QAV #708 – Buridan’s Ass (fixed)

QAV 708 Club

[00:00:00] Tony: 3, 2,

[00:00:13] Tony: 1,

[00:00:14] Cameron: Welcome back to QAV, episode 7 0 8, recording on the 20th of February, 2024. Tony Kynaston, what’s going on? TK, where have you been for the last week?

[00:00:31] Tony: uh, in Sydney, but had a three days in Wagga as well, which was good. Good fun. Catching up with Roddy and playing

[00:00:38] Tony: golf.

[00:00:39] Cameron: How did, how did your

[00:00:39] Tony: And now we’re good. Yeah. I’ll tell you that story. I had the, you know, I had surgery on my eyes last year, cataract surgery, and got fitted with new glasses and since then, haven’t been able to hit a golf ball to save myself.

[00:00:54] Tony: And then went back to the optometrist, well, a month ago. And, um. Came to the conclusion I, I shouldn’t be wearing multifocals to play golf. I needed to have just straight distance, vision glasses. So he made me up a, a pair and I’m starting to become better again, which is good. I can see the

[00:01:14] Tony: ball clearly,

[00:01:15] Cameron: Oh, that’s good.

[00:01:16] Tony: is

[00:01:16] Tony: great.

[00:01:17] Tony: Hmm.

[00:01:18] Cameron: a difference.

[00:01:19] Tony: Made a big difference. Yeah. Huge difference.

[00:01:22] Cameron: Good stuff.

[00:01:23] Tony: Yeah. And I didn’t even notice it. Like it was only when I sort of got so frustrated. I went to the driving range one day and just worked everything out from the, from the basics. You know, here’s how you grip it, here’s how you stand, here’s how you, you know, position the ball.

[00:01:39] Tony: Oh, hang on, I can’t see that ball clearly. And I worked, I worked it out that, um,

[00:01:43] Tony: I wasn’t focusing on the ball properly.

[00:01:46] Cameron: Well, there you go. That’s good.

[00:01:49] Tony: Yeah, and it’s raining heavily here. We had a big lightning storm go through Sydney yesterday. Um, couple of, well, I think one fatality and a couple of hospitalisations, but it was very from our place, lightning all around yesterday.

[00:02:07] Cameron: No, good. Well, I hope that doesn’t, uh, negatively affect on Taylor Swift’s concert there tonight, or there’ll be lots of very sad teenage girls.

[00:02:17] Tony: Oh, is it on tonight? Is

[00:02:18] Tony: it?

[00:02:19] Cameron: I, I, think that’s what it said in the

[00:02:20] Cameron: news. Yeah. Hmm.

[00:02:22] Tony: Yeah. No,

[00:02:23] Tony: they’ll be wet if it’s on tonight ’cause it’s still raining. Hopefully

[00:02:25] Tony: it’ll clear for them.

[00:02:26] Cameron: I saw it in the financial review this morning. Even the financial reviewer talking about Taylor Swift. Biggest thing to happen to the Australian economy this year is Taylor Swift coming to the country. Speaking of the economy, uh, let’s talk about the market, Tony. Jeez, I mean, it had a little bit of a slip last week, but then just, uh, has been going kind of gangbusters since then.

[00:02:49] Cameron: Um, you know what, what’s, what’s going on with the market, Tony? This, why is it just so exuberant at the moment?

[00:02:59] Tony: Well, it seems like it’s the, an exuberance because of reporting season. So, um, I dunno if you wanna talk about it now, but I sent you a link to an article, uh, in the AFR about, um, which was printed just before reporting season and it, um, the 4th of February. So the very start of reporting season, the headline reads, sell Off Looms as Strategists Warn.

[00:03:24] Tony: Earnings to Disappoint is the headline. The article starts off, investors will be left disappointed by a soft earnings season despite a rally that has pushed the local share market to all-time highs. That is the view of equity Strategist whose earnings forecasts have slid more than 10%. The warning comes after the benchmark.

[00:03:43] Tony: S and PASX 200 index rallied almost 2% last week. Has traders ramped up bets that the Reserve Bank may cut interest rates at least twice this year. And I’ve, I’ve gotta be honest, I, I thought it would be a tough earnings season. And then almost straight away, the retailers started reporting if, if not great results and results that weren’t as bad as their forecast, which was suggesting that, um, the, there was still a bit of spending out there in the economy.

[00:04:11] Tony: And, um, I think since then there’s been some really good, uh, good, uh, numbers being reported. In general, I think we’re, usually, there’s, there’s companies that report early in the season are the ones who are reporting good results. And the ones that are coming. But between now and the end of the month might not be as good as they start to try and hide things.

[00:04:30] Tony: Uh, but, um, you know, for example, we spoke about Nick Scali and Maya last week, but, uh, su super retail group, uh, also reported good earnings today. Macmillan Shakespeare had very good results and their shares were up 10%. And, uh, I only know that because I own shares of Macmillan Shakespeare. Um, but just some of the highlights from that result, um, which I found interesting was earnings per share was up 40% and dividend per share is up 30%, roughly.

[00:05:00] Tony: Um, but they are maxing out their payout range. So, uh, that either means that a dividend will go down next half or, uh, they expect profit to rise next half enough to, to. Pay the same sort of dividend, but a smaller payout ratio. Um, so they had a good result. Uh, they called out that electric vehicles are now 40% of new innovative leases.

[00:05:21] Tony: So that is a real tailwind for the, uh, car leasing companies, which MMS is one off. Um, yeah, so that was, um, interesting. Interestingly enough, they reported negative operating cash flow so that they may not be on the buy list going forward once those numbers hit. Um, the other interesting thing today was ANZ.

[00:05:43] Tony: Their, their takeover got waved through on appeal. So, um, that was big news. Uh, I think, uh, Suncorp Rose in value as a stock and ANZ went down about 2% largely I think because, um, people have, uh, analysts have always been a little bit concerned about the ability to integrate Suncorp’s Bank into ANZ and whether the benefits that that were called out will actually be there when they happen.

[00:06:10] Tony: Um, the cynic in me says that the CEO will now retire and leave integration to the next person. Um, ’cause I know it’ll be difficult. Uh, but yeah, it’s um. I think these kinds of good stories are driving the market up. And I think the other thing to note, uh, I sent you another article before we came on air today.

[00:06:29] Tony: This was again in, um, a recent AFR February 11th. Um, the headline is, Qantas Effect Hangs Over Profit Season as Margins Surprise. So given the fact that the strategist thought there was gonna be a bad reporting season, uh, a week later, there’s articles about it being almost too good. And, um, this article says Investors love it when a company gets more profit out of every dollar that flows through its doors, but companies are not necessarily crying about it this year.

[00:06:59] Tony: Earnings margins are a big positive surprise for, for the reporting season. To date, AGL Energy News Corp, Nixcarly and Transurban, or reported stronger than expected margins extracting what’s left from beaten up Australian consumers and running their own businesses. Harder to be leaner and meaner than expected.

[00:07:18] Tony: Qantas is unravelling soon after reporting a record profit, hangover earnings season. However, that profit margin surprise is good news for investors and sent share prices soaring, particularly at AGI and Nick Scali. Nine of the 11 companies that reported last week saw their shares outperform the market and by 3% each on average.

[00:07:36] Tony: According to Macquarie’s analysis of the first week, uh, margin was a big factor in the top gainers. But making more money for investors by squeezing the lemon harder is not what it used to be. Just ask Qantas. Airways, one of the spectacularly unraveled weeks after reporting a record profit for shareholders.

[00:07:53] Tony: The same things that fuel profits, higher prices, job cuts, a lack of competition also for your customer backlash and regulatory scrutiny. So that’s becoming the story of this profit reporting season as well, and it’s, it’s gonna be an issue. Uh. Whatever the government’s focused on reducing the cost of living.

[00:08:14] Tony: And it starts to see big companies make good profits with that kind of backdrop. They’re gonna start focusing on, on whether the companies are doing the right thing and what the government should be doing to regulate them harder. And we’re seeing that with the supermarkets where there’s a, a review going on of their practices and whether they’re, um, treating farmers properly and offering the best deals to consumers.

[00:08:36] Tony: And I think that’s gonna be what’s gonna, you know, that’s gonna have to be what boards think about from these other companies going forward. It’s almost like if we make too much money during this time of cost of living, uh, focus, um, do we invite the government to step in and regulate, uh, our

[00:08:51] Tony: industries even more

[00:08:52] Cameron: Did you see

[00:08:53] Tony: upside down world can,

[00:08:55] Cameron: Did you see the Brad Banducci kerfuffle this week?

[00:09:01] Tony: no, I didn’t, I, I saw a little bit of the, um, analysis, but I didn’t actually see it

[00:09:05] Tony: happen.

[00:09:06] Cameron: Oh right, yeah.

[00:09:08] Tony: Is that the four Corners in the

[00:09:09] Tony: view?

[00:09:09] Cameron: yes.

[00:09:10] Tony: Right.

[00:09:11] Cameron: He got up and walked out of the four Corners interview after he said like he made a crack. Uh, the, the journalist had Angus, Grigg had said something about Rod Simms take on what the supermarket chains are doing. And Banducci made some sort of crack about Rod Simms having been retired and things were a lot different these days.

[00:09:38] Cameron: Competition’s a lot different. The market’s a lot different from when he did his big review in 2008, 2009, and Grigg said he only retired like a year and a half ago. It’s not like it was 20 years ago. Things haven’t changed that much. Then Banducci realized that he’d sort of stepped in it and tried to, he basically tried to get Greg to agree to edit what he said about Rod Simzade of the interview.

[00:10:00] Cameron: And Greg said, well, this, this is on the record, mate. No, we’re leaving it in. And then he got up and he walked off and spoke with his PR team for a bit. Then he did come back and sit down

[00:10:10] Cameron: again. But, uh, he realized he’d stepped in it and, uh, said something he regretted,

[00:10:18] Tony: Well, that’s, that’s a bit of a fumble for

[00:10:19] Cameron: which I’ve never

[00:10:20] Tony: class.

[00:10:21] Cameron: to say I’ve

[00:10:22] Tony: Yeah. We, we don’t, we, we just put

[00:10:24] Tony: this out

[00:10:25] Cameron: straight, never, never

[00:10:28] Tony: I’m just going, I need to go and talk to

[00:10:30] Tony: my PR people for a

[00:10:31] Cameron: my

[00:10:31] Cameron: lawyer. Yeah.

[00:10:32] Tony: Yeah. Back in a

[00:10:33] Cameron: I tell you, one company whose, uh,

[00:10:35] Cameron: results didn’t do well for its share price was data three. Tony, your, uh,

[00:10:41] Tony: Oh,

[00:10:42] Cameron: deep dive. Not that

[00:10:44] Cameron: long ago, they came out, they came out with their

[00:10:47] Cameron: results. Um, here’s the story in Yahoo Finance. One of the biggest stories of last week was how data three limited shares plunged twenty-two percent in the week since its latest half-yearly results,

[00:11:01] Cameron: which were roughly the revenue was roughly in line with analysts forecasts, statutory earnings per share, beat expectations being 3% higher than what analysts expected.

[00:11:11] Cameron: The analysts typically update their forecasts to each earning report, and we can judge from their estimates whether their view of the company has changed, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, the results were good, but, uh, the share price dropped twenty-two percent, which was, uh, nasty. Um, the

[00:11:29] Tony: Yeah, I mean, I

[00:11:30] Cameron: broadly unchanged at $8 and five with

[00:11:32] Cameron: the analysts clearly implying that the forecast decline in earnings is not expected to have much of an impact on valuation, but the share price plunged twenty-two percent anyway.

[00:11:42] Tony: I can’t really comment on that. I’m not that. I mean, I did the pull pork on data three, and I did highlight the fact that. It’s appearing on our buy list, but it may not be, it’s appearing on our buy list because of good prop CAF, but it may not be the right sort of prop CAF that we’re interested in. Uh, because, you know, the diff their prop CAF for this company operating cash flow was basically the difference between what they bought from customers, what they sold the customers versus what they paid as supplies.

[00:12:07] Tony: There’s a lot of throughput going through, uh, their books. It’s not like, um, they’re manufacturing something, charging a big margin and, and getting sales from customers like a, a coffee shop analogy.

[00:12:19] Cameron: Right. Pretty standard for that kind of a business theorem.

[00:12:23] Tony: it is.

[00:12:24] Tony: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:12:26] Tony: Interesting.

[00:12:27] Cameron: they took a big

[00:12:28] Tony: Oh, sorry. One, one other decline I should fess up to as well is I, I talked about the anti-QAV stock portfolio a couple of weeks ago on the show, and one of the stocks in that portfolio was pro Medicus and they came out with results and their share prices gone down a lot since then too.

[00:12:44] Tony: So, which is always the risk, I think with the sort of, uh, growth at any cost customer, uh, uh, companies, they, if they disappoint,

[00:12:52] Tony: they can be beaten about

[00:12:54] Tony: pretty severely.

[00:12:55] Cameron: Did do you have to sell it? Did it break a through a cell trigger?

[00:12:59] Tony: It didn’t actually, it was one of those ones where the cell lines are well below, you know, what, um, what it was, and it’s back to pretty much what they put it in the dummy portfolio

[00:13:07] Tony: at. So it’s not a rule one either.

[00:13:09] Cameron: Right. Well, speaking of performance, Darryl, one of our QAV Club members has been for quite a long time, posted on the Facebook group this week. I’ve been running some analysis of my returns over the last four years of my QAV involvement, as I also use another source Intelligent investor for stock buyers.

[00:13:28] Cameron: Using ShareSol, I can filter stocks according to each process slash source. What I found was that QAV offered a better return 16.5% versus 13.7%, but my WIN-loss ratio was 34% to 66% for QAV versus 51%, 49% for the other source. The better return was almost entirely due to one stock NHC, which accounted for over half of the QAV return.

