Cameron 00:06
Welcome back to QAV. This is episode 604, we’re recording Tuesday the 24th of January. How’re you doin’, TK?
Tony 00:17
Very well, thanks, Cam. I just got back from Tasmania.
Cameron 00:20
Oh, how was Tasmania?
Tony 00:23
Yeah, really good. Been playing golf at Barnbougle.
Cameron 00:27
Barnbougle?
Tony 00:28
Dinner in Launceston. Yeah, really good. Great place. We had good weather, so not much wind. It was lovely.
Cameron 00:34
Yeah, that’s lovely. And Alex tells me she and Sean are going down soon, too. You told me that actually.
Tony 00:40
Okay. They’re going down I think the 12th of Feb. Sometime around then.
Cameron 00:43
I’m so jealous. I gotta get down there one of these days.
Tony 00:47
It’s a great place.
Cameron 00:48
Yeah. Got to do a QAV dinner.
Tony 00:51
Yeah, that’s a good idea.
Cameron 00:53
Some of our Tasmanian listeners organise it so all we need to do is turn up.
Tony 00:58
Didn’t we sit next to someone who operated a resort in Tasmania?
Cameron 01:02
At the whisky thing last year. Yeah. They invited me to go down and be their artist in residence for a while down there. Writer in residence. And with that, let me see. Let’s get straight into it because it’s hot as hell in my office today. Portfolio updates are where I like to start. I had a look at our portfolio this morning for the club newsletter. Since inception, the dummy portfolio as of this morning was up 19.6% per annum.
Tony 01:39
That’s gone up in the last couple of weeks, hasn’t it. That’s good.
Cameron 01:42
It has, yeah. Shot up a good point, I think, in the last week. Hold on, let me see if that’s right. Yeah, no, sorry. That was last week’s number. It’s dropped a bit since last week, I think.
Tony 01:53
Oh, okay.
Cameron 01:54
Let me see. It’s 18.72% per annum — I think it was 19% last week — versus the STW, which is running about 8% per annum over the same time period. For the financial year, though, the STW is up 20.98% versus 8.8% for the dummy portfolio. So, we had a good week, we’re up versus where we were last week, but still trying to catch up to the STW. In the last thirty days the number one stock has been CLX, up 21.5%. In the last thirty days, SMR up another 14.7%, NCK, Nick Scali, up 10.5%.They’re the top performers in the last thirty days. CLX? I don’t even remember who that is. Who is CLX and what do they do, do you remember?
Tony 02:44
It’s a logistics company. I think it’s CLI Logistics.
Cameron 02:49
That sounds right. I wonder why their share price is doing so well lately. People buy lots of stuff and gotta move it around or something. Anyway, who knows.
Tony 02:57
I know Nick Scali is probably riding the boom of price inflation, which is something we talked about last week. I think Super Cheap Auto came out then JB Hi-Fi came out, both during confession season, saying “hey, our results are going to be better than what people think.” And that sort of washed through a lot of other retail stocks as well, including Myer, which I just wanted to touch on briefly. So, Myer is up, last time I looked it was like 81 cents, so a long way above when we last held it, I think, which was around 55 cents. But having a good run. And I did pick up an article in the Fin Review last week saying that the fund managers are starting to take notice of Myer because of the share price increase and are expecting to buy some more or perhaps even there be some corporate activity in them.
Cameron 03:42
I seem to recall when I owned Myer it went up gangbusters and then it came down gangbusters, and I may have broken even or got out a little bit ahead. But it was up like, I don’t know, 70-80% at one point last year.
Tony 03:59
That may be the issue with Myer. If people are buying it because they expect someone to lob a takeover offer, then if that doesn’t happen, the price will drop again. And the other thing that we should mention about, with all these retailers, is that their sales are up but a lot of that’s due to price inflation. So, sales are up because they’re buying stuff at a higher price and then passing on that price rise to customers. So, they might be selling as much in terms of unit volume, but they’re just getting a better price for it. So, if inflation gets tamed then that will start to reverse itself which might hurt the retailers going forward.
