Newsletter and Life Update, October 2026
Cape Town at 2023 Argentine blue dollar prices, Paraguay’s Ueno bank collapse as it looks from the ground, new Cobrasco results from Andina Copper, and my portfolio after a 20% fall in a month.
I spent two weeks in Cape Town and came back to Asunción to a bank collapse. Ueno, the bank I wrote about last month, went into resolution. People were queuing to open accounts anywhere else and the president was gone within three days.
Cape Town first because it’s the fun part. Then Ueno and what I’ve done with my own banking, then Andina. The portfolio is at the bottom after a 20% month it isn’t pretty.
Cape Town 🇿🇦
Cape Town is now one of my three favourite cities.
If you live in South America you need a break from it now and then. Cape Town runs like a Commonwealth country. People queue, the beer is cold and they drink it before 10pm, the cricket is on.
Everyone was friendly. Waiters, Uber drivers, the blokes sitting near me at the cricket. I didn’t have one bad interaction in two weeks, which isn’t what I’d been told to expect. South Africa has its serious issues, but I didn’t see them.
And it’s cheap. If you were in Buenos Aires in 2023 changing dollars at the blue rate, it feels like that, except the menu prices don’t change between lunch and dinner.
The food is the best value I’ve had anywhere. Steak, oysters, and seafood counters like the one below.
The Winelands are less than an hour away, and Stellenbosch is a seriously cool place. It was founded in 1679 by Simon van der Stel, the Dutch governor of the Cape, who named it after himself.
That makes it the second oldest town in South Africa after Cape Town. He had oaks planted along the streets and the locals still call it Eikestad, the city of oaks. The French Huguenots turned up a few years later and brought their winemaking with them.
It’s a university town now, and everyone seems to be big and lots of blonde people (definitely the Dutch genes). I’m 200cm and I didn’t stand out (for once!). The streets are green, the buildings are white, and there’s a good cafe or restaurant every few doors. I could chill there for a month and not get bored.
I went to Spier, which has been making wine since 1692. It’s old Cape Dutch farmhouses under oak trees, with gardens and a restaurant with great views, and the wine would cost three times as much if it were French or even Argentine (these days).
I saw the milk aisle in Stellenbosch and it made sense why Springboks like Eben Etzebeth, and Marco Jansen (the 6’8” Afrikaans all rounder who tore the Australians apart in the Test series), are serious units.
Random theory with no evidence, but I think drinking something that was made to grow a half tonne animal breeds bigger, healthier humans, especially when you’re a kid.
It what my tall Australian mates, my brother (202cms) and I all have in comon
Newlands (cricket) 🏏
I planned the trip around the Cape Town Test because my brother plays in the Australian squad. He didn’t get a game this time.
I still got to watch Test cricket at Newlands with a beer and Table Mountain behind the stands.
It’s the best looking ground I’ve been to.
The dream year
Paraguayan tax residency doesn’t need me in Paraguay all year. On the current rules it needs me here for one day, and that could change any time.
So the calendar is mine. I’m not about to spend three months in Cape Town, but this is how a year can work on a setup like this:
A few weeks of southern summer in Cape Town.
A few weeks of northern summer in Europe.
The rest between Asunción, site work in Argentina and Colombia, home, and a week in Rio when it fits.
It works if you’re single. With a family you’d need to be rich.
Living like that is tough though. You get sick of airports and other people’s furniture.
Having a permanent base in Asunción to come back to is seriously epic.
If you want to know more about Paraguayan residency and the tax number, message me below. I’ve been through the whole process, from the first application to permanent residency, buying a car, getting a driver’s licence, local banking (one bank blow up💥, last week, more on that below), renting an apartment long term and making Paraguay the centre of my life.
Ueno: the bank I wrote up last month just collapsed 🇵🇾
Last month I called Ueno the bank Paraguay runs on. I said I was working towards their black tier for the discounts. In early October I tweeted about getting 40% off diesel at Petropar with a Ueno card, and I listed Ueno as one of the digital banks paying 10% on long term CDAs.