[00:13:56] Cameron: This alone justifies my use of QAV, but I’m mindful that luck may be a factor as I’m also constrained by not being able to buy very small ADT stocks. I’m curious what others are finding is their WIN-loss ratio. So I tried to look at the dummy portfolio, uh, which has been running for five years now, and, uh, do some analysis on that using Nevex’s reporting.

[00:14:21] Cameron: And I found it hard because there’s a number of stocks in there that have had consolidations and splits and acquisitions, which maybe if I took those out, I might be able to get a simpler, well, and actually the other problem was the best reporting I can get from Nevex on performance. It kind of bundle, it bundles it into stocks.

[00:14:43] Cameron: So if I’ve bought and sold FMG five times, it just gives me an FMG profit or loss line and aggregates them all. So,

[00:14:53] Cameron: uh, I don’t think that’s really, um. I don’t know, uh, uh, gonna give me an accurate reflection of the win-loss ratio for the actual investments themselves, the, the, the

[00:15:04] Cameron: tranches. So I haven’t worked out an easy way to do this.

[00:15:07] Cameron: I throw, I tried throwing the, all the trades into Excel and getting GPT to help me. And again, I got stuck on the consolidations and I, there’s a whole level of work I’d have to do to go back through and work out what the consolidation rates were and factor that into the whole thing. So, yeah, I haven’t been able to come up with my numbers yet, but just at a high level, it looked like there were way more losses in the trades than there were.

[00:15:33] Cameron: If I, if I sort of ignore the corporate action ones looks like way more losses over the last five years than wins. But as we know, the dummy portfolio is basically doing twice the, uh, benchmark over the last five years. It’s about 16.5%. Uh, Funnily, like Darrell’s over four years. It’s about that per annum that is, um, over the five years versus about eight point something for the STW.

[00:16:06] Cameron: And I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s similar to Darryl’s, like there’s gonna be, I would imagine 10% of the stocks that have outperformed the rest massively and carried it. Has that been your experience over the years that it’s a small number of trades that carry the heavy lifting?

[00:16:24] Tony: Um, yes and no. So there’s a whole, uh, number of things to unpack in, in this analysis. I think the first thing to note is that when, when Ryan, my, um, my analyst went back and, and looked at, uh, you know, dummy portfolios that he made to do some regression testing over the last three or four years, he was finding a similar sort of thing.

[00:16:45] Tony: He found that, um. A 10% rule. One stop-loss worked better than a 20% rule one, rule one stop-loss, but not by much. But he thought the reason for that was that there were far more transactions with a 10% rule one stop-loss, which meant you had more chance of, of buying the NHC type stock that was going to perform well.

[00:17:08] Tony: So, uh, I, I think it remember that the difference in those two results wasn’t statistically significant. It was about one, one and a half percent difference, but he found that there was more likely to get the, the. Rocket stock if you, if you were doing a rule one at 10%. Um, but he also found there’s a been a heck of a lot of churning in the portfolios in the last two years in particular.

[00:17:29] Tony: And that’s certainly been the case with my portfolio as well. So if I, if I put that to one side, I’m not saying we should ignore it. That’s, that’s what the market did in the last two years. But before that, um, you know, going back to even pre-QAV, my experience I think was, I turned over the portfolio a little bit over a 12 month period.

[00:17:48] Tony: So, you know, 15 stock portfolio meant 15 trades in a bit over 12 months. Um, and I got a 60, uh, you know, 60 outta 10 winners list at that time. I haven’t, um, gone back and revisited that analysis since then, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s more like what Daryl has is that, um, it’s, it’s now, um, a lot because of all the churn in the last couple of years,

[00:18:10] Tony: the, the win rate’s gone down, I would’ve thought.

[00:18:12] Cameron: Hmm. But in terms of a, a small number of stocks. Carrying the heavy lifting for the portfolio, like the super performance out of a small number, like some of those wins aren’t gonna

[00:18:26] Tony: Yeah.

[00:18:26] Tony: it would be.

[00:18:27] Cameron: Yeah,

[00:18:28] Tony: Yeah, no, it would be, yeah, definitely. So the, yeah, so the out, if you have six out of 10 windows, there’s always gonna be one which is doing better than the rest,

[00:18:37] Tony: you know? Yeah. You’ll have some which are, yeah. Yeah. Whether it’s one or two, I’m not sure. I’d have to go back and have a look.

[00:18:43] Tony: But yeah, there was always an FMG, or in the past there was Monadelphus or um, Northern Star Resources. There’s always been really good stocks in there doing, you know, sort of home runs, um, as results. Yeah. And they tend to be the ones that you hold for the longest too. ’cause they just don’t get back to their cell lines and they’re way above the rural ones.

[00:19:04] Tony: Um, so, you know, you let them ride, which is good too.

[00:19:08] Tony: Yeah.

[00:19:09] Cameron: A DUR Duratech for a lot of us. At the moment, it’s up 160. I, I haven’t looked this week. It goes up and down, but last time I looked it was like up 160% or something since I first added it to one of our portfolios, um, which wasn’t that long ago. Yeah, so I, I I think that Daryl’s findings, yeah, probably would be, will be similar.

[00:19:31] Cameron: Like the last couple of years has been crazy as we know for some reason, lot of selling going on. Um, lot of rule ones. But yeah, that this whole thing of one or two stocks carrying the heavy lifting for the portfolios is kind of what I expect to see.

[00:19:47] Tony: Yeah, I do too.

[00:19:50] Cameron: Well, moving right along then. Thank you for sharing that. By the way, Daryl. It’s really good. Anytime anyone shares their analysis on their portfolios, I find it very enlightening and useful and you know, it’s good to. See what’s working or what’s not working for other people. But, um, you know, good to see that Daryl’s QAV portfolio is doing better.

[00:20:10] Cameron: This, uh, his Intelligent investor portfolio. It’s good, magnificent seven profits now exceed almost every country in the world. Should be, should we be worried? Is the question being asked by Elliot Smith over on CNBC? The So-called Magnificent seven US Tech behemoths encompass Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft NVIDIA, and Tesla.

[00:20:35] Cameron: Uh, in a research note, Tuesday, Deutsche bank analysts highlighted that the Magnificent Seven’s combined market cap alone would make it the second largest country stock exchange in the world. However, this level of concentration has led some analysts to voice concerns over related risks in the US and global stock markets.

[00:20:59] Cameron: I don’t know what to make of all of this. Tony? Uh, I dunno if this is unusual. Like if I went back, if you went back in time 50 years and looked at the top seven or 10 stocks, who Buffett was talking about somebody back in the sixties? Who was the name of the group that were the killer

[00:21:20] Tony: The Nifty 50.

[00:21:21] Tony: in The late

[00:21:22] Tony: fifties and sixties. Yeah.

[00:21:23] Cameron: lot. Bigger number than seven, I guess.

[00:21:25] Tony: Yeah.

[00:21:27] Tony: Oh, look, I’ve just, I, we spoke about this last week. Uh, you know, I, we’ve seen this story before. It’s, it’s the Magnificent seven. It’s the fangs, it’s the buy now, pay later. It’s the Bitcoins. It’s the tech boom. It’s the nifty-fifty. They, they all do well until they stop, and then they all crash hard.

[00:21:47] Tony: And that’s, that’s why I wouldn’t be buying Magnificent seven stocks at the moment. I could be wrong. I could be wrong for years, but when I’m right look out, it’s like, you know, you lose all your, you lose all your upside. So unless you’ve got some kind of special Midas touch to get out at the peak, then I’m not gonna play.

[00:22:04] Tony: And Buffett also talks about the Greater Fool theory that people are buying these stocks because they hope to sell ’em to somebody else for more, rather than think that, you know, these stocks are actually worth what they’re paying. Nvidia, I think I read today, is the third biggest stock on the US stock market.

[00:22:21] Tony: Now it’s about to. It’s about to release its results, um, either tonight or sometime this week anyway, and, uh, it’s priced to perfection. So unless it. Outperforms, I’d expect that there’d be a retracement in that share price, at least going forward. I’m not saying these companies are bad companies, they’re not, or that they’re, they don’t have a high level of quality or lots of good things going for them.

[00:22:46] Tony: Um, I’m just saying you’re paying three times or four times or 10 times what they’re probably worth. And, um, I, I’d wait for the pullback, wait for blood on the streets before I invested in any of these, but that’s just me. And I’ve seen this before, but the, I, the other thing that that really bothered me was the.

[00:23:03] Tony: Article I read out last week is I think that they’re becoming so overvalued and such a high concentration in, in size. And as that article said that you are talking about some of these, I think the market cap for the Magnificent seven is bigger than the Canadian economy, if you wanna put it in perspective.

[00:23:19] Tony: So they’re getting to be the, these companies are getting to be city-states really. Um, so they’re huge and they’re, they’re getting that big because of all the passive money that’s following them, that if people buy into an index fund, if it’s a worldwide index fund, increasingly it means probably 20% of it is going to these particular seven companies.

[00:23:38] Tony: And, um, you know, when, when they do crash, that’s a big loss for

[00:23:43] Tony: people who are passively investing.

[00:23:46] Cameron: I’ve got news for you, Tony. It is different every time. It’s always different. Tony. It’s never the same.

[00:23:52] Tony: It’s always the same.

[00:23:53] Tony: cam. It really is.

[00:23:54] Cameron: me with a

[00:23:55] Cameron: negative waves so early in the morning,

[00:23:57] Cameron: bad. Bridge will be there and it’ll be there. It’s a mother

[00:24:01] Tony: think those

[00:24:02] Cameron: bridge and it’s going to be there.

[00:24:06] Tony: think that NVIDIA NVIDIA’s gonna produce great results and

[00:24:09] Tony: it will,

[00:24:09] Cameron: Oh, you go More negative waves. Have a little faith, baby. Have a little faith. Uh, haven’t used

[00:24:19] Tony: I love Kelly’s Heroes.

[00:24:21] Tony: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:24:22] Cameron: Housel’s little ideas. Tony. My idea from household, it’s his idea this week, is Buridan’s arse. A thirsty donkey is placed exactly midway between two pails of water. It dies because it can’t make a rational decision about which one to choose a form of decision paralysis. I asked, uh, my good friend ChatGPT to, uh, explain this to me. He says, Bourdain’s ass is a philosophical paradox that illustrates the problem of indecision in a perfectly rational agent facing two equally good options. It’s named after the French philosopher Jean Bourdain. Although ironically, he never directly proposed this paradox, it’s more a caricature of his ideas.

[00:25:09] Cameron: The gist is this. You’ve got a donkey that’s as thirsty as a pub with no beer, and it finds itself smack bang in the middle of two identical buckets of water. Now, because the donkey’s brain is wired to make perfectly rational decisions, it tries to choose the best option. But here’s the kicker, the options and mirror images of each other equal distance, equal amount of water, equally tempting.

[00:25:31] Cameron: So our poor donkey gets stuck in a mental loop, unable to decide which one to go for, because neither option is rationally better than the other. The tragic end for the donkey. Starving or dying of thirst is a metaphor for decision paralysis when the fear of making the wrong choice leads to no choice being made at all.

[00:25:50] Cameron: It’s a poke at the idea that rationality alone can always guide us to the best decision. Sometimes life throws us into situations where logic’s light doesn’t shine quite so brightly. And indecision can be just as deadly as making a bad choice. Buradon’s ass slaps us with a question. Is it always possible to make a perfectly rational decision?

[00:26:10] Cameron: And it cheekily suggests that sometimes you’ve just got to pick a bucket and have a drink mate. Analysis paralysis can be a real bugger showing us that action, even based on a coin toss, can be better than standing still, especially when the stakes are high, or you are just really thirsty.

[00:26:27] Tony: So true. I mean, I’ve witnessed a lot of paralysis by analysis and big corporates over the years for sure. Yeah. I, I think that was put in a different way by one of my ex-bosses who said that, um, an AFL game is more than just one kick. And he was talking about one of the people we worked with and how that person would always make sure they score the goal because they would, um, check the wind strength, pick up the grass and toss it, um, line the ball up, re-line it, get the, get the slide rule out and work out the trajectory of the ball and take a few practice kicks and then take a kick.

[00:27:04] Tony: But an AFL game has lots of kicks. You’re better off just taking the, taking your best punt and moving on and doing it

[00:27:11] Tony: again in five minutes

[00:27:12] Tony: time.

[00:27:13] Cameron: How do you think this applies to investing?

[00:27:17] Tony: I think it applies really well. I mean, we, we try and remove behavioural anomalies and impediments, you know, that are hardwired into our brains from the investing process. And this is one of them. I don’t know how many times I’ve sat down and said, oh, you know, my system is saying to buy X, Y, and Z stock, but gee, I really like, I. Apple or you know, the Magnificent seven. Well, what am I gonna do? You know, you just gotta put it aside and go with the system. And it’s, it, it, the flip side to it is you don’t beat yourself up if you got it wrong. Your system takes, well, self-correct. If you, if you have to sell it, ’cause it went down 10%, sell it, move on.

[00:28:01] Tony: But it’s almost, you almost sort of start to worry about fear of, fear of value that you’ll get it wrong before you make the decision. Well, you know, if you get it wrong, you can recover. Your system corrects for that.

[00:28:11] Tony: So just make a decision.

[00:28:12] Cameron: Hmm. Yeah, that’s

[00:28:15] Tony: Have you done that Cam? Have you done that? You, you know, uh, the QAV buy list says to buy, you know, XYZ stock, but you go, oh, do I really wanna buy a television station or do I really wanna buy, you know, news Corp?

