In Episode 736 of the QAV value investing podcast, the hosts dive into portfolio updates over the last 12 months, comparing performances between the US and Australian markets. Key stats include the US portfolio’s 44% increase and the Australian portfolio’s 10% growth. They explore a thought-provoking discussion on an article by Alex Gluyas about large caps outperforming small caps amidst economic challenges follows and the incentives of financial planners and brokers. The episode also delves into behavioural economics with a quote from ‘What Works on Wall Street’ by James O’Shaughnessy, focusing on investment decision biases. The ‘Pulled Pork’ segment features a detailed analysis of Judo Holdings (JDO), highlighting its history, market strategy, and financial performance.
00:00 Introduction and Episode Setup
00:26 Weather and Personal Anecdotes
01:36 Portfolio Updates and Performance
06:16 Market Analysis and Economic Insights
14:06 Behavioral Economics and Investment Strategies
19:15 Company Spotlight: Judo Holdings
Transcription
736 Club
[00:00:00] TK: All right, I’m recording. 1, 2,
[00:00:09] TK: 3.
[00:00:11] CR: Guess I better hit record. Welcome back to QAV.
[00:00:16] CR: This is
[00:00:16] CR: episode 736, I think. And I’m so prepared I don’t even have my notes open. Um, 736, here we go. Uh, how are you, Tony Kynaston? Windy down in, uh, Victoria, I believe.
[00:00:31] TK: Well, it was. It’s actually quite still and sunny now, but um, yeah, cyclonic over the last few days.
[00:00:38] CR: Wow.
[00:00:40] TK: I took, uh, so my brother in law Warren was his, he was down staying at Cape Schanck with me and Ruddy and we went out to play golf. And it was actually, I think, possibly his first game of golf or first real game of golf. I think he’s mucked around before, um, he’s decided to take it up now he’s retired.
[00:00:56] TK: And, uh,
[00:00:57] TK: he went down to Flinders, a nice course nearby and played in, uh, 85 kilometre an hour
[00:01:04] TK: wind, so it
[00:01:05] TK: was a baptism of fire.
[00:01:08] CR: Did he give up on golf immediately? Like
[00:01:10] TK: No, no, he was very
[00:01:11] TK: frustrated, but no, he was good.
[00:01:14] CR: Hit the bull, it comes back and hits you in the
[00:01:15] CR: head.
[00:01:16] TK: Just
[00:01:17] CR: Are those sorts of wins?
[00:01:18] TK: Just about. Yeah, very
[00:01:20] TK: Scottish.
[00:01:21] CR: Yeah. Yeah, Well fitting, I guess.
[00:01:23] TK: Yeah.
[00:01:24] CR: Well, uh, it’s hot. As I was saying to you off air, 36 degrees in Brisbane on the
[00:01:29] CR: last day of winter. So that was fun. We know what we’ve got coming in the next few months, I guess.
[00:01:36] TK: Brisbane’s
[00:01:36] CR: Well, speaking of things heating up, let’s get into portfolio updates.
[00:01:42] CR: There’s a lazy segue. Um, last 12 months across our
[00:01:46] CR: portfolios. I’m doing last 12 months because that’s kind of where we’re up to with the Stockopedia portfolios.
[00:01:53] TK: Ah, I wonder why you were
[00:01:54] TK: doing that.
[00:01:56] CR: Yeah, it’s cause I think I started them about September,
[00:01:59] CR: uh, last year.
[00:02:01] TK: Yeah, right.
[00:02:01] CR: The, um, the US version is up 44%, uh, in a year versus the S& P up 27%.
[00:02:11] CR: And I just invested more cash, uh, yesterday, uh, bought two new, cause we were sitting on some cash for a while I was rejigging the.
[00:02:20] CR: Buy list. And so bought two new companies yesterday, UBS and JXN, both financial services companies, UBS, obviously everyone knows JXN is a smaller one, but it’s like half of the portfolio over there now, I think of financial services companies and the rest are shipping companies, more or less. Um, but interestingly, the.
[00:02:41] CR: Australian Stockopedia profile, that’s also been running about a year, is up about 10%, which is the same as the Stock Doctor dummy portfolio over the last 12 months. It’s also up about 10%. So, I don’t know what to, Take from that, but they both did pretty much exactly the same over the last year. I haven’t even looked at what the crossover is of the stocks, but obviously the dummy portfolio has been running for a lot longer.
[00:03:12] CR: The, um, S& P, uh, also up 10%, um, over the same period as the, um, Australian portfolio. Uh,
[00:03:26] TK: the S& P is up
[00:03:26] TK: 10%?