Cameron 04:32
It’s currently trading at 89.5 cents, Myer, up from 85 cents at close yesterday. I saw some of the guys on the Melbourne chat group all excited about Myer this morning. I think what happened to it last year from memory is Jeff Wilson dumped a big parcel, and I’ll never forgive him for that because he ruined my party.
Tony 04:53
You get invited into the Melbourne chat room, did you?
Cameron 04:55
I did get invited. It’s crazy. They send, like, five hundred messages a day in there. I think these guys have got nothing else to do but talk about investing all day. It’s drinking from a water hose.
Tony 05:10
A fire hydrant?
Cameron 05:11
Yeah, that’s the one I meant. Before we move on from our portfolio updates, I wanted to just point out that we haven’t had any trades, we haven’t done any trades in the dummy portfolio for over two months.
Tony 05:25
Wow.
Cameron 05:25
The 21st of November was the last time I traded anything in the dummy portfolio. So, it kind of seems like it’s back to normal-normal. I know that you say even downturns and choppiness are normal, but, you know, I remember the first couple of years we were doing this, we very rarely had to trade anything in the dummy portfolio. Then, of course, in the last year, it was really, really choppy. We were trading things all the time and a lot of rule ones. For people that got started at the beginning of last year, that was their introduction. But yeah, with the dummy portfolio, and also with the light portfolios, too, I haven’t really had to sell. I’ve had to sell a couple of things to be honest, but we hold about eighty stocks and the light portfolios now, so there’s a bigger spread of things to worry about. But very, very little trading going on in our portfolios at the moment, which is kind of normal, right?
Tony 06:20
That’s probably why Alex Hay hasn’t rung me up and asked me out to lunch recently, because I haven’t been trading very much either. Same deal. I mean, we kind of forecast this because when the interest rates started to rise, I said, “look, the market’s going to be unsteady for a while until it gets comfortable with this. People are going to reposition their stocks to take all this movement and interest rates into account.” And now people are starting to think we’re nearing the end of the interest rate raising cycle — whether we are or not, who knows — and are getting comfortable with it. But I noticed the VIX is down, which is the volatility index that’s traded on the Chicago Board, I think. That’s also measuring volatility in the stock market, which is down. So yeah, it makes sense that we’re not trading very much.
Cameron 07:04
Right. Let’s talk about fees. So, on the show last week you asked people to give us some feedback on how their fee situation has changed, the fees that they used to pay to financial advisors since they started with QAV, and we got a couple of emails that were quite interesting. Michael said, “I was paying a flat fee of $4,000 a year after negotiating a down from a higher fee for financial advice. Now paying a QAV and Stock Doctor subscription, so a significant saving on fees.” So, that’s good, probably cut his fees by a third to a half I imagine, depending on which of our plans he’s on and Stock Doctor plans. Dennis also sent us an email and said, “ongoing cost of financial advice was about $350 per month averaged over the year, but that’s after the huge cost of the statement of advice which I overpaid for, apparently. Any who, we’ve had a high turnover of stocks these last few months, so I’m unlikely to churn fifteen stocks every three months for the rest of the year, right?” Right. “So, will definitely end up ahead on a few counts; not paying a useless financial advisor and not paying the high fees for the funds that also underperform the market. Winning. I snagged the Christmas special on Stock Doctor, so get four months free. So, that plus the QAV sub and I’m ahead about three grand. The financial advisor was an additional 1.3% on a $300,000 balance which is about 4k, was as high as $400,000 balance or more expensive then. So, please tell TK it’s totally worth the effort to DIY with QAV.” So, that’s good, good feedback.