[00:28:29] Tony: Or do I really wanna buy this or that?

[00:28:31] Tony: And you start to second guess it, and then nothing gets

[00:28:33] Tony: bought.

[00:28:33] Cameron: No, because I’m not smart enough to doubt the system. Like I do have those, like I, there was a News Corp stock at some point, or I don’t know, one of the TV stations or something. I can’t remember. Oh, radio stations. Sky, sky Television. I think SKT is this

[00:28:51] Tony: Right.

[00:28:52] Tony: Yep. It is. Yeah.

[00:28:53] Cameron: and I’m like, uh, I have a gag reflex, uh, at the idea of buying it.

[00:28:58] Cameron: ’cause you know, whilst I still. Stick very firmly to my theory that Rupert is actually working for the KGB and he’s a secret plant. And his, his strategy since, uh, his university days has been to undo America and capitalism by rising to the top of it and corrupting it from within. That said, I still loathe, uh, everything that he puts out, but, uh,

[00:29:24] Tony: allegedly

[00:29:26] Cameron: which bit allegedly that I loathe it

[00:29:28] Tony: your hypothesis.

[00:29:29] Tony: no, your

[00:29:30] Cameron: Yeah, that’s my hope.

[00:29:31] Cameron: I still stick to that as, as making a lot of sense. But

[00:29:37] Cameron: I bought it because I’m not smart enough. Uh, like, like it’s the same at Kung, Fu man. Like if my Sifu tells me to do something and I’m not gonna question it, well who am I to question what my Sifu tells me? Uh, trust his 30 years of doing Kung Fu, he knows what he’s talking about.

[00:29:52] Cameron: I don’t know. Shit, I just do it. Same with investing. I follow the

[00:29:55] Cameron: system.

[00:29:55] Tony: look at, I mean, I, I can’t speak for Daryl, but you know, Daryl’s given us the donkey problem, hasn’t he? He’s, he’s got, um, one foot in the, what is it? Invest Smart Camp and one foot in the QAV camp. Qav is winning at the moment. I’d be interested to know what his thought process is about how he invests going forward.

[00:30:14] Tony: Does he keep one foot in each camp? Does he not make a decision or does he

[00:30:17] Tony: decide to go with the best returns?

[00:30:19] Cameron: Hmm. Get back to us on that. Daryl, Daryl’s a lot smarter than I am, but yeah. No, I, It’s one of the things that attracts me to QAV is it’s just, uh, it’s a system. I don’t need to think, I don’t need to get caught in Buridan’s ass. I got enough problems with my own ass getting in the way of things, you know, I just, I, I like systems, uh, that’ll tell me what to

[00:30:48] Cameron: do.

[00:30:49] Tony: Right.

[00:30:50] Cameron: Um, I

[00:30:51] Tony: be, you’ll be really good when the

[00:30:53] Tony: AI takes over.

[00:30:54] Cameron: Yes. Just tell me what to

[00:30:55] Cameron: do. AI

[00:30:57] Tony: What? What can I do for you? What am I doing today? ai,

[00:30:59] Cameron: Yes, I already asked it that. Um,

[00:31:05] Tony: you’re trying to put in a good word for yourself when Skynet

[00:31:09] Tony: launches.

[00:31:10] Cameron: Uh, I’m I’m fully on board with our new AI overlords. Let me be the first to congratulate our new AI overlords and submit to them. Um, got an email just before we went to Air from Robert Manfrey at Stock Doctor. Not unfortunately telling me why our new member’s QAV filters are all asked backwards, but telling me that in the coming weeks we are changing the way we display index constituents in StockDoctor.

[00:31:39] Cameron: This will affect your members using the QAV scan as it includes the criterion constituent of the ASX-X. This will be replaced automatic with the criterion constituent of ASX-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X.

[00:31:54] Cameron: Reliable data is a cornerstone of our investment process. Uh, editors note you wouldn’t know. It enabling us to evaluate facts rather than opinions. Get back to me on news. Corps outstanding shares, Robert, and we can talk. However, we haven’t encountered a significant change with one of our primary data providers, standard & Poor’s.

[00:32:15] Cameron: They have amended their distribution agreements with their clients to prevent them displaying index constituents to users who don’t have their own S&P license to view constituents. As a result, we can’t display S&P Index Constituents in StockDoctor to ensure our StockDoctor members continue to receive the high-quality quote-unquote data that they need without adversely impacting their workflow.

[00:32:40] Cameron: We have introduced our own set of proxy index constituents. These are designed to approximate. The composition found in the S&P indices and are ranked according to market capitalization and liquidity. Wonder if we could just put out our own data set and say it approximates, StockDoctor’s data set and scoring system.

[00:33:03] Cameron: We’re just, just, it’s not stock. We’re not taking StockDoctor’s data. It’s, it’s a proxy for StockDoctor’s data.

[00:33:12] Tony: It. Yeah, it does sound like a workaround by stock doctor. Hey, but I don’t think there’s a, um, in our QAV filter, I don’t think there is an ASX

[00:33:20] Tony: 300 constituency

[00:33:21] Cameron: There is, there is one, um, that I added. A couple of years ago, because

[00:33:29] Cameron: some of us, like me and some of our members can only invest in ASX 300 because of the, their superfund, for example. So it’s just a, it is just another filter at the end that you can then filter your buy list by a SX 300 companies if that’s what you need to do.

[00:33:47] Tony: Right. And then if you don’t

[00:33:48] Tony: need it, You just take it

[00:33:49] Cameron: You just leave it there. I mean, yeah. We don’t, we, you know, when in the filter it’s just all, um, and then you can break it down into true or false, um, when you are filtering your own buy list. Anyway, I just wanted to let people know that, uh, so that’ll be happening. Apparently it’s not gonna change anything, but that’s a weird thing for S&P to do too.

[00:34:12] Cameron: Really? Like why, why can’t they tell us if it’s an index constituent? I don’t understand what’s

[00:34:18] Tony: Yeah, they

[00:34:18] Tony: publish. Damn. They publish the damn thing on the

[00:34:21] Tony: ASX

[00:34:22] Cameron: Yeah. Right.

[00:34:22] Tony: rebalance,

[00:34:23] Tony: so yeah.

[00:34:24] Cameron: I dunno what’s going on with

[00:34:25] Tony: that.

[00:34:26] Tony: is

[00:34:26] Tony: strange.

[00:34:26] Cameron: Probably it’s, it’s like World War I, bloody alliance agreements, man. Like they’ve probably got agreements with someone and those people have agreements with other people who have agreements and all it’s gonna take is for somebody to assassinate Franz Ferdinand and uh, watch out.

[00:34:45] Cameron: Not the band. Well maybe the band. Who knows.

[00:34:48] Tony: The first thing I thought of

[00:34:49] Cameron: Yeah. Um,

[00:34:50] Tony: kind of, and was kind of cheering for,

[00:34:52] Tony: but

[00:34:52] Tony: anyway.

[00:34:53] Cameron: hey, they did Franz Ferdinand did a, an album with Sparks a couple of years ago, a duet album with Sparks and it’s really good stuff. I know, you know, the world’s biggest Sparks fan, but we love that album. Franz, Ferdinand, Sparks. It’s great stuff.

[00:35:09] Tony: Check it out.

[00:35:10] Cameron: No, you won’t. Probably not. Um, okay. Got us this week, TK.

[00:35:15] Tony: I do, I have AGL to

[00:35:17] Tony: talk about.

[00:35:18] Cameron: Oh my God. This should be interesting.

[00:35:22] Tony: Oh, okay.

[00:35:22] Cameron: Wow. With the whole, what’s his

[00:35:25] Cameron: face? Atlassian.

[00:35:27] Cameron: Double-baked. Jesus

[00:35:31] Cameron: My old friend,

[00:35:32] Tony: Joe Aston.

[00:35:33] Cameron: Cannon. Brooks, slept on his lounge. I have. All right,

[00:35:39] Cameron: well, off you go then.

[00:35:40] Tony: someone else did too. ’cause he got

[00:35:41] Tony: divorced last year

[00:35:42] Cameron: Oh, well, obviously she was sleeping in more places than just his lounge. Yeah.

[00:35:48] Tony: possibly.

[00:35:49] Cameron: Mm. Allegedly.

[00:35:51] Tony: Yep. Uh, so talking about AGL and the reason for talking about AGL is it popped up on our buy list this week after its results and it, um, we’re at that stage in the. Results season where not every stock on our buy list has the current numbers in there, but AGL does. So I thought I’d do a stock that had recent numbers.

[00:36:11] Tony: Uh, it, it isn’t however a buy at the moment in terms of sentiment. It’s still a hold. So it’s a, it’s above its first buy line, if I’ll call it that. The buy line follows the cell line line. It’s below its cell line and it’s below its second buy line. So it’s a Josephine for us. But, um, it, as I said before, the results, uh, cause the share price to pop by 10%.

[00:36:36] Tony: So it’s worth having a look at. Um. For people who don’t know AGL, and I dare say there’s not many, maybe the overseas listeners might not know it. AGL Energy is the full name for it. It’s an integrated energy provider and in this case, integrated means, uh, it produces power through generators. Um, both thermal coal-powered, but also, uh, also renewable generators.

[00:37:03] Tony: And it also then sells electricity and gas to retail customers and large businesses. And they also have some adjacent businesses selling broadband, mobile, uh, spectrum and solar type products, solar panels, uh, for your home and batteries, et cetera. Uh, they also have a division which trades, uh, electricity prices and power contracts and hedges their own.

[00:37:26] Tony: Um. Power prices. Uh, basically both to manage the price of the power that they generate, but also to, um, make sure that they, uh, uh, are compliant with the government regulations and obligations on Baseload Energy and the like in Australia. Uh, and, and also to, um, to recirculate the renewable loads from Rooftop Solar.

[00:37:50] Tony: Um, as an example, uh, they invest in other renewable companies and they have stakes in companies like Actu, AGL, retail Partners, Tilt Renewables and Energy Impact Partners, Europe. Uh. I guess what you were alluding to before in May 22, May, 2000 and twenty-two AGL proposed to de-merge the coal power generation business from the retailing division.

[00:38:19] Tony: Uh, this plan required a seventy-five percent vote of shareholders, which was thwarted when Mike Cannon Brooks bought 11% of the company. I think he did that in partnership with Brookfield, uh, in March. Before that, before the uh. The, that particular vote in May, 2022. Cannon Brooks also tried to buy AGL in partnership with Brookfield.

[00:38:41] Tony: Um, and he offered $5.5 billion, which was rebuffed by the board. So, um, he, he still has a 10% stake in the company and he has been able to nominate four board members to the board. He doesn’t sit as a director himself, but he has four nominees on the board. And his agenda is all about, uh, getting out of the coal powered fire stations earlier than what he thought AGL would do, um, by them left, left to their own devices and certainly before it would happen if they de-merge those coal powered fire stations.

[00:39:16] Tony: So that’s the kind of corporate history background for it. It’s, um. Uh, recent history. So the stock price rose 10%. Uh, when it, um, reported its results, it swung to a profit of some, uh, $576 million in the last half. Uh, and it lost $1.1 billion in the first half of 2023. So it was quite a big swing. Um, they reported that higher electricity bills better reliability, uh, at the two remaining coal power stations.

[00:39:52] Tony: Uh, and lower coal expenses were the main drivers of, uh, profit profitability. And, uh, that was, as I said before, I think that might start to, um, cause some kind of government focus on their, on their, um, their in, well, the industry going forward. But nothing’s happening at the moment. But it is a risk, I think. they also reported that rising prices come with an increase in bad debts. And that makes sense because AGL doesn’t do any sort of credit checking on customers before they take out, um, uh, contracts with AGL for supply. Uh, so it’s different to a bank, um, which does a credit check before loaning you a, a mortgage or a credit card, for example.

[00:40:38] Tony: Um, so it’s. It is really the, the fact that the bad debts are increasing is also highlighting this fact that they are making profits, um, against the backdrop of increasing stress consumers. And that may attract political consideration and political attention. So, um, there’s that. Um, to put AGL and its size into perspective, uh, it’s the number two player in Australia in the energy market.

[00:41:04] Tony: Origin has about 27% market share. AGL has about 22.5%, and Energy Australia are about, they’re just under 15%. Uh, and then there’s a lot of other small retailers operating in the space. So it’s a, it’s a very large, um, company. Um, it’s got an interesting history, which I’ll, I’ll run through. I always find this in interesting myself.

[00:41:30] Tony: Uh. They go back to 18 thirty-seven when the Australian Gas Light Company was created by an act of the New South Wales Parliament. And in 18 forty-one AGL lit the first gas lamp in Sydney. And. Yeah, in the 1850s, soon after that, AGL had enough gas lights in the, uh, in the city to be able to power the first, uh, late night shopping in Sydney.

[00:42:00] Tony: Uh, in 1857, AGL introduced gas purification, making gas safe to use in homes, and they started connecting up homes, so the gas supply. And in 1871, AGL became the second company to list on the Sydney Stock Exchange. So it went from being government owned to being the second company to list way back in 1871.

[00:42:22] Tony: In the 1890s, gas stoves were, uh. Available to be sold or rented in Australia for the first time. Uh, a lot didn’t change in the next sort of 80 odd years. Um, the big sort of highlight, uh, for me after that was in 1976 when natural gas was introduced into Sydney via a pipeline from South Australia. And, um, that was a big change.

[00:42:45] Tony: That was a big change when I was a kid. That natural gas through direct pipelines from um, reserves in Australia started to be fed into homes. And natural gas was important of course, because, um, uh, not so much in Australia, but particularly in places like England, the gas that they were using, uh, could kill you.

