QAV 730 – Consistency Is The Key

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QAV 730 Club

 

[00:00:00] Cameron: Welcome back to QAV episode 730. How are you today, Tony Kynaston?

[00:00:14] Tony: I’m very well,

[00:00:15] Tony: thank you, Cameron Reilly.

[00:00:16] Cameron: Give me, give me a hook. What’s your hook, Tony? We need a hook.

[00:00:19] Tony: I got a tip for you,

[00:00:21] Tony: Cam.

[00:00:22] Cameron: Yeah, what’s the tip?

[00:00:23] Tony: Don’t listen to tips. I give

[00:00:27] Tony: you the five stocks which are going to benefit from the US election.

[00:00:31] Cameron: Yeah, what are they?

[00:00:32] Tony: I don’t know. No one

[00:00:33] Tony: does. You can’t predict it.

[00:00:37] Cameron: Tony and I were just talking about how to get people’s attention on TikTok in one second based on something my, one of my sons was telling me yesterday, got to get them in one second and gauge them, get a hook.

[00:00:49] Tony: And we know our listeners are far more intelligent than to be click baited to get investment advice, as opposed to the majority of the population

[00:00:57] Tony: who seem to do that.

[00:00:59] Cameron: Yeah. Uh, well, Tony, um, I’d, I’d love to tell you what’s been happening in the all ordinaries this week, but I haven’t been paying attention because you told me to stop paying attention. Uh, so it’s, I’m like a crack

[00:01:12] Cameron: addict. I’m trying not to look.

[00:01:15] Cameron: There have been a couple of stocks that have moved and I’ve had to do something about them, so,

[00:01:20] Tony: Mm hmm.

[00:01:22] Cameron: I think we could talk about that.

[00:01:23] Cameron: SGI, your pulled pork from a little while ago, stealth group, not involved in drones or, or CIA black sites or, you know, black ops or anything like that, surprisingly.

[00:01:39] Tony: So we can’t market it as one of the, get our tip on

[00:01:42] Tony: what stock’s going to benefit from the war in Ukraine.

[00:01:46] Cameron: That’s right, not this one,

[00:01:48] Cameron: um, uh,

[00:01:51] Tony: No, because as I recall, it’s, it’s a chain of hardware stores in Western

[00:01:54] Tony: Australia

[00:01:55] Tony: from memory.

[00:01:56] Cameron: hardware stores, that’s right. So they dropped, uh, 9%, uh, in a single day on the 22nd of July, which was yesterday, I think, when we were recording this. Um, dropped from 2. 20 down to 20 cents.

[00:02:16] Tony: No, that doesn’t sound right. 2. I had a look at, when I got you a show notes, it

[00:02:22] Tony: looked like a drop from 22 cents to 21 cents to me.

[00:02:26] Cameron: Well, it was 23 cents on the 18th and then 22 cents on the 20 cents back up to 21 today, but I had to sell it from our live portfolio. And when I went digging to try and explain why there was a sudden drop. The only news that I could see was that seemed to be at all recent and somewhat maybe relevant was in Stock Doctor, there was something called an application for quotation of securities.

[00:02:53] Cameron: It said 14, 444, 903 ordinary shares at issue price of 24. 23 cents each as part of the consideration for the acquisition of 100 percent of the issued shares in Force Technology International Pty Ltd, nothing to do with. Star Wars or Jedi’s either. They’re just these companies all with misleading names here.

[00:03:17] Cameron: Previous outstanding shares were basically 101 million. Current outstanding shares were 115 million. So they added 15 percent of new shares. Is that the value why the share price dropped by

[00:03:31] Cameron: 9%?

[00:03:33] Tony: Well, I don’t think it is because those shares were issued on the 14th of June. Mm hmm. So it’s taken a whole month to get to where we are now. So that’s more likely to be more recent news. But I couldn’t, I had a look and I couldn’t see any announcements or any research to suggest why, but I would say the ADT for this stock is very low.

[00:03:52] Tony: It’s like. 10, 000. Um,

[00:03:55] Cameron: What? 10,

[00:03:56] Tony: yeah. And so it’s not going to take a big parcel of shares, um, particularly if it’s selling, to drive the price down. So I think it’s just going to be one of those stocks which has, um, high volatility.

[00:04:11] Tony: Why don’t you believe

[00:04:16] Cameron: really? God, it is too. I wonder why I ended up owning it.

[00:04:25] Tony: me? You had to look it up for yourself.

[00:04:28] Cameron: I believed you. I just wanted to see it for myself. Wow. That’s, uh, yeah, so yeah. Okay. I must’ve snuck through my ADT check. It must’ve been higher when I added it back in, no, only in June. I don’t

[00:04:43] Cameron: know. Uh, all right. Well, maybe, so maybe, uh, Force Technology sold a bunch of the 14 and a half million shares that they got.

[00:04:52] Tony: Yeah, could have. And the people who subscribed at that stage are underwater. So there could be some real ones. With

[00:04:59] Tony: them, but who knows?

[00:05:01] Cameron: Right. Okay. So, uh, leaving aside that. My dates were out. Um, would the issuance of a big chunk of shares like that possibly lead to a drop in the value of share price?

[00:05:18] Tony: Well, very much so. So normally when companies are issuing shares, they take that into account. So, um, uh, they sh they should have, I’m just looking at what the price was before they announced. They should have factored into the account that if they’re issuing shares at 24, 24. 23, that that was going to be about what the share price was worth after the dilution of 15 million new shares.

[00:05:46] Tony: That’s usually how it works. Um, it doesn’t always end up that way because the market’s the market and people can react quickly and drive the price down or react the other way and like what they’re seeing and drive it up. So you don’t always have that sort of effect where the dilution is taken into account with the new share price.

[00:06:03] Tony: And that’s how people arbitrage it. If you’re offered shares and it’s below what you think they’re going to trade at after the new shares are added, then you can buy. And if you think it’s going to trade above, you don’t.

[00:06:13] Tony: So

[00:06:14] Tony: that’s typically how it

[00:06:15] Tony: works.

[00:06:16] Cameron: 17th of June, the share price was 22

[00:06:18] Cameron: cents, jumped up to 24 for a little bit and then went down to 20 and has been sort of trading between 24 and 20 ever since. So

[00:06:28] Tony: Yeah, well, I’m surprised they actually got that, that issuance away then if the, uh, yeah, the share price closed at the end of March, end of May, sorry, at 23 cents. But if they’re offering new shares at 24,

[00:06:41] Tony: Um, I’m surprised they were

[00:06:42] Tony: able to issue them, but anyway,

[00:06:44] Cameron: Hmm.

[00:06:45] Tony: don’t

[00:06:45] Tony: know.

[00:06:46] Cameron: Alright, well that bit me on the arse, SGI. The next one was, um, ATP, I wanted to ask you about. Our old friends Atlas Pearls. So they were back at the top of the buy list

[00:06:56] Tony: Mm hmm.

[00:06:58] Cameron: Uh, people may recall back in April, we had to sell it when it dropped 32 percent in a single day. When it announced that it’s, uh, the Pearl auction in Kobe in Japan hadn’t gone as well as they hoped and they held onto a bunch of stock and didn’t sell it and I, I looked them up again yesterday when I was looking for something to replace SGI with and noticed that they’ve had another auction in Japan since then and again they only got the same price they were getting back in April and they held onto some stock for the same reason and I didn’t buy it.

[00:07:35] Cameron: Because you said last time, and I quote, a bit dangerous buying something that’s going to be influenced by a commodity that we can’t track

[00:07:43] Tony: Mm hmm.

[00:07:43] Cameron: being pearls, the pearl market. You did say it seemed to be pretty volatile.

[00:07:47] Cameron: So,

[00:07:49] Tony: Yeah, and it’s auction based, it’s not like a continuous market that seems to be open and people are trading it like gold. So, uh, yeah, it’s always going to be a volatile stock, which is probably why it’s on our buy list, because it’s, um, it is that kind of, it’s a value stock because people are wary of overpaying for something which

[00:08:08] Tony: could be so volatile.

[00:08:11] Cameron: That said, and I hummed and

[00:08:13] Cameron: hawed about this yesterday, we talked about this when we, uh, did mention them last, back in April. They have had a great run, um, well they did have a great run, so going back to a year ago, they were trading at about 3 or 4 cents. They got to as high as 21 cents in February this year.

[00:08:35] Cameron: have slid down to about 10 cents now. So, uh, very volatile. Um,

[00:08:43] Tony: You’d think they’d be using AI to make pearls with that kind

[00:08:46] Tony: of volatility in the stock.

[00:08:50] Cameron: and part of me thought, well, it could go for another run up to 21 cents. And then I thought, and then it could drop

[00:08:55] Cameron: 32 percent the next day, like it did in April. So,

[00:08:59] Tony: Yeah.

[00:09:00] Cameron: uh, yeah. So just a flag for, uh, anyone out there thinking about ATP, cause it’s on the top of the buy list this week. Um, maybe, maybe think hard about it.

[00:09:12] Tony: Yeah. Be aware, be aware of what you’re buying. Um, I, I was going to do a pulled pork on it at the start of the year and I decided not to for that very reason that if it’s, if it’s reliant on infrequent auctions to set its revenue, it’s going to be hard for us to, you know, it’s going to be volatile. It’s going to be hard for us to have any sort of reliable quality about the stock.

[00:09:32] Tony: I thought,

[00:09:33] Cameron: I wonder why the. Pearl market is so volatile.

[00:09:36] Tony: pretty small, I would have thought. Who, who uses pearls?

[00:09:40] Tony: Apart from jewellers.

[00:09:42] Cameron: I don’t know. Are there any

[00:09:45] Cameron: commercial applications of pearls?

[00:09:48] Tony: not that I know of. I

[00:09:51] Cameron: Me either.

[00:09:52] Tony: should go and rag my wife’s jewellery box and see if I can use them for something. Get a return on my investment. Apart

[00:09:59] Cameron: yeah,

[00:09:59] Tony: marital happiness.

[00:10:01] Cameron: yeah. Alright, so that’s the ATP story, uh, CVP, CVP, CivMec, we’ve talked about,

[00:10:11] Tony: Is

[00:10:12] Tony: it CVP or CVL?

[00:10:13] Tony: Yeah.