Tony 08:44
Yeah, thank you for that for those two listeners. That last listener also included his latest statement, or it might be the latest annual statement, and he didn’t mention it in the email, but he totalled over $20,000 worth of fees and costs on his portfolio during the year. It breaks it down into $15,000 deducted directly from his account, and then $5,500 deducted from his investments. Biggest one out of all that was nearly $14,000 for member advice fees, but there’s also an administration fee of $1,300, an operational risk financial requirement cost of $60, transaction cost of $37, etc., etc. But then also, too, fees and costs deducted from his investments, and it looks like he was advised to invest in a number of ETFs which are all taking sort of $500-1000 out — one of them is taking $3,500 out — which I imagine are the trailing commission’s back to his financial advisor. I’m not sure because it’s not mentioned on the statement I’m looking at. But that’s, I mean, that’s a heck of a lot of dollars coming out for basically getting advice to put your investments into four ETFs. I mean, that’s, to me, that’s just crazy. So, thanks for sharing that. One of the reasons for asking for these examples is just to point out that I’m hoping people know that, since we’ve been going for three or four years, DIY is not that hard. It does require a little bit of time, but it’s not that hard. And even if you’re doing it just to invest in index funds, you’d potentially saving up to $20,000 a year by doing it yourself. So, thanks for the feedback, it’s really worth focusing on fees going forward.
Cameron 10:33
It’s something I hadn’t really given a lot of thought to, in terms of the positioning of QAV and DIY. So, that was a real education for me in particular. Do you know this guy David Hains, Tony? Old golf buddy of yours I imagine?
Tony 10:54
I don’t know him personally, but I’ve certainly followed his career. I was gonna mention him myself in after hours because he passed away on the weekend. But personally, out of all the people on the rich list, David Hains was always someone I followed because, you know, similar sort of career. Similar in some ways, not other ways. He made a start for himself in turnaround situations, but then eventually went off and set up Portland House as an investment firm and managed his own funds through that, then handed it over to his kids. Along the way he also was a horse breeder, and a very famous one. He owned Kingston Town, which is probably after Farlap the most successful racehorse until I guess recently with Black Caviar and Winks. But a very successful racehorse and sire of many successful horses, including Kingston Rule, which he owned and won the Melbourne Cup with. So, yeah, I’ve always felt quite inspired by David Hains. He’s always been regarded as a nice guy. I didn’t know him, never met him, but yeah, I did enjoy reading any article I could about him. Pretty sure they had a chapter on him in some of the books like Masters of the Market that had been put out there many years ago. And yeah, for me, having no one to talk to about investing, to see that someone else out there had done it was always very motivating for me.
Cameron 12:18
Well, I’d never heard of him before or Portland House, but I read Chantecler’s obit for him, I guess, in the Financial Review this morning. And it’s entitled “Five Lessons from David Hain’s Rich Life.” “The late David Hain’s incredible seven-decade career is a testament to curiosity, humility, and most of all, class.” and he talks about Hain’s office Portland House: “built in 1872 and purchased by Hains in 1963, the stately Victorian terrace stood in stark contrast to the office towers, hotels and luxury retailers that dominate the so called ‘Paris End of Collins Street’. Once inside, the feeling that you’d step back in time only grew stronger. After making their way up a few creaking flights of stairs past a stunning Howard Arkley painting on the ground floor, visitors would eventually be shown into Hain’s personal office. Portland House Group might have been home to one of Australia’s oldest and most sophisticated hedge funds, but Hain’s personal sanctuary seem to have been untouched for decades: gleaming wood panelling, leather covered chairs, an antique mahogany desks, and certainly nothing as crass as a computer or laptop. The inhabitant of the office was a throwback to another era, too. Hanes, who has died at the age of ninety-two, was a gentleman in every sense of the word; unfailingly courteous and eternally understated for a man who built a $2.9 billion fortune.” And he talks about the bits that just sort of reminded me of you reading through this. He said, “even two years ago, I spoke to Hanes for the Australian Financial Review’s platinum year celebrations about his first international trip back in 1958, and he happily admitted some parts of the market were beyond him. ‘I don’t understand things like Bitcoin and stock prices based on sales growth,’ he said. ‘I just don’t know where it leads, but I don’t think anyone else does either.'” What else? Yeah, they talked about golf and horses, and that obviously made me think of you. So, “the final lesson from Hains is one he learnt from a seven-year stint learning the game of golf from legendary coach Norman Von Nida, who also got Hains into breeding champion racehorses. Talking to the Financial Review in 2009, Hain’s said Von Nida had shown him that class matters in sports, as it enables participants to overcome problems and still win. Hains would come to think about people and business in the same way, he said. A business has to have class to be really successful, so does an investor, and David Hains had it in spades.” As you do, Tony, you’re very classy, a very classy man.
