QAV 546 CLUB
Sun, Nov 27, 2022 1:45PM • 1:05:10
Cameron 00:06
Welcome back to QAV. This is episode 546. We’re recording this Tuesday the 22nd of November 2022 at 1:42pm Brisbane time, 2:42pm Sydney time. You’re back in Sydney, Tony?
Tony 00:27
I am.
Cameron 00:27
How was the drive up from Cape Schanck to Sydney, Tony?
Tony 00:33
Yeah, it was fine.
Cameron 00:34
You got to do it in the South African accent now. We’re going to do the whole Richie Benaud, Tony whatever his name was…
Tony 00:40
Greig.
Cameron 00:40
Tony Greig. You’re Tony Greig.
Tony 00:42
I’ll just take my keys on the wicket here and tell you what I said.
Cameron 00:45
Oh, very good, Tony, how’s things in Sydney today, Tony?
Tony 00:49
That’s Bill Lawry, isn’t it?
Cameron 00:51
I don’t know.
Tony 00:52
You’re the Twelfth Man. I think I’ve got the bone jacket on today. He went to the closet and there was the white, the off white, the bone, the cream.
Cameron 01:07
Wow, the Twelfth Man. That’s taken me back to the 80s.
Tony 01:11
Oh yeah. Billy Birmingham, that was a great series. The Pakistani opening batsman was, “I don’t give a shit.”
Cameron 01:18
You couldn’t do that these days. You could not do that these days. How are you, TK?
Tony 01:23
I’m good. Yeah, drive up from Cape Schanck was good, long, but broke it up with Ruddy in Wagga. Played a bit of golf and then headed back here. He’s got me off the booze, Cam, that’s the big news.
Cameron 01:35
So, he’s got you off the booze?
Tony 01:37
Yeah. So, he’s off the booze and I can see some health benefits in him already. So, I’ve been off for three weeks now as well.
Cameron 01:43
Taylor told me that Ruddy told him that he was off the booze, and I was like, “they were just at the races down in Melbourne. I don’t think they were off the booze at the races.”
Tony 01:53
I wasn’t but he was.
Cameron 01:55
He was off the booze at the races. Why? What do you two when you’re off the booze? I can’t imagine you and Ruddy… like, what do you have to talk about if you’re off the booze? Like what are you… What does that look like? Are you sipping tea and watching Downton Abbey together? What?
Tony 02:12
It’s still pretty similar, but it was funny. So, I was in Wagga for two nights, and on the second night, around five o’clock, we played golf, we caught up on some work we had to do, and we looked to each other and went “oh this is unusual. We’d usually have a beer in our hands by now.”
Cameron 02:32
Oh, yeah.
Tony 02:34
Ruddy had already cooked dinner and we just watched some Netflix.
Cameron 02:38
That’s good. So, how long have you off it for? Do you have a plan?
Tony 02:42
Well, I don’t know. Well, Ruddy says his doctor is telling him it takes three months to have an effect, so I’m gonna call it a soft target of three months. I don’t know if I’ll get that far, because it’s coming into Christmas and New Year’s.
Cameron 02:56
Wow. Yeah, there’re entire, like, whiskey distilleries that are gonna go broke.
Tony 03:02
Yeah, that’s right. Sell your shares in Lark whiskey.
Cameron 03:08
I actually had another glass of that bottle that you gave me for my birthday. By the way, if you’re not drinking and you’ve got anything left in that bottle you bought, you can send that to me. It’s fine. Just send me all of your booze cupboard. Just put it all in a box, send it to me and I’ll look after it for you.
Tony 03:23
Yeah, “get a box”. I’ll get the semi-trailer for you.
Cameron 03:28
Yeah. Okay, well, just the whiskey. I had another glass as I was celebrating the other night, the end of the Caesar series. So, I thought that was a fitting occasion to have a cigar and a glass of that special whiskey. So, for people who don’t know, I do a podcast on ancient Rome. I’ve been doing it for nine years, it’s our nine-year anniversary. We just finished Nero. Last episode we’ve recorded will come out in another couple of weeks. Yeah, nine years Ray and I’ve been working on the Caesar series, every week for nine years talking about all the Julio-Claudians. So, that’s finished. We’ve wrapped it up and it’s kind of bittersweet to, you know, finish up a series like that. It was sort of a big deal for us. But yeah, so anyway, had a glass of that scotch.