[00:10:14] Cameron: yeah, CVL, CivMec,

[00:10:18] Tony: Civil and

[00:10:18] Cameron: percent in the last week, um, I added them to the DP back in March of 2021, they’re up 90 percent since then, which, Yeah, over, what’s that,

[00:10:32] Tony: That’s good.

[00:10:33] Cameron: three and a bit years, it’s okay, it’s not great, but it’s better than

[00:10:38] Tony: Very good.

[00:10:39] Tony: Yeah,

[00:10:40] Cameron: But, um, I, I was trying to figure out why they’re up 20 percent in the last week, the only thing I could see was a notice that said, Proposed change of domicile of the head company of the group from CIVMEC Ltd. domiciled in Singapore to CIVMEC Australia Ltd. domiciled in Australia. Do you think they’re connected?

[00:10:59] Tony: I do, but, um, I couldn’t remember the reasoning behind it. And I, I, it was either a question from someone like Steve Mabb about this or it was a pulled pork I did. Um, I don’t know if you can search your database and see what I said, but I remember vaguely doing a pulled pork on this company and suggesting that when it moved back to Australia, that could be a catalyst for a share increase.

[00:11:24] Tony: Um, but I was, I didn’t have, didn’t have anything in my notes as to why, and I did a quick look at the, the sites today, and I couldn’t see any, um, obvious reason for it, but I, I’m guessing it’s going to have something to do with, uh, less, um, potentially less shares on issues, so like when BHP came back to Australia, Domicile back to Australia, they stopped trading on the, uh, UK exchange and the Australian exchange and that seemed to give them a bit of a boost.

[00:11:55] Tony: And, um, but it also could have to do with mandates that now it’s an Australian company. Some of the other fund managers could buy into it too. But I, I, yeah, I couldn’t see the reason. I did a quick research check this morning, but I do remember talking about it earlier on.

[00:12:12] Tony: So it might be in your notes

[00:12:13] Tony: somewhere.

[00:12:14] Cameron: it is, uh, episode 646, uh, November 2023. You did a pulled pork on Civmec, and I’m just pulling up the transcription on the website now. Um, let’s see if I can see. The shareholder information in Stock Doctor says almost half of the shares are listed as being owned by the Chess Depository Nominees Company, which is, I think, people from Singapore co investing in Australia. So, if the company does go ahead and they put their plan in place, it comes to fruition, which is to say that what they’re doing is to repatriate to Australia.

[00:12:56] Cameron: Then we may see that we have all the shares on one exchange and there may be a better float available to buy and sell in the share market. You said there’s also a low ADT on this stock, which is probably a good thing because there are two large owners. One’s the CEO, one’s the chairman, something like 40 percent of the shares between themselves.

[00:13:17] Cameron: So between Singapore investors and the owners, it’s like 90 percent of the stock is accounted for and it’s only the rump That’s trading every day, so we have the low ADT. The other reason for repatriating to Australia, companies called out, is because they’re doing more and more work for the Navy and defence work, and the government’s getting tighter and tighter on their rules about local sourcing.

[00:13:39] Cameron: So the government wants to buy Australian, and this company’s head officers are currently in Singapore, even though they do all of their work in Australia. Their staff are in Australia. It’s basically an Australian company in everything but name. So there you go.

[00:13:54] Tony: Okay. So it’s been viewed positively, perhaps for those two reasons then. Yeah. Cause you’re right. The court has allowed an EGM to go ahead for this company to redomicile back to Australia.

[00:14:06] Cameron: right. Interesting. Okay. So that’s that one. And now I’ve lost my bloody notes. Oh, here we go. All right. Good. Uh, what else did I have to talk about? The light portfolios are catching up to the benchmark Tony, which is good,

[00:14:25] Tony: Good. Yeah.

[00:14:25] Cameron: in the right direction. I

[00:14:27] Tony: Mm hmm.

[00:14:27] Cameron: mean, I think one or two of them are

[00:14:31] Cameron: ahead of the benchmark and the other couple are behind, but all, all up as a group with the four of them, they’re catching up, um, they’re going in the right direction.

[00:14:39] Cameron: The benchmark is sort of, um, staying relatively neutral while the portfolios get better and better, which is good. Dummy Portfolio, of course, is continuing to do I think 1. 8 times market since inception I saw, recently. Um, the only other note that I had is I got an email from one of our subscribers, Conrad, who had some interesting, uh, feedback on how his portfolio is going.

[00:15:08] Cameron: He said he’s been following QAV for over three years now. Um, I’d like to say thank you for teaching me how to invest and report my QAV journey and results. Last financial year, my portfolio returned 31. 4 percent time weighted return. Which was based on a modified QAV system. After following the QAV system for a couple of years, I found that I was regularly falling outside the rules due to working long hours and having little time available.

[00:15:36] Cameron: My alerts would get outdated and I regularly missed commodity sales. Then I would be in no man’s land, having to make decisions on whether and when to sell, which affected my portfolio performance. So in September 2022, I started a dummy portfolio based on a modified set of rules. I ran this for about a year, achieving 39 percent TWR on paper only.

[00:15:59] Cameron: I modified, uh, adopted the modified rules for my real portfolio in August last year. Basically, I wanted a system that I could follow the fundamental QAV principles with 100 percent discipline. I modified the Stock Doctor filters to generally only return about 30%. Three to eight companies, which I then manually sought.

[00:16:17] Cameron: I looked at the companies that have performed best for me over the years and found most of them were Stock Doctor recovering. So my filters only returned this. The companies that performed worse generally had price to cash flow of less than 2. 5. I assume this was because often these companies were finance companies where the price to cash flow doesn’t measure value or the market was punishing the company for some news I wasn’t aware of expected drop in cash flow in brackets.

[00:16:46] Cameron: So I filter out companies with price to cash flow of less than 2. 5. I made lots of other smaller changes, happy to go into detail if you’re interested. I suspect that the portfolio performance will flatten out in time as filling the portfolio with Stock Doctor recovering seems to give an initial bump.

[00:17:04] Cameron: But based on the testing I have done, I’m confident I can get close to long term QAV results, and most importantly, I can follow these rules every day for the rest of my life. Regards, Conrad.

[00:17:14] Tony: Fantastic.

[00:17:15] Tony: Yeah, it’s certainly been, I think it’s great. And I had been thinking, as you know, about Stock Doctor recovering as being potentially something we need to boost in the checklist. Um, so I need to go back to our regression testing tool and check that. Um, but I like it. I think it’s fantastic. Well done, Conrad.

[00:17:34] Tony: If you can give us any more details, like what you’re

[00:17:36] Tony: actually filtering on, that’d be great to know.

[00:17:40] Cameron: And, uh I’m not exactly sure how big his portfolio is, but one of the questions I had is, um, like, I guess he’s, he said he, before he would miss his alerts and miss commodity sells and he’s still going to have to do those things unless he’s got no commodity stocks in there and no alerts. You still need to, you know, Manage your alerts and your commodity sales.

[00:18:09] Cameron: So I’m not sure how he’s, uh, handling that differently, but be interesting to get him on, to have a chat. So Conrad, thank

[00:18:21] Tony: it’d be great.

[00:18:22] Cameron: Shoot me, shoot me another email and,

[00:18:23] Tony: done.

[00:18:25] Cameron: come on and we can, you can take us through it in more detail.

[00:18:28] Cameron: Well that’s all of my, uh, talking points for today. Tony, what have you

[00:18:34] Tony: a few things to go through. Like you, I had some stocks in the news to, um, to mention. Uh, the, but before I do that, so last week we had, uh, some input. I think it was Dave from UWE was talking about share buybacks and he referred to Chapter 12 of, uh, What Works on Wall Street, the book by, um, O’Shaughnessy.

[00:18:58] Tony: And, um, cause I’m an epic procrastinator, I decided to go back and reread. Chapter 12, but I picked up the book and turned over the front page and went, Oh, that’s really good. That’s interesting. So I’ve been reading it from cover to cover again. So I haven’t gotten to, I’ve done the first three or four chapters.

[00:19:14] Tony: I haven’t gotten to chapter 12 yet. Um, however, it’s, uh, I wanted to, um, Put some quotes into the show, because the, I know I skimmed through it when I first got this book a couple of years ago, and now I’m reading it, um, I’m reading it like, literally every time I sit down at my desk, I’ll read another paragraph and get my highlighter out and find something which just resonates so well, um, like I said, I’m only up to Chapter 3, so the book may go downhill after that, or Chapter 4, um, but at the moment, I’m, I’m gonna put this very high on the list of books to recommend for anyone who, um, uh, likes, like us, likes investing.

[00:19:56] Tony: Uh, it’s, it’s fantastic. And so I might even, uh, every now and then in the show just include some quotes because they resonate with what you and I talk about. And we’d spoken about recently about, uh, stick to it ness, so the ability when you haven’t had a good year to not change. direction or capitulate or sell up and try something different.

[00:20:19] Tony: And O’Shaughnessy has some good quotes on that, which I’ll read out now. So, uh, he’s going to just take a snippet here. He’s talking about the, uh, the secret to success of being a good investor is to follow a successful investment strategy. And he says following a successful investment strategy requires the ability to consistently, patiently, and slavishly stick with the strategy, even when it is performing poorly relative to other methods.

[00:20:47] Tony: He goes on, The key to outstanding long term performance is to find strategies that have the highest base rate, then stick with that strategy, even when it’s underperforming other strategies and benchmarks. Few people are capable of such action. Successful investors do not comply with nature, they defy it.

[00:21:05] Tony: Most investors react very emotionally to the short term gyrations of the market, and I’ve seen many who follow my strategies and portfolios in real time say, well, the strategies used to work, but they don’t anymore, after just a few months of underperformance. What appears dull and boring in, uh, in the long term compilation of factor returns becomes emotional and frightening when investors live through it in real time, leading to doubt as to whether the long term results will somehow change.

[00:21:32] Tony: All of them, meaning successful strategies, are deeply consistent with that common sense With what common sense would tell you was true. Strategies that buy stocks that are selling at deep discounts to cash flow, sales, earnings, EBITDA to enterprise value, and so on, do extraordinarily better than those that are willing to buy stocks with the richest valuations.

[00:21:53] Tony: Discipline is the key. The disciplined implementation of active strategies is the key to performance. And I, I, you know, I talk about this, like, when people talk about Following the QAV process, I do bang on that it’s not necessarily the process that’s important, it’s the fact you have a framework and you stick to it.

