products.
At the core of moderating consumer food price inflation are lower grain, fruit, and vegetable prices on the back of ample domestic and global supplies, and moderating vegetable oil prices, which underpin the softening of price inflation.
We believe meat presents minimal risks to inflation. Base effects on meat prices, along with continued cattle slaughter, have helped ease price inflation.
The Balassa Samuelson effect: if the SARB wants to aide the South African economy’s catchup with more industrialised, developed market economies, it will at some point need to be *more* tolerant of inflation, not less tolerant.
My petrol bill has gone up enormously, so now the Reserve Bank is going to make my mortgage more expensive so that I have less money to spend on medical aid, food and school fees. All this in fear of 2nd round effects which might exist if one squints really hard at the data.
If the SA government wants to structurally reduce consumer inflation in the long term, while also avoiding punitively high interest rates, they need to more deliberately target two big costs:
Rent and medical aid.
Policy design should flow from this fact.
I wonder whether the history books will indeed record this as a large and scrumptious TACO or a strategic success.
US President Donald Trump and his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said the end of the war on Iran could be near, with Washington signalling potential for direct talks with Tehran’s leadership and a winding down of the conflict even without a deal ebx.sh/dKN9k1