[00:03:28] CR: S& P 200
[00:03:31] TK: In Australia.
[00:03:32] CR: to. In Australia, yes, there’s a verse, the,
[00:03:35] CR: the US one, which is up
[00:03:36] CR: 27%.
[00:03:37] TK: I was going to say, yeah, Okay,
[00:03:39] CR: but that’s not a total, um, whatever they call it,
[00:03:43] CR: accumulation metric. Yeah, so when I do it in Stock Doctor versus the STW,
[00:03:49] CR: it’s up 16
[00:03:50] CR: percent versus our 10%. So we’re underperforming that a little bit for this year. But of course, um, since inception, our W portfolio in Australia is up about 15, closer to 16, uh, 15. 77 or something, I think, versus about nine for the STW. So it’s not, not a hundred percent better. It’s about 60. Five, something like that. Over the five years, um, it was double for a while there, but it’s pulled back a little bit over the last year or so.
[00:04:20] CR: In the dummy portfolio recently bought MSV, sold MSV, sorry, and bought SRG. And I just today, um, before going on air, Stockopedia one too. I think it was MME. Which is always a weird one. I had to go back and look at your pulled pork from the beginning of the year on MME reminds me of RMC Resimac, which we’ll talk about, uh, in a minute.
[00:04:49] CR: MME, and um, uh, p something. Can’t even remember what I bought five minutes ago. That’s how my memory is. Uh, something beginning with a letter P.
[00:05:02] TK: that narrows it down.
[00:05:03] CR: Street.
[00:05:04] TK: None of
[00:05:05] TK: these trades are personal recommendations either. It’s just what
[00:05:08] TK: suits the dummy portfolio at the moment.
[00:05:10] CR: Yeah. These are both, uh, uh, uh, quite low.
[00:05:13] CR: Um, a DT stocks too. Anyway, so it’s been very busy in the portfolio front, um, I’ll
[00:05:22] TK: Not unusual given its reporting season.
[00:05:25] CR: yeah, well, in fact, look, I had, you know, barely sold anything out of the dummy portfolio
[00:05:32] CR: for months. Um, the, the Stockopedia one, a little bit more volatile as it’s establishing itself, uh, both in the US and the Australian front, but, um, it’s been relatively quiet, I found both from a super portfolio, from all the portfolios actually over reporting season.
[00:05:52] CR: I haven’t had to sell much. What about. you
[00:05:55] TK: Exactly the same for
[00:05:56] TK: me. Yeah, absolutely. I haven’t, I haven’t bought
[00:05:58] TK: or sold anything for a long time.
[00:06:01] CR: There’s been a couple of crazy things happen that we’ve
[00:06:03] CR: talked about which have affected the light portfolios a little bit, but you know, sudden drops of 19 percent and stuff like that. I think MSV was one of those, but relatively speaking, fairly steady as she goes. I saw this article in The Fin this morning, Tony.
[00:06:19] CR: Winner takes all cycle, Dash’s hope of ASX small cap revival. It’s by, uh, Alex Glyus, uh, The largest companies on the Australian share market flexed their muscle in the August earnings season as investors rewarded blue chips for navigating tough macroeconomic conditions better than their smaller competitors.
[00:06:45] CR: The combination of a slowing economy, sticky inflation, And elevated interest rates created a winner takes all theme according to UBS, speak of the devil, as the strongest operators cemented their market positions even as small and medium businesses suffered. That dynamic has dashed hopes for a revival in small cap stocks this year, with the S& P ASX Small Ordinaries Index dropping 2.
[00:07:11] CR: 2 percent in the August reporting period, while the S& P ASX 200 was flat. It goes on, uh, later to say that, uh, the S& P ASX 200 is now trading at a price to earnings ratio of around 17. 5 times up from 15. 4 times a year ago and far above its long 5. I thought you said it was like 16 or something.
[00:07:44] TK: Yeah, so they’re referring to forward PE ratios. So, um, forecast earnings per share is what they’re using for their PE ratio. I tend to refer to trailing ones because they’re actuals. Yeah, so, yeah, um, that’s what I think they’ll be doing. Uh, yeah, I mean, I, I, well, my note when I read this article was I put a note beside my notes, which says economic puff piece, because that’s pretty much what it is.
[00:08:14] TK: It’s like, um, Look, I read the article. I think the last sentence is crucial to be fair to the, to the author. Um, so this is, the last two sentences read, Instead, the share market’s direction over the next year will be largely dictated by the delivery of earnings growth, which sits at just over 4 percent for FY25.