[00:22:11] Tony: And I think O’Shaughnessy has said it more eloquently there, um, and that’s just an extract of, I think, Chapter 1. Uh, but, uh, he provides a lot of evidence to support what he’s saying, backed up with lots of research. So I thought that was, that was really timely

[00:22:27] Tony: given our discussions over the last few weeks about QAV.

[00:22:30] Tony: Performance.

[00:22:31] Cameron: Yeah, and I was actually thinking of him at that quote when we were having that conversation the other day. I remember, I remember, um, when I read that book a few years ago, just being You know, um, almost on every page thinking, wow, this just sounds like you, like, it just sounds like QAV is a thing. But he talks about how most, uh, professional brokers, the, you know, will change from strategy to strategy, jump horses constantly.

[00:23:01] Cameron: And that’s why they never really succeed long term. Hmm.

[00:23:07] Tony: Or they invest with their gut. So they try and make predictions. And um, there’s a few other quotes about that too, which I might drop into the show in the future. But, but yeah, he’s, he presents the research, which shows that 70 percent of fund managers don’t beat the index. And then he says, answers the questions, why?

[00:23:24] Tony: And a lot of it has to do with, as you say, people reacting and changing strategy midstream. Or, or approaching investment as a, um, a story based, uh, sort of approach. So you’re talking to management, you’re trying to do some kind of analysis on the company. You’re thinking that you’re a better analysis, you’re, you’re a better analyst than your competitors and that you can predict the future.

[00:23:51] Tony: And it just doesn’t work. And you’ll go through periods where it will work and you’ll build a following and then it crashes.

[00:23:57] Cameron: Yeah. And I guess there’s a lot of pressure on, uh, you know, fund managers or professional portfolio managers where they have bosses and investors and people who aren’t gonna be patient and tolerant if their model’s not working for a year or two years. There’s a lot of pressure on them to get with the program and deliver results, you know?

[00:24:22] Tony: Yeah, I mean, a great example of that was in the dot com boom and sort of, you know, the last sort of three years of the 1990s or the, yeah, end of the century when, um, there was a value manager in Australia called, I think it was called Maple Brown Habit from memory, uh, and they were Um, known as a value investor and every year he’d come out and say, look, we’ve underperformed the market.

[00:24:47] Tony: We can’t understand why the market’s going up and putting so much money into these dot com stocks with no, you know, with no revenue and with no income, with no profit. And that just sounds crazy to us. And then like, It, you know, they had to keep saying that for three, four years straight. And then in the fifth year, they were heroes.

[00:25:08] Tony: Um, but they, you know, but half the people had taken their money out of the fund in between. And Buffett was saying that too, during that same period. Look, I know I’m underperforming the market. I’m not going to change. The market’s wrong. And he was right too. But yeah, but he had to endure three or four years of, you know, declining share prices while, um, the market went on a crazy tear into, uh, internet

[00:25:28] Tony: stocks.

[00:25:29] Cameron: Yeah, I was thinking about that the other day. I watched this great video on YouTube over the weekend. It was, I think it was the, um, video they made for the last Berkshire Hathaway AGM. That was sort of the Charlie Munger segment. It was like a bio on Charlie and all that kind

[00:25:51] Tony: a

[00:25:51] Tony: tribute.

[00:25:52] Cameron: Yeah, I was watching that and it was nothing new that we haven’t already seen or read or heard before, but always good to see Charlie in good form.

[00:26:03] Cameron: My favourite bits were him and Warren on stage at an AGM and Charlie makes some sort of wise ass crack and Warren’s just sort of throwing his hands up in the air and shaking his head and he’s like, there he goes. um, yeah, I remember, I can’t remember if it was Charlie or Warren, when somebody asked them not long ago about artificial intelligence and the role that it’s going to have in investing, and one of them said, it’s always, the opportunity of investing is always other people’s stupidity.

[00:26:32] Cameron: I think it was Warren who said that.

[00:26:34] Tony: Right.

[00:26:35] Cameron: You know, it doesn’t matter what tools are available out there. It’s greed and impatience and fear of missing out and all of those very human flaws that it doesn’t matter what tools you’ve got or what tools, what your tools are telling you you should do. Like, you know, people listen to this and we tell them stay fully invested, don’t sell, don’t, don’t change and they don’t care.

[00:27:02] Cameron: It’s the end of the day. It’s what they can live with, you know.

[00:27:07] Tony: Yeah. No, exactly. It’s, it’s, um, it’s, Warren’s completely right. I mean, AI might be the greatest gift to investors, but there’ll still be people who won’t completely trust it. They’ll, they’ll say, Oh, this AI keeps buying, you know, stocks, but I’m underperforming the market. I’m going to jump out of the AI portfolio and jump into my own.

[00:27:28] Cameron: My AI

[00:27:29] Tony: Of Missing Out Portfolio and buy some

[00:27:32] Tony: Bitcoin or NVIDIA or whatever, when the AI is safe. Because, yeah, my AI is broken. Because if you, I mean, O’Shaughnessy backs me up and I’m convinced if an AI is any good at investing, it’s going to invest in a reasonably similar way to how I do and how O’Shaughnessy does and how Buffett does.

[00:27:53] Tony: I mean, there’ll be different riffs and different variations on it. Um, but And if, you know, if, if we’re only a segment of the market and not the majority segment of the market, then the markets continue, kind of continue to be driven by human behavior, which is chapter two of O’Shaughnessy talks about, you know, how we, we evolve to, um, to Jump quickly at frights and keep ourselves alive rather than take risks and how that’s um, you know, we lived in small villages and we had to rely on the, on the herd so we followed it.

[00:28:24] Tony: Uh, and uh, that’s, that’s still a part of our brain and we’re not really hardwired for investing.

[00:28:32] Cameron: Yeah, very good. Well, thanks for sharing that. You got any more for today or are you saving them up for next

[00:28:36] Cameron: time?

[00:28:37] Tony: I’ll save the, I’ll save the HMRC’s up for next time. I’ve got a few articles about, uh, stocks that we, um, we look at. So Fortescue Metals was in the news last week for bad reasons. They, they’re cutting 700 jobs and slowing their push into green hydrogen. And this article is in the Fin Review.

[00:28:56] Tony: Fortescue will cut 700 jobs and slow its push into green hydrogen in a blow to the Albanese government’s plan to make Australia a hydrogen superpower. Fortescue Chairman, Andrew Forrest, said low carbon or green hydrogen still had a bright future, but his immediate focus would shift renewable electricity as he jettisoned the target for Fortescue to produce 15 million tons, tons of green hydrogen by 2030.

[00:29:21] Tony: The concession comes after a six year period in which Dr Forrest was one of the world’s leading advocates for hydrogen. And as Fortescue works to break down a corporate structure that had previously treated its energy and iron ore mining divisions as separate. Companies. So, you know, we, we’ve spoken about Fortescue being a red flag due to all the people, quality people, executives who had left the company in the last sort of 6 to 12 months.

[00:29:47] Tony: Uh, maybe this was the reason. Maybe the executives who left just couldn’t see Green Hydrogen working. And now he’s had to cut 700 jobs and pivot away from it. So hopefully that’s the end of the woes at Fortescue, but I suspect it’s not.

[00:30:02] Tony: The other thing that I guess is also going on in the background, and there was another article which I haven’t put in the show notes, but Rio Tinto has got approvals to begin an iron ore mine in, I think it’s Guinea, anyway it’s in Africa, in an area called Simandu, which is looking like being as big as the Pilbara in WA in terms of iron ore production, and it’s in partnership with some Chinese companies, so in the next couple of years there’s going to be some real downward pressure on the iron ore.

[00:30:33] Tony: Price, according to people who wrote the article I read today on the Fin Review, which is a prediction, but they’re talking about, uh, Simandu being at least 5 percent of the world’s iron ore, um, production, and that’s got to be enough to suppress prices somewhere, so, yeah, I think, I think, um, Fortescue might have some

[00:30:54] Tony: difficulties going forward.

[00:30:55] Cameron: And what did you take away from all of that about why he’s pivoting away, apart from the Rio threat, why he’s pivoting away from the green hydrogen or dampening expectations?

[00:31:06] Tony: Well, I don’t think the Rio threat’s behind him pivoting out of green hydrogen. What he’s saying, I’ll quote again, Dr. Forrest said lower energy prices were the priority for world leaders at a time when war in Ukraine and the Middle East had royal commodity markets driven up the cost of energy and challenged the economics of hydrogen, which is more expensive than natural gas.

[00:31:26] Tony: In that environment, you’re not going to bring in major sources of green hydrogen. which relies on cheap energy prices, he said, we are not going to swim against the tide. So, he’s basically saying green hydrogen works in a low, uh, low, uh, well, with a small competitive against natural gas as a price, green hydrogen works, but he’s, the prices are being held up by volatility in the, in the, uh, markets that produce, uh, gas and oil around the world.

[00:31:55] Cameron: Okay. I’m not following that.

[00:31:58] Tony: Uh, So

[00:31:59] Cameron: energy prices are high, isn’t that a good thing for

[00:32:02] Cameron: anyone who’s producing energy or is it just harder to compete?

[00:32:05] Tony: uh, I think what he’s saying is it’s, I think it’s, I think he needs electricity. I must admit, I’ve always struggled with this argument of his, but I think he needs electricity as an input to make green hydrogen.

[00:32:18] Cameron: Uh,

[00:32:19] Tony: And electricity prices are high because a lot of it’s gas fired. But I must admit, I’ve never followed the science of the whole chain there, because if you’ve got cheap electricity prices

[00:32:31] Tony: to produce, Green hydrogen.

[00:32:33] Tony: Why do you need

[00:32:33] Tony: green hydrogen?

[00:32:35] Cameron: yeah. How is it competitive?

[00:32:37] Cameron: Apart from a

[00:32:37] Cameron: purely ESG aspect, you know?

[00:32:41] Tony: Yeah, so, um, I mean, hydrogen will have, um, other applications, I guess, besides energy, although we’re not very far away from planes being powered by electricity, I don’t think, and batteries. if I’m, you know, if I can believe what I read. Uh, so and that was going to be one of the ways that green hydrogen would be used.

[00:33:01] Tony: And it was also going to be used somewhere else in the article it talks about being used in a test with I think it was Instatech Pivot to make fertilizer. But again, if you can do it with hydrogen, you could probably do it with electricity, I would have thought. So if electricity is an input into green hydrogen, why don’t you just use the cheap electricity to.