[00:43:04] Tony: So people would. You know, decide to suicide by closing all the windows and turning on the gas stove and opening the door. Um, whereas natural gas, uh, eliminated that kind of, um, problem from from homes. Uh, 19 ninety-eight saw the first solar power station commissioned by AGL at a place called Wilpend Pound.

[00:43:25] Tony: At the Flinders Ranges 2005, they purchased a company called Southern Hydro, and it’s, um, obvious what they do. 2006, the company AGL merged with Alinta to become AGL Energy. In 2009, they opened up the Bogong Hydro station, which operates in Victoria 2012. They acquired the Loyang a Power Station and the adjacent Loyang Coal Mine.

[00:43:54] Tony: 2013, the largest wind farm in the Southern Hemisphere opened. It’s called MacArthur Wind Farm, and it’s 50% owned by AGL. 2014 AGL bought Bayswater and the Dell Power Stations in New South Wales. Um, both coal powered and since that time, they’ve bought, had many other purchases and acquisitions, um, particularly in renewable and gas, including the Newcastle gas storage facility, Ningen and Broken Hill Solar Plants, Barker Inlet Power Station in South Australia, and the Silverton and Coopers Gap Wind Farms.

[00:44:29] Tony: So quite a storied history. Um, I guess a, uh, a. History of innovation, or oftentimes the first company to do things in Australia, whether it was lighting lights or bringing natural gas to homes, or, um, getting big into renewables. So, um, that was a, that’s a big thing for them. Uh, and I think that will will stead them in in.

[00:44:54] Tony: Good stead going forward, as they do manage, have to manage this transition away from, uh, thermal-powered energy into, um, into more renewable types of energy running through the numbers. Um, this is a large company, so the ADT is nearly $20 million per day, which is very large and will suit all our listeners.

[00:45:14] Tony: Uh, the share price I’m doing the analysis at is $8 63 and that price is more than IV-one, but less than IV-two IV-one being 6 59, IV-two being 10 72. Uh, but the 8 63, their share price is less than the consensus. Target company’s got a good yield of 5.68%, but not, um, quite high enough to score with us. We need it to be above 6.8, which is the current average mortgage rate.

[00:45:42] Tony: Stock Dr. Financial health is strong and recovering, and we certainly like recovering companies, so we scored an extra point for that. We’re having a recovering trend. PE is 6.71, which is not the highest or the lowest over the last three years, so we can’t score it for that very good prop cap at the moment, 3.48 times.

[00:46:01] Tony: So, um, that’s, that’s right in our sweet spot. Net equity per share is $8 17. So, uh, that’s just a little bit below the share price, but certainly you can buy this for less than book plus 30%. But again, I’ll highlight the fact that, um, net equity per share is $8 17, but NTA is $3 46. So obviously all the acquisitions have an element of goodwill, which is sitting on the balance sheet.

[00:46:26] Tony: And, um, I’ll leave that with listeners. I, I do focus on net net equity per share and look to buy things at, at that book value. But you are paying for some goodwill, uh, accumulated with the company. Uh, forecast earnings per share is not good. It’s, it’s forecast to drop 14%. So we score at, uh, a negative one for that.

[00:46:46] Tony: Um, we don’t have an owner founder obviously, in, uh, because it’s, it’s, you know, a hundred and maybe 200 years old, 150 years old, this company. So we can’t, um. We can’t score it for that. And as I said before, Mike Cannon-Brooks, who owns 10% of the company, doesn’t sit on the board, but he does have four nominees.

[00:47:04] Tony: So, uh, I’m not gonna score it for that. So it doesn’t get known to founder score. Uh, equity, uh, has not been consistently increasing on the balance sheet, so he can’t score it for that. So all in all, the quality, uh, score for this company is nine out of 16, which is 60%, and the QAV score is 0.17, which isn’t too bad for a big company like this.

[00:47:27] Tony: Uh, if I can run through some risks that I see and I guess some positives for it, um, I think, uh. Yeah, the, the risk that we, I spoke about before has to be called out that there, there could be a government focus on the profitability of this company. Um, if the government feels that it, uh, has been putting up its electricity bills higher than what it should, um, given the government’s focused on the cost of living.

[00:47:53] Tony: So that might be an issue for them. That, but that’s, I guess that’s a watch to space. And I know that as a board, they’ll be, they’ll be trying to manage their way through that. Uh, I think, I think, um, another risk. Uh, people will have read about a lot of the risks I’m gonna talk about, but I’ll just highlight them.

[00:48:12] Tony: Uh, a big one is gonna be in transiting to the renewables sector. Uh, it does involve, um, the, the building of, uh, new transmission lines and, and a, a different sort of grid to what we have under the current arrangements. And, you know, they, some of those, um, will have to traverse across farmlands or other areas and that could be a, a problem.

[00:48:35] Tony: Um, both in terms of, and it’s all sorts of problems with that, not just from people who don’t want those things going through their properties, but also, um, as we’ve seen in the recent storms in Victoria above ground power lines can lead to, um. Outages, they, they can be blown over in strong winds or suffer during bushfires, but that is still the cheapest way of doing it, rather than putting the lines underground.

[00:48:58] Tony: But if there is, if, if companies like this are forced to put the bill for underground power lines, and that’s gonna be a huge cost, um, and a huge headwind for them to try and, uh, get over. Uh, likewise with wind farms, not just with transmission lines, but um, there is resistance to wind farms both onshore and offshore.

[00:49:16] Tony: So that’s something that has to be managed through. Um. It’s, it’s not hard to imagine how difficult it must be trying to manage the base load management and profitability in this transition period where, um, they’re obliged to take output from solar panels on people’s roofs, um, and put that into the grid and try and, um, keep their coal-fired power stations operating profitably, uh, and ramping them up and ramping them down to take into account what’s going on with the solar panels.

[00:49:46] Tony: So that’s a very difficult, um, transition for them. Uh, Victoria, the state of Victoria recently banned gas from being put into new homes as their way of trying to, um, fight climate change. So, uh, there could be limits on the gas market for this company going forward, and, and people will have their own opinions about whether that’s good or bad, but it’s, it’s, um, it’s happening.

[00:50:09] Tony: So we have to take it into account. And then the, there’s the internal risk, uh, on the, on the board. If there are four directors pushing for the closure of coal plants early. Um. You know, that that will be a, an issue the company will have to manage, um, solving for that whilst maintaining profit for shareholders.

[00:50:29] Tony: So, um, a few things going on there. I guess on the positive sides, they, they’re a very large company. They with a, um, number two player market share. So that’s gotta count for something and give them sort of financial strength to be able to, to resist, um, times when they, the house, when they may not make money.

[00:50:46] Tony: Um. As I said before, they do have a, um, a culture of engineering and innovation and that’s gotta help them when they’re transitioning to renewables. ’cause oftentimes these things are solving from first principles. Um, so that’s gotta count for them as well. Um, and they have been, um, without the pushing of Mike Cannon-Brooks already being, getting into renewables and, and, um, you know, they, um, have been, uh, a pioneer of batteries and virtual batteries in Australia as well, for example.

[00:51:14] Tony: So they know a fair bit about, um, renewables and the, the strengths and weaknesses of that. So yeah, that’s AGL. It’s on the buy list. Not quite a buy yet for Sentiment, but, um, people who need ADT stocks could have a look at it.

[00:51:27] Cameron: Thank you, Tony. Did you say that natural gas isn’t, uh, a, a risk for suffocation?

[00:51:37] Tony: I didn’t think so. Was it LP, was it LPG? That’s not, or was it natural gas? I can’t remember which one. I did say natural gas wasn’t.

[00:51:43] Tony: So you saying it is.

[00:51:45] Cameron: oh, look, I’m definitely, uh, unlike every other topic, I’m not an expert on this. Uh, my, my understanding was it was methane and it is the, a risk for suffocation if you don’t have the right ventilation, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:52:00] Tony: Okay, I’ll take it back. But there was, there was some change at the time. I remember when it came in, people were, you know, pushing it because it

[00:52:09] Tony: was, um, less chance of, uh, suffocation.

[00:52:11] Cameron: Hmm. My understanding is that’s why it smells like rotten eggs, which is something they is introduced into the gas ’cause methane naturally has no smell. So they make it smell like rotten eggs. Um, called something called mercaptan. It’s introduced to it to, um, give it, that it’s a warning smell basically.

[00:52:33] Cameron: So if you can, if you can smell it, you know, gases leaking

[00:52:36] Cameron: somewhere. Chrissie’s got a good story when she, uh, was young, you know, late teens, 20, 19, 20 when she was working for a hotel like a, a, an accommodation hotel in Cedar City in Utah, uh, hometown on reception and started getting headaches and realized that there was a gas leak in.

[00:53:00] Cameron: At the building and spoke to the manager, uh, about it several times and he just, nothing got done. So she ended up going to, I know the government health safety ombudsman, whatever they call it, over there and filing a complaint that they were putting their employees at risk and got, got him into a lot of trouble, uh, for not addressing this.

[00:53:23] Cameron: It was like, it was, she was having headaches and, you know, other stuff were as well from this gas that was pumped in and they were just like, ah, shut up. Get back to work. Anywho.

[00:53:53] Cameron: It’s kind of amazing to me that we’re still using so much gas in 2024. Like it’s, it just seems like such a primitive pre 20th century technology lighting.

[00:54:04] Cameron: You talk about gas lighting and that kinda stuff. Now if somebody’s gas lighting you, it’s a bad thing. Back then it was state-of-the-art technology. Now it’s, you know, it’s considered, uh, morally, ethically dubious. Anywho, thank you for that. Moving right along. Question time, Jordan. Now this is sort of a report slash some questions and I’ve, I got some replies from Jordan that I got in the last couple of hours, um, that I haven’t forwarded to you, but I’ll talk us through it.

[00:54:40] Cameron: So, Jordan QAV member has been doing some of his own, uh, regression testing. And I’ve reported on it previously, but he sent me something through the other day, just an update. I thought I’d compare using a Renko chart to the other Hugline results I had previously. The sale triggers were Bredelator three point Trendline Rule one Commodity plus the item being tested.

[00:55:07] Cameron: So in one case, there was one year weekly Hugline, which he said developed, uh uh, not developed, delivered a 0.5% increase, a three year weekly Hugline, which delivered a 1.7% increase, and Renko charts, which delivered a 1.2% increase. It says the Renko charts I generally used were five-year monthly graph with the block size set automatically by stock doctor.

[00:55:39] Cameron: In some cases, the monthly charts didn’t give a block in the last five years, so I used five-year weekly for those. There was about six out of the 50 stocks checked the results of the regression test. Testing had me thinking over the last few weeks that QAV relies on the Michael Jordan stocks to produce the outsized results and the churn of Rule one stocks helps to give you the best chance of owning the Michael Jordan stocks when they go up.

[00:56:03] Cameron: This is backed up by Daryl’s Post this morning saying his win loss on stocks is thirty-three percent to sixty-six percent, which is almost identical to what I got doing the regression testing and better than my personal portfolio. It has me wondering if focusing on selling at the right time is misleading and maybe we need a higher bar to try and improve the win-loss ratio and improve the results by reducing the losses.

[00:56:28] Cameron: Interested to hear Tony’s thoughts on the last section? Uh, now I asked him to drill down on that a little bit. Um, I was trying to figure out. So the increases that he’s talking about, are they per year or over the entire period of the testing? He said it was over the entire test period, which was from ow.

[00:56:51] Cameron: Oh, just got a cramp in one of my thigh muscles. Just moved my leg and go, ah, god dammit, I need

[00:57:03] Tony: You shouldn’t have said those. You shouldn’t have said those nasty things about Rupert

[00:57:06] Tony: Murdoch

[00:57:07] Tony: earlier on.

[00:57:08] Cameron: He’s attacking me with his evil, uh, emperor, you know, dark side

[00:57:14] Tony: the Wi-Fi

[00:57:16] Tony: through the

[00:57:17] Tony: 5G.

[00:57:18] Cameron: Oh God, that hurts.

[00:57:20] Cameron: So I should have had some electrolytes after kung fu training this morning. Um, so he said the test period was from the 6th of September, 2021 to the 5th of January, 2024. And so when he is talking about a 1.7% increase for the three year weekly hug line, that’s over that entire period.

[00:57:39] Cameron: Which is, you know, sort of two and half years, roughly over two and a

[00:57:44] Tony: Mm-Hmm.

[00:57:46] Cameron: And then I asked him how the cell triggers work, like if he’s using all of our standard cell triggers and a Renko or, and a three weekly hug line, which takes priority. Um, and he said it’s driven by the date the cell trigger recurred.

[00:58:02] Cameron: I tried to mimic it if it was just added as another trigger to watch in the process and sold on the first trigger. So if a stock ruled one, uh, rule one on the 15th of April 22, but red brick Renko’d on the 1st of February 22, then I’d use the red brick Renko as the sale value, which makes sense. So that’s, so he’s also got a question after this, but that’s his, uh, regression analysis and, uh, looking at hug lines and Renko’s and, uh, what do you think about all of that, Tony?

[00:58:35] Tony: Yeah, it’s good analysis. Thank you. Um, it’s a little different to my Renko chart analysis. So Ruddy also went through. Our dummy portfolio from the start and use Renko charts to trade. And the analysis came out to be about line ball compared to how we normally do it. And I set up a dummy portfolio last year to add Renko charts to our normal rules.

[00:59:00] Tony: So as you just said, it was an additional rule to how we buy and sell. And the, uh, the portfolio underperformed a lot, so I’ve, I’ve just stopped doing that. It’s convinced me that, um, it wasn’t adding value. I, I think there might be some value to add, and I’m trying this now about, um, whether we buy a stock, if it’s a Renko red or not.

