QAV 703 Club

[00:00:00] Cameron: Wel­come, wel­come to QAV, TK, uh, this is episode 703, 16th of Jan­u­ary, 2024. You’re liv­ing in a very bare look­ing room there, Tony. You’ve

[00:00:21] Tony: Oh, don’t talk about the war. We haven’t been robbed. No, we’ve been, we have been cleaned out. Uh, yeah, get­ting ready for our sales process. And, uh, yeah, I mean, we’ve declut­tered, which is prob­a­bly the biggest ben­e­fit of pre­sent­ing the prop­er­ty. Um, we’ve had styl­ists in bring­ing dif­fer­ent fur­ni­ture in, um, dif­fer­ent fur­ni­ture to what I would have picked, but that’s per­son­al taste, I guess, but at

[00:00:47] Tony: least the place is themed

[00:00:49] Tony: now.

[00:00:49] Cameron: is it, is it a reflec­tion on you that they replaced all of your fur­ni­ture with some­thing that is crap­py?

[00:00:57] Tony: did­n’t say crap­py, I have said crap­py to them in the past, but they took that stuff away.

[00:01:04] Cameron: Oh, right.

[00:01:04] Tony: Yeah, yeah, pos­si­bly it’s per­son­al taste, but I mean, it makes sense. Every­thing’s declut­tered. It’s all themed with the same col­or scheme and it’s all low pro­file to high­light the

[00:01:13] Tony: views.

[00:01:13] Cameron: I’ve been to your place many times. I nev­er came away think­ing it was clut­tered. Lots of art, lots of art and lots of,

[00:01:23] Tony: I know.

[00:01:24] Cameron: blown pieces and stuff, but def­i­nite­ly not clut­tered. No.

[00:01:29] Tony: Well, no. Well, the the­o­ry is that you’re meant to basi­cal­ly present a blank can­vas so some­one can walk in and men­tal­ly say, Oh, I can put my art there rather than say­ing, Hmm,

[00:01:43] Tony: I don’t like

[00:01:43] Tony: that art or some­thing like that. So you want to focus them on the

[00:01:46] Cameron: peo­ple peo­ple buy­ing 10 mil­lion

[00:01:48] Cameron: apart­ments don’t have enough imag­i­na­tion to be able to think that through for them­selves, you know, won­der what it would look like.

[00:01:55] Tony: If we only get 10 mil­lion, I’m not going to

[00:01:57] Cameron: I was­n’t, I was not want­i­ng to, you know, throw a real num­ber out there because it might, peo­ple might have hard to say. If any of our lis­ten­ers want to put a bid in for your apart­ment, uh,

[00:02:10] Tony: Yeah.

[00:02:12] Cameron: should they con­tact you pri­vate­ly?

[00:02:14] Cameron: Send you an email?

[00:02:15] Tony: Uh, Adam Regan, he’s our real estate

[00:02:17] Cameron: Oh, okay. Come find me, and I’ll take my cut, then I’ll pass it on to Adam Regan. Well, good luck with all of that over the next, uh, week, Tony. Sounds

[00:02:28] Tony: No, you don’t get a cut because that was, that’s been part of the process. It’s like, um, the real estate agent asked us if we had peo­ple who we thought might buy the place.

[00:02:36] Cameron: Uh huh.

[00:02:37] Tony: So, um, oth­er­wise he gets a com­mis­sion and I’m like, he gets a com­mis­sion on the sale. And I said, we should carve out some­one that we bring to you and he said sure give me their

[00:02:47] Tony: names so a list of names of peo­ple who might be inter­est­ed

[00:02:50] Cameron: And was I one of them?

[00:02:51] Tony: um if you bring if you bring some­one to us I’m not pay­ing your com­mis­sion and the real estate agent a com­mis­sion.

[00:02:57] Cameron: okay. Right. Just me. Fine. I get it. Uh

[00:03:02] Tony: Ha ha

[00:03:02] Tony: ha ha.

[00:03:04] Cameron: Uh All right. Well, let’s get into mar­ket news, Tony. Uh, mar­ket’s had a bit of a noth­ing week. It’s kind of gone up and down and gone real­ly nowhere in the process. I haven’t looked for, Oh, it’s had a bad day today. What the hell? It’s gone right down

[00:03:23] Cameron: today. Um, there you go.

[00:03:26] Tony: should­n’t have looked.

[00:03:29] Tony: Ha

[00:03:29] Cameron: hell hap­pened today?

[00:03:31] Cameron: I, I, I knew the

[00:03:32] Tony: I don’t know, the

[00:03:34] Cameron: the fin this morn­ing.

[00:03:36] Cameron: Yeah, the Iowa cau­cus­es, Don­ald Trump won the Iowa cau­cus­es. The share mar­ket has already

[00:03:41] Tony: Uh,

[00:03:42] Cameron: I did see in

[00:03:43] Cameron: the,

[00:03:43] Cameron: fin this morn­ing, they were say­ing it was going to

[00:03:45] Cameron: slip, but, uh, that’s more than a

[00:03:47] Cameron: slip. That’s, uh. That’s a

[00:03:49] Cameron: dip. Oh well, back to where it was rough­ly, uh, the 18th of Decem­ber a month ago.

[00:03:55] Cameron: So there goes that end of Decem­ber ral­ly. Thanks, thanks for get­ting our hopes up, Mar­ket.

[00:04:02] Cameron: Um,

[00:04:02] Tony: it’s like, it’s like, some, when I was a kid some­times I’d get Christ­mas presents and I’d lose them in Jan­u­ary because I’d done some­thing wrong and they’d be tak­en off me again.

[00:04:12] Tony: What’d I do wrong ASX?

[00:04:13] Tony: C’mon!

[00:04:14] Cameron: that still hap­pen? Jen­ny, take away your presents. Uh, I’ll QA port­fo­lio report. Uh, the dum­my

[00:04:25] Cameron: port­fo­lio, when I looked at it this morn­ing I dun­no what it’s done today, but it was still track­ing along slight­ly less than dou­ble mar­kets since incep­tion. Over the last sev­en

[00:04:32] Cameron: days. It had been up about just under 1% while the, uh, STW was down slight­ly 0.1. But, uh, the big win­ner for us

[00:04:44] Cameron: in the last cou­ple of days had been.

[00:04:47] Cameron: S. U. L. S. U. L’s had a bump a cou­ple of days for some rea­son. I think you’ve got that down as a note to talk about lat­er on. What hap­pened with S. U. L. Tony?

[00:04:57] Tony: yeah, well, don’t talk too

[00:04:59] Tony: soon because I think It’s down today, but, uh, they released a

[00:05:02] Tony: trad­ing update. We’re in con­fes we’re in

[00:05:03] Tony: con­fes­sion sea­son. That is some­thing to talk about. So,

[00:05:06] Cameron: Yeah, right.

[00:05:06] Tony: uh, next month, Feb­ru­ary, which is fast approach­ing will be the com­pa­ny report­ing sea­son when we’ll get busy and crunch our num­bers, uh, based on the results for the last half.

[00:05:17] Tony: Uh, And so com­pa­nies who are already see­ing Graphs of those num­bers, um, are oblig­ed to update the mar­ket if they have, um, some­thing to, to tell the mar­ket, which, um, is dif­fer­ent to, to what the con­sen­sus in the mar­ket is for the num­bers that they’re about to release. So, Super Group came out a cou­ple of days ago and said that they were doing bet­ter than con­sen­sus and so the shares went up, but I think they’re down again today.

[00:05:43] Cameron: Yeah, with every­thing

[00:05:44] Tony: But yeah, be aware of it. It’s going to be a thing for the next cou­ple of weeks that shares could bounce around with those kinds of announce­ments

[00:05:49] Tony: in, uh, con­fes­sion sea­son.

[00:05:52] Cameron: Well, shares have been bounc­ing around quite a lot. I think we’re all used to that. Chairs bounc­ing around. Uh, well that was the big win­ner any­way for us in the WPort­fo­lio in the last

[00:06:02] Cameron: week. Uh, the Stock­o­pe­dia WPort­fo­lio is down a lit­tle bit in the last week for some rea­son. The US

[00:06:10] Cameron: WPort­fo­lio also down a lit­tle bit

[00:06:12] Cameron: but still out­per­form­ing the S& P over there.

[00:06:16] Cameron: Some­body did ask me

[00:06:17] Cameron: dur­ing the week for a list of the US stocks that I’ve put in our port­fo­lio, which I sent, but I also post­ed those today in the blog

[00:06:26] Cameron: posts. So if peo­ple are inter­est­ed, You can have a look, but most­ly a lot of ship­ping and bank­ing and finance,

[00:06:33] Cameron: uh, seems to be. What, uh, the list is throw­ing up in the U.

[00:06:37] Cameron: S., so, yeah, I think 75 per­cent of the U. S. port­fo­lio is made up of those sorts of stocks, which is inter­est­ing, bank­ing and finance we’re used to, but I’m not used to buy­ing ship­ping com­pa­nies, a lot of ship­ping com­pa­nies, a lot of them are Greek ship­ping com­pa­nies,

[00:06:54] Cameron: things like that, Cypri­an ship­ping com­pa­nies, um,

[00:06:58] Tony: Well, we don’t have any of those in

[00:07:00] Tony: Aus­tralia, do we?

[00:07:02] Cameron: Not that I know of. Yeah. Speak­ing of results, Brent, Brent post­ed his results, uh, to the Face­book group this week. And as always, when Brent posts his results, they’re always stel­lar. Uh, he’s out­per­form­ing the dum­my port­fo­lio for this finan­cial year so far, as well as for most of the pre­vi­ous years, as well as my own port­fo­lio, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:07:27] Cameron: He said, uh, just updat­ed my per­for­mance for the first six months of this FY. Rough­ly 35 per­cent of the return con­sist­ed of div­i­dends. Hap­py to beat the mar­ket as I’ve held 33 per­cent of the cap­i­tal in cash. That’s a lot of cash to be sit­ting on. Star per­form­ers were HLI, FPR, SUL, LYL, and DTL. What sur­prised me, if I look at the incep­tion date, I just nudged a dou­ble in under three years.

[00:07:54] Cameron: Wow. Thanks, Tony Cam and the group. Which means that in three years, he’s basi­cal­ly got a hun­dred per­cent. return on his port­fo­lio, which is what QAV should deliv­er, right? The rule of 72 every three, three and a half years, it should basi­cal­ly dou­ble. Um, and so I emailed Brent and said, look, every­one’s going to want to know what you’re doing dif­fer­ent­ly to the rest of us.

[00:08:18] Cameron: And he sent me a reply, which I’ll, I just got before we went to air. So I’ll read this out. Hey Cameron, few points off the top of my head. So I’m right. I’m work­ing while I write this. So very basic. Tell my secrets on the free ver­sion of the pod­cast so every­one hears it. All right. One, I read the annu­al reports of the busi­ness­es on the score sheet before I buy.

[00:08:38] Cameron: I like to look at their his­tor­i­cal per­for­mance, try to under­stand their busi­ness, try to gauge their his­to­ry of cap­i­tal allo­ca­tion, try to under­stand if there is some com­pet­i­tive advan­tage slash moat slash great asset. 2. I look for stocks with buy­backs. In my invest­ing career, I’ve nev­er seen so many list­ed Aus­tralian busi­ness­es buy back so many shares.

[00:09:01] Cameron: Feel free to jump in when­ev­er you want, Tony. 3. I don’t fol­low the 10 per­cent sell rule if there’s no bad news. If there is bad news, I’ll con­sid­er the impact and

[00:09:11] Cameron: may sell, but most times I’ll wait until the busi­ness reports earn­ings before I make a deci­sion. 5. On the oth­er hand, I’ll sell some low qual­i­ty busi­ness­es that have appre­ci­at­ed

[00:09:22] Cameron: in price and I believe are at fair val­ue slash or over­priced.

[00:09:26] Cameron: I don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly wait for it to fall back to the sell line, e. g. GRR, SSG and ME. MHJ, Michael Hill Jew­el­ers, uh, Four, hold on, we went three, five, four, and then five. Okay, so this might be an issue.

[00:09:45] Tony: What? Brent said he does work. What’s he work

[00:09:47] Tony: as?