[00:08:38] TK: We see that as modest and achievable, Mr. Shellback said. I think he’s the UBS analyst. Challenges remain, however, and much will depend on how responsive the RBA is in cutting rates and whether Australia can remain detached from the current Chinese economic slowdown. So basically, the whole article is around caps outperforming small caps unless there’s an interest rate cut or China’s economy picks up or anything else happens between now and then.
[00:09:10] TK: Look, I take the point the article was making about the market being slightly overvalued I take the point about, I wouldn’t say, I wouldn’t draw a line between big caps and small caps. I draw a line between companies like, I guess, larger ones, but just resilient companies, companies with a moat that can ride out any downturn in the economy.
[00:09:30] TK: Um, I keep hearing anecdotally from people I know and in general that small businesses are doing it tough. So that probably means small caps are too, but as we know, there are good and bad small caps and good and bad large caps. So. Um, I, I hate to make
[00:09:49] TK: forecasts about whether large caps will outperform small caps or micro caps or industrials
[00:09:54] TK: or resources or whatever and just look at, look at the
[00:09:57] TK: whole thing, stock by stock.
[00:10:00] CR: And they’re looking right across the board and our job is to find the big caps and the small caps that are performing well but are undervalued. So it doesn’t really matter to us what the entire market is doing, we’re trying to pick the eyes out of the market. As is every investor, I guess.
[00:10:18] TK: Yeah, and I mean, um, yeah, it does, it does matter to me because I’m after more big, you know, larger ADT stocks than smaller ones, but it doesn’t mean I make a call on whether big caps are going to do better than smaller caps. Just a word of caution here, I think the whole industry cycles around these kinds of predictions.
[00:10:34] TK: Um, you know, going back a while, I had friends who were financial planners who would say things to me like, I think it’s time to get out of Australian shares and into US shares, or I think it’s time to get out of, you know, Large cap stocks for small cap stocks. It’s all just designed to make you trade. Um, so if you’re out there listening to this in a financial planner or anybody’s trying to tell you to cycle out of one sector into another because of a prediction, um, feed it with a grain of salt,
[00:11:02] TK: really.
[00:11:04] TK: Get a new financial planner.
[00:11:06] CR: it’s a brokerage play, is that what it is? Or a
[00:11:09] TK: Well, yeah, any sort of, it’s brokerage, it’s, it’s fund managers, it’s anyone involved in the financial services industry who’s using your
[00:11:16] TK: money, basically. Gets paid when You
[00:11:19] CR: to pay to,
[00:11:20] CR: yeah, you got to pay
[00:11:21] CR: to play.
[00:11:22] TK: Yeah, correct. Yeah, so they’ll be, they’ll be trotting out the UBS article for, for weeks saying, Hey, have you seen this? It’s time to rotate out
[00:11:31] TK: of big caps or rotate out of small
[00:11:33] TK: caps.
[00:11:33] TK: Sorry, but yeah. And in the six months time, they’ll be have some other rotation or in three months time, they’ll have
[00:11:38] TK: some other
[00:11:38] TK: rotation for you as well.
[00:11:41] CR: So that’s the thing to remember is these people are in it for the
[00:11:44] CR: fees. They’re not, not in it for your best interests.
[00:11:48] TK: Mm hmm.
[00:11:49] CR: in it for
[00:11:49] CR: their fees and their salary and their
[00:11:51] CR: bonus.
[00:11:52] TK: No financial planner ever takes Hippocratic oaths. Like a doctor. And even doctors these days, have you noticed every time I go to the doctor I get referred for a blood test or
[00:12:01] TK: some form of pathology and it just happens to be a pathologist in the same medical center? How
[00:12:06] TK: about
[00:12:06] TK: that?
[00:12:08] CR: Uh, that doesn’t happen with me, but, uh, okay. They’re always sending me for blood tests, but it’s always Sullivan Nicolaites around the corner or something.
[00:12:18] TK: well there you go, yeah,
[00:12:20] TK: yeah.
[00:12:22] CR: well that’s just convenient. You’re
[00:12:24] CR: suggesting that there’s some sort of a nod and a wink going on there
[00:12:28] TK: Well in, in my case they’re in under the same roof so there’s at least a rental arrangement
[00:12:32] TK: going on there. And they have, you know, got to make sure the pathologists can pay the rent this month, can’t get a
[00:12:37] TK: blood, I mean, I
[00:12:38] TK: mean, uh, that sniffle needs to get tested out at
[00:12:41] TK: the pathologists.
[00:12:43] CR: At our ages, I think regular blood tests are probably a good thing, right?