[00:33:21] Tony: Make fertilizer.

[00:33:22] Cameron: Alright. Interesting

[00:33:24] Tony: a complete newbie to the area, but there’s certainly a lot of turmoil going on at Fortescue at the moment.

[00:33:30] Cameron: Hmm.

[00:33:32] Tony: A company on our buy list, AX1 Accent Group, they’re up 10 percent in the last week after a confession season trading update, and so On the surface of it, I thought that when I read the article, I thought the share price might go down, but it’s gone up.

[00:33:51] Tony: And so the announcement reads, Accent Group Limited, ASX AX1 is the code, advises that the Group EBIT For the full year ended 30th of June, 2024, it’s expected to be in a range of 109 to $111 million. The expected FY 24 EBIT range includes an additional cha charge in H in the second half of approximately 14.2 million relating to Glue store where the company has made a decision to exit 17 underperforming stores where required returns are not being achieved.

[00:34:27] Tony: And they go on. Access Accent Group CEO Daniel Agostinelli said trading conditions across the group in H2 FY24 improved on H1 FY24 with like for like sales in H2 being 4. 1 percent ahead of prior year. So I think that’s the reason for the upgrade. They also, in a separate announcement, announced that one of their brands called Nude Lucy, again a brand of shoe store, was being expanded into the U.

[00:34:58] Tony: S. and the market seemed to like that as well. So, um, I guess one of the reasons for calling it out is A lot of retail companies came on to our buy list and we were talking about this before we came on to air, that Super Retail Group is up 3 percent today. And I haven’t had a chance to look at why, but I’d hazard a guess that they’ve also said that Light for Life sales are doing better than expected in retail.

[00:35:22] Tony: And one of the themes of the market going back 6 to 12 months was, with the cost of living, um, being high, Retail customers didn’t have enough spending power to, to boost sales for these kind of retail companies like Accent1. However, they’re now calling out that, uh, at least in the second half, they’re up 4.

[00:35:44] Tony: 1 percent ahead of the prior year like for like sales, which is a pretty good effort in this kind of environment. Um, so we might start to see, we have in this case with Accent1, we might start to see a re rating of some of the other retail

[00:35:57] Tony: stocks on our buy list for the same reason.

[00:35:59] Cameron: Uh, with those, those results, I’m just looking at their trading update now, they said that their, um, EBIT is expected to be 109 to 111 million. Um, And that includes the charge relating to Gluestore. So, getting out of Gluestore isn’t really pushing their revenues up in any way. It’s having the opposite effect, right?

[00:36:26] Cameron: So the revenues are up despite that charge. The EBIT’s up despite that charge.

[00:36:33] Tony: yeah, so it looks like what happened is the Glue, they’ve rationalized the Glue store network. So they’ve exited 17 underperforming stores, but they’ve kept 18 stores which perform well. So there was a cost associated with the exit. Oftentimes it’s paying out the leases or making staff redundant. But going forward, it’s a good thing because the stores that are left

[00:36:54] Tony: are profitable.

[00:36:55] Cameron: The Gluestore, I’m just looking at it now, looks like a, yeah, clothing retailer.

[00:37:01] Tony: Yes,

[00:37:02] Tony: it’s not where you go

[00:37:03] Tony: for a, if you feel

[00:37:04] Tony: like a sniff.

[00:37:06] Cameron: Yeah, that’s what I assumed. Like, I just had this vision of a shop that just sells glue. I love glue. I love the glue aisle at, uh, Bunnings. Yeah, do you like the glue aisle at Bunnings?

[00:37:17] Tony: I can’t say I’ve

[00:37:18] Tony: ever been in the glue

[00:37:19] Cameron: Oh, Chrissy, Chrissy knows if I ever go missing at

[00:37:21] Cameron: Bunnings, she’ll go find me in the glue aisle Glues, super glues, wood glues, tape, lots of double sided tape, lots of things that, I don’t know, something, isn’t that all, aren’t all men fascinated by things that’ll stick things together?

[00:37:38] Cameron: Or is it just me?

[00:37:39] Tony: I know that men are fascinated by Bunnings. It’s, it’s a, it’s a,

[00:37:44] Tony: it’s a, yeah, it’s a honeypot for men.

[00:37:46] Tony: That’s for sure.

[00:37:47] Cameron: Well, I think there’s the thing is I don’t know what anything else in Bunnings actually does, but I understand glue and tape. That’s about the limit of my

[00:37:57] Cameron: hardware capability. Oh, glue. Yeah. I got a drawer full of glues. None of them work though. You ever found that? Superglue? Superglue in the 70s. You know, they would, in the ads, they’d stick a car to a roof

[00:38:10] Tony: Yeah.

[00:38:11] Cameron: just a little bit of glue.

[00:38:12] Cameron: I never tried that myself, but I assume it was not lying in advertising. I can’t get anything to stick these days, you know.

[00:38:21] Tony: assumed it wasn’t lying in

[00:38:22] Tony: advertising.

[00:38:22] Cameron: Yeah, well I was,

[00:38:24] Tony: Like, when. the

[00:38:25] Tony: Hoover vacuum cleaner would pick up a bowling ball and hold it up

[00:38:28] Tony: in

[00:38:28] Tony: the air. Yeah, right.

[00:38:29] Cameron: I was a kid, it was the 70s, I assume they were telling the truth. Now I buy glue and it’s all shit, none of it ever works.

[00:38:35] Tony: I know superglue sticks my fingers together.

[00:38:37] Tony: That’s about it.

[00:38:38] Cameron: that’s the only thing it.

[00:38:38] Cameron: sticks together. I got a hundred tubes of glue that I’ve used once and then it was shit. Then I go and find the, the one that’s marketed as the extra super strong, you get that, it’s just the same stuff.

[00:38:50] Tony: it comes in two tubes and you have

[00:38:51] Tony: to mix it. And the other The other one which, the other one which I fall foul of all the time is stain removers. Because I’m always like eating, eating dinner on the couch, watching the golf or something. And then I go, oh, shouldn’t I drop the beetroot on the white couch?

[00:39:04] Tony: And then I’ll go, go to the supermarket and buy some stain removers. Doesn’t work

[00:39:09] Tony: at all No,

[00:39:12] Cameron: Uh, all right. So that’s the glue store and AX1. What else you got?

[00:39:17] Tony: What else have I got? I’ve got a pulled pork. I, I do have another Story, but I’m going to include it during the pulled

[00:39:23] Tony: pork,

[00:39:24] Cameron: Who’s your pulled pork, on this

[00:39:26] Cameron: week?

[00:39:27] Tony: Aussie Broadband. I’m denied about doing a pulled pork on them because they are a Josephine and their share price has come off a bit because they recently, uh, during confession season announced the downgrade.

[00:39:41] Tony: But I also came across, um, an analyst who wrote a succinct, um, good review of them and called them a buy. So I thought it was worth doing a pulled pork on them and including the

[00:39:52] Tony: analyst’s story in it.

[00:39:55] Tony: So,

[00:39:55] Cameron: had to, I had to sell them out of a light

[00:39:58] Cameron: portfolio a

[00:39:59] Tony: mm hmm,

[00:40:00] Cameron: week ago when they rule, I had to rule one them cause their

[00:40:03] Cameron: shares have been slipping. So anyway, I don’t have to worry about the pulled pork curse. That’s good.

[00:40:08] Tony: you got ahead of it. Yeah, well, you perhaps sold at a higher price too. Um, yeah, so it’s a Josephine at the moment and, um, It’s, but it could be a future buy what your sentiment returns, and I suspect it might, and so does this analyst, um, it, it had a sharp fall on its share price and probably the main reason for it was there was a, uh, a loss of, uh, a white label business that they, um, have for origin energy.

[00:40:36] Tony: So this company is a an MBM resell. to both retail and commercial customers, but it also white labels broadband services for resale by other companies, in this case Origin Energy. And, uh, so it’s been a thing in banks and utilities and supermarkets that they’ve been able to sell things to their customer base under their own brand, which aren’t necessarily part of their normal product suite.

[00:41:06] Tony: And that’s, that’s why, um, The Origin Energy offered NBN package, which Aussie supported, was a material part of their business. And when it lost it, they had to come out with a downgrade. Um, but I’ll get to that later. Um, bit of, a bit more about ABB. It’s, um, I guess it’s what the name says. It’s an Australian based broadband.

[00:41:30] Tony: Um, they claim they have very high customer service ratings and they make a big deal out of running Australian based call centres and they say that’s one of the reasons why they do so well. Uh, they’ve been operating for 20 years and began life in Western Victoria when a company called West Vic Broadband and Wideband Networks were formed.

[00:41:52] Tony: The company is still based in Morwell, Victoria, which is kind of a strange place for a national company to be based, but I guess it has historic roots. to Rural Victoria. They also have a one foot in Brisbane as well. So in 2007, a Brisbane based company called Over the Wire Network started and Over the Wire would later merge with ABB.

[00:42:16] Tony: Uh, going through its history in 2008, west Broadband, west Vic Broadband and Wideband Networks merged to form Aussie Broadband. Um, back then, this is in the pre MBN days, they offered a DSL voiceover IP and website hosting services. In 2009, the, the federal government announced the NB. National Broadband Network would roll out.

[00:42:39] Tony: And in 2013, ABB joined, uh, to the MBN point of interconnect, the POI, in regional Victoria and connected their first customer to the MBN. By 2014, um, over the wire, the company from Brisbane had listed on the AXS separately. And in 2016, ABB connected to all of the national, uh, Point of interconnects POIs on the MB nm.

[00:43:05] Tony: By 2019 A B. B had connected a hundred thousand customers to the MBM in 2020 A, BB listed on the A SX and racked up 400,000 customers by 2021 in 2022 A, BB merged with uh, OTW. And all the founders for these legacy customers remain on the board today. So that’s, um, I shouldn’t say all the majority of them that I could see have.

[00:43:31] Tony: But there’s been a bit of a tumultuous recent history for ABB. As I said before, they white labeled MBM products to Origin, who unsold them to their customers. However, earlier this year, Origin notified that they were moving the white label business away from ABB. That business eventually went to a competitor called Superloop, also listed on the ASX.