[00:09:50] Cameron: Look, he, uh, his returns, uh, obvi­ous­ly bet­ter than his, uh, num­ber­ing sys­tem. Four, I con­tin­ue to hold the coal stocks. The div­i­dends have been sub­stan­tial over the past 18 months. Five, again, near­ly 50 per­cent of my gain was in one busi­ness, which I put about 15 per­cent of my cap­i­tal into. Per­cent, I guess that means.

[00:10:12] Cameron: GRR, bought for 0. 34 and sold for 1. 40 and col­lect­ed 0. 24 in div­i­dends along the way. That’s the rea­son for my 30 per­cent return in the year the ASX dropped. Uh, by the way, if I go back to his finan­cial year returns, his incep­tion date is Jan­u­ary 21. Finan­cial year 2021, so he’s only invest­ed for half a year there, 21.

[00:10:34] Cameron: 29 per­cent return ver­sus the AXJOA of 8. 4%. 22 finan­cial year, he got near­ly 36 per­cent and the, uh, index went down 7. 5%. 23 finan­cial year up 8. 5 per­cent ver­sus the index up near­ly 15%, and then so far this finan­cial year he’s up about 12 per­cent ver­sus the index up about 8%. So he said that one year GRR real­ly was a mas­sive out­per­former for him.

[00:11:07] Cameron: 6. I don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly buy from the top of the list, I use it as a screen­er and I’m real­ly look­ing for an anom­aly. 7. Buy­ing busi­ness­es with low liq­uid­i­ty does­n’t both­er me. Exam­ple, ASG and KPG. 8. I’m com­fort­able dou­ble, triple siz­ing a posi­tion when there’s an obvi­ous pric­ing anom­aly. 9. I checked lease pay­ments in the finan­cial reports and backed that out of the oper­at­ing cash flow num­ber.

[00:11:33] Cameron: Lease pay­ments are a cost of doing busi­ness but are report­ed in the finan­cial sec­tion in the cash flow state­ment. After back­ing these pay­ments out you get a high­er price to cash flow. It helps me avoid some busi­ness­es. 10. I do my own check­list on each busi­ness I intend buy­ing. I add scores for buy­backs and ROIC.

[00:11:52] Cameron: I add scores for busi­ness moat and cap­i­tal allo­ca­tion using my own knowl­edge and ideas. I remove low­est PE con­sen­sus tar­get from my check­list. 11. Can­not rule out luck and tim­ing. This is not a rec­om­men­da­tion that lis­ten­ers fol­low these ideas. And then he’s got, below is a list of what I own and what I’ve recent­ly sold.

[00:12:12] Cameron: I haven’t sold much in the past finan­cial year. So I’d actu­al­ly Don’t know which is which here. I think this is the list of stocks. So I think this is his port­fo­lio. Um, NHC, WDS, YALT, uh, White­haven Coal. FPR, KPG, TER, NWS, ASG, NHC, YAL, ASG, SUL, S32, VUK, HLI, MQG, WAF, AFG, WALYL, WGC and CITC. No, sor­ry, DTC, Data 3, um, so that’s, that’s quite a lot of stocks there, that’s like 20, 23 stocks in that port­fo­lio, um, and the ones that he’s sold recent­ly, GRR, um, IGL, CBA, Uh, N‑A-B-C-C-P-C-I‑A HELIA Group, uh, K‑S-L-V-E‑A, Qan­tas, uh, N‑I-C-J-B-H-W-A-F-S-T‑O, uh, CCP, again, and CRN.

[00:13:31] Cameron: So that’s, uh, so, you know, uh, you’ve always said, uh, feel free to mod­i­fy things and tell us how you do. And Brent, as peo­ple may remem­ber, six months ago, Brent was on the show when he and his dad went over to the, um, uh, Berk­shire Hath­away AGM, good tim­ing, got to see Char­lie at his last Berk­shire AGM. Um. So, you know, he’s a seri­ous, seri­ous val­ue investor, Brent, and has made some mod­i­fi­ca­tions and is doing very well out of it, Tony.

[00:14:05] Tony: That’s great. Well done, Brent. And thanks for shar­ing too. And, um, I guess my take­aways, and I haven’t, I did­n’t see your email by today before this, but my take­aways from that are that, you know, I should look at, um, putting some scores in the check­list for buy­backs, um, poten­tial­ly, and for ROIC, which I think were in there, and poten­tial­ly look at remov­ing low­est PE and con­sen­sus fore­cast.

[00:14:30] Tony: Uh. They were the sort of, out of all the things that you said there in the answer from Brent, they were the things that I think are hard, can be hard cod­ed. Um, poten­tial­ly the, he said he is flex­i­ble with the 10 per­cent sell rule, so, um, you know, I’ve been tri­alling a 20 per­cent sell rule myself, because I think the 10 per­cent has been whip­saw­ing us over the last 12 months, so there may be some­thing in that.

[00:14:58] Tony: Um, I would love to know more about this con­cept of anom­aly. He said he’d look for anom­alies on the check­list, um, that’d be good to know what he means by that. Um, it’d be good to know more about, he said he dou­ble sized some posi­tions, so was that, was that done on the first pur­chase or does he buy some­thing and then decide to buy more and what are the thoughts and rules around that?

[00:15:23] Tony: Um, and then I think the What was the oth­er thing that we were talk­ing about there? What he talked about there? Uh, yeah, back­ing out the lease pay­ments, I think was one to look at as well. So some good, good thoughts there. I’ll do some research on those. Thanks, Brent.

[00:15:38] Cameron: Yeah. Good job, Brent. Um, and thanks for shar­ing. Much appre­ci­at­ed.

[00:15:43] Tony: Yeah,

[00:15:44] Cameron: By com­par­i­son, I did the dum­my port­fo­lio per­for­mance by finan­cial year. Um, FY20, uh, we, we were up 4%. We start­ed sort of halfway through that year. We were up 4%, um, ver­sus the STW down 7%. Uh, FY21, we were up 48 per­cent ver­sus the STW up 26 and a half.

[00:16:11] Cameron: That was, you know, the com­ing out of COVID year.

[00:16:15] Tony: COVID.

[00:16:16] Cameron: killed it. FY22

[00:16:19] Tony: and go, sor­ry, I was going to say, and going into COVID too, we got out

[00:16:24] Tony: at the right.

[00:16:24] Tony: time too, I think,

[00:16:25] Tony: and set it out for a month or two.

[00:16:27] Cameron: Yeah, right. FY 22, we were down one point a 5%. The S St. W was down sev­en FY 23. We were up nine point a half, and the s stw was up 15. And so far this finan­cial year we’re up about nine and the SST w’s up about sev­en accord­ing to Navea. Um. So, yeah, we’ve out­per­formed it, um, well, yes, out­per­formed it four out of the five peri­ods.

[00:17:02] Cameron: I think FY23 was the only one where we did­n’t,

[00:17:06] Cameron: um, but some peo­ple on the Face­book group So, yeah. I’ve said their per­for­mance over the last few years has been nowhere near as good as that or Bren­t’s, um, Alex and Steven haven’t had good results. I, I, as I told you off air, I’ve been try­ing to do my super results using OzSu­per and I can’t make se their report­ing is just a com­plete mess.

[00:17:26] Cameron: And, uh, I emailed them to ask some ques­tions and was told that it’d take five busi­ness days for them to reply to my email. So I spat the dum­my and just down­loaded every­thing out of their sys­tem and put it into Navexa. Accord­ing to Navexa, um, my incep­tion date for the super port­fo­lio is, um, August 21.

[00:17:47] Cameron: That’s when I moved every­thing over to Con­sol­i­dat­ed, my super into OzSu­per and could man­age it direct­ly. Uh, FY22, I was down 5%, STW was down 10%, 10. 5 per­cent in the same peri­od after incep­tion. FY23, I was down 2%, it was, STW was up 15%, and year to date, FY24, I’m down 1. 5 per­cent and it’s up 7%. So You know, my per­for­mance in my super port­fo­lio is nowhere near as good as the per­for­mance in the dum­my port­fo­lio, even though I obvi­ous­ly man­age them exact­ly the same way.

[00:18:25] Cameron: The only dif­fer­ences being ADT’s super port­fo­lio is lim­it­ed to ASX 300 stocks, and there have been lots of peri­ods in the last cou­ple of years when I haven’t been able to find any­thing to buy in the ASX 300, and I’ve been sit­ting in cash for long peri­ods of time. And the oth­er dif­fer­ence obvi­ous­ly is, um, you know, the, sort of the, just the tim­ing and how long some of these things have been held for and, uh, all of that kind of stuff, you know, tim­ing of get­ting in and get­ting out.

[00:18:56] Cameron: Some of the stocks in the dum­my port­fo­lio we’ve held for quite a long time, you know, they’ve just gone on to do bet­ter and bet­ter, uh, like DU, DUR, Durat­e­ch is up

[00:19:07] Tony: Mm hmm.

[00:19:08] Cameron: 200 per­cent since we added it to the

[00:19:10] Cameron: dum­my port­fo­lio, stuff like that. So that’s the big ques­tion. I know your per­for­mance has strug­gled in the last cou­ple of years.

[00:19:16] Cameron: We’re we’re all basi­cal­ly fol­low­ing the same sys­tem. Bren­t’s got a cou­ple of, uh, tweaks to it. But, um, the big ques­tion, I guess, in my mind is why, if we’re all fol­low­ing the same rules, more or less, are we get­ting such dif­fer­ent results? Leav­ing Brent as an out­lier for a moment. Is it ADT? Is it tim­ing? Is it

[00:19:34] Cameron: just, you know, com­bi­na­tion of the two?

[00:19:37] Cameron: Luck of when you get in, when you get out, what you buy? Uh, I know that you Prob­a­bly don’t have any

[00:19:44] Tony: I know we, I don’t, because, because if I did, I’d be chang­ing my per­for­mance as well, and you know, we’ve done a lot of work on that, about, you know, whether we’re, whether ADTs are, um, are, you know, uh, are appro­pri­ate for us, whether we’re As a group now step­ping on each oth­er’s toes as we buy and sell.

[00:20:03] Tony: I’ve been try­ing using a 20 per­cent stop loss rather than a 10 per­cent stop loss, so I trade less and that seems to be help­ing. I know one of my shares in the last Last week went through its 10 per­cent stop loss, but I kept it and it rebound­ed, so, um, I think the 20 per­cent is prob­a­bly going to be work­ing out bet­ter than the 10%.

[00:20:28] Tony: Uh, but yeah, I, I can’t, I can’t, um, I can’t say why, uh, all, all I can think of is that what­ev­er’s Brent doing does add val­ue to the process, so. I’ll def­i­nite­ly look at some of those things and see if we want to change our process as well. And then we’ll all be like Brent and his returns will

[00:20:48] Tony: drop down.

[00:20:52] Cameron: Yeah, there’ll be a, there’ll be a lag. Um,

[00:20:55] Tony: but yeah, the dum­my port­fo­lio is inter­est­ing. It does have a lot of, it does have some low­er ADT stocks. Like you said, your super is con­strained to. ASX 300, my invest­ing is con­strained by my need for liq­uid­i­ty. So, um, it could just be that this last year or two, large, you know, large cap

[00:21:13] Tony: val­ue stocks haven’t done as well as the mar­ket.

[00:21:17] Cameron: and I won­der, just think­ing it through, think­ing about it now, I won­der if, um, you know, I did my rule one analy­sis. Well, not just rule one, my, my sell trig­ger analy­sis on the live port­fo­lio a while ago, and it’s basi­cal­ly said that it did­n’t cost us any­thing, but I won­der if I. Iso­lat­ed that to just high ADT stocks, if it would show a dif­fer­ence.

[00:21:42] Cameron: I won­der if high ADT stocks, uh, may suf­fer from our, say, rule one sell trig­gers more than low­er ADT stocks.

[00:21:53] Tony: Yeah, quite pos­si­bly. And I guess the issue with that is, is it, is that an ongo­ing thing or is it just a once off? And, um, I’ve nev­er had prob­lems with it in the past. So I sug­gest it’s prob­a­bly just, you know, the mar­ket cycle we’re in at the moment.