[00:12:47] TK: Oh, for sure.
[00:12:48] CR: Early cancer detection, all that kind of
[00:12:50] CR: stuff?
[00:12:51] TK: Yeah. Once a year.
[00:12:52] TK: Yeah.
[00:12:54] CR: Well, if you came down with some illness and they hadn’t sent you for a blood test, you’d be
[00:12:58] CR: like, you know, Doctor should have sent me for a blood test. I would have picked it up six months earlier. They can’t win. But, no, back to the financial planning industry, I think it is, you know, You know, there’s so much, uh, built up around all of these sorts of things. It is hard probably for people to remember that that’s what’s going on a lot of the time is it’s, it’s a con job, you know, a large, large percentage, I’m sure there are good and honest brokers and whatever’s financial planners out there and all that kind of stuff.
[00:13:29] CR: But a large percentage of the industry is about, uh, tricking you into doing things, being, uh, being active because that’s how they make the money. If you just. Sit and hold. don’t make any money. They’re not
[00:13:45] TK: An index fund.
[00:13:46] CR: of your portfolio. Yeah, right.
[00:13:48] TK: Like how you just spoke, you spoke about them, the STW’s up a tremendous amount this
[00:13:52] TK: year and long term is running at
[00:13:55] TK: least 10 percent but doing nothing.
[00:13:58] CR: Yeah. And as we know, beats most professional fund managers. Yeah. Well, moving right along. Things to be careful of this week. Uh, Resimac. Um, I was talking to a new member, Rod, last week about why it had such a high QAV score. And I knew we’d talked about it, but I couldn’t find it in my notes. Thank you to Andy, who Found the pulled pork that you did back in episode 702 for me.
[00:14:26] CR: Don’t know why it didn’t turn up in my searches. Um, the CEO resigned suddenly in July, uh, with, you know, no succession plan in place and, you know, I know we always look at that as a red flag, but I had a look at the share and the share price sort of collapsed in July, but then it’s recovered since then quite well too, but they have, one of these companies with weird financials, their PropCaf is 0.
[00:14:53] CR: 2. Um, which reminds me of MME, because I think MME’s is like 0. 3, they’re these financial services company where their PropCaf’s are weird. But, um, you did a pulled pork on it, as I said, back in 7. 02, and you sort of explained how that works, but they’ve been at the top of our buy list for the last couple of weeks.
[00:15:17] CR: Um, do you remember much about them from when you did the pulled pork?
[00:15:21] TK: Well, not a whole lot. I remember them. They’re a small sort of, um, a lender, uh, but I did look at, look at their annual report, uh, when you raised the issue today. I, I’m not sure what’s going on. I haven’t had enough time to drill down and get a detailed explanation, but their operating cash flow surged last year, which is why I think they have a very low QAV score and they’re on our buy list.
[00:15:48] TK: When I looked at their, uh, Their cash flow report in Stock Doctor and then also in the annual report. Looks like there’s a line item which is called something like repayment of loans. So it looks like they’ve had some kind of big income of cash, uh, which they’re calling some kind of repayment of loan. I don’t know the detail of it.
[00:16:09] TK: I don’t know if there was like a, you know, a large company that sold a building and paid off an office tower to them or something like that. I’m not sure. Quickly went through the annual report and couldn’t see any notes about it, but it lasts for the 12 months. It does look unusual compared to its long term
[00:16:26] TK: history.
[00:16:26] TK: So, um, this is the, I guess we’ve. Well, it is, it is a good one because there’s more operating cash flow in there, right? So, um, I suspect a couple of things. I suspect one, that it won’t last forever. It’ll go back to being off the buy list, probably this half or next half. Cause, probably next half. Cause this half, remember Stock Doctor and the numbers we use are a rolling 12 months.
[00:16:47] TK: So, there’s still six months of high operating cash flow.
[00:16:52] TK: in the current number, even though I think the last half was much lower. So I think if they have another half in the future, like they just did, then they won’t have a, they won’t be on our buy list because the PropCaf leader would be too low or it might even be negative.
[00:17:08] TK: So there’s something going on there with money coming in and going out. Um, could be about large projects repaying loans, or it could just be about, um, you know, they borrowed I’ve gotten more lending facilities available, which they’ll eventually lend out, which they, which banks often do. Issue a bond or arrange, um, you know, with someone to, uh, loan them money, which they can then loan out at a higher rate to residential mortgage holders.
[00:17:37] TK: So I suspect it’s something like that. I suspect it’s temporary, but, you know, influx of cash, we’ve said before, is a good
[00:17:44] TK: thing if management can, you know, redeploy it well. So, um, that’s what I
[00:17:49] TK: think I’m going to rely on in this case. But I don’t think Resimac will be around for a
[00:17:52] TK: long time on the buy list.