[00:59:23] Tony: So don’t worry about the sell of it, but the buying side of it. Um. I, I, the couple of things about Renko’s, which I found difficult and maybe, um, maybe, uh, who’s this, uh, Jordan, maybe Jordan solved it was, was actually getting alerts for, for trades with Renko because what I’ve had to do is to go into stock, doctor, look at what, where I think the price would be if, uh, it changed color from red to green or green to red, and use the fixed price alert for that, and then go back in next month and have a look.

[00:59:54] Tony: And it, it is a bit of hit and miss because the Renko chart. The size of the boxes gets changed all the time. It’s a dynamic type of process, so you can be out of date with that. Um, but it also produced lots of false positives. So I was always going in saying, okay, it’s, it’s dropped to that cell price, but that hasn’t changed color in the box.

[01:00:13] Tony: It’s now on it’s way back up again. Or it’s, it’s just, you know, it was a green, it didn’t go the red, it’s just created a new green box. So I found the alert side of things difficult, but that’s a practical thing, which maybe Jordan can shed some lights on, light on. Um, I’ve never tested a three-year weekly hug line, but those results are interesting and we’d have to do some further testing on that.

[01:00:35] Tony: Um, you know, I, I think the way to test that is again, to set up a. Dummy portfolio and see how it performs going forward. Um, to use a three-year hug line, um, I’m, I’m guessing that Jordan was only doing that for the stocks where he needed it. So the five-year monthly does take care of most stocks. It’s only those ones which are gone up quite considerably in the last sort of year or two, but it means the sell line’s well below where the price is now.

[01:01:01] Tony: So, um, but yeah, we could add that to the list and try and do some further research on that, but that’s promising. Um, the one-year weekly hug line and 0.5% increase, I think is getting too statistically insignificant because I, I still, you have to be wary of the fact that even though it’s a four-year regression test, it’s still, those four years weren’t the same as other four years in the market.

[01:01:24] Tony: So I think it does require us to do a forward test as well to see if it, how it trades on paper anyway, going forward,

[01:01:30] Cameron: years.

[01:01:30] Cameron: It’s like two and a half years.

[01:01:32] Tony: Well, two and a half. Yeah. Um, so when things are, were only very marginally better or worse, it’s hard to take them, um, as being anything more than just statistically

[01:01:41] Tony: insignificant for that period.

[01:01:43] Cameron: even the 1.7% increase for the three-year weekly hug line over two and a half years, uh, one seven or 1.7% improvement over two and a half years is, is, doesn’t seem much per year.

[01:01:57] Tony: Yeah. It’s slim. So, but it’s, it may, it may indicate something which works and maybe it works better in other periods. So I think it is worthwhile setting up a dummy portfolio and, and trialing it going forwards. Or if we get regression testing automated to put that through the

[01:02:11] Tony: testing code. Yeah,

[01:02:12] Cameron: or 20 year. Speaking of which I, I, uh, by the way, thank you Jordan. I’ll get back to your question from your sister in a minute, but, um, while we’re on the topic of regression testing, I sent you an email last week. I’m not sure if you had a chance to look at it ’cause you were golfing about the regression test I did.

[01:02:30] Cameron: Going back to early 2022.

[01:02:33] Tony: I

[01:02:33] Tony: did look at it. Yeah.

[01:02:34] Cameron: Did you have any thoughts on that? So just for the listeners, I used Matt Walker’s regression testing system, which still has, uh, a few bugs in it, but it is what it is. Um, and I, I, you know, we’ve been having this conversation about QAV and all of the rule ones and is it being driven by us and us publishing stuff and people all selling and buying at the same time?

[01:02:58] Cameron: This doesn’t, um, remove that totally as a factor, but because it’s, uh, an automated regression test and it’s not based around anything that we’re publishing, hopefully it has some element of random trial quality about it. But anyway, I, I started it at the same date. I started the light portfolios 15th of February, 2022.

[01:03:20] Cameron: Gave it the same budget, 80,000 that they’ve had, and it returned a CAGR of negative 13.5%, um, over that period.

[01:03:30] Tony: Negative. I thought that was, sorry. Negative 13.5%. I thought it

[01:03:34] Tony: was like 1.3. Did I read that wrong? Did I?

[01:03:36] Cameron: Yeah. negative negative 0.135, which is negative

[01:03:42] Tony: Okay.

[01:03:43] Cameron: Right.

[01:03:44] Tony: Mm-Hmm.

[01:03:45] Cameron: Um, I think 0.135 was the result. Yeah.

[01:03:51] Tony: Well, is it, is it a number or is it a percentage that I read it to be

[01:03:54] Tony: a per

[01:03:55] Tony: 0.13

[01:03:56] Cameron: No, I think, okay. Let me open the spreadsheet. Um, well, it’s not giving me it, it’s not telling me here. It’s, it gives me a start date, an end date, final value. Yeah. Well, the final value was less, so the starting cash was 80,000. The final cash was 61,609 T.

[01:04:15] Tony: so it would be minus 13?

[01:04:16] Cameron: Yeah. So it’s minus 13.5%. Uh, well, not per annum though.

[01:04:22] Cameron: Or is it, uh, what’s it? Yeah. Minus say sixty-two thousand

[01:04:28] Tony: in total,

[01:04:29] Cameron: 18. 18%. Yeah.

[01:04:31] Cameron: So that’s,

[01:04:33] Cameron: I mean, that’s what it got. Using the QAV rules over that period the last couple of years, which we know have had problems. Um,

[01:04:45] Cameron: you know, thinking it through, as I said, like does it completely remove the QAV member community trading aspect of it, influencing that?

[01:04:56] Cameron: Not completely, but it does seem to support the idea that just the system has not handled the last couple of years very well because of the turbulence, I think, um, of the market.

[01:05:12] Tony: Look, I, I dunno, I think you could be, you could be right. Um, it certainly, certainly has been a, a heavy churning period for the last two years for us. Um, and that’s, that’s my other comment was that I have been in my own portfolio a 20% rule one stop-loss, um, which has slowed down the churn dramatically.

[01:05:30] Tony: Um, but I do have a couple of stocks which are basically stranded at sort of, you know, roughly minus 15% on what I paid for them. Um, and using a 20% stop loss means I just sit there and wait for them to recover, which is not a bad thing, um, as opposed to a rule one where I would’ve sold them and tried to buy something else quickly to, to make up that loss and something that’s increasing.

[01:05:50] Tony: So, yeah, I’m not sure. I mean, there’s swings and roundabouts with this. I’m not sure what’s

[01:05:54] Tony: gonna work out to be best, but that’s why I’m trialling it.

[01:05:56] Cameron: mm Well, I can run a 20% regression test, uh, using MatSystem

[01:06:02] Tony: Yeah. Good.

[01:06:04] Cameron: you know, I mean, should I do it over the, that same time period, 20 twenty-two onwards, or, yeah.

[01:06:11] Tony: Yeah. I mean, Ryan did that for me manually and he came over the three, three and a half year period I think. And he came back saying that 10% beat had a CAGA that was better than 20%, but only I think by about one or 1.5% over that time period. And his thought was it was because the 10% rule one had a lot more selling and buying than the 20% rule

[01:06:32] Tony: one, which meant you had more of a chance of

[01:06:34] Tony: catching that,

[01:06:35] Cameron: Michael Jordan. That’s what Daryl

[01:06:37] Tony: performing. yeah. Michael Jordan.

[01:06:38] Tony: Yeah.

[01:06:39] Cameron: yeah. Gives you more

[01:06:40] Cameron: opportunities to find the Michael Jordan.

[01:06:43] Tony: Hmm.

[01:06:44] Cameron: Uh, all right, uh, so back to Jordan’s question then. He says, my sister’s been asking for advice about talking with her children regarding the stock market. The oldest is nine at the moment, and I’d be interested to hear yours or Tony’s thoughts or experiences. Well, funny you should mention that coming up as our new show, QAV for Kids.

[01:07:07] Tony: Is that right?

[01:07:08] Cameron: No. No, but it could be.

[01:07:10] Tony: Disney? QAV. Disney.

[01:07:12] Cameron: Can We just get

[01:07:13] Tony: we get

[01:07:14] Tony: sock puppets. Sock puppets to explain the stock

[01:07:16] Tony: market.

[01:07:17] Cameron: Hello boys and

[01:07:18] Cameron: girls. I’m going to do it like this, the whole

[01:07:22] Tony: window are we looking through today?

[01:07:25] Cameron: This is Jemima. Hello Jemima.

[01:07:29] Tony: Uh,

[01:07:30] Cameron: Who was

[01:07:30] Tony: Ted. What’s that?

[01:07:31] Cameron: Who was that, uh,

[01:07:34] Cameron: play school host in the seventies and early eighties that, uh, said some questionable things? John Blondhead.

[01:07:43] Cameron: Yeah, there’s these clips on YouTube of him saying, uh, you know, sexually coded words.

[01:07:52] Tony: really?

[01:07:53] Tony: Oh, I hope I’ve got his name right then. I don’t wanna impugn his motors

[01:07:57] Tony: if I got it wrong.

[01:07:58] Cameron: co-hosts sort of cracking up as their. Saying this stuff, which is sort of, you know, encoded sexually explicit stuff for the little kids.

[01:08:09] Tony: Right. Well, apologies to John Hamblin, if it’s not John Hamblin.

[01:08:13] Cameron: you can get away with that sort of stuff in the, uh, uh,

[01:08:17] Tony: Yeah.

[01:08:18] Cameron: Yeah. John Hamlin, that’s a, I just

[01:08:20] Tony: it was John Hamblin.

[01:08:21] Cameron: Yeah. He, he passed away so he’s not gonna

[01:08:23] Cameron: care. But, uh, passed away, uh, 2022 aged 87 Play School host for nearly 30 years.

[01:08:31] Cameron: Oh, there you go. In the obit and the Guardian, it says, affectionately known as Naughty John. There you go. I was right. Um, Hamlin became affectionately known as Naughty John while hosting the show for his cheeky sense of humor. Uh, there you go. Um, I, they, they, uh,

[01:08:51] Tony: Well, look,

[01:08:52] Tony: it’s, this is a really good

[01:08:53] Tony: question

[01:08:53] Tony: and, and, um,

[01:08:54] Cameron: John had a wicked sense of humor and was not afraid of a ante.

[01:08:59] Cameron: His presence always managed to keep both our toddler target audience and their parents equally engaged with the show. Says ABC, director of Entertainment, Rupert Murdoch. Um, no. No. Jennifer Collins. No. He might as well be running the ABC these days. Anyway, moving. Yes.

[01:09:22] Tony: moving along, I think it’s a good question that Jordan’s raised and yeah, we, we could talk a lot about it too. And interestingly enough, it’s, it’s kind of a, um, I was talking with Steve Mabb yesterday about the ASA and its strategy going forward. He has a number of. Thoughts on that. And I, I think, again, good luck to him.

[01:09:40] Tony: I hope he achieves what he sets out to achieve. But one of the things he mentioned was that the, the profile of ASA members is, is, is kind of like skewed towards retirees. Um, uh, and they weren’t bringing in young people into the association. So I think it’s the kind of same thing. It’s it’s how do you talk about finances with young people who, um, may not be interested in the share market or interested in finances.

[01:10:03] Tony: So just trying to get a, you know, live from hand to, uh, live from week to week and hand to mouth. So, um, that’s probably a different question to someone who’s nine years old. But for what it’s worth, uh, you know, I remember when Alex was very young. I think she was about four or five. We used to sit down, I used to get stock market reports in the mail on printouts.

[01:10:27] Tony: And,

[01:10:28] Tony: uh, I’d open the letter and sit down

[01:10:30] Tony: with her and go through it. And

[01:10:31] Cameron: You gave me shit for us taking Fox to some Apple courses a couple of weeks ago, and that’s what you used to do. Come on. Wow.

[01:10:42] Tony: Well, Alex took an interest. I’d be sitting there reading these, the stock market reports, and she’d come over and say, what are you doing? And we’d go, we’d go through it. But I used to give her the, the, the newsletter and I’d say, okay, what’s this? Is this a buy or a sell? And she’d open it up and have a look at, you know, AGL.

[01:10:57] Tony: And she knew enough to know if the graph was going from bottom left to top right, it was a buy. And if it wasn’t, it was a sell. So we used to play that game, buy or sell, and look at the charts of different companies. And, and that got her started. Didn’t really take, that was the end of her interest in the stock market.

[01:11:12] Tony: But, um, we, we actually talked about that recently that we used to do that.

[01:11:17] Tony: Um, I think the, my other comment

[01:11:19] Cameron: talking with her therapist about the fact that that’s what you subjected her to as a child.

[01:11:28] Tony: yeah. Um. But I think like for a nine-year-old, and even for Alex when she was six, the stock market is a, is a very abstract concept. I’d probably starting way back before that in terms of simple financials. Like, um, you know, explain to them who paid for the house, who buys the food, who take, who does a job, how do they get paid?

[01:11:50] Tony: How, how does that all work as, um, as something that a, a kid, a kid might get interested in. And, you know, people talk about, you know, uh, paying their kids’ allowances and, and to teach them how to save and to start getting ’em to pay for their own things. And I know you’ve done that with Fox,

[01:12:05] Cameron: And the

[01:12:05] Tony: um, as well, and the twins.

[01:12:08] Tony: Yeah. So that’s important. But, um, I, uh, you know, getting them interested in getting a job I think was a big thing for me. When I was a kid. I was mind-blowing when I was a, I wasn’t nine, I was probably about 12 or 13, that one of my classmates was able to afford a boom box when they came into school with a Rodeo cassette player.

[01:12:26] Tony: Um, and you know, I said, where’d you get that from? And he said, well. I have a paper route. I get on my bike before school every morning, deliver papers, and I get paid 15 bucks a week. And that kind of just blew my mind. It just motivated me to get jobs. It just blew my mind. And, um, it was hard for me to find a job.