Tony 15:00
Thanks, Cam. We were just talking about not liking to wear suits and things like that before we started recording, so…
Cameron 15:07
That’s classy. You don’t have to dress up to be classy.
Tony 15:09
Yeah, right. I wouldn’t hold a candle to David Hains, but certainly has been very motivational and inspirational to see him out there doing what he’s done, for sure. And there were some other lessons I noticed in that article which were worth talking about. He shied away from taking on debt, and the quality side of things, you’re right, he used that in horse breeding as well as in the share market. And that’s one of the things that we look at, quality, in our investing. Quality at Value. So, yeah, a lot to learn from him and he and his family. I think his daughter runs the horse breeding operations now and his sons do the hedge fund stuff. So, vale, David, and thanks for sharing your life with us, I guess, in print.
Cameron 15:52
Indeed. All right. I want to just recount a Facebook thread that happened during the week that I thought was terrific. Kurt asked a question, “I was hoping to find out from the QAV community whether you predominantly have utilised the QAV method for investing, or whether there have been other financial strategies mentioned on the show that you found helpful. I would be keen to hear as I have an appointment with my financial advisor soon and would like to float a few of these strategies.” Yeah, hope you listened to the earlier conversation about fees, Kurt, take that into account. Gary said, “hi Kurt. I have three separate portfolios: one joint with my wife, non-QAV, all LIC as that’s what she is most comfortable with. My SMSF has a 30/70 LIC to QAV blend. The QAV side is only down due to market timing and a few mistakes along the way, but in the last two weeks has gained back nearly 75% of the losses. My other portfolio is 100% QAV and sitting around 20% per annum after three years. This is the only portfolio that I add money to. I’m looking into adding additional to SMSF for taxation reasons, though.” So, well done, Gary, 20% per annum after three years; right on the money there. Ed also replied. He said, “I was introduced to QAV via James S just on two years back. Prior to this I was just doing bog-standard index investing in both my SMSF and in a company structure. I trialled an amount of money for twelve months, $170,000, while still running the indexes. I made a few mistakes with ADTs buying Josephine’s thanks to good ol’ FOMO and impatience. During this time I went back and listened to every episode, something I appreciate not everyone can do, nor do you really need to know as so much of it has been refined: the buy list every Monday, the Brettelator, Sir Andrew Flitman sheet — he should be knighted along with TK and Cam — commodity status, etc.” TK and Cam, for the record, Ed, whilst we appreciate the gesture strongly reject the concept of royalty and would not accept a knighthood. Andrew Flitman on the other hand comes from the old country, so I don’t know. Let him respond to that. He might be up for it. I personally would do a John Lennon and just tell him to stick it up their ass.
Tony 18:13
A knighthood, yes. Maybe an Order of Australia. As someone once said, OAM: Ordinary Australian Male.