[00:17:55] CR: And the sudden resignation of the CEO back in July, and the market, or the
[00:18:00] CR: price dipped, and then as I said, sort of recovered. In terms of red flags, how would you take something like that a couple of months, six weeks after the event?
[00:18:12] TK: Yeah. I haven’t looked at that issue, but if it was a, if
[00:18:14] TK: it’s prima facie, it’s a red flag.
[00:18:17] TK: So let me just see if I
[00:18:19] TK: can find something about it.
[00:18:21] CR: Well, I’ve got the
[00:18:23] CR: I’ve got the announcement in, um, Stock Doctor’s announcement, it just said. Sort of pretty abrupt. Uh, 9th of, uh, sorry, 7th, no, what, 9th of July, 9 7, um, just trying to bring it up here. It says, uh, Resimac Group advises that Mr. Scott McWilliam has resigned from his employment with Resimac after 21 years of service, been CEO for six years, before that was joint CEO.
[00:18:51] CR: It is mutually agreed that Mr. McWilliam will take a period of leave Before his employment contract ends on the 1st of September 2024, so it was two days ago, uh, then it says they’re going to commence a search imminently to find a permanent replacement CEO. So,
[00:19:10] TK: that’s interesting. I mean, there could be any sort of reason for that, but that’s the sort of announcement that gets made if he’s got a job somewhere else.
[00:19:18] TK: You know, he’s gone to work for a competitor or something, so they’re asking him to leave straight away. But it could be, it could be anything.
[00:19:25] TK: It’s pretty, you know, pretty light on information there, isn’t it?
[00:19:29] CR: Yeah, I’m looking up, uh, the
[00:19:32] CR: interwebs to see if I can find out what’s going on, see if there’s any news about uh, Mr. Williams resigning, McWilliams, sorry, Mc. And, um, here we go, Banking Day, resign suddenly. Looking for Scuttlebutt.
[00:19:49] TK: Yeah, so am I. I think I’ve got the same article open.
[00:19:52] CR: Scuttlebutt.
[00:19:54] CR: Scuttlebutt.
[00:19:55] TK: Yeah, I mean, there’s a few interesting points in there, but there’s no reason. Talks about the share price being 60 percent of what it was when you took
[00:20:01] TK: over, um, but still that would be,
[00:20:04] TK: uh, a reason to move the CEO on, but to do it
[00:20:06] TK: in a managed way.
[00:20:08] CR: Yeah, never a good look
[00:20:09] TK: they ask you to leave straight away.
[00:20:11] TK: Well, we don’t know if he was asked, yeah, we don’t know if he was asked to leave straight away or he just resigned and
[00:20:17] TK: left.
[00:20:19] CR: well it was agreed that he was going to take a period of leave for several months. The move The move comes amid a period of upheaval at Resimac, with the lender recently having withdrawn from the New Zealand market and had a change in several senior leadership positions this year.
[00:20:35] CR: Anyway, nothing obvious there, um, so there you go. So, I’ve, I’ve sort of, bottom line is I’ve been sort of turning a blind eye to it in the last, uh, week. I’ve got a, I’ve got a vibe about it. I don’t know how you’d feel about it, but yeah, I just got a vibe.
[00:20:53] TK: Yeah,
[00:20:54] TK: look, it’s, um, it generally is a red flag for me, but it’s hard to know what’s going on, isn’t it,
[00:20:59] CR: Yeah,
[00:21:00] TK: to me, I mean, there’s another article here, which, where the chair says that, um, uh, where is it now? is, it’s not the chair, sorry, it’s the managing partner of First Point Mortgage Brokers. He’s saying, I’ve known Scotty for 20 years and I’ve worked with him and dealt with him on the other side in broking at Resimac. He’s someone who’s a wonderful people manager. He’s also strategically strong.
[00:21:21] TK: He’s seen the business through the merger of home loans and the real estate of Resimac. He stripped down, stripped away some unprofitable business lines and sold them off. He’s also set up Resimac Asset Finance, which has been a really wonderful success. Committing on his departure after 20 years. Troy Phillips said that he thinks that McWilliam has one more grand final left in him.
[00:21:43] TK: I think he’s a good operator. I think it’s probably good timing for him to move on and see what else is out there and use all the skills he’s learned to see if he can, uh, if it can take him to the next level. Um, yeah, I’m reading from that that he’s seen greener pastures somewhere else and decided to leave.