[01:12:42] Tony: The local newsagent didn’t need another paperboy. Um, and by law he had to be 15 to get employed, um, in big companies. So it was hard to get a job. But because I was a tall kid, I started working at the local Walton’s department store when I was 14 and put my age up, um, and made a lot of mistakes. I probably was too young to start working in a complex business like that, but, um, but yeah, I think that for me was a motivator.

[01:13:07] Tony: So I’d start with simple things about, um, earning money, what to do when you earn, earn it, and then get into, okay, what do you do with your spare change? And talk about savings, bank interest, and then how do you improve on bank interest and what are the risk and rewards of doing that? And that gets you into the investment later.

[01:13:28] Tony: Um, so you start talking about the stock market and how it has an index and how you can buy that index and what that performance has been over time and get into discussions of compound growth. And, you know, you can, there are, I guess, tutorials on online about that, but, you know, simply you can take out some grains of rice and show that one becomes two, becomes four, becomes eight over time.

[01:13:50] Tony: And how you, how that is achieved through compound growth. Um, yeah. And go up the investment ladder to, to creating your own index fund, to working out which stocks in that index that you’ve created do the heavy lifting and which ones are the losers. And, and then looking, you know, wider into the rest of the ASX in terms of finding companies that have those profiles and.

[01:14:11] Tony: It’s, it’s kind of that whole process, um, which you do over time. You don’t try and do it all in half an hour after school one day. Uh, but, but that gets them into thinking about those things and thinking about what they might do when they’re old enough to have a job. And I guess you have to talk about property with that as well, um, and, and how the housing market works too, and how, you know, you, you, how renting works versus owning your own home and how you often take a loan out to do that and all that kind of thing.

[01:14:37] Tony: So I think it’s just starting an open discussion. And it’s great that this person’s thinking of doing that when the kids are nine. Because when I was nine, when I was 19, my parents didn’t talk at all about, about finances and didn’t know themselves much about finances. So it’s great that, um, a parent’s willing to do that for their ch for

[01:14:55] Tony: their kids.

[01:14:58] Cameron: Yeah, I, I agree. I think it, like I didn’t get any education on any of this kinda stuff until. We started doing this show five years ago. So, I mean, but you know, when, when the twins were little, and I’ve done the same thing with Fox. I’ve had this idea of the Bank of Daddy, which has always just been a spreadsheet.

[01:15:16] Cameron: And, uh, they have to take with the twins. And I think it started the same way with Fox. It was a percentage. If they, if they got any money as at birthday times or Christmas from grandparents or whatever, they got half of it maybe to spend. And then the other half went into an investment account, which was the bank of Daddy.

[01:15:33] Cameron: And I would pay them an interest rate. And then they, they would check in every now and again. How much do I have in that? And they would put more money into it every time they got more money. And you know, Fox has been doing that since, I think we started this podcast not long after that. He’s nine and a half, nearly 10 now.

[01:15:52] Cameron: Nine and a half. He’s been doing it probably for four or five years. Um, and you know, I, I was paying him an, an exorbitant interest rate in the early days of it so he could actually see it going up in a short timeframe. I think I was paying him like a dollar a day. He put a couple a hundred bucks or a couple hundred bucks in it initially as his starting capital, I was paying him like a dollar a day.

[01:16:17] Cameron: And you know, we’d work out every couple of months how much it had grown by. ’cause that’s what I wanted to get him interested in, is the idea of putting something away and it growing while he does nothing over time. And then at some point a couple of years in, I was like, yeah, this is ridiculous. I’m cutting it down now to a lower interest rate.

[01:16:35] Cameron: And he was furious and, and he forgot. And then he checked in with me like a month or so ago, how much money? And I told him, he goes, it should be a lot more than that. And I go, well, no, you remember I adjusted. He goes, you what? He thinks it’s

[01:16:49] Tony: Cost of living

[01:16:50] Cameron: Yeah, that’s right. It is using me

[01:16:52] Cameron: of a bait and switch. And if he ever tries, if he ever tries to call it in, it’s gonna create a run on the bank of daddy. ’cause I don’t have the money to pay him. I’d be like, ah, sorry there is no money. Take it up with the government. Um, but yeah.

[01:17:08] Tony: and Fox should compared bank rates to the bank of dad and take his money and put it in the bank.

[01:17:13] Cameron: Yeah. True. That’s what I’ll say. If you don’t like it, go put it somewhere else. ’cause he can’t get his money to put in the bank. ’cause I don’t have the money,

[01:17:20] Cameron: so.

[01:17:21] Tony: I remember when I started having these conversations with Alex when she was in high school and I took her to a Canadian bank to open up a bank account and we put a thousand dollars in there and I said, you know, just watch this grow and learn about compound interest and stuff. I think the interest rate was like 0.01%, so I think for a thousand dollars, like a cent or 10 cents or

[01:17:39] Cameron: Yeah.

[01:17:39] Tony: and it cost, you know, 20 bucks a year to keep the account open.

[01:17:43] Cameron: yeah.

[01:17:44] Cameron: yeah,

[01:17:45] Tony: where the, that’s where the lesson

[01:17:46] Tony: ended.

[01:17:47] Cameron: Banks,

[01:17:48] Tony: another, another, another thing to that, that this mother or father could do with their 9-year-old is to buy them a share. Buy them, buy them one stock in an index fund, or buy them one stock in BHP and let the kid do what Fox is doing with the your bank, but with an actual share and tell ’em how to look up the price and let them decide whether to keep it or

[01:18:07] Tony: sell it

[01:18:08] Tony: and all that kind of stuff too.

[01:18:09] Cameron: I should do that with Fox. Like the idea was always when he had enough money in his bank of Daddy account to do that, to set up a little portfolio for him and start to buy shares.

[01:18:19] Cameron: And it’s probably at a level now where we could start to do that, um, and then help him manage it and learn how to manage it.

[01:18:26] Cameron: Have a monthly meeting where we sit down and look at it. That kind of thing. Yeah.

[01:18:30] Tony: And there certainly are apps out there which do micro portfolios

[01:18:33] Tony: too,

[01:18:34] Cameron: Oh, right. Okay. Yeah, I, I should look

[01:18:37] Tony: you can

[01:18:38] Tony: put real money into them. Yeah.

[01:18:41] Cameron: Good idea. Anyway, I look, I do think it’s, it’s great, um, to teach kids this an early age. Of course, you know, I think by the time Fox’s 20, there will be no more economy. It’ll all be run by the ai. It’ll be centrally managed. So no

[01:18:55] Tony: Yeah, that’s a

[01:18:56] Cameron: do all of that. But anyway,

[01:18:58] Tony: okay,

[01:18:58] Cameron: in case

[01:18:59] Tony: assume that may not happen. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

[01:19:02] Cameron: yeah.

[01:19:05] Tony: Well, you should ask the chat GPT. What are the chances of there being no, uh,

[01:19:09] Tony: capitalist economy in five years

[01:19:11] Tony: time?

[01:19:12] Cameron: Not five 10, but, uh, I was gonna, I was gonna say, the other thing to do is I, like, I would get into chat GPT and say, you know, how do I teach my nine-year-old investing? Because it’s really good at that, at breaking stuff down for kids. Fox. Fox got into, he, he read his first as. Directs comic over the last couple of weeks that he got out from the library and struggled with it for the first week with the Latin.

[01:19:35] Cameron: He kept asking me what the Latin meant, and I thought he was gonna give it up, but the, the other, the opposite thing happened. He be, he loves it. He’s now, he wants to read all of them in an order. And we’ve been watching some of the animated versions and a live action film that came out last year. He’s totally into it.

[01:19:49] Cameron: And, and so he was asking me about the big rock that Obelisk was carrying around and we got talking about Stonehenge and then we watched some videos on Stonehenge, but I was driving him home from school the other day and I just pulled up GPT on my phone and I said, talk to, uh, I’ve got my 9-year-old in the car with me.

[01:20:07] Cameron: Explain. The history and the significance of Stonehenge to him. And it did, you know, we had this chat for a few minutes about Stonehenge and when it was built and why it was built and what it does, what function it performs, and we could ask it questions to drill down at it as we were driving. And it is fabulous for that kind stuff.

[01:20:26] Cameron: I’m, I’m so jealous of kids

[01:20:30] Tony: Hmm.

[01:20:30] Cameron: today that they have access to this. Like it’s the world’s greatest encyclopedia that will answer your questions and, you know, explain things to you in detail or in different ways if you didn’t understand it, et cetera, et cetera. It’s uh, just an incredible, it is an incredible tool for kids.

[01:20:50] Cameron: It’s mind blowing.

[01:20:52] Tony: Mm.

[01:20:53] Cameron: Anyway. Yes, ask it about investing. It’s a good, uh, good way to use it. Well, that is, uh, the regular part of the show, TK. Now, well, we, we can do an after hour show, but in your email to me, you said you don’t have anything to talk about. So this whole idea of us having a standalone after hour show, kind of, I don’t feel, you know, you know, very confident when you go, I got nothing to talk about.

[01:21:17] Cameron: I just was playing golf with Ruddy for three days, so I’ve done nothing.

[01:21:20] Tony: yeah. Yeah. Well, I’m still reading Elon Musk’s autobiography. That’s gonna

[01:21:25] Tony: take me a while to get through, I think, unfortunately.

[01:21:28] Tony: Um,

[01:21:28] Cameron: are you up to in that?

[01:21:30] Tony: Still early days. He’s, um, he’s just, uh, setting up PayPal

[01:21:36] Cameron: right.

[01:21:38] Tony: Yeah. Or dealing with PayPal and merging and

[01:21:41] Tony: there’s a lot of corporate shenanigans going on with

[01:21:43] Tony: that.

[01:21:43] Cameron: Yeah. Him and, uh, Peter. What’s

[01:21:46] Tony: Peter Thiel.

[01:21:47] Cameron: The, yeah.

[01:21:48] Tony: Yeah.

[01:21:49] Cameron: Okay. Anything else?

[01:21:52] Tony: No, that’s me.

[01:21:54] Cameron: Mm, well, I’ve, I’ve been.

[01:21:56] Cameron: I read, uh, you know, I finished, I think I told you last week, I finished the Gogol book, but then I started reading notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky, and I got about halfway through that and it’s just, uh, it’s just too angry for me.

[01:22:10] Cameron: I, I, I couldn’t sort of get into it. So I put that down. Then I started I, Chrissie and I just did our first episode of our new Kung Fu podcast. And so I’ve been reading a couple of books on the history of Shaolin over the last couple of weeks. So I was going deep into that and that led me to reading the Lankavatara Sutra, which I may have read when I was 19 or 20, but I don’t think I have.

[01:22:33] Cameron: It was the Buddhist Sutra that Bodhidharma supposedly used as the basis for his teaching of Chan Buddhism at Shaolin. So I’ve been reading that, which has been fascinating. Um, lot

[01:22:49] Tony: So let, let me, let me ask a question, right? So I’ve always been sort of entranced or. Enchanted by Buddhism, but I’ve never felt the need to follow it or, or, you know, live by its principles. What, what, what would convince me to, um, look into

[01:23:04] Tony: another theology?

[01:23:07] Cameron: Buddhism isn’t necessarily a theology. Okay, so you know, it depends on which branch of Buddhism you want to go into. Like if you go back and you read about the life and the teachings as far as they can piece ’em together of Siddhartha, Gautama, the Buddha, it’s really about enlightenment. It’s not about theology, it’s not about gods.

[01:23:34] Cameron: It’s about enlightenment, which is about. Seeing the oneness of things and realizing that, uh, the, the perception that we have of the universe is really an illusion caused by the senses. There’s a deeper underlying reality, and that’s what my three Illusions book is all about, right? It’s okay. Well, we think of ourselves as separate, and we think of all of the objects as being separate, but really that’s what our brain is telling us based on the information that it gets from the sensors.

[01:24:03] Cameron: But that’s not what’s really happening at a deeper level. It’s it’s molecules, it’s atoms, it’s subatomic particles. And atoms don’t have a hard shell around them. They have a fuzzy probability cloud. So really, your body doesn’t have a hard. Shell around it, it’s connected to the air around you, which is connected to the objects, the chair, the desk, the table, the wall, the other people.

[01:24:28] Cameron: So it, it’s about rethinking your sense of identity and your place in the universe and how everything is connected, which in theory gives you deeper level of, of, uh, uh, peace. Uh, less anxiety, less anger when you rethink the, the connected tissue of the universe. But,

[01:24:50] Tony: given I accept all that stuff anyway. ’cause I’ve read your book and I,

[01:24:54] Tony: so I don’t feel any, I feel

[01:24:56] Tony: unchanged

[01:24:57] Cameron: no, that’s, oh, you do,

[01:25:00] Cameron: well, they,

[01:25:01] Tony: I, I know something today I didn’t know yesterday, but that’s about it. It doesn’t make me feel, um, any more, you know, any more equilibrium with things rather than getting angry if I

[01:25:10] Tony: stub my toe or, um,

[01:25:12] Tony: laugh at a joke.

[01:25:13] Cameron: don’t get angry. You’re already enlightened. You’re just naturally enlightened, and so you have nothing to gain.

[01:25:19] Tony: I should talk to Jenny and Alex about whether I get angry or

[01:25:22] Tony: not.

[01:25:24] Cameron: Well, maybe then you should, uh, look into it a little bit more deeply. Maybe you, maybe you think you understand it at an intellectual level, but you haven’t really, and I’m being serious, not about you, but there is, there’s a big difference between intellectually under, and I find this with neuroscientists.