[00:22:05] Cameron: Yeah. The volatil­i­ty of the last cou­ple of years and

[00:22:09] Tony: Yeah.

[00:22:11] Cameron: Well, any­way, um, we don’t have answers, you know. Your per­for­mance for decades It was strong, it’s had a weak cou­ple of years, Bren­t’s doing well though, the dum­my port­fo­lio’s been doing rea­son­ably well, um, so, it’s uh, it’s a head scratch­er.

[00:22:32] Tony: Yeah, but we’ll con­tin­ue to evolve. I mean, we look, you know, like I said, we’re, um, I’m tri­alling 20 per­cent stop loss­es. Um, I’ve looked at RENCO. I don’t think it’s the right thing to do. Um, and I’ll keep look­ing and I’ll now set up some port­fo­lios that high­light the impor­tance of buy­backs and some of the oth­er things that Brent men­tioned and see if they’re worth

[00:22:53] Tony: putting into our process.

[00:22:54] Cameron: Yeah. Hey, by the way, um, I was going to talk about this in After Hours, but I’ve been read­ing um, a col­lec­tion of essays by Max Planck. You ever read any Max

[00:23:06] Tony: Uh huh. I have not.

[00:23:09] Cameron: Max Planck, um,

[00:23:11] Cameron: as I’m sure most peo­ple know, one of the founders of quan­tum physics, uh, the Planck length is named after him. It’s the small­est length in mea­sure­ment.

[00:23:24] Cameron: I was going to make a

[00:23:26] Tony: Yeah, I was about to as well, but we won’t.

[00:23:32] Cameron: We won’t

[00:23:32] Tony: Con­tin­ue, Mr. Plank.

[00:23:37] Cameron: but he’s, he’s got a lot of great quotes. He was, he was very, very good with the quote. One of his most famous is a new sci­en­tif­ic truth does not tri­umph by con­vinc­ing its oppo­nents and mak­ing him, mak­ing them see the light, but rather because its oppo­nents even­tu­al­ly die and a new gen­er­a­tion grows up that is famil­iar with it. Um, sci­ence advances one funer­al at a time, sim­i­lar light. Um, when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

[00:24:16] Tony: Okay.

[00:24:17] Tony: Yep. True. That’s pro­found.

[00:24:19] Cameron: Yeah. And that gets back to my con­ver­sa­tion or our con­ver­sa­tion last week about. AI and pro­gram­ming and cod­ing, now every­thing I see has changed because I’m now like, okay, I can, I can write code and every­thing becomes a cod­ing prob­lem for me now. But, um, I like this one. This is the one I was going to men­tion that I thought was, um, rel­e­vant for us.

[00:24:41] Cameron: Uh, order demands clas­si­fi­ca­tion.

[00:24:47] Tony: Yeah, that’s a real­ly good one. And that’s, I think, the basis of QAV, isn’t it? It’s, it’ll be inter­est­ing to know how much of Bren­t’s secret sauce is cod­able and how

[00:24:58] Tony: much is gut feel.

[00:25:01] Cameron: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s obvi­ous­ly some things you said there that are, that are cod­able. Um, but you know, if we, we can put those to the

[00:25:12] Cameron: test and maybe if we get this new regres­sion test­ing sys­tem built with Matthew’s help, um, we might be able to, you know, do some regres­sion test­ing on that and see how it plays out.

[00:25:21] Cameron: But, uh,

[00:25:23] Tony: yeah,

[00:25:23] Tony: it reminds me of the old John, um, is it John? No. Peters, any­way. Tom Peters. The, um, busi­ness man­age­ment guru who said you can’t man­age what you can’t

[00:25:32] Tony: mea­sure.

[00:25:33] Cameron: yes.

[00:25:34] Tony: Same sort of thing.

[00:25:35] Cameron: At Microsoft, we used to say, what gets mea­sured gets, uh, man­aged. Yeah. What gets, what gets mea­sured gets done. I think it was. What gets mea­sured gets done. Yeah.

[00:25:48] Tony: Hmm.

[00:25:50] Cameron: Speak­ing of mea­sur­ing things, uh, Stock­o­pe­dia, Elio, our old friend Elio D’Am­a­to did a post the oth­er day. The Aus­tralian New Zealand Stock­o­pe­dia NAPS 2023 review.

[00:26:04] Cameron: So this is a port­fo­lio that they ran in 2023. NAPS stands for No Admin Port­fo­lio Sys­tem. Um, so they basi­cal­ly bought a bunch of stocks and then did noth­ing with it to see how they did, I think, is how it worked. Uh, a bit like Dogs of the Dow, but with dif­fer­ent cri­te­ria. Uh, any­way, the per­for­mance, 12 months to the 31st of Decem­ber 2023, their NAPS port­fo­lio was up 10.

[00:26:33] Cameron: 2 per­cent ver­sus the ASX 300, which they’re mea­sur­ing it against, which was up 13. 13%. Some of the win­ners, well, the big win­ner they had was like a podi­um LYL, which, uh, was up 87.3% and the los­er was Insignia Finan­cial, IFL. That was down 23.7% over that year. And basi­cal­ly what they’re doing is, I think they’re just select­ing, um, the two high­est stock rank scores at the start of the year in each sec­tor.

[00:27:12] Cameron: that are large enough for us to con­sid­er. I don’t know what that means, but prob­a­bly a large enough ADT, so it’s like a no ADT stock or some­thing like that. Stock rank being their equiv­a­lent sort of, of, um, stock doc­tor’s, um, scor­ing, um,

[00:27:32] Tony: Well, yeah, they’re fac­tor investors, so they have a, they rank all the stocks on the ASX in three cat­e­gories, qual­i­ty, um, price, and, um, uh, yeah, sen­ti­ment, I guess,

[00:27:44] Tony: in our terms. Yeah.

[00:27:46] Cameron: So, um, yeah, they did now per­form the index, but it did okay for the year, 10%, but that’s sort of like You know, basic index lev­el returns, but no effort involved in that. They just picked stocks at the begin­ning of the year and just hold them for the year. Sort of a, an ETF sort of approach, but very lim­it­ed, I guess.

[00:28:07] Cameron: They’re just buy­ing what they think are the best look­ing stocks and doing noth­ing for the year. Not a bad strat­e­gy if you want to be hands off.

[00:28:17] Tony: Mm-Hmm.

[00:28:19] Cameron: All right. Well, uh, what else have I got? Uh, la, la, la, la, la, hun­dred lit­tle ideas. My lit­tle idea from Mor­gan Hus­sell this week, the curse of knowl­edge. This reminds me of you when we start­ed the pod­cast.

[00:28:39] Cameron: The occur­rence of knowl­edge, the inabil­i­ty to com­mu­ni­cate your ideas because you wrong­ly assume oth­ers have the nec­es­sary back­ground to under­stand what you’re talk­ing about. Ha ha

[00:28:52] Tony: yeah. I cer­tain­ly have had the curse of knowl­edge from time to time.

[00:28:55] Cameron: ha ha ha ha ha ha

[00:28:56] Tony: Basi­cal­ly, every time I go to a din­ner par­ty and try to hold a con­ver­sa­tion, usu­al­ly .

[00:28:59] Cameron: ha ha ha ha

[00:29:00] Tony: Do you, I mean, you must hap­pen to you too. I go to a din­ner par­ty and peo­ple wan­na talk about the NRL or the AFL or the crick­et, and I’m like, I just sit there and lis­ten and then, and I’m not, you know.

[00:29:11] Tony: In the mean­time, I’m think­ing about, you know, QAV and, yeah, free will and reli­gion and, you know, all these things. And as soon as I try, I remem­ber one clas­sic exam­ple was I had a con­ver­sa­tion, I did the par­ty once about, um, oh, a num­ber of times actu­al­ly about the, The, um, you call it Rhap­sody of the Nerds, so, you know, the, um,

[00:29:34] Cameron: ha ha

[00:29:36] Tony: the sin­gu­lar­i­ty is in the eye.

[00:29:37] Tony: I was so tak­en by that book, and I used to talk about it with peo­ple, and, um, and, and like they’d just stare at your blank face, and their take away from it is, Kynas­ton’s crazy, he thinks he’s going to live for­ev­er, and I’m like, no, that’s not the point, right?

[00:29:53] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:29:55] Tony: Uh,

[00:29:56] Cameron: Well, that’s, yeah, I do feel like that, uh, we were at a Christ­mas par­ty a cou­ple of weeks ago, um, and I was bored until some­body said, Uh, what do you think’s going on with Rus­sia and Ukraine? What’s that all about? It’s like, real­ly?

[00:30:17] Tony: then they were bored?

[00:30:18] Tony: Yeah,

[00:30:32] Cameron: I think we need to go now. These peo­ple were like semi, semi con­scious at that point. But, um, yes, I think I did get it. Yeah. But I’m like, okay, well, now we, now we’ve got to a place where I can actu­al­ly talk about some­thing inter­est­ing to me.

[00:30:53] Tony: yeah, no, exact­ly.

[00:30:54] Cameron: the curse of knowl­edge. Yes, but like the inabil­i­ty, it’s more like the inabil­i­ty to com­mu­ni­cate some­thing that you know a lot about to peo­ple who don’t know a lot about it because you don’t even have the ter­mi­nol­o­gy. Uh, to talk about it in a way. And you know, that’s pret­ty much like for the last 19 years with the shows that I’ve been doing on his­to­ry and sci­ence and phi­los­o­phy, I’ve always seen, because I’m not, uh, as, as you well know, edu­cat­ed on any top­ic, I have no qual­i­fi­ca­tions.

[00:31:30] Cameron: Uh, but. What I’ve always seen my job as being in the pod­cast is to, and in the film and, and, you know, the books and that kind of stuff, is to take what all the aca­d­e­mics are say­ing and trans­late it and com­mu­ni­cate it in a way that peo­ple might be able to under­stand, because aca­d­e­mics are often very bad at artic­u­lat­ing what they know in a way that won’t put peo­ple to sleep in 30 sec­onds.

[00:31:59] Cameron: So I sort of always thought that was my job. And even with QAV, like in the ear­ly days, it was try­ing to fig­ure out What you were talk­ing about and dumb it down to a lev­el where I could under­stand it. And if I could under­stand it, then maybe oth­er peo­ple could under­stand it as well. So, um, I think it’s, it’s an oppor­tu­ni­ty, but yeah, for­tu­nate­ly I don’t have any knowl­edge about any­thing, so I don’t suf­fer from the curse of knowl­edge, but I did think of you when I read that one.

[00:32:25] Tony: Oh, come on.

[00:32:27] Cameron: No, huh?

[00:32:28] Tony: Tell us about Kung Fu. Tell us

[00:32:29] Tony: about chess. Tell

[00:32:30] Cameron: I’m not an expert on any­thing. I know, I know a lit­tle bit about a lot of things.

[00:32:36] Tony: Oh, is that the time? Oh,

[00:32:37] Tony: well.

[00:32:39] Cameron: Like my wife.

[00:32:40] Cameron: Chris­sy just, her eyes roll up in the back of her head at din­ner time if

[00:32:43] Cameron: I ever get under some­thing and

[00:32:45] Cameron: gets quite cranky. All right.

[00:32:48] Tony: Alex, of course,

[00:32:49] Tony: suf­fers from the curse

[00:32:50] Tony: of knowl­edge when she

[00:32:51] Tony: talks to us about art.

[00:32:52] Cameron: Yes. Hel­lo, Alex. Wel­come to the show.

[00:32:56] Alex: Hel­lo. Thank you. I have to say my

[00:32:59] Marker

[00:32:59] Alex: cap­tive audi­ence is quite

[00:33:01] Alex: polite when I do start going on about art, so

[00:33:04] Tony: it’s inter­est­ing. It’s good, isn’t it? It’s a good sub­ject to talk about

[00:33:08] Tony: at din­ner par­ties.

[00:33:10] Alex: Yeah, or when we’re at the Lou­vre on

[00:33:12] Tony: Oh,

[00:33:13] Alex: Pod­cast

[00:33:13] Tony: it’s one of the

[00:33:14] Tony: high­lights of my life is going through

[00:33:16] Tony: a, an art gallery with you. It’s like get­ting a per­son­al tour. It’s

[00:33:19] Cameron: Yeah. I remem­ber when we were walk­ing around the Lou­vre.