[00:22:00] CR: right,
[00:22:02] TK: Which, you know, that’s fine. People have to manage their own careers.
[00:22:06] TK: But again, like it’s, it’s strange if the CEO, if that was going to happen, you think the CEO would be saying to the board, hey, let’s work on a succession plan. I’m going to leave or something like that. Who knows?
[00:22:17] CR: yeah. Yeah, alright,
[00:22:20] TK: as, as we know, with these small caps, we operate in the vacuum in terms of that information, don’t we?
[00:22:26] CR: yeah, just not a good look, either way,
[00:22:29] TK: Yeah,
[00:22:30] CR: anyway, moving right along. ACL, this has been bugging me for the last few days, um, it’s, uh,
[00:22:40] CR: on our buy list, Australian Clinical Labs Limited. Their financials came out on the 29th of August, the share price shot up 10%, but their financials aren’t loaded in Stock Doctor.
[00:22:57] TK: well, that’s not unusual. We
[00:22:59] TK: see that a lot.
[00:23:01] CR: really, how long does it normally take?
[00:23:03] TK: can take up to a week usually.
[00:23:06] CR: So you can’t do anything.
[00:23:08] TK: Correct. So, but they’re on the buy list. Are they on the buy list or not?
[00:23:14] CR: they were on the
[00:23:14] CR: buy list yeah, but with outdated financials.
[00:23:17] TK: Yeah, right.
[00:23:19] CR: Um, and I’d want to look at their new financials. I could go through the
[00:23:22] CR: annual report. I even went to Stockopedia and they didn’t have their financials either loaded,
[00:23:27] TK: Right.
[00:23:27] CR: financials. So
[00:23:29] CR: anyway,
[00:23:30] TK: that’s a data provider issue. I think whoever’s doing their data
[00:23:33] TK: provision then hasn’t loaded it.
[00:23:34] CR: I’m sure that’s true. it doesn’t make it any
[00:23:36] CR: easier for me to buy them. So just, uh,
[00:23:42] CR: Word of warning, I guess, for everyone out there, because I’ve seen this a couple of times, as I mentioned, I think, last week, where financials come in and, or don’t come in, you see things jumping around, and just make sure that the numbers that you’re looking at in your checklist are the most recent numbers.
[00:24:01] CR: You don’t want to be making decisions. I mean, I guess you can assume if the If the results come out and the share price jumps 10%, they were probably good financials.
[00:24:11] TK: Yeah. No, that’s, that’s a good point. But, um, I’ve also seen the case where, you know, fund managers are at the results announcements
[00:24:19] TK: or waiting for the results announcements and
[00:24:20] TK: then placing their orders. And then a couple of days later, when they have a sober review, they’re
[00:24:26] TK: going, Oh, we shouldn’t
[00:24:27] TK: have done that.
[00:24:29] TK: The upturn can
[00:24:30] CR: and also, and our buying criteria are quite often different too. we want to buy something that’s undervalued, not just buy it because, you
[00:24:40] CR: know, it’s got good results. You know, we want to see how the numbers stack up, so. Anyway,
[00:24:45] TK: and also too, I think, um, I think in a lot of cases, maybe even the majority of cases, if you’re a fund manager who’s following a stock like ACL, and there probably
[00:24:55] TK: isn’t many, you’ve got a DCF in front of you saying you think the earnings are gonna go up
[00:24:59] TK: by X percent. And if it,
[00:25:02] CR: come Friday.
[00:25:03] TK: and if they come out, um, and it’s
[00:25:05] CR: That’s what Scott McWilliam, that’s what Scott McWilliam got, he got a DCF. Don’t come Friday.
[00:25:11] TK: they know, well, this is a discounted cash flow. But,
[00:25:13] CR: Oh, that DCF.
[00:25:15] TK: yeah. Um, if, uh. Yeah, if the, if the, your forecasts are below what the company announces, you’re probably just going to say buy straight away.
[00:25:25] TK: If you’re a fund manager, right? Because it’s, yeah, you don’t want to miss out on that first little bit. But again, my experience is I can’t possibly do that across every stock.
[00:25:35] TK: Um, I got to wait for the numbers and base my decision based on that. I may miss out on the first 10% But, um, I’ve also seen cases where it goes up 10 percent and comes back and then I buy it and it rebalances and it takes off
[00:25:48] TK: again. So,
[00:25:51] CR: Um, I’m just having a look to see what it actually has done. ACL. Let me see. Oh no, it’s still going up. Oh, bastards. It was at 2. 67 before the results came out last week. It’s now 3. 20. Ah, bastards. Anyway,
[00:26:11] TK: buy list last week. Did you think about buying it then before the results came
[00:26:14] TK: out?