[01:25:43] Cameron: Uh, and, and you know, um, when I read them say, look, I know, um, from the level of physics and neuroscience that free will probably doesn’t exist because we have no scientific theory for it. But I still feel like I have free will and I still act like I have free will. So that’s a difference between.

[01:26:07] Tony: I’m happy

[01:26:07] Tony: in my illusion.

[01:26:08] Cameron: Well, I wouldn’t go so

[01:26:10] Cameron: far as to say they’re happy in it, but they are in it.

[01:26:13] Cameron: So there’s a big difference between understanding something intellectually and integrating that understanding deeply into your daily life and your self-concept about who you are and who everyone else is and how the world works. It’s, it’s a bigger leap, um, to make. But anyway, so Buddhism though, for like a thousand years after the Buddha died in 500, BCE, give or take, did sort of become sort of a religious type of thing where people were Mahayana Buddhism, you know, it was all about studying the scriptures and living according to the Eightfold path.

[01:26:54] Tony: a theology.

[01:26:56] Cameron: they did start to introduce God. I mean, it comes out of India, right? So you, it’s sort of. You had Hinduism with all of its gods, and then Buddhism and Hinduism kind of syncretized. And so the Bodhisattvas became kind of gods that they would look up to, and all of

[01:27:13] Tony: Well even take.

[01:27:14] Cameron: and that kind of stuff.

[01:27:16] Tony: even if you discount the fact that there are gods or there aren’t gods, it’s still a theology in terms of, you know, you become a monk, you shave your head, you get rid of your material possessions. There’s a kind of

[01:27:26] Tony: prescribed way of living so you can attain

[01:27:28] Tony: enlightenment.

[01:27:29] Cameron: That’s not a theology, that’s a

[01:27:30] Cameron: philosophy though, right?

[01:27:32] Tony: okay, what’s the

[01:27:32] Tony: philosophy then?

[01:27:33] Tony: If I’ve got my terms wrong, I’ve got my

[01:27:34] Cameron: Well, theology assumes a DEOs a, a belief in a God,

[01:27:39] Tony: okay, well what do you, so what do you call something which tells you how to live your life

[01:27:43] Tony: to achieve enlightenment but doesn’t

[01:27:45] Tony: involve a

[01:27:46] Cameron: That’s, it’s, it’s a

[01:27:47] Tony: Look, it kind of does enlightenment’s the kind of God

[01:27:50] Tony: in this case, isn’t it?

[01:27:51] Cameron: No, enlightenment’s not a God. It’s nothing, something that’s separate to you and above you. It’s, uh, a process that you undergo. Which changes the way that you see yourself and the world around you and your place in the

[01:28:04] Tony: So God

[01:28:05] Tony: is, so, God is within you.

[01:28:07] Cameron: Well actually, I mean, the way I would explain it to a, uh, religious person is what enlightenment really is.

[01:28:15] Cameron: It’s kind of pantheism. You know what I would argue that Buddha, uh, is saying, and what Zen teachers and Chan and Advaita Vedanta is that there is only God. Everything is God. You are God. Everything around you is God. And in scientific terms, we call that the universe. There is only the universe. We are

[01:28:39] Tony: So it’s a theology.

[01:28:42] Cameron: depending on your

[01:28:43] Tony: I, what I, what I draw the line out is I can, I can buy into the logic of it, but I can’t buy into, it’s gonna change me spiritually. It’s gonna change my, the way I live my life every day, day to day. I don’t like being, having a prescribed way of doing

[01:28:58] Tony: things.

[01:28:59] Cameron: There’s no prescribed way of doing things.

[01:29:02] Cameron: at

[01:29:02] Tony: Mirror is, is a

[01:29:03] Cameron: in, my, in my

[01:29:04] Tony: prescribed way of doing things to get a

[01:29:06] Tony: to find enlightenment.

[01:29:07] Cameron: No. Well, no, not really. I mean, you can FI I’ve, I’ve known people I know. A, a woman, an American woman, a friend of ours who got her enlightenment when she was sitting in the desert in Arizona, suddenly came outta nowhere. Um, uh, when her father died, she was just sitting in the desert and had this realization that there was no separation between her.

[01:29:31] Cameron: And, and then she didn’t talk to anyone about it for like 10 years. And we were having dinner with what with her one night. And she was sort of hesitantly explaining this, like she, that we would think, what she was saying was like, really weird. And I was like. Yeah, I know. I worked that out like 30 years ago too.

[01:29:49] Cameron: That’s how we live. And she was like, really? I didn’t know anyone else felt this way. And I’m like, yeah, lots of us. She had no. Sort of exposure to enlightenment, schools of thought or whatever. Anyway, my point was gonna be that what, what Boddhidharma’s School of Thought, the Chan Buddhism, which turned into Zen Buddhism was saying, listen, ignore the scriptures.

[01:30:11] Cameron: Ignore, you know, living the eightfold path. It’s got nothing to do with that. That’s all good. If you want to go do that, go do that. Really it’s about, it’s an intellectual exercise of understanding, um, how your mind works and that the mind is, uh, creating these narratives. But the narratives are really just that they’re a narrative.

[01:30:31] Cameron: They’re not the underlying reality. And seeing, seeing through the narratives into the underlying re reality and having a direct experience of enlightenment, not trying to get it through worship or practices or, you know, being a vegetarian or the Eightfold path. Stuff about treating other animals as sentient beings and all that kinda stuff.

[01:30:51] Cameron: And that, and that’s sort of the direction that Zen took because it came outta Chan Advaita Vedanta, which comes out of Hinduism and is older, but it’s the same. But from a, just from a Hindu perspective, you know, but it’s the same sort of direct approach. Um, anyway, long story short, Lankan for Tara Sutra is the Buddhist scripture.

[01:31:10] Cameron: That is sort of the Buddha talking to a guy, one of his disciples and telling him all this stuff. Um, so anyway, I also have been watching the Black Lady Sketch Show. We just discovered that, uh, the Black Lady Sketch Show. I think it’s on binge. Um, very funny bunch of black ladies. Um, written, directed, produced.

[01:31:35] Cameron: Everyone behind the scenes is a black lady. It’s a very black lady centric comedy show, and we kinda like those. So we like sketch slash comedy shows that are written by non-white people. Um, they just have a different kind of a focus and energy and vibe to them. It’s a little bit fresher for white people to see comedy that comes from a different perspective, I think.

[01:32:01] Cameron: So anyway, we’re really enjoying that. Chrissie’s, pretty convinced she’s half black girl anyway, so it’s sort of right in her wheelhouse. New season of Curb. Your Enthusiasm has dropped. We watched the first episode of that last night, Larry’s final season. There’s a great, there’s a great scene in the first episode where he’s trying to get directions from Siri in his car and I can’t understand what he’s saying and he loses his damn mind.

[01:32:26] Cameron: It goes on for like five minutes. Him just getting angry and angry and screaming and vector at Siri, which I think we can all relate to. It’s pretty good.

[01:32:38] Tony: Yep.

[01:32:39] Cameron: And then I was listening to a lot of Jacques Brel this morning as people who got my newsletter will know because I was quoting a Jacques Brel song.

[01:32:46] Cameron: You ever gotten a Jacques Brel? Tony

[01:32:49] Tony: I have not, no.

[01:32:51] Cameron: Alex would be familiar with at least one or two Jacques Brel songs because he was covered a lot. He’s this Belgian singer in French in the fifties through to the seventies, died aged 49 in the late seventies. Um, but Bowie covered a couple of his songs and Scott Walker.

[01:33:13] Cameron: Covered a couple of his songs and I know that Alex is a fan of Bowie, but also of Scott Walker ’cause she and I have talked about Scott Walker and the Walker Brothers in the past. Um, uh, yeah. And then And Nina Simone and Dusty Springfield and Mark Armand. A lot of people have covered Jacques Brel and he was this French, well Belgian slash French singer-songwriter who was, had a brilliant voice.

[01:33:39] Cameron: He was also an actor, but had a brilliant voice, kind of like an earlier, slightly earlier Serge Gainsbourg kind of thing. This sort of mid-twentieth century French very Latin love songs, but with a beautiful, warm, rich voice and brilliant songs and all that kind of stuff. So we’re, we are very much into Charlotte Gainsbourg.

[01:34:01] Cameron: Have I mentioned that in the show recently? Listened to a lot of her music, a lot of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s music over the last couple of months. And we’ve watched a couple of her TV series and films that she’s been in really getting deep into her. Wanna see, she did a documentary just a couple of years ago on her mother, um.

[01:34:22] Cameron: Uh, shit. What was her mother’s name? Um, Sue Gaines’s, uh, uh, mistress girlfriend for many years. Kate, she was an, she was a British model in em. She’s the English girl and em, yeah, can’t remember her name. Anyway, she passed away last year. There’s a handbag named after her too, that she distanced herself from because she was a vegetarian.

[01:34:48] Cameron: It was made out of leather. Anyway, wanna watch that. But yeah, Charlotte Gainsburg is a great singer. Got some really great albums, great songs in that sort of tradition of her father, but a little bit more Poppy.

[01:35:01] Tony: Okay.

[01:35:01] Cameron: Speaking of which, you’re off to

[01:35:03] Tony: I will check them out.

[01:35:05] Cameron: you’re off to see, uh, Tyler Swift tonight, I believe. Going, you’re a huge Taylor Swift fan.

[01:35:13] Cameron: Can’t get enough of Taylor. You’re a

[01:35:14] Cameron: Swifty. Secret

[01:35:16] Tony: I, uh, I don’t, think I only know one tale of one Taylor Swift songs. The Shake it Off, shake it off.

[01:35:22] Tony: Shake it up.

[01:35:23] Cameron: You know more than me.

[01:35:25] Tony: yeah. I dunno.

[01:35:26] Tony: Anything about Taylor

[01:35:27] Cameron: I have heard that

[01:35:28] Cameron: song. I have heard people go, da da da da da.

[01:35:32] Tony: That’s it. Yeah,

[01:35:33] Cameron: Yeah, yeah. I dunno where I know that from. Oh yes I do. The Bear. Have you watched The Bear yet?

[01:35:39] Tony: Uh, I tried, I watched the first three episodes and gave up on it.

[01:35:42] Cameron: Didn’t like it

[01:35:43] Tony: Yeah. Didn’t grab me. And it, it also too, like, it just seemed a bit clichéd, you know. Died. Guy comes back from a big restaurant to run a small one. Finds out the, the loan sharks pay like loan money that like, it’s just like pulling on all the pressure and you just know he is kind of work his way out of it somehow.

[01:36:01] Tony: ’cause he’s smart

[01:36:01] Tony: and experienced. And I just went, yeah,

[01:36:04] Tony: I’m not

[01:36:04] Cameron: That good? Did you watch Ted? Lasso?

[01:36:07] Tony: Yeah,

[01:36:07] Cameron: But you like that you like Ted Lasso, but you thought this was

[01:36:10] Cameron: cliche? ’cause I thought, I thought the Bear was the less smarmy version of Ted Lasso.

[01:36:16] Tony: Oh, okay. Yeah, it could be fair

[01:36:18] Tony: enough.

[01:36:19] Cameron: Uh,

[01:36:20] Tony: Anyway, I didn’t like,

[01:36:21] Cameron: didn’t like well,

[01:36:22] Tony: I didn’t this, I didn’t dislike it. I just couldn’t be

[01:36:24] Tony: bothered going on with it.

[01:36:25] Cameron: there’s a big scene, I think in the, I don’t know, first or second season where Paz has a, an enlightenment experience in his role in Restauranting, and it’s accompanied to the Taylor Swift song. I’m not sure

[01:36:39] Tony: Oh,

[01:36:39] Cameron: it was, but it might been

[01:36:40] Cameron: one of those.

[01:36:42] Tony: I just remember Alex used to play, uh, used to learn bass guitar in Toronto and they had a concert at the end of the year, and one of the girls, other

[01:36:49] Tony: girls in the group got up and played that

[01:36:50] Tony: song, shake it off.

[01:36:52] Cameron: Wow. She’d been around that long. Taylor

[01:36:53] Cameron: Swift.

[01:36:55] Tony: Mm

[01:36:55] Cameron: Can’t think of her

[01:36:56] Cameron: as only having been around for a couple of years, but I

[01:36:58] Cameron: guess

[01:36:59] Tony: no. It’s gotta be a long time. Yeah,

[01:37:01] Tony: a long while.

[01:37:02] Tony: I.

[01:37:03] Cameron: Yeah. I completely, as I said to you off air, uh, like a month or so ago, I, it was like, okay. I need to give this Taylor Swift thing a crack because I don’t wanna be that old guy.

[01:37:13] Cameron: And I listened to like 10 tracks on Spotify, and I was like, eh, it’s, it’s fine. It’s like reasonable pop music, but it just sounds like lots of other female pop acts to me. I, I didn’t get, you know, it’s like Kylie’s new track that just, she won all these awards for. I listened to that. I was like, oh, Kylie, good for you.

[01:37:33] Cameron: Kylie. Like, you know, good stuff. I, I moved when I moved to Melbourne when I was 17, you know, my whole plan was to date Kylie Minogue and corrupt her, uh, girl next door, uh, persona. But Michael Hutchins beat me too. Yeah, he, Michael Hutchins beat me too. Well, he didn’t beat me. Yeah.

[01:37:52] Cameron: he

[01:37:52] Tony: Oh, why you were beaten out by a better man,

[01:37:54] Tony: I think in

[01:37:55] Tony: that case.

[01:37:56] Cameron: Well, let’s not be judgy about it, Tony, but he, he, uh.

