Dead Sardine Warning Issued For Kouga Coast by Kouga Municipality

by SFT | Aug 31, 2026 | St Francis

With the dead sardines warning issued by Kouga Municipality, residents and beachgoers in St Francis Bay and Cape St Francis are being asked to keep an eye out for dead or dying sardines following the detection of Pilchard Herpesvirus (PHV) and reports of fish washing ashore elsewhere along the South African coastline.

To be absolutely. clear, there have been no reported sardine wash-ups in the St Francis area at this stage, but Kouga Local Municipality has issued a precautionary warning as the situation continues along other sections of the coast.

What To Look Out For

Large numbers of dead and dying sardines have washed ashore at several locations along the Western and Southern Cape coastline during August, while sardines have also recently been reported on five beaches in Gqeberha.

These include 1st Beacon, Pollok Beach, Hobie Beach, Humewood Beach and Kings Beach.

With St Francis Bay and Cape St Francis sitting between affected stretches of coastline, local residents are being asked to remain alert should sardines begin washing ashore here.

Pilchard Herpesvirus Detected

Kouga Local Municipality said Pilchard Herpesvirus has been detected in connection with sardines washing ashore along the coastline.

The municipality has advised people not to touch, handle, collect or consume sardines found washed up on the beach.

The same precaution applies to pets and other animals. Fish found on the shoreline should not be fed to animals.

What To Do If You Find Sardines

Anyone who notices dead or dying sardines washed ashore anywhere along the Kouga coastline should leave the fish where they are and report the location to Kouga Local Municipality.

Reports can be made by calling 042 200 2200, allowing municipal officials to assess the situation and take any necessary action.

Authorities continue to monitor sardine mortality along the South African coastline, including testing and investigation into affected fish.

For now, St Francis beaches remain unaffected by any reported wash-up. However, with incidents recorded elsewhere along the coast, residents walking, surfing or spending time on local beaches are encouraged to keep an eye out and report anything unusual.

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by SFT | Aug 31, 2026 | St Francis

When 400% Leverage Meets a Bad Week – The Human Side Of Money presented by Client Care

by SFT | Aug 30, 2026 | St Francis

I read a story recently that reminded me how many investors fail to learn from history and how human investing behaviour doesn’t change. This isn’t a story about hedge funds, I think it’s a story about all of us.

 A 24-year-old former OpenAI researcher, Leopold Aschenbrenner, wrote an essay predicting the pace of AI development, he then became an overnight investing sensation and launched a hedge fund called Situational Awareness built around that conviction. The fund grew from a few hundred million dollars to an estimated $45 billion in under two years. At one stage it had returned over 1,000% since inception. People called him the Nostradamus of AI.

Then, in July this year, everything changed. He had borrowed heavily against his positions, leverage as high as four times his capital. Then a rough week for tech and semiconductor stocks triggered margin calls he couldn’t meet and he was forced to sell around two-thirds of the fund’s holdings at a discount. The fund fell from $45 billion to roughly $10 billion before a rescue injection kept it standing.

 Here’s the part that really got my attention, the fund itself finished the year up around 80%while most of its investors were down 67%. Not a typo. The early money made a fortune, while the money that arrived later, chasing those extraordinary headline returns, absorbed nearly all the pain. I think about that gap often when I sit across from clients. I like to call it the behaviour gap, caused by the human emotions of fear and greed. It’s rarely the strategy that catches people out. It’s the timing of when they arrived and how exposed they were when the ground shifted.

Here are a few lessons from this story.

 Leverage cuts both ways, always. Borrowed money makes good years spectacular and bad years brutal, and it has an unpleasant habit of forcing you to sell at precisely the moment you can least afford to, so be very careful betting with money you don’t actually have.

 Conviction is not the same as safety, and running with the herd can be dangerous. A portfolio built entirely around one big idea can work beautifully right up until it doesn’t. Diversification has never been about excitement. It’s about still being at the table when the next hand is dealt.

 Being right isn’t the same as staying invested. Aschenbrenner may yet be proven correct about AI infrastructure over the long run. It won’t matter one bit to the investors who were forced out in July, at the worst possible price, not because the idea was wrong but because the structure around it was too fragile to survive a bad week.

 Aschenbrenner stayed invested, so his personal returns are still massive. These underlying truths apply just as much to a modest retirement portfolio in St Francis Bay as it does to a $45 billion hedge fund in New York.

 The goal should never be to catch the best-performing fund in the room. It should be comfortably, steadily invested twenty years from now while living your best life!

—

Dirk Groeneveld, Certified Financial Planner

t. 083 261 9287

e. dirk@clientcare.co.za

Heart of a Woman – Unmask Your Heart At This Mardi Gras Carnival Celebration At The Links On Saturday

by SFT | Aug 27, 2026 | St Francis

Step into a world of extravagant glamour and make a lasting difference.