Cameron 18:19
Yeah, okay, that’s good. “By listening to all the shows, I’ve learned a shedload, and think the Bible they’ve written gives you the baby without the delivery.” I still don’t know really what that means, but anyway. “Now that I’ve learned so much and I’m understanding it more, I decided back on the first of July ’22 to roll all of my cash in and simply stick with the system and not deviate from it. It’s working well, so now no need to do the index investing when running twice market.” S,o I wanted to thank Kurt for asking the question, valid question, and Gary and Ed in particular for their replies. There may have been others that I haven’t seen since then, but congratulations to Gary and Ed for working the system, and obviously it’s doing well for them. And thanks for sharing, we always appreciate it when… You know, I think that’s the proof is in the pudding for me. It’s one thing for you to claim your returns and people rightfully can be sceptical of those. But when I see the dummy portfolio running at 18-19% per annum after three and a bit years, and I’ve been doing most of the dummy portfolio buying and selling for the last couple of years, and I see these guys getting the same sort of returns doing it themselves, that’s the proof is in the pudding for me. It’s like, the system works if you work the system, it just works. Again, feel sad for the people that started at the beginning of last year just before the market downturn. It was obviously a rough year. But if they stick with it and stay disciplined, I have zero doubt that they will be able to claim the same sorts of returns a few years from now.
Tony 19:54
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I guess, in my humble opinion, it has to work, right? Because we take a share market, which if you do nothing and buy an index fund gets sort of 9 or 10% per annum, and then you back out all the risky stuff, all the bad stuff. It’s got to beat the index, and I guess that just from my experience of being able to hone things over many years and then assign values, etc., it’s been refined. But yeah, I mean, just staying away from Bitcoin, just staying away from tech stocks with high PE values, all that kind of stuff. Staying away from things which are patently overvalued; they might be quality stocks like your CSLs, but to me, they’re very highly valued stocks. Yeah, makes sense to me that you’ll get better than index, and if you refine it a bit, you’ll get double market. That to me, that’s almost like common sense. But anyway. And now it’s happening for these guys. So, thanks for sharing. The other point I wanted to point out was that I think both of these guys didn’t just jump in boots and all, they tested it for a while, and I think that’s quite a smart thing to do. Get used to it, make your mistakes with a smaller amount of money, and then when you get comfortable with it, jump in if you decide it’s for you.
Cameron 21:05
Yeah. And it won’t be for everybody, because not everybody has the right kind of temperament, which we’ve talked about early on. Something that Buffett says, right, it takes a certain kind of temperament to do this style of investing.
Tony 21:18
Yeah, because as we said, last week, it’s boring. Getting rich slowly is boring. It’s good fun, but it’s boring.
Cameron 21:27
It’s boring, but it also takes a certain temperament to be able to ignore what your cabbie tells you and what your hairdresser tells you, and your friend who knows a guy knows a guy who made a lot of money out of a tech stock or Bitcoin, and all of the hype. There’s not so much of it around at the moment, because all of those things crashed last year and didn’t really recover, but I know the first couple of years we were doing this, all of the hype around Bitcoin… I spoke to Torsten, our friend Torsten Hoffman the other day. Torsten was producer of our film Marketing Messiah, one of the producers, executive producer, on it, and he’s made two films about Bitcoin and crypto, and he knows everybody in Bitcoin and crypto circles around the world. He’s currently making a new film which sounds really interesting, it’s on space: he’s interviewed Neil deGrasse Tyson, and it’s all… He said, like, everyone thinks the space stuff is Branson and Musk and Bezos, he said that there’s like a thousand companies doing really cool stuff that no one’s heard of, and so he’s focusing mostly on them. He’s been bugging me for as long as I’ve known him: “are you going to get into Bitcoin?” Bitcoin Bitcoin Bitcoin, “you’re not a real investor if you’re not putting at least 50% of your investments into Bitcoin.” I said, how’s you Bitcoin portfolio doing? He goes, “yeah, it’s not too bad.” He said, “I got in seriously in 2019,” and so we had a look at it, and it’s basically doubled since 2019, where it is now. Yeah, that’s alright, three and a half years, if you got in in 2019. If you got in in 2020, it’s down 60% from probably where you bought in. But I pointed out to him that rule of seventy-two says the QAV portfolio doubles every three and a half years, too, without the risk of Bitcoin; without losing sleep and having to be lucky about how you timed it and all that kind of stuff. So, same returns as Bitcoin over the same timeframe without all of the bullshit, right?