Cameron 03:37
What’s next? You’re not going to stop, are you?
Cameron 03:55
Yeah. I’m trying to scale back the amount of work. You have no idea how much work I’ve been doing for the last nine years. Well, we’re still doing the Cold War series, we’re still doing the Renaissance series, we’re still doing the bullshit filter series, but we’re trying to just scale back the amount of work so I can put more effort into QAV and get some of our life back, too. But having to write ten thousand words of notes every week for one of these shows that I’m doing is…
Tony 04:46
Not for QAV. Where’s the other nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety words?
Cameron 04:51
This shows my easy show. You take the load on this one, I take the load on all the rest of my shows. So, scaling it back.
Tony 04:57
Is that ten thousand words for you and ten thousand words for Ray?
Cameron 05:00
No, that’s my words. He has one-page, double lined notes, you know, written with big spaces in between them. No, anyway, so yeah, I had a glass of scotch.
Tony 05:13
I guess that’s congratulations, isn’t it then? It’s a bit of a triumph. It’s been a long, good series, long great series.
Cameron 05:19
It feels bittersweet. It was a great series.
Tony 05:24
Are you two now pro console, are you? You’re across the Rubicon, go back into Rome, this is where you reap all of for your rewards.
Cameron 05:31
Yeah, well, that was the thing about it. It never really was, I guess, as successful in terms of its reach or its size as I would have hoped. So, it’s a little bit bittersweet to finish it. But we had a good time. Anyway, people don’t care about that, they want us to talk about the fact that oil is a sell, now, Tony.
Tony 05:48
It is.
Cameron 05:49
That threw a spanner in my week. I noticed, though, that when I was posting our disclosure stuff this morning, WDS is still listed is one of your stocks. You haven’t sold WDS?
Tony 06:01
No, no. And it’s, I think we’ve talked about Woodside before, I think it’s more of a natural gas play than an oil company.
Cameron 06:09
It is, but LNG is a Josephine. So, LNG is a Josephine, oil is a sell…
Tony 06:16
Well, we don’t sell on Josephine’s, and I don’t know what the split is. Seventy/thirty, something like that?
Cameron 06:21
Sixty/forty I think.
Tony 06:22
I think it’s more. I had a look too.
Cameron 06:24
Okay.
Tony 06:25
But no, I’m not going to sell on a Josephine.
Cameron 06:27
Well, I did. Wish I’d asked you that before I sold it. I was like, “am I gonna hold it just because LNG is a Josephine?” A Josephine is a slippery slope. I know we don’t sell on a Josephine. But anyhow, okay, so you’re holding on to it. Anything else you had to get rid of?
Tony 06:42
Yeah, I had shares in Viva Energy, which is definitely an oil company — or retailer, refiner. So, I sold them.
Cameron 06:44
VEA?
Tony 06:50
VEA, the old Shell company.
Cameron 06:53
Oh, really?
Tony 06:54
I get to wipe my hands twice of the company in twenty years.
Cameron 06:58
I was surprised I didn’t have more oil stocks, because I have had STO, I’ve owned a lot of things, but I must have gotten rid of them. Must have rule oned or 3PTL’d them. Anyway, so that’s oil for the moment. We’ll see what happens with oil moving forwards. I also noticed this interesting article in the Fin about iron ore: “Stop Doom scrolling,” it said, iron ore has plenty of reasons to keep rising.” This was by Peter Kerr, resources reporter. “The good news for Australian iron ore miners is that Spring will be over for another year in just ten days. The season of rebirth and new blooms has often been the season of existential dread for Australian iron ore miners over the past decade, as Chinese construction tends to slow down ahead of the Northern winter. Fortescue had a near death experience in September 2012 when a sudden slump in iron ore prices left it struggling to service debt and forced it to launch a fire sale of assets and slash staff numbers.” Maybe that’s the problem with Twitter and Facebook; maybe it’s the iron ore slump. “It was September last year when the iron ore price slumped by 38% in just twenty days.” Ah, we remember it well. Don’t we remember that well?