[00:33:22] Alex: How are we going to fina­gle the, yeah, we need to some­how fig­ure out a QAV. Europe trip, 2025,

[00:33:31] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:33:31] Tony: Oh, Okay. All right.

[00:33:34] Cameron: We can’t like make it this year. It has to be,

[00:33:36] Cameron: you want to kick it out of you? Yeah.

[00:33:41] Alex: Enough time to plan, you know.

[00:33:42] Tony: Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the most nat­ur­al

[00:33:44] Tony: QAV trip is to Oma­ha in, in May.

[00:33:48] Cameron: Well,

[00:33:48] Tony: have an air and space muse­um

[00:33:50] Tony: there, but no art

[00:33:50] Tony: gal­leries, I don’t think. Not that I

[00:33:52] Tony: know of any­way.

[00:33:53] Cameron: may not be any­one to go see in Oma­ha in May, but you know,

[00:33:57] Cameron: way it’s going.

[00:33:58] Cameron: We’re already 50 per­cent down. What have you been up to this week, Alex?

[00:34:06] Alex: I had an inter­view this morn­ing and then we’ve been mov­ing. We got

[00:34:09] Alex: keys to our new place this morn­ing, so. Lots of things hap­pen­ing, and of course I got sick last night,

[00:34:15] Tony: ah,

[00:34:16] Alex: but oth­er­wise it’s been

[00:34:18] Cameron: what kind of sick?

[00:34:21] Alex: Noth­ing bad, I’ve test­ed and I’m all good, but

[00:34:25] Alex: um, I think just run down. It hap­pens.

[00:34:27] Cameron: All the Kynas­tons are

[00:34:28] Cameron: mov­ing at once. What’s going on?

[00:34:30] Tony: Yeah. It’s genet­ic,

[00:34:35] Tony: genet­ic move­ment, we have a genet­ic move­ment, a ram­bling gene, I’m read­ing that book you

[00:34:39] Tony: rec­om­mend­ed from Bil­ly Con­nol­ly at the moment, Alex, The Ram­bling Man,

[00:34:42] Alex: Oh, you did? yeah, It’s good, I for­got to give you the, my ver­sion,

[00:34:46] Tony: I got

[00:34:46] Cameron: Bil­ly Con­nol­ly book?

[00:34:48] Alex: Yep.

[00:34:49] Tony: yeah, came out last year called The Ram­bling Man,

[00:34:53] Cameron: I

[00:34:53] Tony: it’s about

[00:34:53] Tony: his life run­ning, walk­ing around,

[00:34:56] Cameron: Oh, right,

[00:34:57] Cameron: because I lis­tened to the audio book that he

[00:35:00] Cameron: nar­rat­ed of

[00:35:01] Cameron: his bio a cou­ple of years ago. Windswept and inter­est­ing.

[00:35:05] Cameron: Um,

[00:35:06] Tony: that was his last book

[00:35:07] Cameron: right. I did­n’t know he had

[00:35:08] Cameron: anoth­er one out. Oh, I got­ta grab that

[00:35:11] Cameron: I love lis­ten­ing

[00:35:11] Cameron: to Bil­ly.

[00:35:13] Cameron: Tell his

[00:35:13] Tony: Oh, yeah.

[00:35:15] Cameron: That was why I grew my hair long. That

[00:35:17] Cameron: was after I lis­tened to his, uh, pod­cast,

[00:35:19] Cameron: not his pod­cast, his audio

[00:35:21] Cameron: book.

[00:35:21] Cameron: Yeah. Yeah. I thought

[00:35:22] Cameron: this is my

[00:35:23] Cameron: last

[00:35:23] Cameron: chance prob­a­bly to grow my

[00:35:25] Cameron: hair as long as Bil­ly.

[00:35:28] Cameron: Try and be a

[00:35:28] Cameron: lit­tle

[00:35:29] Cameron: bit more windswept and inter­est­ing. Oh, good luck with the move, Alex. I hope it goes

[00:35:33] Cameron: smooth­ly and I hope you’re feel­ing

[00:35:35] Cameron: bet­ter. Do you have a ques­tion

[00:35:37] Cameron: from a lis­ten­er for us

[00:35:38] Tony: and good luck with the

[00:35:39] Tony: inter­view. Good luck with the inter­view, Al. How’d it go?

[00:35:43] Alex: I think it went well. Yeah. It’s for a gallery, so that’s kind of ide­al if it

[00:35:47] Cameron: yeah. Per­fect.

[00:35:49] Alex: Yeah. Yep. Um,

[00:35:52] Alex: I’ve got anoth­er ques­tion from Angus. I think I read Angus’s

[00:35:54] Alex: ques­tion last week.

[00:35:55] Tony: You must have liked it. He’s back for more.

[00:35:58] Alex: Yeah. So, Angus says, Hi Cameron, thanks for a great

[00:36:03] Alex: year of

[00:36:03] Alex: con­tent. One small side note, Grain­Corp, ASX

[00:36:06] Alex: GNC, has been on the buy list.

[00:36:08] Alex: You have giv­en it com­mod­i­ty

[00:36:09] Alex: sta­tus look­ing at the wheat price as a

[00:36:11] Alex: buy or sell. I don’t think the price

[00:36:14] Alex: of

[00:36:14] Alex: wheat is a real dri­ver of GNC prof­itabil­i­ty. They are not a pro­duc­er of

[00:36:18] Alex: wheat. They are a bulk han­dler, so they receive cere­als and

[00:36:21] Alex: oil

[00:36:21] Alex: seeds from pro­duc­ers, then on sell

[00:36:24] Alex: domes­ti­cal­ly and inter­na­tion­al­ly.

[00:36:26] Alex: The big­ger prof­it dri­ver for them will be the size of the har­vest in Aus­tralia. The greater the ton­nage of com­modi­ties they han­dle and trade, the

[00:36:33] Alex: bet­ter it

[00:36:33] Alex: is for them. a ris­ing wheat

[00:36:35] Alex: price may help the bot­tom line at times, but may also mean they are pay­ing more for the under­ly­ing

[00:36:39] Alex: com­mod­i­ty. Just thought I’d pass it

[00:36:41] Alex: on. I’m a wheat grow­er who has sup­plied Grain­Corp

[00:36:44] Alex: in the

[00:36:44] Alex: past. They no longer have a

[00:36:45] Alex: facil­i­ty near us. Cheers, Angus.

[00:36:48] Tony: wow. Angus is the expert here. Um, yeah, thanks for the ques­tion. I did the pulled pork on Grain­Corp And I think we’ve had this dis­cus­sion dur­ing the pulled pork, um, about whether we should be using the wheat futures price or not. And I think we, you know, it was a

[00:37:04] Tony: 50 50 call. We weren’t, I think, I think I side with Angus about Grain­Corp and they, you know, they move things in vol­ume, so vol­ume is going to dri­ve their share price.

[00:37:14] Tony: Um, so I com­plete­ly con­cur with Angus, how­ev­er, I think what con­vinced us then and still con­vinces me now is if you go into Stock Doc­tor and chart GNC share price for the last five years, it cor­re­lates almost, it’s so close, it could almost be one to one with the weak futures WHash. Um, so I think that swayed us last time and I think it sways me again now that, you know, for what­ev­er rea­son, whether it’s Angus’s, um, You know, as, as the price goes up, you know, some­how Grain­Corp get a bet­ter mar­gin, per­haps, when They buy, pay more when they buy, but pay a lot, get a lot more when they sell, or whether, you, know,

[00:37:58] Tony: per­haps farm­ers plant more when the price is high­er, I don’t know, I can’t

[00:38:01] Tony: explain it, but, you know, there’s a very strong cor­re­la­tion between the

[00:38:05] Tony: Wheat Futures com­mod­i­ty price and GNC

[00:38:08] Tony: share price, so I’m hap­py to leave

[00:38:10] Tony: it that way.

[00:38:11] Cameron: Yeah. It’s crazy when you look at them, how. Close­ly the

[00:38:14] Cameron: hair­line, isn’t it?

[00:38:15] Tony: Yeah. Yeah. So, Angus, um, if you have any more info, please, um, pass it

[00:38:20] Tony: on. You’re, you’re far more

[00:38:22] Tony: knowl­edge­able on this than I am, but that’s where we’ve.

[00:38:25] Tony: Got

[00:38:26] Tony: to last time we had a look and I’m inclined to stay there now.

[00:38:29] Cameron: I’ll take a screen­shot of this and I’ll, uh, post it

[00:38:33] Cameron: to the Face­book group so peo­ple can have a look.

[00:38:36] Tony: Thanks.

[00:38:37] Cameron: Thanks, Tony. Thanks, Angus. Thank you, Alex. The Alex

[00:38:42] Cameron: Angus. Uh,

[00:38:45] Cameron: so you’re going to move two blocks up the road this week? Uh, two blocks clos­er to St. Kil­da?

[00:38:52] Alex: Yeah. Two blocks south. Very spe­cif­ic. right. direc­tion.

[00:38:57] Cameron: All right. Well, good luck with that and good luck with

[00:39:00] Cameron: the inter­view.

[00:39:03] Alex: Yeah. Thank you. All right. See you

[00:39:05] Cameron: you

[00:39:05] Tony: Han, I’ll talk to you

[00:39:06] Cameron: Thanks, Alex. Bye.

[00:39:08] Alex: Thanks. Bye.

[00:39:09] Marker

[00:39:09] Cameron: Okay. Over to you, Tony, with your ques­tions. No,

[00:39:14] Cameron: your, not your ques­tions. you got any ques­tions for me,

[00:39:17] Tony: pulled pork.

[00:39:19] Tony: Tell me about Max Planck. Pulled

[00:39:22] Cameron: Oh, I can talk about Max Planck. Yeah.

[00:39:24] Tony: doing, we’re

[00:39:27] Cameron: Who are we doing this week? Who should I be short sell­ing this week,

[00:39:30] Cameron: Tony?

[00:39:32] Tony: bram­bles. Code is BXB,

[00:39:36] Cameron: Oh, do we

[00:39:37] Cameron: own BXB? No, it’s all good. Don’t have to sell it this week. Off you go.

[00:39:44] Tony: alright, well, I think most peo­ple will know who Bram­bles are, but I’ll just give you a back­ground first.

[00:39:50] Tony: I think the inter­est­ing thing about Bram­bles is when I first start­ed invest­ing, Bram­bles was one of the gross

[00:39:55] Tony: stocks on the ASX. It was, um, it trad­ed on a PE of about 45 times, and it was the CSL of the

[00:40:03] Tony: 90s, in the 80s and 90s. And I guess for good

[00:40:05] Tony: rea­son, um, pio­neered the busi­ness of pal­let rentals. which I’ll talk about in a minute. Um, and he also then got into a lot of oth­er busi­ness­es based on the cash flow of that pal­let rental busi­ness and um,

[00:40:21] Tony: just, just run­ning through it. Um, so

[00:40:26] Tony: it’s, it’s kind of one of those unique busi­ness ideas that come along.

[00:40:29] Tony: I remem­ber I think it was an arti­cle, it may have

[00:40:32] Tony: been a book, um, some­one was talk­ing about some of the impor­tant things that, sort of, turn­ing points in inter­na­tion­al busi­ness that peo­ple may not have clocked on to, and one of them, um, which stuck with me was the stan­dard­iza­tion of ship­ping con­tain­ers.

[00:40:48] Tony: So that pro­duc­tiv­i­ty took a huge leap for­ward when ship­ping con­tain­ers all came in the same size, right? Because you think about it, you need one set of cranes to take it off the boat. A semi trail­er can take one or two or how­ev­er many on the back.

[00:41:04] Tony: They can go from a semi trail­er onto the back of a flatbed

[00:41:07] Tony: rail. Truck they can be put on the back of a flatbed truck and tak­en to a home or a fac­to­ry, what­ev­er. And that sort of, you know, went from being, I, I’ve got to only use this com­pa­ny ’cause my. Sup­ply chain is con­fig­ured to that size to, it’s like stan­dard user inter­face across the whole of the logis­tics busi­ness around the world.