[00:43:51] Tony: Around this time, ABB launched a raid on Superloop, who are one of their competitors, and amassed a 19. 9 percent stake. They later claimed that this was done before their knowledge that the Origin contract had gone to Superloop occurred, and I stress that they are not accused of any form of insider trading.

[00:44:10] Tony: However, the saga continued, and in March, Superloop notified ABB that they would require the approval of the Singaporean government to allow anyone to acquire more than 12 percent of the company. ABB fought this, but eventually sold its stake in Superloop. or reduced at stake, down to below 12%. These shares were sold at a profit due to the fact that Superloop had won the Origin contract.

[00:44:34] Tony: So, not all a bad thing, but didn’t achieve what ABB set out to do. During the recent confession season, however, ABB released a downgrade due to the loss of the Origin business, and also ABB’s decision to help fill the loss of customers by launching a new lower cost brand called Buddy. The launch doesn’t come cheap, And the profit downgrade contains launch costs for the new brand.

[00:45:00] Tony: So now I’m going to read from, uh, the Intelligent Investor, chap by the name of Gaurav Sodhi, he’s the analyst. And, uh, the headline is Aussie finds a buddy. So this analyst’s first reaction to Aussie broadband’s, uh, Logo, sorry, I’ll skip that. Um, Aussie’s share price finished the day down 16 percent after it announced the launch and provided an operating update.

[00:45:27] Tony: Uh, the launch was to Buddy. That update showed the business was growing to plan. The business had added almost 85, 000 new broadband connections, about 75 percent of which came from the residential broadband base. The loss of the Origin contract will hurt. With about 145, 000 customers rolling off the network in the early months of the new financial year.

[00:45:51] Tony: We think that loss will equate to about 20 million in operating profit. Of course, it won’t show up in the numbers that Aussie will report in August. Those numbers were confirmed to be between 116 to 121 million in EBITDA. Aussie guided to EBITDA of 125 to 135 million in FY25, but that was lower than the 150 million they had expected, we had expected a few months ago, and judging by the market’s reaction, this analyst wasn’t alone.

[00:46:20] Tony: Yet that number includes the loss of the Origin contract and an additional 10 million in spending on launching the new brand called Buddy. The Aussie broadband brand is a premium one, attracting high volume users, About 40 percent of residential customers opt for top tier speeds, about twice as many as the NBN average.

[00:46:41] Tony: This has meant that Aussie has collected high value profitable customers but neglected about 2 million households who opt for lower cost plans. The plan is to target those customers with Buddy. The service will launch at much lower prices in Aussie and will offer lower service levels. Rather than an expensive local call center that solves almost any broadband problem, regardless of how long it takes, Buddy will be run with a chatbot and offer limited support.

[00:47:07] Tony: It will, however, use Aussie’s network and technology stack, which we think is the best in the industry. A senior manager at a large competitor confided the changes that take him six weeks to implement happen within minutes at Aussie because of their automated technology stack, and that will help to keep costs low.

[00:47:25] Tony: Uh, it goes on, uh, further on, but, um, I’ll just finish off. With a valuation now cheaper than at any time during its listed life and customer growth still in double digits, it’s time to upgrade this company to a buy. So I think that was a pretty good, um, analysis of the company and what’s happened recently and what it’s doing.

[00:47:50] Tony: Um, so now for the numbers from the QAV buy list. The share price for this analysis is 3. 11. That was on, the download was done on the weekend, however I think today it’s 3. So, the price still is declining. However, given the analysis we’ve just seen, with customer numbers rising still, maybe that will turn around, the price will turn around.

[00:48:15] Tony: This is a high ADT company, with 2. 2 million traded on average every day. So that’s a good thing for our listeners. The market cap sits just below a billion dollars but has fallen recently from above a billion dollars. Earnings per share forecast has been lowered from about 0. 20 per share to 0. 155 per share following the concession season downgrade, and that’s corresponded in the share price lowering quickly.

[00:48:42] Tony: The price now sits below consensus forecast by some 20%, however. Uh, there is no dividend yield, so we can’t score it for that. And this company is generally seen as being a growth company, at least up until recently. Stock Doctor financial health is strong and the trend is steady. The PE sits at 18. 6 times, which is the lowest in the last three years.

[00:49:03] Tony: Um, but it is high, as I say, it’s because the company is generally seen as a growth company. PropCaf is 6. 99, which just makes it onto the buy list. Um, and it’s largely driven by the reduction in share price that gets it to 6. Stock price is well above IV1 and IV2, which are 56 respectively. We can’t also buy this company for book price or book plus 30%.

[00:49:30] Tony: Net equity per share is 1. 49, which is materially above, um, materially below the share price and a lot above the NTA, net tangible asset value of 0. 17, suggesting that there’s been a lot of goodwill incorporated to the balance sheet due to prior acquisitions and mergers. Thank you very much. Stock Doctor shows EPS forecast growth at 51 percent in the latest download, but I’m not convinced this is taking into account the recent downgrade, so that may change in the next, in the coming days.

[00:50:01] Tony: Directors hold 10 percent of the stock, and various founders of the original companies remain on the board, which is a good sign. Equity has consistently increased strongly, uh, but that may come to an end with the recent announcements. We won’t see that Probably in this latest results, they may come through in the six monthly, um, in March.

[00:50:21] Tony: ABB gets 14 out of 15 or 93 percent for quality and a QAV score of 0. 13. And it’s new on the buy list this, uh, this week. There are some risks as we’ve seen, um, The white label business, obviously. Uh, I think the biggest risk at the moment is attached to the launch of the new brand Buddy. It may work, and management certainly know what they’re doing, but it may also require more cash injections to establish it.

[00:50:47] Tony: Uh, there may also be further corporate acquisition activity with Superloop or with other smaller telcos, uh, which can drive the share price. Um, I like the experience of the directors who have skin in the game, and have been around for a long time, and I agree with the Intelligent Investor Analyst who thinks the company will bounce back from the loss of the Origin Conflict.

[00:51:09] Tony: So that’s ABB.

[00:51:11] Cameron: So keep an eye on it, but it’s downtrend.

[00:51:15] Tony: Correct. Yep.

[00:51:18] Cameron: Thank you, Tony.

[00:51:20] Cameron: Yeah. We’ve had to talk about them a bit in recent times, haven’t we?

[00:51:24] Tony: Yeah, we have.

[00:51:25] Cameron: Hmm.

[00:51:26] Tony: certainly, um, made the back page of the Fin Review a lot back in about March or April with their attempted, um, share, well, with their share raids on

[00:51:35] Tony: Superloop. Made for interesting reading.

[00:51:39] Cameron: While I think of it, I’m gonna give my ISPA plug again, LTEL, A-L-A-U-N-T-E-L. If you’re looking for an ISP, I’m not getting paid for this unfortunately, but check ’em out. They’re based in Launceston or Inver May. Actually, I started using them. I, no, probably 6, 7, 8 months ago I’d been with. Internode Forever.

[00:52:04] Cameron: I was getting about 150 megabit download on internode. Always having problems though. It was always dropping down to like 20, 30 and it was just really flaky and you contact their tech support and they’re like, have you tried turning it off and on? I’m like, screw you dude. Like I’ve been in the internet industry since before you were born.

[00:52:24] Cameron: Don’t play me like that. Anyway, I was, um, I think on Reddit or somewhere, somebody suggested Lawn Towers. So I. migrated over within, and I’m not lying, two minutes of filling out their form, they’d switched the connection over and I was getting 500 megabits a second. No equipment changes, no fiber changes, nothing.

[00:52:46] Cameron: And then that ran for like six months. And then I got an email from them a couple of weeks ago when I was in Bundaberg saying, Oh, that plan that you’re on. Uh, we’re getting rid of that plan, um, and we’re replacing it with another plan, basically the same price, but Neo now on a thousand megabits a second.

[00:53:06] Tony: Yeah,

[00:53:07] Cameron: I was like, maximum of a thousand, so I get about six to seven hundred and fifty megabits a second. Again, no, no equipment changes, nothing. My speed’s gone up, you know, six or seven times, um, for no extra cost. But the reason I was going to give them a plug is, um, a week or so ago, I was sitting here late one night and the TV wasn’t working, you know, the streaming thing wasn’t working, and I did a speed check and it was down to like thirty.

[00:53:36] Cameron: Megabits a second. And so I slayed at night, it was like 10 o’clock at night, and I jumped on Twitter and I shot them an email and didn’t hear anything back until the next morning when one of their tech guys said, Hey, Cameron, sorry, we, um, I just checked the logs and there was some really weird traffic spike that happened last night.

[00:53:55] Cameron: We haven’t quite figured out why, but it sort of crashed everything in your area. How was it this morning? I said, Yeah, it’s all good. He said, great. And then he sent me another email, like yesterday, uh, sort of a few days later, saying, Hey, just checking in. You seen any more spikes? I’ve checked the stats in your area.

[00:54:13] Cameron: I haven’t seen anything since that spike last week. Is it all good? And I was like, yeah, it’s as far as I know, but thanks. Love your work. And then he’s like, yep, no worries. So out of the blue, like their tech support people are sensational. Their support game is first class. Just, um, always following up really quick, really friendly.

[00:54:32] Cameron: Um, yeah, so I can’t speak highly enough of Launtel.

[00:54:38] Tony: It’s interesting they’re based in Launceston and the ABB’s based in Morwell because I remember going way back, um, I can’t remember how I came across these guys, but I came across, I think at that stage there was two guys, they were managers and they were working for one of the airlines and they had, um, set up a, I think, Large call centre, I think it was in Launceston, and they were fighting against the outsourcing.

[00:55:05] Tony: Um, of call centers overseas, and they had proved that, uh, even though the hourly rate for the workers was more expensive in Tasmania, um, every other metric, including satisfaction and productivity and sales, was higher than an overseas call center, because the people in the law system, um, had very low churn, they all wanted the job, they all cared about what they were doing.

[00:55:31] Tony: Um, there was a ready made market of, uh, people who would otherwise probably have been unemployed. Uh, and, um, yeah, they kind of opened my eyes to that whole situation. And it was something I’d used at Myer Direct when we were based in Roeville. Uh, we had a ready made market of people to work on the call centers then.

[00:55:51] Tony: We had a large call center that we were running. And then I came across them again. I think somehow they’d gotten into Telstra and Telstra had employed them to set up. Call centres for them. So, yeah, I wonder if that’s the secret of the success of Launtel and with ABB is being in a rural area and having an Australian call centre based business where there’s low churn, even though it’s a higher operating cost,

[00:56:15] Tony: it does provide better business service.

