Five years after his housemanship program at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital LUTH, Kazeem now earns N600,000 as a pediatrician in a private hospital in Lagos.
Like many professionals, he soon realized that sheer passion for the job the really love isn’t enough especially in the face of current economic realities.
To augment his earnings, he started an online consultancy gig by the side but most recently, he has been more interested in investing.
The prospect of earning passively tickled his fancy and he believes that if he could decode the complexities of anatomy, this ought to be a walk in the park. He was wrong.
In 2020, his first flurry in the world of investing, he parted ways with the bulk of his principal; involuntarily of course. As a neophyte, he hadn’t realized that losing was indeed a possibility in investing. Armed with a few pages of Robert Kiyosaki’s self help finance books and a bunch of talking heads on CNBC and Bloomberg, Kazeem thought he was an investment superstar. Luckily for him, he learnt his lessons and improved.
Fast forward to the end of 2023 and he had put aside 30% of his earnings in 3 years amounting to around N5,500,000 in an investment account. He had realized early on that knowing how to invest and having enough liquidity to take risks was very important. He also kept aside 20% of his income in that same period in an emergency savings account as a safety net. 2024 was going to be a great investing year for him.
In 2024, Bitcoin hit the psychological $100,000 milestone. The SP 500 and Nasdaq 100 hit all-time highs. The year of the semiconductors. NVIDIA toppled Apple as the most valuable company in the world but SMCI got battered from $700 to $17 due to audit concerns. 2024 – The year Coffee sold for $10,000 a tonne and oil failed to touch $100 despite all the geopolitical tensions in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Markets would always remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
In the United States and the United Kingdom, Central banks cut rates as they began to see a downward trend for inflation, but the same cannot be said in Nigeria, where the government devalued the currency, and took massive cuts in petroleum and electricity subsidies with their citizens bearing the brunt of it. The Nigerian stock market ended 2024 positively, either citing investors’ confidence in the economy or market participants saw the stock market as having the hedge against a depreciating currency.
One cannot talk about the year 2024 without speaking about the 2024 US elections as this was a major; if not the most important event in 2024. We saw the victory of president Trump back to the white house with a landslide win in popular and electoral college votes.
In a phenomenon now jokingly referred to as the Trump effect, we saw a parabolic rise in cryptocurrencies and the US Dollar in the first 24 hours of the results of the election. A relic of the first Trump administration that saw digital currencies run with Bitcoin hitting its previous cycle highs.
Even though Kazeem learnt that the markets cannot be 100% predicted, he relied on expert reports and data from NBS, Yahoo Finance, etc to make bets. For example, following the Naira devaluation, Kazeem knew the elites who had Naira exposure would diversify into Nigerian stocks. In 2024 the benchmark index of the Nigerian market the NGX ASI was up 37.65% outperforming the S&P 500(23.5%), DJI(13%), NASDAQ(30%) and NIKKEI 225(20%) indices.
Kazeem also kept an eye on the semiconductor industry. He realized that Nvidia was at the leading edge of chip manufacturing closely edging towards the 3㎛ transistor size. From experts, he gleamed that Artificial Intelligence AI and Artificial General Intelligence AGI was impossible without these highly advanced chips. His bet on Nvidia paid off as the stock rode by 179.4% in 2024.
With Tesla leading the pack on self-driving and fully autonomous vehicles, Kazeem also bet big on Tesla in 2024. Additional boost for this play was when Tesla launched their humanoid robot prototype, Optimus. Tesla rose by 66.9% in 2024.
Kazeem fundamentally believes that digital currencies are the future but timing was the problem. However, following the 2022 cryptocurrency crash, he had been buying digital assets in his mock portfolio. In 2024,his conviction paid off.
The cryptocurrency market saw its market capitalization add about $1.8 trillion. The market cap surged from just below $1.8 trillion to $3.6 trillion in 2024. Bitcoin hit its ATHs of $108,135. Performance of the top 5 crypto currencies by market cap in 2024:
The energy sector in Nigeria was one of the biggest players in 2024. A lot of activities and buzz surrounding the Dangote refinery created renewed interest in the sector. We saw Oando outperform Bitcoin, Solana, Nvidia and S&P 500 all put together.
The energy sector in Nigeria was one of the biggest players in 2024. A lot of activities and buzz surrounding the Dangote refinery created renewed interest in the sector. We saw Oando outperform Bitcoin, Solana, Nvidia and S&P 500 all put together.
The banking sector was also one of the best performing sectors in the Nigerian market. Kazeem picked five stocks from the Nigerian market to invest in 2024. Here’s how they performed.
Coffee: Throughout 2024, rising coffee prices have been a recurring news story, driven by a powerful confluence of challenges that have significantly reshaped the market. US Coffee C futures increased by almost 83% in 2024.
Brent Crude: Brent Oil Futures Historical Data shows that crude declined in 2024 with futures price plummeting by 7.5%.
Gold: Gold spot prices show that the commodity was up 28.4% in 2024. Escalation of conflict in the Middle East; especially the fear of direct confrontation between Iran and Israel and rate cuts were chief causes of the flight to safety in Gold in the last year.
US T-bills: As of December 31, 2024, the 1-year Treasury rate was 4.20%. The 9-12 month S&P U.S. Treasury Bill Index was 237.16.
Nigeria EUROBOND: As per the Nigerian Debt Management Office DMO, the rate of its US$1.118 NOV 2025 Eurobond is 7.625% as at December 27 2024.
In terms of allocation, Kazeem allocated a very high percentage of his portfolio in risky assets. 20% of the portfolio was allocated to safe assets and the remaining 80% to stocks, digital assets and commodities. 30% was allocated to stocks, 30% to digital assets and the remaining 10% to commodities.
Here’s a complete breakdown of Kazeem’s hypothetical portfolio.
If Kazeem invested N5,500,000 in these assets on January 1 2024 he would have made N5,429,349 in returns.