[00:41:31] Tony: And the rea­son why I call that one out is because the pal­let busi­ness is fair­ly sim­i­lar. If you think about a pal­let, it’s just a, you know, square bit of wood that you can put a fork, you can put a fork­lift under and move things around. You know, box­es or what­ev­er. Car­go goes on top, forms a cube, shrink wrap it, put it on a lor­ry, then a truck, then a ship, then a plane, then a rail, you know, rail car.

[00:41:54] Tony: And it’s very ubiq­ui­tous. And Shep were good at pio­neer­ing that. And they had a great busi­ness mod­el because they rent­ed all these pal­lets. So they were, they’re real­ly cheap to pro­duce and they’re uni­ver­sal­ly inter­change­able. So they’re all the same size. And you did­n’t real­ly, you know, when I was run­ning ware­hous­es, it did­n’t real­ly wor­ry me that I did­n’t have to sort of count how many pal­lets went out the door and how many pal­lets came in.

[00:42:20] Tony: I just sort of knew that there was always, always pal­lets in cir­cu­la­tion and I was going to be charged a rental each month. And every now and then I’d do an audit and send back some of the bad ones, the bro­ken. So it’s a real­ly good busi­ness because they build the pal­let once it stays in cir­cu­la­tion for years and years and years and they keep rent­ing it out.

[00:42:36] Tony: And it’s kind of like the orig­i­nal soft­ware as a ser­vice busi­ness if you think about how all those dot com busi­ness­es in the last cou­ple of years have tak­en off. They’re low invest­ment, high return busi­ness­es. And this is going way back into the sort of 50s or 60s when this start­ed. So Bram­bles was a real­ly strong com­pa­ny on the ASX.

[00:42:59] Tony: Great his­to­ry, I did a bit of research into that today as well. So list­ed on the ASX back in 1954. Um, the com­pa­ny back then was called W. E. Bram­bles and Sons, and it was a, uh, a trans­port com­pa­ny back then. I think Mr. Bram­bles orig­i­nal­ly was a butch­er in New­cas­tle, and then, um, when they list­ed they moved to Syd­ney.

[00:43:22] Tony: Soon after list­ing, they changed their name to Bram­bles, and They bought the Com­mon­wealth Han­dling Equip­ment Pool from the Aus­tralian gov­ern­ment, and those ini­tials spell out CHEP, C H E P, and that’s pret­ty much what’s sten­ciled on the, on the side of all these pal­lets, and the busi­ness has been going since then, so orig­i­nal­ly They diver­si­fied based on the cash flow com­ing out of the chip busi­ness into waste dis­pos­al, even­tu­al­ly the clean away busi­ness, armored cars, which they brand­ed Brinks.

[00:44:00] Tony: They oper­at­ed the Man­ly Fer­ries in Syd­ney. They had a com­pa­ny that sup­plied off­shore oil plat­forms. Um, they, uh, in 1975, they expand­ed CHIP over­seas to the UK. In 1984, they pur­chased Grace Removals, may have been Grace Broth­ers Removals. In 88, they bought a com­pa­ny called Group C A I B, the largest pri­vate rail wag­on oper­a­tor in Europe.

[00:44:27] Tony: Um, and then the his­to­ry kind of took a turn and they start­ed divest­ing a lot of those com­pa­nies. So, in 96, Bram­ble’s Trans­port was sold to Toll Hold­ings. In 2000, Bram­ble sold its zero retain­er con­tain­er busi­ness to a com­pa­ny called Iwa, E‑R-M-E-W‑A. And they sold the armored car busi­ness Brinks to Chubb.

[00:44:47] Tony: Um, in two thou in the two thou­sands, they divest­ed Unit­ed Trans­port to Patrick Corp. They had a rail­way leas­ing divi­sion. They divest­ed, um, they divest­ed bram­ble ship­ping to toll clean­away to KKR, Clean­away UK to Veo­lia. Um, and in 2016. They com­bined their two sep­a­rate list­ings. They had a list­ing in the UK and a list­ing in Aus­tralia, and they merged as Bram­bles on the ASX.

[00:45:14] Tony: 2013, they spun off the recall stor­age busi­ness. So, the his­to­ry is Lots of expan­sion, good under­ly­ing busi­ness, which threw off lots of cash flow, allow­ing the com­pa­ny to expand. I guess some bat­tles with debts, prob­a­bly a suc­cinct way of putting it, and then lots of divest­ments. So the clas­sic sort of con­glom­er­ate life cycle.

[00:45:37] Tony: Um, now the busi­ness is focused on the inter­na­tion­al CHEP pal­let busi­ness. So it’s gone back to its core and, uh, it’s, it’s suc­cess­ful. So The last results were good. I’m talk­ing about FY23, um, and one of the things that they high­light­ed in those results is that sup­ply chains are free­ing up again post COVID.

[00:45:56] Tony: So, you know, back in COVID and post COVID times, sup­ply chains were con­strained. A lot of com­pa­nies start­ed stock­ing up. On local, um, inven­to­ry rather than trad­ing, uh, which hurt the Shep busi­ness, um, one of the things they called out in their, uh, their annu­al results was that for the first time in a long time, they actu­al­ly had pel­lets being returned from the pool, excess pel­lets that weren’t need­ed to be in cir­cu­la­tion because there was­n’t as much sup­ply chain trans­port going on post COVID.

[00:46:27] Tony: And, um, They were able to see just how many of their pal­lets were actu­al­ly dam­aged, and so they’re tak­ing a lot of time now to invest in bet­ter ana­lyt­ics to track the pal­let pool to work out, you know, how many pal­lets are dam­aged, how can they get them to cus­tomers quick­er, how can they be replaced. I think for a long time there was even some ques­tion Shep knew how many.

[00:46:50] Tony: Pal­lets were actu­al­ly in cir­cu­la­tion. So they’re spend­ing a bit on IT. They’re try­ing things like chips in pal­lets so they can be tracked. They claim to be using AI to get bet­ter infor­ma­tion about the pal­let pool. That seems to be a bit of a buzz­word in man­age­ment pre­sen­ta­tions at the moment, but I’ll take them on face val­ue.

[00:47:12] Tony: But over­all, uh, You know, the busi­ness is rebound­ing post COVID. They grew sales by 10 per­cent last year and earn­ings by 15%, so it’s com­ing good. Um, the num­bers, uh, this com­pa­ny’s large, so it has an ADT so it’s suit­able for all of our lis­ten­ers. Uh, the share price for this analy­sis was 1364, which is just above the sell line, so this may go off the buy list.

[00:47:38] Tony: Quick­ly, um, that share price is, is less than con­sen­sus, um, tar­get, but quite a long way above IB1 and IB2, and also a long way above net equi­ty per share, which is 3. 11. So even though it’s on our buy list, it’s not going to be a high val­ue stock, but it is throw­ing off lots of oper­at­ing cash­flow. Stock Doc­tor, how­ev­er, call this a star growth stock, uh, and they rate it Um, their finan­cial health is being strong and recov­er­ing, and of course, I like stocks that are recov­er­ing, and they score 2 on their check­list.

[00:48:14] Tony: Yields only 2. 9%, so we can’t score it for that. For peo­ple who are inter­est­ed, ROE is 25%, so quite high, and again, that’s at the top. That’s the ben­e­fit of hav­ing a low cap­i­tal inten­sive busi­ness that the rental side pro­vides the oper­at­ing cash flow and there’s not much capex spend once the pool’s estab­lished.

[00:48:33] Tony: PE is still rea­son­ably high. It’s 19. 5 times, but it’s def­i­nite­ly not the high­est in the last three years. I think it’s the sec­ond low­est, so we can’t score it on that, but it’s, it’s low, I guess, tra­di­tion­al­ly. 3 times, so again, that’s very strong, but, and it’s just below our cut­off of sev­en, so, um, again, you know, if peo­ple are inter­est­ed in get­ting quick, it may make them off the buy list soon.

[00:48:59] Tony: And it is actu­al­ly the low­est stock on our buy list. Um, fore­cast growth is 13%, so growth over PE is only 0. 66, because the PE is rea­son­ably high, so we can’t score it on that. Uh, there would have been an under­founder at some stage, but Not now, so that the Bram­ble’s boys or girls have left. Um, there’s no, uh, equi­ty took a bit of a hit dur­ing the COVID time, so we can’t score it for con­sis­tent­ly increas­ing equi­ty.

[00:49:26] Tony: But all in all, a qual­i­ty score of 10 out of 16, 63%, and a QAV score of 0. 10, so bot­tom of the buy list. But I nev­er expect­ed to see Bram­ble’s come on our buy list, because it’s always had that sort of, um, it’s always been in the good books of most ana­lysts. So, uh, I guess we’re get­ting it com­ing out of COVID

[00:49:42] Tony: as it turns around.

[00:49:45] Cameron: Tony. I love learn­ing about busi­ness­es like this. Like, I nev­er think about pal­lets as a busi­ness, but I was read­ing this arti­cle,

[00:49:56] Cameron: um, An inter­view with, um, a guy called Juan Jose Freo, Bram­ble’s Glob­al Head of Sus­tain­abil­i­ty. And this arti­cle says, it calls itself the invis­i­ble back­bone of the glob­al sup­ply chain.

[00:50:10] Cameron: Invis­i­ble is right. You’ve prob­a­bly nev­er heard of CHEP, the ship­ping and logis­tics arm of Aus­tralian giant Bram­ble’s. Chep­’s Bread and But­ter is reusable pack­ag­ing equip­ment, pro­vid­ing crates, pal­lets, and box­es to com­pa­nies around the world to ship their stuff. If you’re a man­u­fac­tur­er, you man­u­fac­ture any kind of con­sumer goods, and you want to send it through the val­ue chain to a retail­er, you need a piece of pack­ag­ing.

[00:50:31] Cameron: Specif­i­cal­ly, you need a pal­let, says Juan. The hum­ble pal­let is very impor­tant, because with­out pal­lets, things just don’t move. And, you know, makes per­fect sense. You see them every­where and you just, like, don’t notice them, right? It’s just that thing. They’re sim­ple lit­tle wood­en crates and you go, okay, you know, pal­lets, big deal.

[00:50:54] Cameron: But you think about it, with­out those, to move shit around quick­ly, fork­lift, pick it up, move it into a ship­ping

[00:50:59] Cameron: con­tain­er, off a truck, into a ware­house,

[00:51:04] Tony: Yep. You can stack them. You can, you can fill a con­tain­er. Yeah. The focus would­n’t work with­out a stan­dard­ized. Pal­let, yeah, and invent­ed back in the 40s or 50s, um, grew out of an Aus­tralian gov­ern­ment pool. So, the idea’s been around for a long time, and I guess, I don’t know how stan­dard it was in oth­er coun­tries, but CHEP cer­tain­ly has stan­dard­ized the world.

[00:51:26] Tony: And I think it only has, well, last time, you know, going back a cou­ple of decades when I was run­ning ware­hous­es, but it was only CHEP and LOSCAM, so it’s only ever had one big com­peti­tor, and they both adopt the same dimen­sion, so

[00:51:40] Tony: they’re inter­change­able and ubiq­ui­tous, real­ly.

[00:51:42] Cameron: This says CHEP is one of the largest pal­let busi­ness­es in the world, and at any giv­en moment it will have 300 mil­lion pack­ag­ing units on the move. Wow.

[00:51:55] Tony: And they’re made of tim­ber and they called out one of the issues for them in the last cou­ple of years has been the price of lum­ber has increased and fuels up, so because they still have to deliv­er the pal­lets to com­pa­nies, um, and they’re reced­ing now, so that’s going to help them. But yeah, I don’t know what it costs to build a pal­let, but it’s, you know, basi­cal­ly a dozen pieces of wood, um, which get nailed togeth­er and then it gets rent­ed for eter­ni­ty.

[00:52:18] Tony: It’s just amaz­ing. It’s an amaz­ing

[00:52:20] Tony: busi­ness.

[00:52:20] Cameron: busi­ness. Yeah. I remem­ber, it reminds me a lit­tle bit of the book I read 30 years ago, um, by Har­vey McPay, I think, Swim With The Sharks, With­out Get­ting Eat­en Alive, or some­thing like that, but he’s an Amer­i­can busi­ness­man who I don’t know, like in the six­ties or the ear­ly sev­en­ties or some­thing was look­ing for a busi­ness, he’s a bit like Buf­fett, right?