A few weeks later the central bank shut it down. I’m not a banking expert, but I live here and I had their card in my wallet, so this is what it looked like from the capital Asunción.
What happened
The timeline, from what’s been reported:
29 October. Ueno told the central bank it couldn’t top up its reserve requirement. It was about US$70M short.
2 November. The BCP board voted unanimously to put the bank into resolution. Once the accounts were adjusted, its solvency ratio was 5.56% against a 12% minimum. The supervisor had been looking at loans to companies linked to the owners, Grupo Vázquez, since June.
3 November. The app and the cards stopped working. Close to 3 million customers, in a country of 6.1 million people, couldn’t get at their money. Ueno held about 9% of the country’s bank deposits.
5 November. President Santiago Peña, who was a Grupo Vázquez shareholder until March 2025, resigned as Congress moved to impeach him. Congress removed him anyway. He and the former central bank president, Carlos Carvallo, have since been charged, and Peña is under house arrest.
On the ground the cards stopped working first, then everyone went looking for another bank. Banco Familiar said it opened about 60,000 accounts in 48 hours. Other banks’ apps crashed under the load and the central bank had to put out a statement explaining why.
The guaraní had its worst week in years. The dollar went from ₲5,661 on 28 October to ₲6,358 a week later, which is about 12%. Country risk rose from 119 to 138 basis points.
If you earn dollars and spend guaraní, a scare like this makes Paraguay cheaper. Meat, diesel and the mechanic cost the same in guaraní, but at ₲6,358 my dollars bought 12% more of them than they had a week earlier, and I did nothing to earn it. The guaraní had been getting stronger all year, which made the country more expensive for foreigners every month, so this was the first move in our favour for a long time. For Paraguayans it’s the reverse. Their savings are worth less in dollars than they were a month ago.
What it says about the system
People online wrote Paraguay off within two days. It was a corralito, it was Argentina in 2001, the country was finished. Most of the people saying it have never been here and couldn’t name a second Paraguayan bank. Then depositors started getting paid and they moved on.
Paraguay handled it better than I expected. The deposit guarantee paid out and it paid out quickly.
The Fondo de Garantía de Depósitos covers 75 minimum wages per person per bank. That’s ₲228.3M, or about US$36k at this week’s rate. Under the old law the fund had 15 days to start paying and could take another 15.
Congress changed the law in a day so depositors could get an advance of up to 40 minimum wages, about ₲121.8M, within 24 hours. The first ₲10M payments went out on 5 November and about 1.2 million people had been paid by the weekend. The BCP says 97% of Ueno’s depositors are under the cap and will get everything back. Moody’s put the fund’s liquidity at about US$1.6bn in September, roughly double Ueno’s insured deposits.
For comparison, Argentines in 2001 were locked out of their accounts for a year and had their dollar deposits turned into pesos.
The losses are above the cap, and the biggest depositors were public bodies. IPS, the state pension and social security fund, had about ₲1.74 trillion in Ueno CDAs, and around 32,000 retirees were paid through the bank. The economy ministry and the bank workers’ pension fund are on the list as well. Anything above ₲228.3M goes into the liquidation, which will take a long time. The Senate refused to cover public funds in full, though IPS ranks ahead of the other large depositors.
Did foreigners like me get burned?
Mostly no. The guarantee covers foreigners the same as locals, and most foreigners here only keep spending money in a Paraguayan bank. The real money stays offshore in dollars.
That was my setup. Ueno was my daily card and it had a few weeks of living money in it. About a week after the app went down, the BCP assigned me an account at FIC with my full balance in it, and I could use it straight away. I didn’t have to queue anywhere and I didn’t lose a guaraní. I had been close to moving more in to reach the black tier. I’d still have been under the cap, but I’m glad I didn’t have to find out.
Not everyone stayed under the cap. I just met a guy in a cafe in Asunción who went all in on Ueno Black. Everything he had above the guarantee is gone for now, and he’s waiting on the liquidation to see if any of it comes back.