Tony 23:33
Good point.
Cameron 23:34
Of course, if you bought in 2019 and sold at the peak, if you had the balls to do that, or the luck to get in and out, they did very well. But how many people did that? Probably not many.
Tony 23:50
That FOMO is still there. I had someone run into me a month or so ago and ask me whether he should be buying lithium stocks. So, there’s always that kind of FOMO in the market somewhere.
Cameron 24:02
Yeah. But people are always looking to get rich quick. I mean, that’s just human nature, right?
Tony 24:07
Yep. If that’s everything. I’ve got a pulled pork on SEQ to do. So, this was a request from one of the listeners, and they asked the question, “can we do a pulled pork on Sequoia Financial Group because their share price dropped 10% yesterday” or the day before. So, I said sure. For those who aren’t familiar with this stock, it’s on the buy list. It’s right down the very bottom, it’s right on the border of our cut off of with a QAV score of 0.1 but I’ll run through it. So, this company is basically quite a broad ranging wealth management company. So, it does the sort of wealth management we were talking about before with all the fees that go with it, I guess. I’m not familiar with the company enough to know what fees it charges, but it’s a wealth advisor helping you structure your investments. It does a lot of self-managed Superfund administration, provides technology to accountants to do that. It’s gotten into a few stock market newsletter type businesses and market data provision businesses, so I better speak well of them because they may well come along and knock on our door and make us an offer one day, Cam, to buy us out. So, they do that. They bought a legal advice company called Top Dock, which I think may have been the one that we spoke to about obtaining an AFSL licence at some stage, but anyway. They provide corporate advisory, especially in the small cap sector, they will raise money for small to medium sized companies. They do specific investments and specialised investments, particularly in the alternative class; so, if you’re running an SMSF and you want to have access to things that aren’t listed on the stock market that might interest you, they can arrange that for you. They do insurance brokerage, they have a stock broking section called Morrison Securities, financial planning, etc., etc. So, very wide-ranging company, however, it’s not a big company: market cap is $74 million and average daily trade is $55,000. So, it’s not for everyone, but certainly big enough for some people. Why did the price drop 10% recently? Well, they put out an ASX release during confession season, it went out on the 23rd, advising that their profit would be below what they had budgeted for, and I guess, therefore, what people who are following the company may have figured into their spreadsheets in planning for, or discounted cash flow valuations and planning for what they want to pay for the company. In detail, it looks like they’ll be 40% below budget in terms of profit, reasons being that a number of their units have underperformed. So, they are having business integration issues with some companies that they acquired, it’s going slower than expected. Some of their direct investments have underperformed, which has been a fairly common thing in the last six to twelve months for fund managers. They’re waiting for a claim with their personal PI insurer, so their professional indemnity insurer, which is taking longer than expected to pay out. So, a number of things which they claim are happening slower than they thought, which, you know, they claim won’t have long term impacts on the company. I would tend to believe them with that, but it’s also par for the course when they’ve got so many different operating units that some may underperform. To get into all that, so if we accept the fact that they’ll be under budget this year, under forecast this year, but they’re short-term issues, then we can still focus on their numbers and look to the future with them. People should bear in mind that we’re doing this podcast on January 24 and we’re only a week away from reporting season, so these numbers will be updated fairly soon. I’m doing my analysis on a share price of 61 cents, and that was on the weekend when I think, well, when the last download that Alex did was provided. But the share price now is 55, so it has gone down from there, which will improve some of these metrics, but I’m using 61 in my numbers. There’s no consensus target, so we can’t compare 61 cents against anybody else’s valuation for the company. However, Stock Doctor rank it strong and steady with financial health, so that’s good. The interesting one, the price to operating cash flow for this company is 7.82 times, so it doesn’t score for us on that metric. So, it’s starting to get away from us in terms of valuation, but that will come back