I contributed the following article to Dr Marc Faber’s Gloom, Boom, and Doom report in January 2014. It was an updated version of the argument my colleagues and I at ETM Analytics had been making to clients since around 2012. It was a warning to be careful of a coming bust in African economies and markets.

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Email me for the password. (The duplication of chart 2 & 3 in the report was the editor’s error).

At around the same time (December 2012), The Economist ran its Africa Rising cover;

And Renaissance Capital analysts published The Fastest Billion (November 2012).

If one invested in this Africa rising view in November 2012 by adding money to the Market Vectors Africa ETF, you’d  have wiped out 30% of your capital in USD. The exuberance had become a little irrational. If you bought in late 2012 and managed to sell at the 2014 peak you could have picked up at most 9% in USD.

The time you should have been buying Africa was back in 2000 (when Jim Rogers said the time was right in his book: “Adventure Capitalist”). Africa was an option on a developing commodity boom. Such a buying time will come again, but my sense is we’re not there yet. There are some opportunities across the continent, but they are few and far between.