Tony 08:13
We do.
Cameron 08:14
So, he’s basically saying that there is, historically, a correlation between Spring and iron ore prices collapsing. I was interested in your thoughts on this. Have you seen that trend before? Are you expecting iron ore prices to spike again?
Tony 08:30
I’ve got no opinion, Cam, no prediction ability. It’s not my area of expertise.
Cameron 08:35
That’s boring, come on.
Tony 08:36
Look, it makes sense. But again, it’s a prediction. I would think, given the fact that a lot of China’s in COVID lockdown, that’s more important than the season. So, I think that’s why oil is coming off and probably why iron ore is in a similar position. No, I’ll just wait until the cards are dealt and then play them as they’re dealt, rather than trying to guess what’s coming out next.
Cameron 09:00
You’re so predictable and boring, Kynaston. Any thoughts on this article, another Fin Review article: “These ten shares would have made you 888% plus in a decade.” Is that good? 888% in a decade?
Tony 09:19
It’s okay. Yeah, no, it’s good. Ten times is better.
Cameron 09:25
“Investors who leave tech exposure to overseas bourses are missing out. An analysis of the top-performing stocks in the S&P/ASX 100 over the past 10 years shows that while home-grown IT companies might have been late to the tech party, they have caught up with a bang. Four of the top five and five of the top 10 performers are in the IT space. They are Pro Medicus, Altium, Wisetech Global, Xero and Technology One. All are software companies. All are highly focused specialists in providing software and services to a specific industry or product group. The top 10 also reflect the importance of the decarbonisation thematic – particularly around electric vehicles and the current preferred power source in the form of the lithium-ion battery. The 10 best-performing stocks in the current S&P/ASX 100 over the last 10 years (ranked in order) are: Pilbara Minerals; Pro Medicus; Altium; Wisetech Global; Xero; Aristocrat Leisure;” I know they were on our buy list once, I think, a long time ago. At least, we talked about them on an early show. “The a2 Milk Company; Allkem; Fisher & Paykel Healthcare; and Technology One. A2 Milk and Wisetech Global have been listed for less than 10 years but still made the top 10.” Now, most of these companies have never appeared on our buy list that I can remember, apart from maybe Aristocrat. Pilbara, I don’t really remember them being on, they may have been on at some point. A2 milk; I think we’ve talked about them, but they may have been on briefly once, A2M. Anyway, what do you think about this analysis? These are the top ten stocks, none of them are sort of on our radar. Is there anything we can learn from this?
Tony 11:02
I think, first of all, it’s hindsight bias. So, this guy is picking a ten-year period where tech stocks and high PE stocks have done well, and we’ve spoken about this endlessly over the last three or four years. I haven’t been able to find a way of picking the good ones from the bad ones and the successful ones from the unsuccessful ones along the way. So, it’s just not my core competence. Investing in thematics is not my thing, I think it’s hard to do. And on top of all that, they’ve all come back quite a bit. So, I’m not sure what his end date was for this, whether it was the end of the calendar year or what, but if you look at Altium, I think it dropped down again yesterday. I was reading something in the paper about it having some more problems.
Cameron 11:42
According to his article, it’s had a share price increase of 3,002%. So, can probably afford to come back a little bit.
Tony 11:49
Yeah, I mean, short of just using three-point trend lines to trade high PE stocks, I can’t think of a way to invest in it.
Cameron 11:56
So, the period he looked at was ten years to November 1, 2022.
Tony 12:00
So, it would have done better if he got out earlier in the year. Look, it’s impressive, I’m not gonna belittle it, but it’s not how I invest. And ten years ago, if you had asked me to invest in these stocks, there’s no way I would have picked them from other tech stocks or high PE stocks, which haven’t been as successful. So, I’m guessing ten years ago, even if I had put together a portfolio of high PE stocks or tech stocks, or whatever the theme was for the stocks, that there’d be some duds in there as well and you wouldn’t be getting the kind of return that you do from standing here and looking back.
Cameron 12:30
And looking at the top ten performing stocks. If you could pick, accurately, the top ten stocks, you would have done this well.