[00:52:46] Cameron: He was look­ing for a cash busi­ness to buy that was under­val­ued. And he bought this busi­ness that made, uh, let, um, envelopes. An enve­lope busi­ness is like, every­one needs envelopes. They’re one use items. You know, you, you, you buy it, you mail it, it gets thrown in the bin. And he’s like, it’s not

[00:53:08] Cameron: glam­orous, it’s not sexy. But at the time it was just like this phe­nom­e­nal cash cow busi­ness for him that was just churn­ing out mon­ey. Um, just again, one of those sim­ple things that at least back then, I’m not sure if it’s still true today, but back then every­one, every busi­ness, every­body used envelopes all every day. And, um. You know, it was just like a stock stan­dard thing and, and you just, it’s one of those things you don’t think about.

[00:53:37] Cameron: It’s not sexy, it’s not glam­orous, but it was a sol­id lit­tle busi­ness.

[00:53:42] Tony: Yeah. No, def­i­nite­ly. Again, focus­ing on the cash flow,

[00:53:45] Tony: which is impor­tant.

[00:53:46] Cameron: All right. Bram­bles, BXB. What else have we got to talk about? Tony, got anoth­er ques­tion.

[00:53:57] Tony: Yeah,

[00:53:58] Cameron: done?

[00:54:00] Tony: I’m done?

[00:54:00] Tony: Yep. You’ve got a Ques­tion

[00:54:01] Cameron: Ques­tion from Jeff.

[00:54:03] Cameron: Uh, he said, regard­ing the dis­cus­sion on last week’s pod regard­ing aver­age true range as a pos­si­ble sell sig­nal. Stock Doc­tor have a basic expla­na­tion and offer it as one of the stud­ies you can add to a chart, so no need to do any math your­self. It’s also used by Jason McIn­tosh, motion trad­er, who also offers a sub­scrip­tion ser­vice for buy tips and process, and his phi­los­o­phy seems sim­i­lar to TK’s.

[00:54:28] Cameron: Have you or ever TK looked into his work? Might be a great guest. I think I have, actu­al­ly. I think I’ve read about him before. Don’t think I’ve reached out to him, though. Jason uses ATR as a sell sig­nal set at 30 days and a mul­ti­pli­er of 10. This way, he says it gives a share price room to move, but pro­tects some prof­its against a share price fall, com­pared to traders who often use 21 days and a mul­ti­pli­er of 3 so much tighter.

[00:54:57] Cameron: Then he links us to a Jason McIn­tosh video where he talks about it. I’ve been play­ing with it. To use in cas­es where the three point trend line sell line is very low. For exam­ple, DUR, the bret­to­la­tor sell price is 53 cents and using this I would lose all prof­it. How­ev­er, an ATR with a peri­od of 30 days and a mul­ti­pli­er of 10, the sell price is 1.

[00:55:20] Cameron: 03. Of course, you can change the mul­ti­pli­er to make the sell line tighter or loos­er. Love to hear TK’s thoughts. Regards, Jeff. Also love the show and QAV, thanks for every­thing. Has made a huge dif­fer­ence to my invest­ing. And then he sent us a screen­shot of DUR with an ATR sell line from Stock Doc­tor.

[00:55:40] Cameron: Thanks Jeff. Tony, ATR, we talked about it last week. We talked about Renko. What do you think about this Mac­in­tosh mul­ti­pli­er stuff?

[00:55:53] Tony: Yeah, I mean, I had a look at Jason McIn­tosh a long time ago, the motion trad­er, um, and I briefly went into it this morn­ing and I guess that I haven’t been able to see what the CAGR returns are. from, you know, his, his sys­tem. So that’s, um, I hope, hope­ful­ly they’re avail­able on the web­site. So I can’t real­ly com­pare it.

[00:56:11] Tony: That’s always my basic test for a sys­tem. Do they have a long term track record? What is it? Is it bet­ter or worse than what we’re doing? So I can’t, I can’t com­pare it to that. Um, I’m not say­ing it’s a bad sys­tem. It’s prob­a­bly a very good one. And I, you know, I think any of these sys­tems that use sen­ti­ment are impor­tant, whether it’s three point trend lines or ATRs or Um, mov­ing aver­ages or what­ev­er.

[00:56:36] Tony: So that’s my sort of gen­er­al com­ment on that. Hap­py to get Jason on and talk about it. Sounds like an inter­est­ing per­son to have on for an inter­view. Um, so I had a look at the DUR exam­ple and in the bread loader and this gets back to Jef­f’s right, this gets back to the ques­tion that kept pop­ping up very QAV is peo­ple would say The sell line’s very low.

[00:56:58] Tony: I’ve bought Fortes­cue, Mabels Group or what­ev­er. The sell line’s very low. I want to lock in my prof­its. And then some­one came up with the idea of a hug line. So rather than using the low­est two points on the graph, they want­ed to use the low­est two points of a more recent time peri­od so they could get out on some kind of sen­ti­ment down­turn.

[00:57:15] Tony: And you can cer­tain­ly do that with the DUR graph if you have a look at it. Um, you know, very briefly it sort of goes along for a while and then it has a huge upturn. Um. And it’s start­ing to be a bit of an upturned U, and if you use the bread lat­er, the sell line is well below where the share price is now, because it’s using low points from that sort of flat peri­od before the share price took off, but if you want­ed to use the two low­est points from when that sell, that share price took off, you could draw anoth­er sell line and do that, so I guess my break.

[00:57:48] Tony: My imme­di­ate reac­tion would be to do some­thing like that and to research that, the Hug­line idea, to hug the cur­rent trend was the con­cept, rather than to look at ATRs. I’m not say­ing ATRs don’t work and, you know, if Jeff uses them, we’d love to know some oth­er exam­ples and some real world appli­ca­tions for it.

[00:58:08] Tony: But yeah, it has­n’t worked for me with Renko. I think Renko is based on ATR, so I’m not Gonna look at doing more work on this, but I’m hap­py to have Jason on and talk about

[00:58:19] Tony: it.

[00:58:19] Cameron: hmm. Mm. All right. I’ll dig him up, see if I can reach out to him. I mean, I haven’t done, you know, when I did that sell analy­sis thing. I did­n’t, um, go into detail to see how many times in the last few years I’ve bought some­thing and then rid­den, it’s gone up and then rid­den it all the way back down to a low sell line.

[00:58:44] Cameron: Um, it’d be inter­est­ing. I mean, I, I can think of one or two instances where I’ve seen that hap­pen, but not many. Like it seems to be one of those exis­ten­tial fears that QAV mem­bers have, but it, it, I mean, it’s hap­pened with Myer once. I recall Myer was up like 60 per­cent and then it came all the way back.

[00:59:07] Tony: Yeah. Look, it’s heart­break­ing when it hap­pens. It hap­pened to me with Qan­tas last year. So, uh, I think that was going along real­ly nice­ly for me. And then, um, it, it crashed with all the prob­lems it had and now enjoys leav­ing and all, et cetera, et cetera, last year, back, back down to, you know, what I paid for it or maybe slight­ly below.

[00:59:25] Tony: But if you recall, we always had the reverse exam­ple of stocks like Fortes­cue Met­als Group, which went up, came back a lit­tle bit and then went up two or three fold from there. So you can sell out

[00:59:35] Tony: too ear­ly if you set your stop loss­es too close as Well,

[00:59:38] Cameron: Well, DUR is an inter­est­ing exam­ple, right? So, uh, look­ing at the bread lat­er, the end of August, 2023, it was trad­ing at 1. 38. Then it slid, uh, in Octo­ber down to 1. 18, and then it bounced back and went up to 1. 60. Come back a lit­tle bit since then, it’s now at 1. 54, but it was one of those ones that had a lit­tle bit of a hic­cup there if we’d been You know, I don’t know, doing a hug line or some­thing.

[01:00:11] Cameron: We might’ve sold it

[01:00:12] Tony: Mm hmm.

[01:00:13] Cameron: we would’ve bought back in. Maybe we would­n’t. I don’t know. You nev­er know, depend­ing on how full the port­fo­lio was and those sorts of things. But it bounced back up. Um, uh, you know, so yeah.

[01:00:27] Tony: Again, a clas­sic exam­ple, isn’t

[01:00:29] Tony: it?

[01:00:29] Cameron: Yeah. Well, yes, but yeah. How many times does it work and how many times does it does­n’t work? I mean, I’d have to do some analy­sis on it and see.

[01:00:39] Tony: Yeah, same.

[01:00:42] Cameron: And now that I’m a cod­ing genius, I could prob­a­bly knock that out. And I love, I got­ta, I got­ta do shouts out. I’ve had QAV QAV mem­bers in the last cou­ple of weeks, reach out to me about using GPT to code stuff. And I know a lot of peo­ple are start­ing to exper­i­ment with it. Um, Some­body asked me to send them like all of the buy lists from 2023 and asked if I could col­late them all into a sin­gle list.

[01:01:09] Cameron: I said, I don’t have them all on a list. And he said, well, I could prob­a­bly use GPT to write a script that would col­late them all for me, merge them all togeth­er. I said, yeah, prob­a­bly man, not that hard at all. So I

[01:01:19] Tony: What, did­n’t I,

[01:01:20] Cameron: are doing it.

[01:01:21] Tony: did­n’t I, send you a col­la­tion of the buy list for the last three

[01:01:25] Cameron: Not for last year though, there was like 22, yeah.

[01:01:28] Tony: yeah, yeah, right,

[01:01:29] Cameron: guy who asked for that want­ed if, want­ed the same thing for 23, and I could have done it, but it would have

[01:01:35] Tony: we did­n’t have it.

[01:01:35] Cameron: half an hour to fig­ure it out. I fig­ured

[01:01:38] Cameron: he could do that. Um, but, uh, yeah, I’ll, I’ll see if I can, um, do some more analy­sis on, um, the stocks that have gone up and then fall­en back to a very low 3PTL line at some point.

[01:01:55] Tony: yeah, thanks. That’d be great to know.

[01:01:56] Cameron: But good stuff. Thank you for,

[01:01:58] Cameron: um, bring­ing all of that, uh, infor­ma­tion to our atten­tion. Jeff, well, that’s, uh, that’s the end of the ques­tions for this week. TK, we’re into after hours. Uh, you sold a horse.

[01:02:13] Tony: Yes, at the Mag­ic Mil­lions on Sat­ur­day, well on Fri­day actu­al­ly, Fri­day night. Yes, we had a, one of the hors­es I bred, I don’t own 100 per­cent of it, um, but it sold well. We were a lit­tle bit wor­ried because we were one of the last, um, hors­es to go through the ring and some­times that can work against you because every­one’s spent their bud­get and bought oth­er things ear­li­er, but no, we got a good price for it.

[01:02:35] Tony: We were, we were talk­ing on Fri­day with the man­ag­ing, um, part­ner of the own­er­ship group and he said, Oh, look, you know, we’re not get­ting much inter­est in this. I think we’re going to need to drop our reserve to 90 grand. And we all agreed like, okay, we thought it would, that would, you know, get us out, um, make a lit­tle prof­it, but not, not a great prof­it.

[01:02:57] Tony: And any­way, the horse sold for 160.

[01:02:59] Tony: So we were all very hap­py. with that.

[01:03:01] Cameron: Fan­tas­tic. Well, I have no idea what hors­es cost and what they’re worth. So you prob­a­bly made a good prof­it out of that by the sounds of it. And, and why did it go for 70 grand more than your reserve? Like, why was it

[01:03:15] Tony: Well, I don’t know. I don’t know. Yeah. I don’t know what the vagaries are. There was, um, you know, we get sales reports would say we had all these peo­ple come and have a look. And I think the per­son who bought it had been back a num­ber of times to have a look at it. And there was two peo­ple in that camp. So that could have just been the mar­ket forces, but we were quite wor­ried that, um, one of those two would have already spent their bud­get by sort of four o’clock on Fri­day after­noon when it sold,

[01:03:41] Tony: but it looks like it did­n’t

[01:03:42] Tony: hap­pen.

[01:03:42] Tony: So that’s good.

