VENOBLE

Thank you to TheCable for publishing this: our VCORE™ data shows that roughly ₦84 trillion of Nigeria’s “stock market value” is effectively locked away and cannot realistically be bought or sold. That matters because pensions, portfolios, and performance benchmarks are being judged against a market that looks nearly 3x larger on paper than what investors can actually access. https://lnkd.in/eNZF5FAe

Every naira devaluation since 2006 showed the same pattern beforehand. We built an index that tracks it. Right now, it says risk is at historic lows. VNG-FXR combines two inputs the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) publishes daily: external reserves and Bonny Light crude oil prices. Reserves are what the CBN uses to defend the naira; crude is the income stream that replenishes those reserves over time. When both fall below their 12-month trend simultaneously, devaluation follows. It happened in 2014-2016. It happened in 2020. Three cycles, three correct signals. Today? Reserves sit at $48.9 billion, well above trend. Crude closed above $130. The index is reading 1,948 against a neutral baseline of 1,000. The structural preconditions for devaluation are nowhere in sight. We're not saying the naira is permanently safe; that would be irresponsible. But the macro data right now says something very different from the anxiety you hear in the conversation. Everyone has an opinion on the exchange rate. Almost nobody is measuring it systematically. That's the gap we built VNG-FXR to fill. The methodology is open, the inputs are verifiable, and we will have more to share on this soon. #NigerianEconomy #Naira #FXRisk #CapitalMarkets #Venoble

₦1m in Nigerian cash bought back roughly ₦380k over 17 years. That is the real-return number nobody publishes. The reason nobody publishes it is the NBS CPI rebase. In February 2025, headline inflation collapsed overnight from 34.80% to 24.48%; same economy, same shop shelf, just a different basket. But the rebase severed the before-and-after, so no one investing, regulating, or running pension money could answer a simple question across the break: what did cash actually earn in real terms? We built the bridge. One continuous 204-month series from February 2009 to January 2026, chain-linked across the rebase. The result is ugly but useful: rolling 91-day T-bills compounded at roughly minus 5.48% a year in real terms, which is how ₦1m quietly becomes ₦380k. ₦620k of purchasing power, erased inside the asset every PFA on this continent still calls risk-free. The picture did flip recently, though. Six of the last six months printed positive real returns, and January 2026 hit +4.39%. That is a genuine inflection; it is not a reprieve. Half a generation of negative carry doesn't unwind in two quarters, and the roughly ₦16 trillion sitting in Nigerian pension government securities is still carrying the legacy damage on its back. Why this had to exist: opinions do not close benchmark gaps; published, auditable series do. Nigerian capital has been flying blind on real returns for as long as the data has existed, and flying blind is expensive. Published in Financial Nigeria, Feature 632. #CapitalMarkets #NigerianEconomy #RealReturns #VNGCRR #Venoble

FTSE Russell just restored Nigeria to Frontier Market status. Three years in the wilderness. Done. What changed? The FX queues that triggered the 2023 downgrade have cleared. Naira up 9% against the dollar in H2 2025, and repatriation risk isn't the barrier it was eighteen months ago. The NGX added N390bn in a single session on the news. Airtel hit the 10% daily limit, Seplat and GTCO rallied hard. We aren't surprised. When a N130tn market gets readmitted to global tracker funds, capital moves. That's mechanical, not sentimental. We've been building data infrastructure for exactly this moment. Every corporate action in Nigerian market history, verified and structured. Our VNG-EDGE factor model, backtested against three decades of Nigerian equities, was designed for a market entering this kind of transition. Now the honest bit. FX stability and transaction costs haven't been fully solved, and the upgrade's conditional on continued progress. A waypoint, not a finish line. But we're bullish. Nigeria is back on the map and we intend to make sure the data's ready when the capital arrives. #FTSERussell #NigerianCapitalMarkets #FrontierMarkets #VNGEDGE #Venoble

SEC's Director-General Agama said something last month that stuck with us: the next three to five years will determine whether Nigeria captures the upside of this moment or lets it pass by. He is talking about market infrastructure, the plumbing, the data systems and regulatory frameworks that let capital flow where it should go. Nigeria hit N130 trillion in market capitalisation this quarter. The raw growth is there, but what's missing is the structured data layer underneath it. That is what we have been building for two years: every dividend, stock split, bonus issue and rights offer in Nigerian market history going back to 1998, organised into one place for the first time. Then we ran a quantitative model against it to test what actually works when you invest in Nigerian equities. Value works. Consistently, across recessions, oil shocks, currency crises, and every other kind of chaos Nigeria has weathered in three decades, the evidence was sitting in the data the whole time. The market is maturing faster than anyone gives it credit for. Agama is right. We're building the infrastructure to make sure this window doesn't close on anyone who's paying attention. #NigerianCapitalMarkets #FactorInvesting #CapitalMarkets #VNGEDGE #Venoble