Tony 12:38
Yeah, exactly. So, much better investing in the TARDIS and going back ten years and buying these stocks.
Cameron 12:44
I’d love a TARDIS. What are we doing? What’s the human race doing we don’t have a TARDIS? Yeah. So, you made the really good point that you don’t have a model for figuring out which high tech stocks are going to do well, and which ones aren’t. It’s not that you’re intrinsically fundamentally against the idea of high-tech stocks, you just don’t have a model for figuring out which ones are gonna survive and which ones are gonna go belly up. There’s been plenty that have literally gone belly up in the last couple of years.
Tony 13:11
I noticed that the buy now, pay later stocks aren’t in this list, but if you had written the article a year ago: “if you’d bought Zip Co ten years ago,” I don’t know if it was listed ten years ago, but “if you’d done that, look how much you would have made.” So, yeah. And if you think about lithium miners, I mean, there’s probably other ones out there which haven’t done as well. So, if you had ten years ago just bought lithium miners… Pilbara metals is the one that has shot the lights out, but what happened to the rest of them? Some of them will have gone broke.
Cameron 13:41
Pilbara Minerals has had a 17,000% increase over the period. It went from $0.03 to $5.31. Alkem is the other lithium miner in that list, it’s gone up by nearly 1,000%. So, not as good as 17,000, but not not bad either I imagine. Over ten years, what’s that?
Tony 14:00
But ten years ago, at three cents a share, what was your investment thesis for buying Pilbara minerals? If it was even called that back then.
Cameron 14:11
Yeah, well, you would have been thinking lithium, isn’t that something they used to give people that were suffering from anxiety? There’s gotta be a lot of anxiety in the world.
Tony 14:22
Maybe you’re a Nirvana fan and you’re gone, “great. There’s going to be another Lithium record. We better buy some lithium stocks.”
Cameron 14:28
For bipolar disorder and major depression. I thought it was something that people with schizophrenia sometimes take, too.
Tony 14:35
Yeah, this is going back to 2012, first of November. I’m not sure, was the first Tesla on the road by then? I don’t think so.
Cameron 14:45
Maybe.
Tony 14:45
So, would you even have been thinking about battery operated electric vehicles back then?
Cameron 14:49
Not vehicles necessarily, but we’ve had lithium batteries for a long time. Rechargeable batteries are all lithium, aren’t they?
Tony 14:56
Yeah, they are, but they were using existing resources. No one was going out opening up new mines to service Nokia or Samsung or whatever.
Cameron 15:06
Well, this article says lithium miners were on their knees less than two years ago. Look at the ten year chart for PBM.
Tony 15:15
I don’t think it goes back that far.
Cameron 15:17
Ten years, really? Yes. Oh, let’s look: “we do not have any price data for PBM.” What?
Tony 15:25
It’s delisted.
Cameron 15:28
Well, it was really good until it delisted.
Tony 15:32
Okay, try PLS.
Cameron 15:35
PLS, that’s a new code, hey?
Tony 15:38
No, I think it’s always been called that. Yeah, it does go back to 2012. No, I accept that. And it’s been fairly parabolic except for the last couple of years, where it’s retraced and then went up again.
Cameron 15:49
Okay, cool. So, nothing we can take away from that article. Okay.
Tony 15:54
Well, yeah, just don’t be swayed by those kinds of articles. It’s just hack journalism in the financial press. Well, he may as well have said “if you’d bought Apple, Amazon and Tesla when they were first listed, you’d now be a billionaire.” Yeah, you’re right. You’re also very late to tell me that.
Cameron 16:20
Tell me what’s going to be successful in the next ten years, and then we can have a conversation.
Cameron 16:24
The only other article I read this week was Rear Windows’ “FTX’s Alameda bought out Fred Schebesta for $300,000.” Now, Fred Schebesta is an old friend of mine from the old dotcom days, and now he’s a friend of Taylor’s. Taylor has been hanging out with him when he goes down to Sydney. Fred’s your local dotcom millionaire, co-founded Finder, but he also had a crypto business that he sold and he’s the only person to have made money out of running a crypto company. But there was this one quote in the article that tickled me. “Speaking of whiplash, KordaMentha’s teleconference with FTX Australia director Jamie Kennedy came but a month after he spoke at a Bloomberg panel on the next frontier for crypto in Australia. Did anyone suggest then that the next frontier was the Centrelink cue? Interestingly, Kennedy’s bio for the event noted the FTX Australia Country Manager, quote, ‘helped to oversee the implementation of the CHESS replacement project,’ end quote, at the ASX,” which we found out this week has been put on hold. I think they’ve dumped $250 million into it or something and it’s not working, so they’ve killed it.