[01:03:43] Cameron: Like how many cans of dog food can you get out of a sin­gle horse? Well you’re sell­ing it obvi­ous­ly because it’s no good on the track.

[01:03:54] Tony: no, no, no, not at all. That’s our busi­ness is to sell race­hors­es, usu­al­ly two train­ers to them, race them,

[01:04:00] Cameron: Oh, I thought you raced them your­self and made all the

[01:04:03] Tony: We do so that, yeah. So the oth­er half of the busi­ness is we try and race fil­lies that if we get them to a stage where they’re going to, um, they have some resid­ual val­ue,

[01:04:13] Tony: we can then breed

[01:04:14] Tony: from them.

[01:04:14] Cameron: yeah,

[01:04:15] Cameron: But in some cas­es

[01:04:17] Tony: busi­ness side, like if you talk to the tax office, for us to call the busi­ness, you’ve got to be a breed­er.

[01:04:23] Tony: that breeds race­hors­es and then sells them to peo­ple. That’s the busi­ness side of it.

[01:04:28] Cameron: not just rac­ing them.

[01:04:30] Tony: No, no,

[01:04:32] Tony: the back­bone of the busi­ness is the breed­ing side.

[01:04:34] Cameron: So you breed them and then sell them to peo­ple who want to race them.

[01:04:40] Tony: Cor­rect.

[01:04:40] Tony: Yes. And hope­ful­ly they do a good job and then we can say that the, you know, the next horse that we breed out of the same mare will sell well as

[01:04:50] Tony: well. So that’s the idea.

[01:04:51] Cameron: Right. Yeah, right. Speak­ing of breed­ing ani­mals, so we’ve, um, uh, a friend has a grey­hound that we’ve dog sat a cou­ple of times in the last cou­ple of weeks when they go away on week­ends. And it did race for a while, was­n’t very good. So. got sold off and she bought it and it’s a beau­ti­ful

[01:05:12] Cameron: dog. But we found out that her father, the dog’s father, was, is, the, not only the high­est ever win­ning grey­hound in his­to­ry I think, maybe in Aus­tralian his­to­ry, maybe ever, called Fer­nan­do Um, Fer­nan­do Male, I think, no, Bale, Fer­nan­do Bale, I think he won one and a half mil­lion dol­lars in prize mon­ey when he was rac­ing, but his off­spring have won over a hun­dred mil­lion dol­lars,

[01:05:45] Tony: Wow.

[01:05:46] Cameron: and his sperm goes for nine thou­sand dol­lars a shot, um, appar­ent­ly.

[01:05:55] Cameron: So any­way, this dog, grey­hounds are amaz­ing, like I’m not a Ani­mal per­son. Don’t even like humans very much, but, uh, they, this is a real­ly chill dog. It just lies around all day,

[01:06:08] Tony: Oh, yeah. They sleep. 23 hours a day,

[01:06:10] Cameron: Yeah. And real­ly just comes up and wraps its head around you. Just like gives you a lit­tle dog­gy hug and then just goes and lies down and wants to do noth­ing.

[01:06:19] Cameron: Like, you do won­der what’s the point, um, does­n’t

[01:06:23] Tony: Yeah.

[01:06:23] Cameron: does­n’t, does­n’t want to go for a walk. You’ll get, go to the

[01:06:25] Cameron: park, does­n’t want to do it, does­n’t want to get out of the car, does­n’t want to move. Like, lazi­est bloody dogs, but sweet natured. Um, you watched Boy Swal­lows Uni­verse, set in 70s Bris­bane, 80s

[01:06:41] Tony: 80s Bris­bane. Yeah. Yeah. Loved it. Yeah. Yes, very, very good. Um, it’ll be, I think it’ll be a clas­sic Aus­tralian pro­duc­tion with the usu­al sus­pects, Bri­an Brown and, um, Simon Bak­er and etc, etc. I think Joce­lyn More­house direct­ed. Uh, I love the book. I love the series. My only crit­i­cism is it has a bit of a Hol­ly­wood end­ing.

[01:07:06] Tony: It should have stopped

[01:07:06] Tony: one episode ear­li­er. But,

[01:07:09] Cameron: Before he actu­al­ly swal­lowed the uni­verse, like that was too

[01:07:12] Tony: to give it away, but, um, you know, there’s a kind of Crazy thing, which I’m sure would nev­er hap­pen in Bris­bane about, um, parts, peo­ple being, you know, hav­ing their body parts tak­en off them and reused and all that kind of stuff.

[01:07:28] Tony: So,

[01:07:29] Tony: um, yeah, any­way,

[01:07:31] Cameron: I don’t know.

[01:07:32] Tony: did­n’t have to go that far. Because it’s a great, it’s a great sto­ry about grow­ing up in Dar­ra, in Bris­bane.

[01:07:38] Tony: And, uh, I remem­ber all those times well.

[01:07:41] Cameron: Yeah.

[01:07:42] Tony: And they shot it up there, so like, it’s shot in love­ly old Queens­lan­ders. That must have spent a bomb on it though, because look, every­one’s dri­ving Tiranas and Ford Lasers and, you know, old bus­es and things.

[01:07:55] Tony: It would have been a

[01:07:56] Tony: big pro­duc­tion cost.

[01:07:57] Cameron: Wow. Oh, good stuff. Well, I look for­ward to, uh, check­ing it out at some point. It’s got a pret­ty good

[01:08:04] Tony: Yeah, okay.

[01:08:07] Cameron: It’s got an 10, which is, uh, you know, bet­ter than our doc­u­men­tary. So, you know, that’s say­ing

[01:08:15] Tony: that’s about where I’d rate it. But I mean, I just, I guess it got the nos­tal­gia of

[01:08:19] Tony: Bris­bane in the 80s there for me too.

[01:08:22] Cameron: And you watch Killers of the Flower Moon. I haven’t seen that yet. Scors­ese’s lat­est. What did you think?

[01:08:29] Tony: Well, we haven’t quite fin­ished. It’s about three and a half hours long. So we’re about two and a half hours through it. Yeah. It’s um, I could Scors­ese and DiCaprio and De Niro.

[01:08:38] Tony: So it’s fab­u­lous act­ing and real­ly, real­ly sump­tu­ous. It’s a bit like, uh, once upon a time in Amer­i­ca, it’s, it’s quite lengthy,

[01:08:53] Tony: um, but yeah, I’m lik­ing it. I’m lik­ing it.

[01:08:56] Cameron: Did you like the Irish­man?

[01:08:59] Tony: I did again. I did­n’t like the end­ing. Went on a bit too far, I thought, so,

[01:09:03] Tony: um, but, But yeah, I did.

[01:09:06] Cameron: But it went on too far.

[01:09:08] Tony: would­n’t say it was, I would­n’t say it was as good as

[01:09:10] Tony: the Irish­man. But it’s

[01:09:13] Cameron: A lot of peo­ple com­plained about how long it was. And I was like, dude, you put De Niro, Paci­no, Pesci togeth­er on screen and Har­vey Kei­t­el, you know, and a bit of it, but make it 20 hours long. I mean, come on,

[01:09:26] Tony: Yeah, yeah,

[01:09:27] Cameron: is your last chance to see these guys

[01:09:29] Cameron: pos­si­bly ever. Like, I mean, sit down, shut the fuck up and watch the, watch what they have to give you.

[01:09:35] Cameron: Like, how dare you com­plain about it? That’s just me. I

[01:09:40] Tony: I’m not com­plain­ing. I’m just, I’m just let­ting peo­ple, peo­ple know that’s what you’re get­ting in

[01:09:43] Cameron: peo­ple did com­plain about Irish­man and the length and all that kind of stuff. I, I don’t know, I don’t get peo­ple to com­plain about length. Get­ting back to Max Planck. Uh, so many jokes we could make. I look for­ward to see­ing that.

[01:09:59] Cameron: Well, we’re, we’re watch­ing, uh, uh, the. The lat­est in our Bol­ly­wood series. We’ve watched, they’re all three hours long. Bol­ly­wood films are always at least three hours long. And two and a half of that is songs and dances.

[01:10:15] Cameron: We’re watch­ing anoth­er, it’s anoth­er 2023 film start­ing Shahrukh Khan. It’s called Patan.

[01:10:22] Cameron: And it’s kind of Mis­sion Impos­si­ble meets James Bond meets MTV. Uh, you know, big dance num­bers, volup­tuous dance num­bers in it, but I mean, man, like it’s over the top, like the action stuff is just crazy over the top, but Shah Rukh Khan is, he was 57 when he made this, um, and his body is, you know, Brad Pit­t’s body in Fight Club.

[01:10:53] Cameron: Like, like the, the stan­dard in Hol­ly­wood now for the most, you know, the per­fect­ly shaped cut body Sha­han has that body, but bet­ter. And he’s 57, 58 and like he was nev­er that guy. Like he’s always been trimmed. He was nev­er a huge­ly built guy in the nineties and the two thou­sands. Um, but as he’s get­ting old­er, he is.

[01:11:20] Cameron: Beef­ing up and he looks insane. Like he takes his shirt off every now and again. You’re like, Oh, like what? It’s insane body he’s got any­way.

[01:11:33] Tony: It’s not a body dou­ble? You’re pret­ty sure

[01:11:35] Tony: it’s

[01:11:35] Cameron: Oh no. It’s it’s his. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve looked it up and his train­er and the whole thing. It’s like a. Chris Hemsworth lev­el trans­for­ma­tion, you know, it’s, these, these train­ers now with the sup­ple­ments and the train­ing and the diet, they just have it down to a sci­ence.

[01:11:50] Cameron: I mean, it must take a ton of work as well, but at his age, it’s insane how he’s trans­formed his body. Any­way, Chris­sy enjoyed that bit. Um, good film, like we, and we just, for the Bol­ly­wood, I don’t know if there’s any, I’ve con­vert­ed any­one to Bol­ly­wood yet, like, but you got­ta watch, um, like the clas­sic, the clas­sic Shah Rukh Khan films, uh, from the 90s, uh, um, DDLJ is like the biggest one I’ve talked about, uh, and then he did, uh, Kuchi Kuchi, Kuchi Kuchi.

[01:12:25] Cameron: Which is the sec­ond one. Uh, uh, and then the third one is Kabi Kushi Kabi Gum, which we just watched. Again, I think that was like 98, 3 hours long, 100 per­cent score on Rot­ten Toma­toes. Um, just, yeah, I mean, these films are just great, man. And bonkers. Absolute­ly bonkers. And it’s all, they’re all about, You know, the young lovers who, uh, can’t be togeth­er because the par­ents are arrang­ing mar­riages with oth­er peo­ple.

[01:12:54] Cameron: And so they run off and the par­ents are angry, but they love their elders. And they, you know, there’s all these, you know, there’s all the, the Hin­du reli­gious cer­e­monies and the dances and the elders and the mod­ern kids. It’s just, it’s like days of our lives, soap oper­ary, dance num­bers, and just bonkers over the top.

[01:13:15] Cameron: Any­way, we’ve enjoyed that. Um, uh, have you watched, speak­ing of Joe Pesci, have you watched Bup­kis, heard about Bup­kis?

[01:13:26] Tony: You told me about that

[01:13:27] Cameron: Did I? Oh man, we watched anoth­er

[01:13:28] Cameron: episode of that So great. Um, Ren­field we watched this week.

[01:13:35] Tony: Yeah.

[01:13:35] Tony: Watch that too. Did­n’t, did­n’t like it.

[01:13:38] Cameron: It was­n’t great, but Nico­las Cage was

[01:13:41] Tony: Nicholas Cage. He was fan­tas­tic.

[01:13:43] Cameron: Yeah, the film

[01:13:45] Tony: Again, talk about a 60 year old with a, you know, with a,

[01:13:47] Tony: good body and, um,

[01:13:50] Cameron: it was just like he just eats up every sec­ond he’s on the screen, does­n’t he? And quite lit­er­al­ly, because he’s eat­ing peo­ple as Drac­u­la, but he just, oh, man, like the film, yeah, the film was­n’t great. Um, I don’t know what hap­pened, but, um, It, but he, Nicholas Cage, Oh, just so much fun to watch as always.