[01:37:59] Tony: well, you know, it’s, you’re all part

[01:38:00] Tony: of the same atoms and universe, so it was really you who

[01:38:02] Tony: was corrupting

[01:38:03] Cameron: corrupted her via my Michael

[01:38:05] Cameron: Hutchins persona avatar. But I saw, anyway, I listened to her big new hit song too. The one that’s just won all the awards. And I was like,

[01:38:13] Tony: But dumb dumb.

[01:38:13] Cameron: I was like, it’s,

[01:38:15] Tony: I know, But I

[01:38:17] Tony: don’t get pop

[01:38:17] Tony: music. I never did.

[01:38:18] Cameron: Well, I think she’s had some

[01:38:20] Cameron: really good songs, uh, that I’ve liked over the years.

[01:38:22] Cameron: Like the last one that she won awards for like 20 years ago. Nah, nah, nah. The nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. I thought that was catchy. I, I’ll give that props,

[01:38:32] Tony: It’s catchy.

[01:38:33] Cameron: but, um, this one not

[01:38:35] Cameron: so much.

[01:38:37] Tony: it’s a bit bit like eating a a no-sugar dessert. It’s not very filling.

[01:38:45] Tony: Yeah. I’m not into

[01:38:46] Tony: that stuff

[01:38:46] Cameron: uh, look, I

[01:38:47] Tony: I’ve gotta, I’ll tell a story. I’ll tell a, speaking of no-sugar desserts, I’ll tell a story against myself. I’ve been getting into, um, watching Suits.

[01:38:56] Tony: Netflix. You ever seen

[01:38:57] Tony: Suits?

[01:38:58] Cameron: uh, it was my old mate, Michael

[01:39:00] Cameron: Seward’s was telling me to watch that 10, 15 years ago when it first came out. And I, and I watched the first episode and it was like, it’s just a bit network-y for me, and everyone tells me it gets better. I think Stephen, Madd might be a big fan of that.

[01:39:14] Tony: Oh, okay.

[01:39:14] Cameron: been telling me to

[01:39:15] Tony: I like, I’ve liked the first season and it goes downhill from there, but I’m still watching it. A bit of a guilty pleasure. Yeah, it’s um, what I found out though, sort of researching a bit, it was written by one of the writers from the West Wing and it’s got that sort of vibe about it.

[01:39:29] Tony: But yeah, it’s a soap opera, like the first season’s really good. It’s fast, quick-witted, think on your feet solving problems, and then it sort of gets into

[01:39:37] Tony: Megan, Markle’s love life and

[01:39:39] Tony: that kind of

[01:39:40] Cameron: Oh, she was in

[01:39:41] Cameron: it

[01:39:41] Tony: there.

[01:39:42] Tony: Yeah. And like I was, I was watching it like halfway through the first season.

[01:39:46] Tony: I’ve gone, oh, I get it now. Like the lead character in Suits is like this kind of little weedy, nerdy, um, idiot savant. And, and he’s in all these, uh, you know, scenes. It’s unrequited love scenes with Megan Markle. And I’m going,

[01:40:05] Tony: you know, if you squint, he looks like

[01:40:07] Tony: Prince Harry.

[01:40:08] Cameron: Is that who she hooked up with?

[01:40:11] Tony: yeah. Yeah.

[01:40:12] Cameron: I know nothing about, oh, tell you what I did watch, uh, was the, um, we are the world documentary.

[01:40:21] Tony: Oh, is that

[01:40:21] Tony: good?

[01:40:23] Cameron: I look, I wouldn’t say it’s good, but it, it’s not like the last dance or something like that. But it’s interesting,

[01:40:34] Cameron: um, you know, for those of us that were around and remember the period, like I didn’t know until I watched this, that Lionel Richie was the main sort of guy I.

[01:40:43] Cameron: Pulling the whole thing together. It was, um, it was, um, well, you know, so, um, Boomtown’s Rats guy did the British version. Do they know it’s Christmas Geldof, thanks. And then Harry Belafonte, it was this, this guy in the US who was sort of a big music manager, guy Kraken, I think his name was released, the Kraken.

[01:41:07] Cameron: And, um, he and Harry Belafonte were talking and said, we need to do something for Africa. Harry Belafonte was all about poverty in Africa at this stage.

[01:41:16] Tony: Mm-Hmm.

[01:41:16] Cameron: said, we need to do something. So this guy, the music manager, I think he managed Lionel Richie, and he said to Lionel, you should do this. And Lionel got into it, and then they reached out to Stevie Wonder to write the song, and Stevie said, I’ll get back to you.

[01:41:28] Cameron: And then they never heard anything back from him. So Lionel Richie got together with Michael Jackson and said, who he’d known forever, since, you know, the Commodores and the Jacksons were on the same circuit. So he and Michael got together to, to write something.

[01:41:43] Cameron: And they weren’t making a lot of progress with it, and they thought they had plenty of time.

[01:41:46] Cameron: But then the music manager guy was trying to figure out, now we wanna have all these big celebrities come together, it’s gonna be impossible to coordinate all their schedules. They figured the only opportunity they were gonna have was when they were all in LA for the American Music Awards. That would be the only chance of getting them all in the one spot at the one time.

[01:42:05] Cameron: And that was a month away. So then it becomes this, holy shit, we’ve got a month to pull this together. Song’s not written. We have to sell all of these people on this thing. They’re gonna need something before they’ll commit. And so they, they’re reaching out to Springsteen and Billy Joel and Bob Dylan and Cindy Lauper and getting them all in the, and then they all get in the room, and then there’s the egos and there’s, you know, and, and Quincy Jones is involved in pulling the whole thing together and it’s, yeah, but it is kind of.

[01:42:38] Cameron: Like it’s the shmarmiest song ever. And um, you know, anyway, it was interesting. I mostly did it. I put it on for Fox to watch ’cause he kinda likes a bit of Michael Jackson and that kind of stuff. So I thought he’d, he’d sort of get, he likes eighties music. Um, I was gonna talk to you something about before when we were talking about TV shows.

[01:42:58] Cameron: Oh, Gia Marty. So, yeah. The other show that you keep talking about is that Gia Marty show. Yes. Which I still haven’t had time to get into, but I heard Gia Marty, I saw a clip of him on, I think it was Stern. Have you heard the Gia Marty share story

[01:43:17] Tony: No.

[01:43:18] Cameron: was a great story. I mean, Gia Marty, you gotta, you gotta look it up and look him tell it.

[01:43:23] Cameron: But Stern goes, Hey, I heard this is a story about you and share. What’s that all about? Gia Marty tells the story. He goes, yeah, for years people have been coming up to Gia Marty and saying. Cher really wants to speak to you. Like not, would like to speak to you, needs to talk to you, Cher. He goes, well, great, but you know, I don’t have Cher’s number.

[01:43:49] Cameron: And they’re like, no, no, she really, really wants to talk to you. And he’s like, okay. And this goes on for like a couple of years. He keeps hearing this. Cher really wants to talk to you. Finally, somebody, he meets somebody who knows Cher, her hairdresser or somebody and woman who makes her wigs, I don’t know.

[01:44:13] Cameron: And, and like, well give her my number, you know, and she can reach out to me. He gets this voicemail one day from Cher is like, hi, this is Cher. I believe you really need to talk to me. Here’s my number. I. And so he calls her back, gets her voicemail, and he says, this is Paul Giamatti. Great to hear from you and, and, uh, would love to talk to you, but I heard that you really, really wanted to talk to me.

[01:44:48] Cameron: So if you do, and he goes, and I haven’t heard anything since. It was a great story. Somebody’s going around telling Giamatti that Cher really wants to speak to him. She hears that Giamatti really wants to speak to her. And anyway, maybe it’s not that good a story. I thought it was a good story at the time.

[01:45:09] Cameron: You

[01:45:10] Tony: Yeah, it’s all right.

[01:45:11] Cameron: don’t sound

[01:45:11] Tony: That’s a. No, it’s on the same level of, um, the new Band of Brothers, sequel, Masters of the Air. Have you seen that

[01:45:19] Tony: one?

[01:45:20] Cameron: Uh, I don’t even know what Band of brothers was really, was that a

[01:45:23] Tony: Oh, you haven’t seen Band of

[01:45:25] Tony: Brothers?

[01:45:26] Cameron: was that again?

[01:45:28] Tony: Well, it’s the one about World War II Soldiers

[01:45:30] Tony: and the Normandy Landing.

[01:45:33] Tony: Yeah, yeah. Spielberg

[01:45:34] Cameron: Oh, no. Like I would throw up a

[01:45:36] Cameron: little bit in my mouth just thinking about it. I can’t stand American rah rah, world war

[01:45:42] Cameron: II things, man. They just make me puke a little bit.

[01:45:46] Tony: Okay. Well, I really liked it and it was, it was like right there at the forefront of that HBA revolution when in the early days of the television.

[01:45:55] Tony: Ascendancy. It’s one of the, one of the very first ones that people point to as being a classic. And anyway, they made a sequel of that called The Pacific, which was partly shot in Melbourne, which was worth watching just for that.

[01:46:07] Tony: But it wasn’t very good overall. And now they’ve made one about the Air Force in World War II

[01:46:11] Tony: and it’s crap.

[01:46:12] Cameron: Oh, right.

[01:46:13] Tony: the first episode or two and I can’t watch any more of that either.

[01:46:16] Tony: So, um, just kind of warning you don’t

[01:46:19] Tony: bother,

[01:46:20] Cameron: Yeah. Like, you know, I, I, I

[01:46:22] Cameron: struggle with historical. Stuff that Hollywood puts out. ’cause you know, the historian in me just goes, oh, that’s just fucking bullshit. And like the American propaganda, particularly over their role in World War II, and, you know, the Vietnam stuff tends to be a little bit more self-critical these days.

[01:46:43] Cameron: But, uh, world War II, Korea,

[01:46:47] Cameron: I know too much about actually Fox. The, the, you know, there’s this high school associated with Fox’s primary school. It’s called Humanitas, same sort of hippie sort of thing. They, one of the teachers there reached out to me a week or so ago and said, Hey, a bunch of our kids are interested in military history.

[01:47:05] Cameron: They wanna know more about Korean War and the Vietnam War. And the Gulf War I. Would you be interested in coming down and talking to them? I was like, what I. Absolutely. Just make sure you block out a good eight hours of their day if I’m gonna come down and talk to them about that stuff. Yeah. The American propaganda, the, the American sort of, yeah.

[01:47:33] Cameron: I really, I really struggle with that kind of

[01:47:37] Tony: Actually one speaking on that sort of, I understand what you’re saying. Bandit Brothers is still worth watching, I think because it. It takes you through all the negative aspects of war, but it doesn’t, it does come from the American side. I’m not saying it, it’s critical of the American involvement, um, or the American, the way it paints America, but it’s, it’s worth watching.

[01:47:55] Tony: Um, but the other one I watched recently, just out of the blue, I just was flicking

[01:47:58] Tony: channels and came across from here to Eternity.

[01:48:01] Cameron: Hmm. Oh, many years ago.

[01:48:05] Tony: Yeah. I called it for the first time, like last week. And it’s, it’s, it’s got its limitations, but I thought it was just brilliant with, um, Sinatra’s, you know, early role and Montgomery Cliff and Burt Lancaster and, and you know, their approach to military

[01:48:20] Tony: life and, and dealing with the war and the

[01:48:22] Tony: attack on Pearl Harbour.

[01:48:23] Cameron: That’s the film the Godfather is

[01:48:25] Cameron: referring to. Uh, you

[01:48:28] Tony: Oh,

[01:48:28] Cameron: that

[01:48:29] Cameron: whole thing.

[01:48:31] Tony: Sinatra shouldn’t be in the

[01:48:32] Tony: movie.

[01:48:32] Cameron: Yeah. My, my understanding is when Mario Puzo was writing the book, that was the film, he was, he had heard they didn’t want Sinatra, and then Sinatra got Giancarta. Was it Gian Carter? Was that the name of the mob boss, Sam Giancarta, that he was connected to.

[01:48:54] Cameron: I think whoever the mob boss was that Sinatra was close to at that time, to put some pressure on the studio to get the role in the picture, which everyone has always denied actually happened. But yeah, I think it was from here to Eternity was the.

[01:49:11] Tony: Okay.

[01:49:11] Cameron: Was the film.

[01:49:12] Tony: Well, I

[01:49:12] Tony: was mildly impressed. It

[01:49:14] Tony: was, it was good.

[01:49:15] Cameron: I think I watched it after, you know, after I, in my early twenties when I started getting into film Deeply and I watched The Godfather and then I read up on it. I went and watched, I think from here to Eternity. Yeah. And I like it. I like Sinatra as an actor in those days. I always thought Sinatra had this easy thing about him, like his singing.

[01:49:32] Cameron: He just had this easy

[01:49:33] Cameron: charisma. He was, he was a pretty good actor, you know, unlike

[01:49:38] Cameron: Elvis,

[01:49:39] Cameron: Sinatra could actually,

[01:49:40] Tony: Yeah.

[01:49:43] Tony: Actually, if you, have you ever seen that movie? Some come running.

[01:49:45] Cameron: I don’t think so.

[01:49:47] Tony: It’s Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, but it’s, it’s kind of late in their career. Or maybe, you know, late seventies. And it’s brilliant. Really low, really low key seventies, you know, um, you know, working class drifters, working for the, or, you know, going to the carnival.

[01:50:05] Tony: It’s, it’s really

[01:50:07] Tony: good.

[01:50:07] Cameron: All right. I have to check it out. I.

[01:50:10] Tony: Hmm.

[01:50:10] Cameron: like Fox is home and Chrissie’s back. Some come running. Yeah. All right. I’ll check it out. Thank you, TK.

[01:50:17] Tony: All right. Thanks Cam.

[01:50:19] Cameron: Have a good one. Talk to You next time.

[01:50:20] Tony: You too. All right.