Tony 16:24
Yeah.
Tony 17:40
Yeah. And that was the blockchain project that all the other stock exchanges around the world we’re looking at to see if I’ve gotta work or not.
Cameron 17:48
You and I worked in the tech industry long enough to know that…
Tony 17:53
You don’t feel on edge.
Cameron 17:54
Yeah, you don’t want to be the person on the bleeding edge with this stuff. I mean, if you pull it off..
Tony 18:01
Don’t go first.
Cameron 18:01
Yeah. When Ray and I talk about Alexander the Great and how he used to throw himself into extreme dangerous situations in battles, it was like suicide. He would throw himself in. And I’ve always figured that he figured it was a win-win scenario; if he pulled it off and won the battle, he’s a goddamn legend that people will be talking about forever. If he throws himself into it and gets killed, he gets to go to Elysium, as, you know, a great, brave Greek general, and he’ll be immortalised in poems. So, it was a win-win situation. There’s no losing if you’re Alexander the Great in that situation. On the other hand, when you’re trying to do a bleeding edge tech project, if you pull it off, you’re a superstar. But most of the time, it doesn’t work out that way.
Tony 18:54
And what’s the upside for the ASX to be a superstar in the tech world? It’s not their core business. What benefit do they get from it? Just a huge support and maintenance bill.
Cameron 19:02
Yeah, well, maybe there were cost saving benefits, I don’t know, things that they can do tech-wise. New services they could have run on it. I don’t know. But anyway, there you go. Portfolio update. Now, we have spoken in recent weeks about benchmarks in Navexa and the portfolio, and you said “I don’t think it’s showing us the total return,” and we did confirm that STW is a total return index. But one of our — I don’t even think he’s a club member, I think he’s just one of the free listeners or a light subscriber — pointed out that the Navexa chart was, in fact, only showing us the capital return for STW. They had a separate chart that you could drill down into that would show you the total return for STW, it just wasn’t the one that they show you on the front page. So, I emailed Navare at Navexa and they fixed it. So, thank you to the person that pointed this out, I think it was somebody called Alex. Thank you to Alex if you’re listening to this, for pointing that out. We have it fixed now. So, now the portfolio update is a little bit less broken, but still kind of weird. If I look at it in Navexa now, the dummy portfolio, it says we’re running about 15% per annum CAGR since inception versus the STW total return running at about 7% over the same timeframe. So, we’re doing twice as good instead of fifteen times as good. We knew we were good, but we didn’t think we were that good. However, if you go and look at the embedded version of the dummy portfolio on our website page, it says we’re doing about a point better than it says we’re doing when I look at their website. It says we’re doing like 15.6 or 15.7% per annum, not 14.5%. So, I’ve emailed Navare again today saying, “why am I getting two different results on this? Am I doing something wrong? Am I looking at something wrong?” Anyway, as of right now, it says we’re at 15.02% per annum versus 7.33% for the STW. So, that makes way more sense. We’re doing twice as good over the long haul, which is kind of what we aim for. So, Holy shit, it works. Look at that.
Tony 21:21
I’m glad you sorted that one out, thank you. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. And yeah, we’re doing twice the market, which is pretty much what we should be doing.
Cameron 21:29
So, thank you again to Alex for solving that. The QAV brains trust comes through yet again. What have you got to talk about, TK?
Tony 21:40
Yeah, just a follow on from the deep dive and pulled pork on Selfwealth last week. One of our listeners emailed and said that he has reached out to Selfwealth about how safe his cash deposits were, and they came back with quite a good answer, I thought, to say that they use ANZ, and any cash deposits are held on trust with ANZ. And so, I think that gives me a level of comfort that would mean I wouldn’t hesitate to put — well, I would still think about it, but I wouldn’t necessarily not put money in with Selfwealth.
