One of the central reasons for saving money is to finance a comfortable retirement. Investment managers, such as ourselves, help people grow their savings so that they don't have to work until they drop dead.

So, what's retirement really like? You've seen the rendition in the movies: silver-haired couples drinking wine at fancy restaurants, smiling in photos at world heritage sites, celebrating at happy family gatherings, or taking a month to hike for hundreds of kilometres in Portugal.

According to popular culture, retirement is like getting upgraded to first class, typically a two-decade picnic, with lots of freedom, mental stimulation, and thrilling holiday travel.

Well-funded surveys suggest otherwise. The average American stops working at 64 and dies at 82. What do they spend their time doing? It does not sound very glamorous.

Retirees spend a lot of time sleeping. Typically 8 hours a day plus afternoon naps. Why get up early if you don't have to, especially in bad weather?

They watch a lot of video content, up to 6 hours a day. Time disappears on the couch, watching movies, series, and sports on TV. Over time, the quality of what older people watch declines. They don't sign up for video courses on how to code mobile apps, they are probably watching home restoration clips on YouTube, or worse. Watching mindless social media video content on smartphones is also rising fast.

Most do not travel much. In the US, 1 or 2 domestic trips a year is common. Only a third of retirees ever take any international trips. In fact, most Americans only clock around 3 trips abroad in their lifetime.

Evidence suggests that taking up new hobbies in retirement will not stick. You may imagine yourself getting into sculpture, bird-watching, or writing a novel, but that's not likely. Volunteering on a sustained basis is also very rare.

Your actual post-retirement "hobby" will be trying to stay alive, with a creaking body, engaging with the healthcare system. American retirees visit doctors around 9 times per year. Hospital stays are also common, around 4 during the retirement period, with an average duration of about 5 days each.

As you age, you will probably bounce from home care to step-down or rehab facilities, assisted living homes and then frail care. Your retirement may start with a celebration, but it will end under fluorescent lights.

Money might be a worry. You will either have too little, and stress about survival, or too much and stress about who to give it to, and when. Either way, having lots of money is vastly better than not having enough.

What's the point of my story here? Save hard to improve your prospects in later life, but remember to enjoy your family, money and health, through every stage of your life. Don't put everything on hold for when you are 65. Your best years should be right now.

When trying to solve a problem, working backwards can help to obtain a better perspective. A good example is the debate about whether electric vehicles are better than those with internal combustion engines.

Watch this interview from a gent called Rory Sutherland who unpacks it brilliantly. He asks you to imagine a world where EVs came first and then a rogue engineer from VW invents a combustion engine.

This "new concept" requires a huge tank of flammable liquid in your car. He then explains the very complicated way a petrol or diesel-based car engine works, along with all the messy oil and a myriad of moving parts. The logistics behind the petrol station versus charging an EV at home is also ridiculously inefficient.

Watch the clip, it is summarised and only 2 minutes long. It is certainly worth it.

Tesla recently applied to supply electricity to British homes. In the UK, power is generated by certain companies, the grid is owned by another company, and then many more companies sell the power to customers. Tesla is applying to be part of the final leg of the journey. It could take the regulator around 9 months to approve the application.

Tesla is an electricity supplier in other parts of the world already, so this isn't new to them. In Texas, Tesla allows owners of its EVs to charge their cars cheaply and pays them for feeding surplus electricity back to the grid. They will probably be aiming to do something similar in the UK, to make their cars more appealing. Tesla sales have been smashed this year in Europe, down 60% in the UK, so they need to do something.

Given that this is a secondary business for Tesla, they don't need to have pricing discipline. I would be nervous if I was one of the other power suppliers in the UK, as Tesla could significantly shake things up.

Swedish start-up Lovable was founded in 2023 in Stockholm by Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin. The company is riding the AI wave by making app creation as simple as writing a sentence. Think ChatGPT, but for building websites and fully functioning apps, no coding experience needed.

In just a few months, its intuitive tool, which stitches together output from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic models, drew over 30 000 paying users and hit $17 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). That was in February. Today, just seven months after launch, it's racing past $75 million in ARR, making it Europe's fastest-growing company.

That kind of speed doesn't go unnoticed. Lovable is now finalising a fresh $150 million funding round led by Accel, with 20VC and Creandum also backing it again. The deal values the company at $1.8 billion. Interest was so high, Lovable reportedly upped both the size of the round and its valuation mid-process.

TV is not popular with kids today. Youngsters watch YouTube on their phones - YouTube is now the second most-watched service in the UK.

Nuclear power is back in fashion. There is now a new space race - NASA wants to be the first to build a nuclear reactor on the moon.

Asian markets have followed the lead of the US, and are up nicely this morning. China Evergrande Group will delist soon in Hong Kong, marking the end of an era. The once high-flying property developer was the (sad) face of China's property bubble that popped a few years ago.

In local company news, AdvTech said yesterday it expects headline earnings per share to rise between 13% and 18% for the first half of the year, as earlier investments to expand its portfolio paid off with higher student enrolments.

US equity futures are rising again in pre-market trading. The Rand has strengthened to around R17.58 to the US Dollar.

What's on your agenda for the rest of the week? At least you don't have to meet with an a-hole in Alaska on Friday.