if the price is dropping, so that will improve their score. So, we’re not getting a score for that metric. IV 1 is only 22 cents, the share price is above that so it’s not scoring there. We don’t have IV 2 because there’s no consensus estimates on future earnings, so I can’t score it on that. This company does pay a dividend, but the yield is only 2.3%, which is low. So, we don’t score it for that. And again, that yield is going to improve as the share price drops, however it’s kind of small. And, you know, I’d question why they bother paying a 2% yield. I suspect given that there is some concentrated share ownership on the register, I suspect it’s a way for them to get money out. When they have to pay themselves a dividend, they have to pay it to everyone. So, 2.3% is the yield but low. Net equity per share for this company is 36 cents, which is below the share price, and book plus 30% is 47 cents which is still below the share price even at 55 cents, so it doesn’t score on book value measures. Directors hold 12% which is good, so we score it for an owner-founder. In terms of the manually entered data, it does have the lowest PE of the last six halves, so it gets a score for that, and equity has been consistently increasing, so it gets a score for that. So, it scores 82% for quality which is why it’s getting a QAV score of 0.10, which is why it’s on the buy list at the bottom. That will improve as the price drops. But one thing I did want to highlight is for this company we’re only able to score it on eleven of the metrix, and the checklist I think from memory, has eighteen. So, there’s a number of things we’re not using to score this company. I tend to ignore that, but I just wanted to highlight to people that it’s not being scored across the full range of items that it could be. Risks and potential positives for this company: it’s small and it has many moving parts, so it’s fairly diversified. And the rationale for that will be that, you know, when everything’s firing you make a lot of money, and when half of things are firing and half of things aren’t, you’re not losing money. However, it does get difficult to manage a company the more complex it gets; especially a small one where the founders are probably doing a lot themselves. So, that’ll be an issue for this company. They’ll probably at some stage have to start boosting management if they keep getting much more complex. In some ways it’s okay at the moment, because a lot of the things they’re into would be able to be run by the one person, but eventually it’ll be a problem if it’s not managed properly. And I have no evidence to say it’s not being managed properly, but I just raise it as a potential risk. Another potential risk is that the wealth management industry’s been going through upheaval since the Hayne Royal Commission, and all the banks have divested, which is a positive for small companies like this, because they pick up the slack. So, their wealth advice section should be doing well. However, the ones that are left in the market, the two big ones, AMP and IOOF, if they get their act together on wealth advice they’ll be, you know, pretty strong competitors for this company. And when I say get their act together, they’re both trying very hard to either lobby the government to change the rules regarding financial advice to make it cheaper for the average person to get financial advice, and/or they’re investing in IT to be able to offer wealth advice through what’s called Robo advice, which is using IT to structure advice for people following a set of rules. So, again, if AMP and IOOF do that well, they will be a strong competitor for this company, as well. And then there is the legacy issue of Hayne. I mean, it does increase the compliance costs for any sort of wealth advising company, and they have to be very careful now to make sure that they are acting in the client’s best interest, that they are not cross selling or vertically integrating, selling their own products. Although I think Kane may have let that one go through, but anyway, it could be an issue again in the future. So, there is a bit of a spotlight on this industry at the moment, so there’s positives and negatives for that: the big players are on the ropes so small players can pick it up, but if the big players ever do come back strong, the small players will find it hard. On the positive side, though, small companies do have the ability to provide the personal touch. And that’s important, I guess, for a lot of people, and probably important for a lot of people in small companies who might want financial advice because they may not be getting as good a service from the big banks as they could be, and so having a one-on-one advisor would be useful to them. So, that’s Sequoia Finance.
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Cameron 1:11:42
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