Cameron 22:14
Of course, the reply came in the form of a video message, and it was the CEO of Selfwealth snorting coke on a yacht somewhere in the Bahamas. Kidding. Satire.
Tony 22:28
I think it’s fair to clean that one up for people who are either investing in Selfwealth or who use Selfwealth. Two points, I think, still are outstanding for me; one is whether you get the government guarantee for deposits with Selfwealth. So, just a quick recap for people, if you put up to a certain amount, which I think is $200,000 in a bank in Australia, the government will guarantee that deposit. So, if there’s ever a run on the banks, your deposits are safe, and government guaranteed. Of course, you pay for that, because the banks themselves have to pay the government insurance premium.
Cameron 23:03
Only $200,000? Like, if you put $198,000 or $202,00, you’re not covered? It’s only for $200,000?
Tony 23:10
No, it’s up to $200,000
Cameron 23:12
Oh, up to $200,000. So what happens if you put in a million?
Tony 23:15
You could still lose the second $800,000.
Cameron 23:19
Really, it’s not all guaranteed? I thought it was all guaranteed?
Tony 23:21
I don’t think so. I mean, it’s been a while since I looked at it, but my memory is that it’s up to $200,000.
Cameron 23:27
And the rest of it they’re just like, “meh, sorry.”
Tony 23:29
Correct.
Cameron 23:29
You know, “safe as banks”
Tony 23:32
Yeah, no.
Cameron 23:33
Really? Oh.
Tony 23:34
I mean, the first thing to note is I don’t think there’ll ever be a run on Australian banks which would bankrupt them, because they’re very well run, very well regulated and have large capital reserves. But yeah, during the GFC, the government stepped in and said we just want to calm everything down, and we’re gonna guarantee up to — I think it’s $200,000. I should check that and come back to you on that, but it was $200,00; or it was a guarantee up to a certain amount, but I’ll check whether it’s 200k or not. That’s the first thing. So, my question to Selfwealth would be, if I deposit with you and it goes to ANZ, am I guaranteed if there’s a run on Selfwealth? That’s the first question. My point is, it may not be as completely safe as putting it in the bank. It’ll be administratively harder to deal with, because you’ve got to transfer money across between accounts if you want to trade on Selfwealth, but that might be an issue for you. And secondly, file it away and watch it for the future, but I’d just be careful if Selfwealth ever came out and changed the situation. And I’m not saying they will or that, you know, that could happen, but a red flag for me would be if Selfweath changed their banking relationship. Say, for example, they swapped to minor bank or building society or something like that, for their banking relationship
Tony 24:46
So, just to follow up on Selfwealth. I think it looks fine. Doesn’t take away from the fact they’ve got three years of runway ahead before they run out of cash, and they can start turning a profit. So, that’s all still ahead of him, so we’ll see how that goes. So, that’s Selfwealth. Last thing I want to do was a pulled pork, and this week my pulled pork is on South 32, S32.
Cameron 24:46
Or a crypto fund. They’ll put all your money in a crypto fund, it’ll be fine. Yeah, it’ll be fine, don’t worry about it.
Cameron 25:16
I own South 32, Tony, don’t put the kibosh on it just yet.
Tony 25:21
But what’s it worth?
Cameron 25:22
I don’t know?
Tony 25:24
What’s it worth to you for me to lose the notes on South32?
Cameron 25:32
Yeah, we need to have a pulled pork index.
Tony 25:36
Committee? “Hasn’t been signed off by the pulled pork risk committee.”
Cameron 25:45
While you’re doing that, I’m just going to mute my microphone and go sell all my South32 shares.