[00:56:19] Cameron: Well, customer service

[00:56:20] Cameron: is, you know, hard to come by, uh, good customer service. And, um, you know, when you, when you find a

[00:56:27] Cameron: company that provides that, I

[00:56:30] Cameron: think, you you know, you’re willing to provide them with a lot more, um, I don’t know, flexibility, benefit of the doubt. Um, you’ll tolerate a lot. The other story I got to tell you is Chrissy last week.

[00:56:42] Cameron: She was dropping Fox off at school, dropped her iPhone on the pavement, face down, picked it up, the screen protector was all cracked, but the screen was okay, but it was just all yellow. She couldn’t get it to do anything, it was just like straight, just a block yellow. So she came home and gave me a look at it, I rebooted it, still all yellow, so she made an Apple Genius appointment for that day, um, took it in, And the phone, we’d had the phone for nearly three years, so well out of warranty period, and they looked at it and they said, you know what?

[00:57:22] Cameron: It’s in really good nick. Apart from that, we’ll just give you a new one. So they just replaced her phone. She walked out 10, 15 minutes later with not a brand new phone, but a replacement of that. So 13 Pro Max or whatever, um, with a new two year warranty. Just, yeah, look. You know, he said it’s only six months out of warranty.

[00:57:45] Cameron: She said, well, it’s nine months really. I guess six, nine, you know. No, I figure they, they, they probably got some of these phones sitting on stock that, you know, they’re two, three year old phones. They’re probably not selling. So there’s probably economics or whatever in there and justifications for doing it.

[00:58:02] Cameron: They might’ve been told, you know, just get rid of these things, whatever. I don’t know. But. She was like, thought it was going to cost us 600 bucks for a new screen. She walked out with a new phone. I mean, that level of customer support, like you’re not getting that from many businesses in

[00:58:19] Tony: That’s amazing. Didn’t, it didn’t like, he didn’t come away with his phone number at the top of the contact list or something like that. I wonder if I get the same service if I went in

[00:58:29] Tony: with a cracked phone.

[00:58:31] Cameron: Probably, you know, might’ve had, I also think we, um, A couple of days earlier, um, or maybe the day before actually, uh, I took her to the Apple store for a Vision Pro demo. I was picking up my laptop, it was getting fixed, and, um, I booked her a Vision Pro, well, she booked a Vision Pro demo on my suggestion.

[00:58:52] Cameron: So, maybe they thought, ooh, she and her husband are both in for Vision Pro demos, maybe we’ll sell them a seven and a half thousand, two seven and a half thousand dollar headsets if we keep them happy. I don’t know. But, um. Anyway, it’s just really impressive customer service from both Launtel and, um, Apple in the last week.

[00:59:14] Tony: Well done.

[00:59:15] Cameron: She deserves a mention.

[00:59:17] Cameron: Alright, well, thank you for ABB,

[00:59:19] Cameron: Tony. that’s it. After hours, Tony. Horses? How are the horses

[00:59:23] Cameron: doing?

[00:59:24] Tony: Well, I haven’t had much horse activity. They’re all in training at the moment, but, um, nothing running. I did wanna call out. We should, and we should perhaps try and get him on the show. Chris Bachelor, who used to be one of the principals in scaffold with Roger Montgomery, I came across him. I was doing my, um, online learning for our authorized representative.

[00:59:44] Tony: License, um, and he wrote a module about share buybacks, and it’s often a question we get at, um, in, uh, we get a question on QAV from, uh, our listeners about share buybacks, and it was actually a really good module, so, um, I might try and reach out to him and get him on for an interview about share buybacks and the, and the ins and outs

[01:00:05] Tony: and legalities and intricacies of it.

[01:00:07] Cameron: We have had Chris on the show, haven’t we?

[01:00:11] Tony: Possibly, is he now in

[01:00:12] Tony: Stockopedia?

[01:00:14] Cameron: Yeah.

[01:00:15] Tony: Okay, well, there you go.

[01:00:16] Cameron: I’m just I’m just confirming. Yeah, he’s at Stockopedia

[01:00:19] Cameron: now. Yeah,

[01:00:20] Tony: right,

[01:00:20] Tony: there

[01:00:21] Tony: we go.

[01:00:22] Cameron: I’m pretty sure we had him on to talk

[01:00:24] Cameron: about Stockopedia a while back, because

[01:00:25] Tony: what he did,

[01:00:27] Cameron: yeah,

[01:00:28] Tony: or we should get him back to talk about share buybacks because he did a really good job,

[01:00:32] Tony: um, on the Authorized Rep Learning

[01:00:34] Tony: site.

[01:00:36] Cameron: Okay. Share buybacks. And, uh, we’re doing a thing for them in a couple of weeks.

[01:00:43] Tony: are, yeah, We can talk to him then if you like.

[01:00:47] Cameron: yeah. Share buybacks.

[01:00:52] Tony: after hours, um, Alex gave me a few good tips. Uh, she went to a Brace Cummins concert. Have you heard of her at all?

[01:01:00] Cameron: I don’t think so, no.

[01:01:01] Tony: I think she’s a young singer in Melbourne, so you probably haven’t. Um, Alex’s comment was, uh, I wanted to go and see her at the SV before she got big. It might be too hard to get tickets.

[01:01:10] Tony: So, um, I’ve been listening to her. It’s probably not my cup of tea, but, um, anybody who likes sort of, uh, the person she reminded me of was Joni Mitchell, anyone who likes sort of female. folk singers. Um, it’s that kind of style. But the other one which I’m enjoying is um, Alex gave me a link to the uh, the site’s called stitchesintime.

[01:01:30] Tony: me. So stitches in time slash watch slash one. But it’s basically someone has Taken everything that’s ever been broadcast about Dr. Who and put it in chronological order. So like if the doctor went back to prehistoric times, that’s in the, in the right order with the other de another episode that went back in prehistoric times.

[01:01:56] Tony: Or if there was a radio play, it set in prehistoric times that gets wedged in as well. So it’s, it’s quite, it’s quite fun to watch. It’s a bit of a mind. Mindfuck when you go through and look at all the different, it jumps between different doctors quickly and assistants and all the rest, but it’s, it’s, um, really interesting and a lot

[01:02:14] Tony: of fun.

[01:02:16] Cameron: Wow. I bet you a lot of it takes place in, like, 19th century London.

[01:02:22] Tony: Yeah, Victorian

[01:02:23] Tony: era. Yeah.

[01:02:24] Tony: I haven’t got that far yet, but

[01:02:26] Tony: yes.

[01:02:26] Cameron: yeah, two thirds of it’s just in Victorian London. Yeah,

[01:02:30] Tony: yeah. Uh, and also I want a big shout out to Alex, I don’t think she’s listening, but if she does, she’s a finalist for the Mosman Emerging Artist Art Prize, run by the Mosman City Council up here,

[01:02:42] Cameron: Right.

[01:02:43] Tony: is being drawn in a couple of weeks

[01:02:45] Tony: on a Friday night, so we’ll go along and look

[01:02:47] Tony: at

[01:02:47] Tony: that.

[01:02:48] Tony: Yeah,

[01:02:48] Cameron: you know how she ended up in that? Did she submit something

[01:02:52] Tony: yeah, there’s, there’s lots of art prizes, and I’ve encouraged her to suss out the ones she thinks she might have a chance at, and so she submitted, I think, to three at the moment, and this one has put her on the short list.

[01:03:04] Cameron: Fantastic. Congratulations, Daleks.

[01:03:06] Tony: Yeah, that’s pretty much it. I’ve had fun watching US politics over the weekend and my, my favourite headline was Donald Duck.

[01:03:19] Cameron: Yes,

[01:03:22] Tony: great to see George Clooney running the Democrats and calling the shots now. He, he came out Saturday night and said that Biden

[01:03:28] Tony: should step down and by Sunday he was gone.

[01:03:31] Tony: So, yeah,

[01:03:33] Cameron: well maybe he should run,

[01:03:35] Cameron: they might have a chance against Trump if Clooney runs against him.

[01:03:39] Tony: I don’t know. He’s, um, he’s a polarizing figure. I remember when I was in Canada, I had some American

[01:03:45] Tony: friends who hated him because he was seen as being a Democrat. a

[01:03:49] Cameron: Well the lefties, I mean the right won’t vote for him but he might get the lefties to

[01:03:52] Cameron: get out and

[01:03:54] Tony: Oh, I’ll get out and vote for

[01:03:55] Tony: Kamala. if she gets it, she’s got to get through the conference. yeah learning.

[01:04:03] Cameron: You know, Biden up until, you know, the weekend saying there was no way he was not running and only if the Lord Almighty himself came and told him not to do it.

[01:04:14] Cameron: And, you know, yeah, clearly, apparently. Well, apparently it sounds like Pelosi and Obama. Sort of told him he had to pull out. But he didn’t say that when he was interviewed a couple of weeks ago. If he’d said, well, listen, you know, if the, uh, head honchos of the Democratic Party all come and convince me that I’m not the right person, then sure, I’ll step down.

[01:04:37] Cameron: But no, no, no, he’s

[01:04:38] Tony: can’t do

[01:04:39] Tony: that though, can he? It’s like a CEO of a company. I’ve got the backing of the board. Just keep saying I’ve got the backing of the board, even if you’re in midnight negotiations for your future. He keeps, otherwise you’re a lame duck. You can’t do it that way. I listened to the AmeriCast podcast, which is the BBC reporters who cover American politics, and one of them said that it was on the weekend that, uh, their sources were telling them that Biden finally got to see the poll numbers, he is, like he’s had been hiding them or not showing him the correct numbers, and that had been one of the convincing factors as well.

[01:05:18] Tony: But as soon as, as soon as Biden came down with COVID, I said to Jenny,

[01:05:21] Tony: that’s it, he’s gone. It’s a cover.

[01:05:23] Cameron: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I wondered if the COVID was a cover for him just, yeah, staying at

[01:05:29] Tony: Take a breather.

[01:05:30] Cameron: out his exit strategy.

[01:05:32] Tony: Correct. Step back, talk to everyone and announce a

[01:05:35] Tony: step down.