[01:14:17] Tony: Oh, yeah. he was the

[01:14:19] Tony: star turn­er for

[01:14:20] Cameron: Oh, he just like, he’s doing his whole F. W. Mur­nau’s Nos­fer­atu impres­sion and his inten­si­ty in his eye­brows and the whole thing. That’s fan­tas­tic. Um,

[01:14:33] Tony: but that was like the thing, the thing I liked about it, though, was he actu­al­ly think like, after a while, I’m going, hang on, is Nico­las Cage actu­al­ly a vam­pire? It’s like, because he’s just like, he just had so much nat­ur­al charis­ma and, and, you know, maybe I don’t know much about vam­pire lore, but brought so much to it about, you know, how he’s going to rule the world and how he had ruled the world for a long time.

[01:14:56] Tony: And,

[01:14:57] Tony: And yeah, it was just amaz­ing.

[01:14:59] Cameron: fan­tas­tic. And I, I know I’ve talked a bit before, but have you, you’ve, have you seen vam­pires kiss?

[01:15:05] Tony: Yes.

[01:15:05] Cameron: Uh, I mean, that to me is still one of my favorite films when he thinks he’s a vam­pire.

[01:15:14] Cameron: He’s real­ly just insane, but

[01:15:17] Tony: I saw him, inter­view because he’s pro­mot­ing a new movie,

[01:15:19] Tony: which looks inter­est­ing too, um, where he pops up in peo­ple’s

[01:15:22] Cameron: dreams, Yeah. Yeah.

[01:15:25] Tony: but he, um, he rat­ed his five best scripts that he’s act­ed in and

[01:15:28] Tony: Vam­pire’s Kiss was in there as well.

[01:15:30] Cameron: It’s fan­tas­tic. Like I saw that when I was, uh, 20 or some­thing. And I just, and it’s one of those films that no one I know apart from my friend in Mel­bourne, who’s the CEO of, um, uh, what­ev­er the bus busi­ness is down there, Michael Seward’s. Sky­bus. Yeah. I think Michael was the per­son who showed it to me when I was 20 and like, he was like, dude, you’ve got to see this.

[01:15:51] Cameron: It’s like the great­est thing ever.

[01:15:52] Tony: ha ha. Ha

[01:15:54] Cameron: I know he loves it, but every­one else I’ve ever shown it to are like, what is hap­pen­ing? This is insane. I’m like, yes.

[01:16:02] Tony: ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha

[01:16:03] Tony: ha ha. I love Wild at Heart. That was still my, that was my favorite Nico­las

[01:16:07] Cameron: Wild At Heart. Yeah, that’s up there too, man. I just

[01:16:10] Tony: Lau­ra Dern.

[01:16:11] Cameron: that so much. And Red Rock West. Loved Red Rock West. I mean, I love every­thing Nicholas Cade.

[01:16:18] Cameron: Moon­struck. I love him in Moon­struck. I mean,

[01:16:20] Tony: mm. Okay.

[01:16:23] Cameron: THIS HAND! THIS

[01:16:25] Tony: Yeah.

[01:16:26] Cameron: HAND!

[01:16:29] Cameron: HE STILL HAS HIS HAND! Any­way, um, Quentin Taran­ti­no’s pod­cast. I know we’ve talked about it before, the Video Archives pod­cast. Um, he did an episode, which I’d missed. I think it was back in May. I’d just been lis­ten­ing to it. Where at the begin­ning, it’s him and um, um, Roger Avery.

[01:16:51] Cameron: Uh, do the pod­cast, yeah, Roger was his pro­duc­er on Reser­voir Dogs and Pulp Fic­tion, they worked at Video Archives togeth­er, they start­ed off their careers, and then Roger went on to become a direc­tor in his own right. Um, they do this pod­cast, and in this episode in May, they start off the episode going, look, we had a plan for this episode, but we, we’ve had a, we had, there was some news that broke last night, and we’ve had to change our plans.

[01:17:15] Cameron: Um, that great tele­vi­sion star of the 70s, Rick Dal­ton passed away last night at his home in Maui, Hawaii, um, with his wife by his side, Francesca Dal­ton. And so they do a, they do a whole like hour and a half long obit on Rick Dal­ton, obvi­ous­ly for peo­ple who don’t know the char­ac­ter played by. Leonar­do DiCaprio, once upon a time in Hol­ly­wood,

[01:17:46] Cameron: and he, they do it com­plete­ly straight.

[01:17:49] Cameron: Roger’s daugh­ter is also, um, one of the co hosts and they’re read­ing inter­views that Rick Dal­ton did in movie mag­a­zines and talk­ing about the, the things he missed out on and, and the shows that he made and doing this full ret­ro­spec­tive of his career. Doing it absolute­ly, total­ly straight and seri­ous­ly, and it’s just fan­tas­tic.

[01:18:12] Cameron: It’s hilar­i­ous, and they’re talk­ing about the 38 Fists of McCluskey, and the Fire­man sequels, and how they pre­fer Fire­man 2 to the orig­i­nal Fire­man that he did, and who the direc­tor was, and they’re quite, you know, they’re throw­ing in

[01:18:26] Cameron: Real direc­tors from the sev­en­ties and oth­er actors and writ­ers and pro­duc­ers and mix­ing it all in.

[01:18:32] Cameron: It’s just like Taran­ti­no, man. He’s just so great. He takes this stuff seri­ous­ly. Um, any­way, I high­ly rec­om­mend lis­ten­ing to

[01:18:41] Tony: a, there’s a doc­u­men­tary on one of the stream­ing ser­vices about his movies, QT8, must have been made a few years ago, but there’s a great one in there about, um, Jack­ie Brown

[01:18:53] Tony: where

[01:18:53] Cameron: Oh Yeah.

[01:18:54] Tony: he’s, he’s talk­ing about Robert De Niro. And he’s going, he’s going, Nero was­n’t sure if he was going to sign up and play the part.

[01:19:01] Tony: He asked me, what kind of shoes does my char­ac­ter wear? And I said, well, Bob, you’re just out of jail, right? So you’ve got good black dress shoes, they’re a bit old and scuffed, and the toe’s been bent up because they put it in the paper bag and put it in the lock­er when you went in and they took it out and now the toe’s all bent up.

[01:19:18] Tony: And then Nero went, hmm, yeah, okay, I’ll do it.

[01:19:23] Cameron: Love it.

[01:19:25] Cameron: I mean, just test­ing that Quentin had thought through this char­ac­ter’s back­sto­ry, right? That he knew what he was doing, you know? If the direc­tor could­n’t answer that ques­tion, then the direc­tor had­n’t thought through the char­ac­ter deeply enough. Yeah, love it. Um, and then apart from Max Planck, I’ve been, I’ve dug back into a book I haven’t picked up for a long time.

[01:19:50] Cameron: Robert Fisk, Great War for Civ­i­liza­tion. Do you ever read any of Robert Fisk’s stuff?

[01:19:57] Tony: No, I can’t say I

[01:19:58] Tony: did.

[01:19:59] Cameron: Oh man, this is one of the greats. He was an Irish slash Eng­lish, um, jour­nal­ist who lived in the Mid­dle East for 30 years, was, uh, wrote for the Inde­pen­dent for like 30 years, lived in Beirut. and cov­ered the Mid­dle East, high­ly crit­i­cal of the Unit­ed States and the Unit­ed King­dom’s for­eign pol­i­cy in the Mid­dle East, and was on the front lines of all of the wars and Lebanon, Israel, you know, Iraq, Afghanistan, report­ing from them.

[01:20:31] Cameron: Passed away in 2020, uh, but this book came out in the 2000s. I’ve got a Like a hard­cov­er ver­sion of it, I’m in my library down­stairs still, but I’ve been read­ing the ebook ver­sion, just his abil­i­ty to write, like he’s just, it’s, it’s like half mem­oir of his life liv­ing in the Mid­dle East and half just talk­ing about the Mid­dle East, you know, and he calls it the Great War for Civ­i­liza­tion, about how this part of the world has been fought over by the, the great pow­ers for, you know, hun­dreds of years and And, uh, and all of the peo­ple’s lives that have been ruined along the way, um, the, the civil­ians, and who’s just been can­non fod­der, um, and, uh, you know, a lot of peo­ple that he knew that he’d lost in var­i­ous wars and jour­nal­ists and, and, um, you know, just civil­ians, um, yeah.

[01:21:32] Tony: it up. That sounds

[01:21:32] Cameron: Uh, it’s just, and his, his writ­ing style is, you know, like you feel like you’re in his apart­ment in Beirut watch­ing every­thing going on for decades, you

[01:21:40] Tony: Mm hmm.

[01:21:42] Cameron: yeah, I’ve been real­ly enjoy­ing get­ting back into that. It’s been a long time since I’ve picked him up. Uh, so yeah, uh, that’s

[01:21:51] Tony: Love those first, first per­son accounts from those sort of front­line reporters. Neil, Neil Davis is one cred­it hour still prob­a­bly my favorite. That’s bril­liant.

[01:21:59] Cameron: Neil Davis.

[01:22:01] Tony: Aus­tralian com­bat pho­tog­ra­ph­er, um, from the Viet­nam War.

[01:22:05] Cameron: Oh, okay. Tim Bow­den. Oh, uh, so I’ve got one crowd­ed hour. Yeah, okay. I’m that cam­era­man. Speak­ing of jour­nal­ists, John Pil­ger died, uh, recent­ly.

[01:22:19] Tony: Yeah, I saw that too, yeah.

[01:22:21] Cameron: Um, big fan of John’s work, um, sort of sad a lit­tle bit that I nev­er got to talk to him. I think he was on my list of, uh, when I start­ed G’day World back in the day, like he was one of the peo­ple I had on the list with Chom­sky that I want­ed to talk to one day.

[01:22:41] Cameron: Nev­er man­aged to do it, but, um, you know, he lived a life as a, what would you call it? A, um, rebel jour­nal­ist? Um,

[01:22:52] Tony: Yeah, con­trar­i­an

[01:22:53] Tony: jour­nal­ist, was­n’t he very much so?

[01:22:55] Cameron: Yeah, crit­i­cal of Aus­tralia, the Unit­ed States, the Unit­ed King­dom, big sup­port­er of Julian Assange and Edward Snow­den, um, yeah, so, sad loss to the pro­gres­sive left, los­ing, Guys like him that have ded­i­cat­ed their life to telling the oth­er side of the sto­ry that’s not nor­mal­ly cov­ered in our main­stream media.

[01:23:20] Tony: I think that’s the impor­tant take out from Pil­grim. I did­n’t always agree with every­thing he wrote, but it was impor­tant to have him there pre­sent­ing the oth­er side. I agree with a lot of the stuff he wrote, but, um, you know, if he was­n’t

[01:23:33] Tony: there, you only get the main­stream media side of

[01:23:35] Cameron: Yeah. And he did a lot of doc­u­men­taries as well, uh, real­ly

[01:23:39] Tony: Mm hmm.

[01:23:39] Cameron: pow­er­ful doc­u­men­taries on,

[01:23:43] Cameron: yeah, the sto­ries of the, again, quite often the sto­ries of the peo­ple that are impact­ed by the wars that our gov­ern­ments get involved in. All right. Well, that’s the show for this week. Uh, so next week. You may, uh, not own your apart­ment any­more.

[01:24:02] Cameron: We don’t know.

[01:24:03] Tony: Oh, yeah, that’d be good if that hap­pens that quick­ly, but I’m pret­ty sure I’ll be talk­ing to you from this same office next

[01:24:09] Cameron: Right.

[01:24:10] Tony: Yeah, yeah, I’m head­ing off to Tas­ma­nia for a cou­ple of days at the

[01:24:15] Tony: end of this week and I’m going to play golf at Barn Boo­gal

[01:24:18] Cameron: Oh, the old barn boo­gal.

[01:24:19] Tony: good fun.

[01:24:20] Tony: Yeah,

[01:24:21] Cameron: that’s the, that’s time. It’s barn boo­gal time of the year again, is it?

[01:24:24] Tony: it is. That’s right.

[01:24:27] Cameron: Well, have a great time down there, Tony. And, uh, I’ll talk to you

[01:24:31] Cameron: next week.

[01:24:33] Tony: Ooh,

[01:24:34] Cameron: Have a good week,

[01:24:34] Tony: quite a good week. All right.