[00:26:16] CR: Uh, I didn’t have anything to buy last week. No, I didn’t, yeah, it wasn’t, wasn’t an issue. Um, speaking of weird stuff in Stock Doctor, when Alex sent me the, her buy list yesterday, SCL
[00:26:32] TK: Hmm.
[00:26:32] CR: at the top of the buy list and she put a question mark beside it because some of the charts didn’t work and I, it wasn’t on my buy list when I compared hers to mine.
[00:26:43] CR: And, um, I noticed that she had a PropCaf of 6 and mine had a PropCaf of 30. So, I went digging into that and there was a weird download issue in her Stock Doctor download. Download. I think it was the share price. The share price in her download was like 10 cents when the share price was actually like 48 cents or something like
[00:27:13] TK: Oh, wow, okay.
[00:27:15] CR: And then I think you did a download and there was some problem with the market
[00:27:19] TK: Yeah, market cap
[00:27:20] TK: was blank, which is wrong, clearly. It’s listed and it’s got a decent market cap. So, yeah.
[00:27:26] TK: Um, again, data provider issues.
[00:27:29] CR: Well, no, I don’t think so
[00:27:32] CR: because. I did a download from Stock Doctor on Friday
[00:27:36] CR: night and the share price was right. Alex did her download sometime over the weekend and her share price was completely wrong. She had a market cap, I had a market cap, you did a download yesterday and didn’t have a market cap.
[00:27:49] CR: So it’s not data provider issues, it’s Stock Doctor
[00:27:52] CR: software issues, I think. Anyway.
[00:27:56] TK: data provider.
[00:27:58] CR: Well, they’re not changing the data over the course of the weekend, are they? They could be, you could be right. Anyway, my, I’m not, I’m not
[00:28:06] CR: trying to beat up on Stock Doctor. My point
[00:28:07] CR: is that I’ve learned the hard way over the last few years that If something, what do they used to say?
[00:28:14] CR: If, uh, if you see something suspicious, report it. Um,
[00:28:19] TK: be alert not alarmed
[00:28:21] TK: Yeah.
[00:28:22] CR: not that
[00:28:22] TK: If you see
[00:28:23] CR: If you see something, say something. That’s it. Yeah,
[00:28:25] CR: yeah. If something looks fishy,
[00:28:29] CR: it possibly is. Like, if a stock you’ve never seen before is suddenly at the top of the buy
[00:28:33] TK: Mm hmm. Mm
[00:28:34] CR: There might be something going on, look into it.
[00:28:36] CR: And like Rod, uh, you know, who’s new, as I said, and is doing a deep dive on the checklist and all that kind of stuff, he’s doing a great job. Um, if something like Resimac has a really low PropCaf, um, look into it. You go, oh, that’s weird. You don’t often see PropCafs that low. What’s going on? And it’s good to, you know, have an orange alarm go off and say, yeah, maybe I need to drill down on this a little bit rather than just press the button.
[00:29:05] CR: I had
[00:29:06] TK: and that’s, that’s true, because we’ve had other examples where accounting standards have changed from one half to the other, and that’s changed PropCaf and things like that, so, as the case was with ASX, the company, not the share market, the operator, um, uh, and there’s been cases of, um, I forget now what the company was.
[00:29:24] TK: It was a supplier of software to other companies, a reseller of software and hardware, and
[00:29:30] TK: their PropCaf depended a bit on timing of when they got bills from their
[00:29:35] TK: customers and they had to
[00:29:36] TK: pay their suppliers, that
[00:29:37] TK: kind of stuff.
[00:29:39] CR: yeah, so it’s worth taking a beat. I was, uh, when I was looking to buy stuff for the US portfolio yesterday, iHeartRadio was at the top of the list. I H R T. They’re like an online radio, kind of thing. Big company, like
[00:29:54] TK: Mm hmm.
[00:29:55] CR: of revenue. But, um, when I was looking, for some reason, oh, when I went to check their bankruptcy, score, their Z score, it was quite
[00:30:05] CR: low, like in the bad way.
[00:30:08] CR: And I thought I better double check that when I was reading through the press announcements, there was some talk of them having negotiations with, uh, um, whatever, like a liquidation firm or a bankruptcy firm to come and sort out their creditors. And, but their F score was actually quite high as we talked about.
[00:30:29] CR: Last week, I think in the US show, um, F scores about recovering health, Z scores about liquidity issues, potential bankruptcy risk. And I was like, look, I’m, I’m after that conversation and that analysis, I’m willing to forgive a company with a low Z score if they’ve got a, got a good F score and a good quality score.