[01:05:36] Cameron: But it’s, this is the thing that gets me though, like, so for quite a few years now, since, you know, his last run against Trump in 2019, 2020, you know, there were lots of stories about the fact that his mental acuity wasn’t what it was. A lot of

[01:05:55] Tony: Yeah.

[01:05:56] Cameron: in the, in the, nomination process. A lot of his, uh, um, other candidate wannabes were highlighting the fact that he was losing his memory and losing his ability to speak and all of that kind of stuff.

[01:06:09] Cameron: Uh, and then when he became the nominee, when the party basically forced him down everyone’s throat, they all rallied around and said, Oh no, he’s great. And as Glenn Greenwald has been pointing out on his podcast for the last few weeks, right up until. Days before the last, before his debate with Trump, there were people, not just in the Democratic party and the, the rank and file and his advisors, but even journalists like Joe Scarborough from Morning Joe, absolutely swearing black and blue that they’ve spent time with Biden, that he was sharp as ever, 100 percent old Biden, all great.

[01:06:50] Cameron: And then of course the debate happened and it was obvious that he wasn’t all there, at least on that particular night he was not able to cope. And then all of those guys like Joe Scarborough did a, you know, double take or did a 180 overnight and said, Oh yeah, he needs to drop out. He’s not the man he used to be.

[01:07:09] Cameron: Whereas they’d been saying for like right up until the night before that he was sharp as ever and they personally had spent time with him and he was in killer form. It’s just, the media’s lying, the party’s lying, everyone’s lying, and then they’re like, but we’re the good guys. Donald Trump’s, Donald Trump’s a liar and a bad guy.

[01:07:31] Cameron: Where they go, go, well, hold on. You have no credibility. None of you have, why should

[01:07:35] Tony: I don’t know why you’re shocked by

[01:07:37] Tony: that, Cameron.

[01:07:38] Cameron: I’m not shocked

[01:07:39] Cameron: but it’s the fact that they get away with it, that no one calls them, like JD Vance saying, you know, Trump was Hitler, now is his veep.

[01:07:50] Cameron: Tucker Carlson getting up at the Republican National Convention over the weekend and saying Trump was the greatest guy on earth, where he got fired from Fox News when his emails and text messages were leaked saying that, thank God we don’t need to talk about him anymore, he’s, he’s, he’s, whatever he said, I can’t remember, but it was not complimentary of Trump.

[01:08:08] Cameron: And he, you know, said that he’d been so sick of, you know, hated having to prompt him up for the last couple of years. So, Glad to see the back of him forever and all that kind of stuff. But no one, like, it’s just, no one calls them on their hypocrisy, whether it’s in the media or it’s the politicians or the party officials, they don’t get called on it.

[01:08:26] Cameron: It’s

[01:08:26] Tony: Well, they do. I’ve been reading articles about JD Vance flip flopping and how Peter Thiel took him to Mar a Lago and he met with Trump and there was a big stack of papers that Trump had printed out where JD Vance had been critical of him and Vance was, you know apologetic and kissed the ring and now he’s the VP so it gets reported it’s just that it

[01:08:46] Tony: gets gets washed away in the tide of whatever else is

[01:08:49] Tony: going on.

[01:08:50] Cameron: Yeah, I mean the Democrats report on the Republicans, the Republicans report on the Democrats, but for their own people, they just turn a blind eye and, you know,

[01:08:59] Tony: of course. Yeah, no, I

[01:09:01] Tony: agree.

[01:09:01] Cameron: But, but, it’s just no wonder

[01:09:04] Cameron: that, you know, there’s just a lack of trust in the system and the politicians.

[01:09:08] Tony: Well, it’s a shame it, it’s particularly happening in the US but it’s happening here now too, that the media’s become partisan. It’s not news anymore. It’s not impartially reported generally, it’s it’s partisan. It’s it’s editorial, it’s it’s opinion. It, you shouldn’t call the news anymore. You just call it the.

[01:09:27] Cameron: Yeah.

[01:09:29] Tony: And, uh, it’s a shame. Speaking, uh, did you hear the meme or story from J. D. Vance at the, um, Republican convention?

[01:09:38] Cameron: Uh,

[01:09:39] Tony: loaded handguns?

[01:09:41] Cameron: No.

[01:09:42] Tony: Oh, this, I couldn’t, I couldn’t believe it when I heard it and it made me laugh. But, um, this is after, you know, assassination attempt. When you’d think that they’d be saying, maybe we’ve got too many guns.

[01:09:55] Tony: He gets up on stage, and I’m going to quote it. He says, um, let me tell you another meme, he calls it Mamaw story. He says, um, let me tell you another meme, he calls it Mamaw story. Now my mamo died shortly before I left for Iraq in 2005. And when we went through her things, we found 19 loaded handguns.

[01:10:10] Tony: Now the thing is they were stashed all over her house, under the bed, in the closet, in the silverware drawer, and we under what? What We wondered what was going on. And it occurred to us that towards the end of her life, Mamaw couldn’t get around so well. And so this frail old woman made sure that no matter where she was, she was within arm’s length of whatever she needed to protect her family with.

[01:10:31] Tony: That’s who we fight for, that’s American

[01:10:32] Tony: spirit. And the crowd erupted. And I’m like, don’t you know that your presidential candidate was almost shot to death a couple of days before?

[01:10:44] Cameron: Almost shot.

[01:10:46] Tony: and they’re cheering for this guy’s grandmother who had 19

[01:10:50] Tony: guns stashed around

[01:10:51] Tony: the house.

[01:10:52] Cameron: One of the things that Glenn Greenwald’s been pointing out though about the RNC is the diversity of views from the speakers on stage. He was like, yeah. He said it’s all over the place. He said you had like, um, Tucker Carlson. and I think Vance himself that are really anti supporting the war in Ukraine.

[01:11:15] Cameron: Tucker Carlson got, he played a clip of Tucker Carlson getting up and saying, you know, the US provoked, Biden provoked Putin into invading Ukraine, which I agree with, Glenn Greenwald agrees with, John Mearsheimer agrees with, deliberate provocation to lead him into a drawn out, unwinnable war. Um, but then they’d have another speaker get up.

[01:11:39] Cameron: immediately after him and be all pumping up America and fighting the war and destroying Putin. And he said it was, he said, it’s like, there’s no consistency. And he was kind of asking the question, like, is this a good thing? Like that in a Trump Republican party that you don’t have to tow the line, you can get up and just speak your mind.

[01:12:01] Cameron: But he was also playing, the audience was cheering. Regardless of what anyone said, one speaker says, yeah, we got to prosecute the war in Ukraine. They’re all cheering. He says, no, we should pull out of Ukraine. They’re all cheering. It’s whether

[01:12:15] Tony: Well, there is no, there is no, Trump doesn’t have a policy.

[01:12:18] Tony: He’ll say one thing one day and something else another day.

[01:12:21] Tony: So yeah, That’s it.

[01:12:22] Cameron: yeah, he’s just auditioning to see which gets the most applause and what he might say next, you know?

[01:12:27] Tony: Yeah.

[01:12:27] Tony: it’s an evolutionary growth

[01:12:28] Tony: algorithm. So let’s just

[01:12:30] Cameron: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:12:32] Tony: I think it’s great, though, that, um, that Trump is the new Gough Whitlam. He’s going to bring home the troops. He’s going to put up tariffs. He’s going to support local industry, local resources, make the U. S. self sufficient with oil.

[01:12:46] Tony: Uh, he’s going to support the working person. Um, can I, can I stop immigration? You could hold Goff Whitlam’s 72 policy agenda beside the Trump agenda. And it’s almost line by line

[01:12:59] Tony: the same.

[01:13:00] Cameron: Pre university. Bring in

[01:13:03] Tony: Eh, maybe not that.

[01:13:07] Cameron: Yeah,

[01:13:08] Tony: Trump’s running a, like a.

[01:13:10] Tony: You know, 70s style socialist

[01:13:12] Tony: agenda.

[01:13:13] Cameron: there’s

[01:13:14] Cameron: the other point Greenwald made is he ran on that in 2016, too, and then really did none of it. He said, you know,

[01:13:22] Tony: Yeah, it’s just all bullshit.

[01:13:23] Tony: Yeah.

[01:13:24] Cameron: yeah, yeah, yeah. Goff actually did it.

[01:13:26] Tony: Yeah.

[01:13:27] Tony: true.

[01:13:29] Cameron: Well, he was saying that, you know, that Trump ran on that anti war, you know, sort of, Pulling away from NATO, et cetera, et cetera. Um,

[01:13:40] Tony: But never did it.

[01:13:41] Cameron: know, cleaning up the swamp. Well, he said, and then he stacked his administration with Mike Pompeo and, you know, John Bolton and the generals who were all, you know, just maintaining.

[01:13:53] Cameron: Like I said to you the other day, I don’t think Trump really did anything that any. Republican president in the last 20, 30 years wouldn’t have done. He just ended up with a bunch of people, you know, and I don’t think his attention span’s that great. So he probably doesn’t know what’s happening from day to day.

[01:14:08] Cameron: So Greenwald was asking this time around, will he actually build an administration full of people that are going to prosecute what he says he’s going to do, or it would just be a repeat of the same thing all over again, you know,

[01:14:19] Tony: Well, no, he’s going to build an administration of yes people. So whatever Trump says that morning, they’ll run around in circles trying to do that day and the next day it’ll

[01:14:27] Tony: change.

[01:14:30] Cameron: Anyhoo, just making sure that he’s, uh, Got the best score on the scoreboard at the golf club.

[01:14:38] Tony: Oh, speaking of golf, it was the British Open this weekend. So I really happily watched a lot of golf, but I played a couple of rounds and I managed to win the C grade competition at my golf

[01:14:49] Tony: club

[01:14:50] Cameron: C grade!

[01:14:51] Tony: The C grade. Yeah. So, um, I beat Donald Trump

[01:14:58] Tony: or he didn’t know that I’d won it. Otherwise he would have, uh, he would have come in and,

[01:15:01] Tony: and trumped me. Yeah, big deal. Haven’t won a thing at golf for years. So that was, um,

[01:15:07] Tony: that was fun.

[01:15:08] Cameron: What did you get? Like a little trophy or something?

[01:15:11] Tony: 50 buck pro shop voucher.

[01:15:13] Tony: Which will,

[01:15:14] Cameron: what can you get at a pro shop

[01:15:15] Cameron: for 50 bucks?