The way he explained it, I get it. Ueno’s perks were over the top, but the other banks here run similar promotions, so that wasn’t a warning on its own. In March, eight months before it failed, JP Morgan and Bank of America sold US$350M of Ueno’s bonds to international investors and the deal was oversubscribed.
The president at the time had been a shareholder in the group and his party was in government. I was chasing the same tier myself. Who honestly would have thought? It goes to show you just never know.
I’ve since opened a basic account at Itaú and that’s what I’ll use in Paraguay from now on. It’s one of the three biggest banks here and it’s owned by Itaú Unibanco in Brazil.
The people who got hurt were Paraguayans. Plenty of families only banked with Ueno, small businesses had their payroll sitting in it, and pensioners didn’t know where their next payment would come from. Lo siento de verdad.
For 97% of depositors it’s nearly over. The full payment of up to 75 minimum wages has to be made within 15 days. What nobody has explained is how the supervisor found related party lending in June and the bank stayed open until November. That question is with the prosecutors now.
One correction from last month. I wrote that Paraguay hadn’t had a serious bank failure since the late 1990s.. WELL NOW IT HAS.
The system coped with it, but it still happened.
CDAs after Ueno
Last month I said I’d take a CDA at 10% over an apartment off the plan. I still would, and the guarantee worked the way I said it would. But the digital banks were paying 10% because they were riskier, and now everyone has seen what that risk looks like.
This is how I’m thinking about it now, bearing in mind I like risk more than most people:
Never hold more than the cap in one bank. It’s ₲228.3M per person per bank, so you can spread money across banks and be covered at each one. Above the cap you’re an unsecured creditor behind IPS.
Split it between types of bank. The big traditional banks pay about half as much but you won’t lose sleep. Keep whatever you put in the high yield digital banks under the cap at each one.
The exchange rate is better. In September my worry was buying guaraní at its strongest level in years. That problem has gone. If you were going to buy guaraní anyway, you’re getting a much better rate now.
Watch the rates. Banks want deposits after a scare like this. If long term CDA rates go up from here, that’s the time to lock one in.
Have a second bank account before you need one. Ueno customers who already had another bank were paid into it directly. Everyone else, me included, waited about a week to be assigned one.
There’s still risk in all of this. The politics could push the guaraní lower, guaranteed money can still be frozen for days, and nothing paying 10% is safe. This isn’t advice. It’s how I’m thinking about my own money.
Andina Copper and Cobrasco 🇨🇴
The usual disclosure: I work for Andina and it’s my biggest holding by a long way, so everything here comes from public releases.
On 5 November Andina released CDH014 from Cobrasco: 212m at 0.50% Cu and 112ppm Mo from 52m, including 76m at 1.00% Cu and 191ppm Mo, with 32m at 1.48% Cu from 60m inside that.
It was drilled from the same pad as CDH013, which I covered last month (322m at 0.51% Cu from 74m). Together the two holes show shallow, higher grade copper about 350m northwest of the earlier drilling.
That makes 14 holes and about 11,000m. The footprint defined by drilling is about 1,300m by 550m to 700m and it’s still open in several directions.
The team has moved into a new core yard and geology office in a beautiful part of Antioquia, Colombia. The climate is a lot more pleasant than at the old one. IYKYK.
Why it matters in a tough market
October was a bad month for anything in mining. Tech sold off, gold and silver have fallen a long way since late August, and the juniors went down with them. ANDC went from C$1.15 to C$0.89, down 23%, while the rigs kept turning.
Copper has come off its September record but it’s still above US$6/lb. RBC reckons the big North American producers are priced as if copper were about US$5.
My view as a shareholder is that near surface grade is what any future mine would dig first, and it’s what pays the bills early. 1% copper from 52m is that kind of rock. A bad month on the Nasdaq doesn’t change it.
I haven’t sold a share. Drilling continues.
My big bet since I first wrote about it (below) in January 2025 when we were Pampa Metals.
The book: down just over 20% in October
The rest is for paid subscribers. It covers every position I hold, and a summary of all recent significant news.