NSIA just posted a 91% profit decline. ₦1.89 trillion in 2024; ₦161 billion in 2025. Same fund. Most of 2024's headline number was flattering itself. ₦850 billion came from foreign exchange gains off the naira devaluation. When the currency stabilised in 2025, those gains vanished. FX-linked securities income collapsed from ₦612 billion to practically nothing. Now, core operating income actually grew 17% once you strip out the FX noise. We think that matters. But it doesn't change the headline, and it certainly doesn't justify NSIA's own LinkedIn post today claiming "continued growth and stronger profitability." We'd argue the audited financials tell a different story. The question we keep coming back to: should a sovereign wealth fund be booking one-off currency windfalls as though they're recurring income? Because that's what produces a 91% drop when conditions normalise. And nobody in the room seems to be asking. #Venoble #NSIA #NigerianEconomy #CapitalMarkets

The average Nigerian mutual fund returned 26% in 2025. Yet the market returned 51%. You could've bought the index, gone to sleep, and doubled your fund manager's performance. No stock picking. No quarterly reviews. No fees. Equity funds did track the market. But they charged you for it. That is the part worth sitting with. Pensions are worse. The best PFAs returned about 15% last year; inflation sat above 25%. Your retirement savings lost real value for the fifteenth consecutive year. Fifteen. We built our VNG-CRR index to measure exactly this: what your cash actually earns after prices rise. For most of the past decade, the answer has been negative. Fund managers aren't villains. But the numbers don't lie. The industry owes investors a straight answer to a simple question: what are we paying for? #Venoble #NigerianInvestors #MutualFunds #PensionReform #NGX

Temi Popoola said it plainly last week. The NGX Group is "ensuring the accuracy of free-float data captured by the exchange." The exchange is admitting its own free float numbers might not be right. BUA Cement trades with less than 3% free float. Dangote Cement sits at roughly 11%. Both still meet the listing rules because they clear the N40 billion monetary threshold; the 20% minimum float requirement becomes academic once you hit that number. But how would you actually verify these figures? You wouldn't. That's the problem Popoola is trying to fix. The bigger signal: NGX is considering whether free float should factor into index construction. Every NGX index currently uses pure market-cap weighting. If they shift to free-float adjusted weighting (the way MSCI and FTSE do it globally), someone needs to have the data. Accurate data. Point-in-time data. Not estimates. We've been building that dataset for two years. Every listed Nigerian security. Float factors verified against company filings, not exchange approximations. India mandated 25% minimum public shareholding in 2010. The result was $1.25 trillion in foreign portfolio inflows over the following decade. Nigeria doesn't need to copy India; it needs to start with getting the numbers right. Nobody asked the exchange to admit this gap. They did anyway. #NGX #FreeFloat #NigerianCapitalMarkets #CorporateGovernance #Venoble

Zichis Agro-Allied listed at ₦1.81 in January. One month later? ₦17.36. An 859% run on the NGX Growth Board. The exchange wasn't convinced. They froze trading, opened an investigation, and spent a full month probing suspected price manipulation. Last Monday, RegCo lifted the suspension. But they'd cut the reference price to ₦8.58. Roughly half. That's not a slap on the wrist; it's a statement. Day one back, the stock jumped 9.91%. We've been watching this closely. If you bought Zichis above ₦10, the exchange has effectively told you what they believe your position is worth. You can disagree with that assessment, but you can't ignore it. Here's what bothers us. The Growth Board was designed to give smaller companies access to public capital markets. Good idea. Necessary, even. But episodes like this erode trust in the entire segment, and trust is the one thing a young board can't afford to lose. NGX RegCo did the right thing by acting. Now we need the conversation that should follow: what safeguards exist for retail investors on the Growth Board, and are they enough? We think the answer's obvious. #NGX #GrowthBoard #NigerianCapitalMarkets #CorporateGovernance #Venoble

₦4.6 trillion. That's what Nigeria's top five banks printed in combined pre-tax profit for FY 2025, a 70% jump year-on-year. GTCO and Zenith both crossed the trillion-naira mark for the first time. Historic. But look at where the money actually came from. Loan growth was essentially flat. The surge? Treasury gains, FX revaluations, fee income. Banks figured out how to monetise volatility better than anyone on the continent; they just didn't do it by lending to businesses or consumers. We think that's the tension worth watching. Record earnings are great for shareholders and capital adequacy ratios ahead of the March 31 recap deadline. Nobody's arguing otherwise. An economy where the most profitable sector doesn't deploy capital into productive activity, though, has a structural problem. Full stop. In our view, this pattern holds through H1 2026. Rates stay elevated. FX stays volatile. Banks keep printing. The question we can't shake: does anyone build anything with it? #Venoble #NigerianCapitalMarkets #NigerianBanks #CapitalAllocation