Tony 25:51
Yeah, sure. Well, I’ll let you do that. The reason for doing South32 is a) it’s a large stock, and b) I noticed recently it’s back on the buy list and it’s above its second buy line, so it’s able to be bought. South 32, for people who don’t know, spun out of the BHP seven years ago and was rather notoriously at the time known as the “bad BHP”. BHP promoted itself as the good. Part of their portfolio was going to remain with BHP, the iron ore in particular, and they were going to clean up their portfolio of mining assets because they’d gotten too big and complex. They were going to roll up all the other mines and put them into a spin off called South 32, which was quickly called the “bad BHP”. But it hasn’t been too bad. South 32 is mainly an alumina and aluminium business, probably about half their mines and smelters are in those two businesses. But they also have copper mines, which is a buy at the moment on the commodity charts, manganese which is a sell, zinc which is a sell, met coal which is a Josephine, and lead and nickel which I haven’t looked up. So, you know, something like 40% comes in those smaller metals, so they could still have issues with commodities. But certainly, aluminium is strong at the moment. They’ve changed what they initially listed over the years. They’ve been trying to become a better corporate player, in their eyes anyway, and they’ve gotten out of thermal coal, and they’ve gotten into things like hydro powered aluminium smelters. Their strategy is to transition away from carbon and make themselves a better corporate player in terms of climate change. That’s a good thing. But you know, I just wanted to flag the fact that I really don’t think it makes you a better corporate player if you divest yourself of thermal coal if it’s still being bought by someone else and operated by someone else. I mean, it makes no difference to the planet in that circumstance. If you wanted to get ticks in my book for being good on climate change, you bury the coal and plant trees above it. And South 32 didn’t do that, they just divested their coal; as other mining companies have done in trying to clean up their act, but it doesn’t help the planet because they just divest the mines somewhere else. Anyway, that’s my little rant on corporate greenwashing. Going through the numbers, the ADT is large for this stock. It’s $80 million bucks, so it’s gonna suit, I would think, all of our listeners. Large market cap stock: $17 billion. It’s a recent second buy line cross as I said. A couple of other things; it’s fairly shareholder friendly at the moment. They’ve had an ongoing buyback for a long time to use up the operating cash which has been thrown off by this company. They’re paying a high dividend, which is currently at an 8.5% yield, so that’s very good. And this is one of the stocks that I come to at certain points in the cycle which I like from a value perspective, and we’ll see there’s a fair bit of value in this one. But it’s one of those stocks where the PE is lower than the yield, which is an interesting situation that mining companies in particular can find themselves at certain times in their lives, and I quite liked that crossover when the PE falls below the yield. The numbers: I’m using a share price of $391, which is less than the consensus target, less than IV 1 and IV2, and also less than book plus 30%. So, on all those metrics it scores for us. Financial health is strong and steady; this is a company with lots of cash and low debt, so it’s financially very strong. For anyone who’s interested, the ROE on this company’s 27.4%, and of more interest to us, the Pr/OpCaf is four times. So, you’re buying a very large company and only four times the cash it’s throwing off. PE is 4.8, again, which is very low, which is also the lowest in the last three years, and so it scores on that basis for us. I guess where the numbers start to become a bit murky, and this is probably why we’re buying it cheaply, is the forecast earnings per share is to drop 45% next year. So, straightaway it scores a negative one on our growth over PE hurdle. And this is certainly the risk in this stock. However, at these kinds of prices, I think that risk is well and truly baked into the price. There are other risks, though; as I said, nearly 40% of the company is investing in commodities or operating mines that have commodities, which are Josephine outright sells, so that could be a problem for them. This company is still developing all of its mines and doing drilling, so the capital requirements are reasonably large. And then there’s the usual mining industry risks at the moment of COVID breaking out again and shutting down mines, rising supply chain costs, as well as increasing wages and difficulty finding workers. So, I should also point out, this is an international company. It has a lot of operations in South Africa and in South America, particularly in Brazil. So, there could be risks in those operating in different countries. I don’t think those countries necessarily pose sovereign risks, although they could, but it’s more likely that if there are risks to supply chains and finding staff that they could have different perspectives on them compared to how it goes in Australia. So, that could be better or worse compared to Australia. Last thing I should say is no founder/owner because it spun out of BHP, and scores well from the Stock Doctor point of view. It’s a borderline star stock and a star income stock, which get half a point each, so total of one in our checklist for a total quality score of 88% and a QAV score of 0.22. So, quite healthy on those metrics, not high up the buy list, but certainly worth looking at if you’re after a large ADT stock.
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Cameron 1:04:24
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