[01:15:16] Tony: you know, about nine golf, eight or nine golf balls, which will do me for a couple of

[01:15:19] Tony: weeks

[01:15:20] Cameron: Yeah.

[01:15:21] Tony: before I lose them on the golf

[01:15:22] Tony: course.

[01:15:23] Cameron: Really? Do you lose a lot?

[01:15:25] Tony: Uh, we, we play at a golf course, which is, has very high winds and a lot of rough. So yeah, I used, I actually went around on the weekend without losing one, but I probably average one or two balls around in the rough,

[01:15:38] Tony: can’t find it.

[01:15:40] Cameron: I should send you the 400 that Fox has got in bags in the garage from picking him up on golf

[01:15:45] Cameron: courses.

[01:15:46] Tony: Oh, we should get some reward for that. I’ll, I’ll buy some off him.

[01:15:50] Cameron: Yeah, how do I get them to you?

[01:15:53] Tony: Uh, next time I’m up in Brisbane, we’ll go through them and I’ll pick out some.

[01:15:56] Cameron: gonna cost me a hundred bucks to ship them to

[01:15:58] Tony: Yeah, yeah. I’ll be up there at some stage again and we’ll go through the

[01:16:01] Tony: barrel and I’ll get someone, give them some

[01:16:03] Tony: money.

[01:16:05] Cameron: I got a couple of plugs for you. Film, I watched on Tubi, T U B I, the streaming service, the free streaming service that I’ve been using with a lot of great films from the 40s, 20s, through to the whatevers. A lot of B, C, D grade, straight to video, straight to drive in movies, which are often my favourite to watch.

[01:16:27] Cameron: Stingray from 1976, 1976. You ever seen that?

[01:16:32] Tony: No, I can’t say I have.

[01:16:34] Tony: Or perhaps I have, but

[01:16:35] Tony: I’ve forgotten it.

[01:16:37] Cameron: Can’t recommend this film enough if you like, sort of, 70s films. Written and directed by a guy called Richard Taylor, whose name sounded familiar and I tried to figure out why, um, really couldn’t figure it. Like, I don’t know him, it’s just one of those names that sounds familiar, but he didn’t do much. He wrote a piece of, uh, Fright Show, which was a 1985, uh, horror Mythology that I might have saw back in the day, but anyway, this is, this is, this Stingray is a great plot, like low budget, sort of a mid seventies, um, car chase kind of film, a lot of real stunts, you know, the kind of thing, like Smokey and the Bandit kind of car

[01:17:25] Tony: right. Yep.

[01:17:27] Cameron: the plot is fantastic, really

[01:17:29] Cameron: great, but it starts off with a drug deal goes bad in an alley late at night, two guys with, uh, Bags of coke, two other guys arrive with the cash.

[01:17:43] Cameron: They do the transaction and as the guys are counting, the guys who are selling the drugs are counting the cash, they see a tracker in the briefcase under the cash. So they figured these guys are going to track them down and kill them. So they pull guns out, kill the guys. So they take the coke and the money.

[01:18:01] Cameron: And they’ve a moose, but they hear cops behind them. So they need to stash it. So they pull, it’s like middle of night in some town, Midwest US. They pull into a car yard and one of them gets out and he gets the briefcase with the Coke and the cash, and he goes into a Corvette that’s for sale, a Corvette Stingray, and stashes it behind the front seat, like they had the, the boot was behind the, the slightly a two seater behind the seat.

[01:18:26] Cameron: Then they get pulled over by the cops later that night anyway, they get taken in, questioned, held for 24 hours, they’ve got nothing on them so they have to let them go. The guys go back to the car yard to get their stuff, just in time to see two preppy young guys get the keys and drive away in it. By the way, in the car, getting him out of the police station was their boss, who’s a woman.

[01:18:48] Cameron: Who’s dressed up as a nun in disguise so the cops don’t recognize her. She’s this tough, gorgeous, uh, gang leader in the 70s, which is always great. Sherry Jackson is the actress. Again, don’t know. She was a child actor, I think. Never seen her in anything before or since. So anyway, they, they chase this stingray.

[01:19:08] Cameron: to try and run these guys down. The Stingray thinks they’re having a race, the guys in the Stingray, so they, they start speeding up and fanging around the streets. Then a cop car pulls out to chase them for speeding, pulls them over. The gangsters come up behind, think the cops are going to find the drugs, kill the cops. But the cops have phoned in the fact that they’re chasing the Stingray, then they get killed. And so the rest of the cops think that the guys in the Stingray killed the cops. So now they’re chasing, so the guys in the Stingray have got the cops chasing them, the gangsters chasing them, and they’re just two dummies who have no idea what’s going on.

[01:19:46] Cameron: Actually, one of them’s played by Robert Mitchum’s son, Christopher Mitchum. Anyway, and, and hilarity, uh, ensues. Um, Uh, but it’s just a lot of fun. A lot of, some of the acting is great. Like some of the characters are just larger than life and it’s just a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it. Chrissy came in halfway through it.

[01:20:05] Cameron: She really enjoyed it because the, the, the woman who’s running the gangsters is this really hard ass, cool, sort of badass chick who’s pulling machine guns and blowing people away and not taking any shit from all the guys who work for her. Um, And then I watched another film on, uh, Tubi, The Assassination Bureau

[01:20:30] Tony: Well, that rings the bell.

[01:20:34] Cameron: Um,

[01:20:34] Cameron: 1969 British film starring Diana Rigg, a young, handsome Oliver Reed, and Telly Savalas.

[01:20:45] Tony: Now, I think I have seen this one, Cam, because as soon as you said it, I

[01:20:48] Tony: Rigg.

[01:20:50] Cameron: yes. She’s this, and again, just a great plot. I think this was remade maybe some years ago with um, Roger Stirling from Mad Men in it. But basically it starts off with her as a journalist, a wannabe journalist. She’s this prissy, it’s set in like the 1800s. She’s this pretty woman who, um, is briefing a bunch of journalists, the proprietor of a newspaper in London, played by Telly Savalas, putting on a British accent, about this organization called the Assassination Bureau that she’s heard rumors of that, uh, that kill for hire, but high profile politicians and business leaders and that kind of stuff.

[01:21:31] Cameron: And she wants to sort of break a story on them, so Telly Savalas, gives her the commission to go and research it. So she tracks these organization down and gets a meeting with the head of the organization. The chairman, Oliver Reed, says she has a commission for him. And he said, well, you know, we only kill people who really deserve it.

[01:21:50] Cameron: She said, well, this person is a murderer. And he suffers from arrogance and pride and all. He goes, well, okay, we’ll take the commission. Who is it? And she says, it’s him. Uh, so she puts a commission of his assassination bureau out on himself and he accepts it. He goes, okay, fair call. So he goes to his board and then it turns out Telly Savalas is the vice chairman of the board.

[01:22:13] Cameron: So he knew what, this is Telly Savalas plot to get rid of the boss and take his job. But anyway, so the chairman, Oliver Reid then says to his board,

[01:22:22] Cameron: so you’re all getting slack and you, you know, I don’t think our integrity is what it once was. You have, you have 24 hours before the race starts. You have to kill me or I will kill you.

[01:22:34] Cameron: And so then it’s just this movie of them all plotting to try and assassinate him and, and they’re wearing disguises and he’s wearing disguises and Diana Rigg’s in the middle of the whole thing. Absolutely stupid. Um, and played as a comedy, you know, but, um, really fun, like a great, really good, entertaining, good old time 60s British film, which, anyway.

[01:22:58] Cameron: Really enjoyed it.

[01:23:00] Tony: Oh, good.

[01:23:00] Cameron: Highly recommended

[01:23:01] Cameron: if you can track it down.

[01:23:03] Tony: Yeah, I’ll look them up.

[01:23:04] Tony: Sounds

[01:23:04] Tony: great.

[01:23:05] Cameron: Directed, by the way, by Basil Reardon, uh, Dearden. Basil Dearden, who, um, did a lot of great, uh, films in the 40s, 50s. One of the great British directors of that period. And then, um, my last recommendation is music wise, the Jim Carroll Band. You ever come across the Jim Carroll Band?

[01:23:25] Tony: No, I

[01:23:25] Tony: haven’t. No.

[01:23:27] Cameron: Ever seen the Basketball Diaries?

[01:23:29] Cameron: Leonardo DiCaprio film from the, uh, No? Okay.

[01:23:32] Tony: Oh, yuck.

[01:23:33] Tony: No.

[01:23:34] Cameron: I knew Jim Carroll, I knew who he was, uh, no,

[01:23:36] Cameron: for decades. He was a American poet, um, got into heroin and, uh, got his money from heroin by passing out sexual favors under bridges and that kind of stuff, and, um, he wrote a memoir called The Basketball Diaries that Leonardo DiCaprio, um, starred in as a film, good film, just about, you know, his tough life as a, you know, poet, sort of druggie, addict, that kind of thing, got clean, Um, dated, um, Paddy

[01:24:09] Cameron: Smith, lived with Paddy Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe after he got clean, dated Paddy Smith.

[01:24:13] Cameron: Anyway, Paddy, he had a punk band called the Jim Carroll Band that put out two albums in the 70s. And it’s kind of like a cross, but he’s a poet, like a real poet, who created a punk band. And it’s like a cross between the Stooges, MC5, and, you know, maybe Lou Reed. And, um, with a really Surprising music. I like, I was one of these things like, how the hell have I never

[01:24:39] Tony: Yeah.

[01:24:40] Cameron: heard this before?

[01:24:41] Cameron: I know Jim Carroll, totally in my wheelhouse, 70s punk. Um, and, uh, yeah, anyway, there’s two albums on Spotify. If you like 70s punk, if you like the Stooges, that kind of stuff, I can highly recommend it, good stuff. Patti Smith, all that kind of jazz.

[01:25:00] Cameron: Well, my headphones just dropped out on me, Tony. So I think that’s

[01:25:05] Tony: It’s a sign. It’s a moment.

[01:25:07] Cameron: Run out of battery.

[01:25:10] Tony: Well, that’s good. Thank you.

[01:25:12] Cameron: go have a good week.

[01:25:13] Tony: Yes. Happy ASX.

[01:25:16] Tony: All right.

[01:25:16] Cameron: Talk to you next

[01:25:17] Cameron: week.

[01:25:18] Tony: Thank you.