[00:30:53] CR: But if there’s talk about them having this, you know, potentially entering negotiations with someone to help them organize their creditors, um, you know, I was like, yeah, I don’t think so. I think I might just. Leave that one
[00:31:06] TK: Yeah.
[00:31:07] CR: There’s a, there’s a line.
[00:31:08] TK: Yeah. no, I agree. And that, I think that, it’s been bothering me since our discussion last week that I just don’t know enough about Z scores or F scores to competently make a call on them. I know we talked about it last week and kind of landed on the fact, based on Elio’s advice, that the Z score, even though it’s a forecast of bankruptcy in the next two years, may not happen because Companies are growing or whatever.
[00:31:34] TK: Um, yeah, I just can’t comment on
[00:31:37] TK: it without doing some more
[00:31:38] TK: research.
[00:31:40] CR: I’ll have to get a Zed score expert on,
[00:31:44] TK: Yeah. Good.
[00:31:45] CR: I’ll reach out to some people. Uh, what have you got on your list of stuff
[00:31:50] CR: today, TK?
[00:31:51] TK: Well, speaking of companies that went down and came back up again, um, one of the stocks on the buy list, one of the ones I own is called Macmillan Shakespeare. And, uh, it reported, and then the share price dropped, and it’s been recovering since then. And just a quick clip from the AFRI, from Investing. com, uh, 28th of the 8th.
[00:32:15] TK: Uh, Citibank adjusted its financial outlook for Macmillan Shakespeare Limited, MMS, reducing the firm’s price target from 22. 50 to 20. 05. While still recommending the stock as a buy, the revaluation comes amid anticipations of a challenging fiscal year 2025 for the company due to the impact of losing a significant government contract.
[00:32:37] TK: Macmillan Shakespeare’s forthcoming fiscal year is expected to be demanding as the company grapples with the repercussions of losing the South Australian government contract. This loss is projected to create an earnings gap that may not be entirely compensated for in the future. by the increased demand for electric vehicles and novated leasing.
[00:32:55] TK: So that was kind of the note that Citibank set out and I guess other brokers did too. I read it and scratched my head because months and months and months ago the company announced that it had lost the South Australian government contract and that was factored into the share price straight away. I think it dropped like, 15 or so percent, um, when the contract loss was announced.
[00:33:19] TK: I think Smart Group was the other competitor that picked it up and their share price has gone up. So, you know, if Citibank hasn’t been awake, bad luck, but, um, If they’ve just worked out there’s going to be a hole in the earnings going forward for MMS, because they’ve lost a contract three or four months ago, which was called out at the time and backed into the share price, and they’ve missed it.
[00:33:42] TK: And of course, what’s happening now is the share price is recovering, and I think largely because people are working out the fact that the loss of the SA government contract was already in the price, um, and MMS still, still looks pretty attractive at the current level. Uh, still a solid company and, you know, again, who knows what’s going to happen in the next 12 months.
[00:34:04] TK: They’re going to be working hard to pick up a contract to replace the SA government one. And they may well be able to plug that gap with another big win. So, you know, I’ve seen this before and you would have too working for Microsoft. Sometimes big contracts just rotate and revolve around the players, revolve among the players in that particular market.
[00:34:24] TK: And this year it’s your turn to get it, next year it’s, next time it’s my turn to get it. And there’s only three or four companies operating in this space, so, um, yeah, I suspect if they, it’s a bit like the old fuel game that when I was at Shell, there were five big, uh, oil companies, and if I picked up a service station that was previously supplied by Mobile, then they’re not going to take one off me that Shell supplied, so it’s a bit of a zero sum game.
[00:34:50] TK: You know, the only growth in the overall system is when new service stations get built. And they only get built as the population grows. So it’s like a GDP thing, really, GDP growth sort of play. Otherwise you’re just rotating around between the players. And, and I suspect the same will be the case with MMS.
[00:35:08] TK: And certainly the market’s coming to that realization too, I think, but yeah. Um, it came close to a, uh, sell for me. I’m not sure how it was compared to the 3PTL. I did have a look at it at its worst and it was getting very close to a sell, but I think it’s Let me just get the numbers up. I think it’s way above that again now.
[00:35:29] TK: No, sorry, it’s way above its sell. It must have been close to a rule 1 for me, but it’s turned up again just recently. So,
[00:35:35] TK: um, yep, it’s, I think it’ll recover, but
[00:35:38] TK: can’t predict. I liked it when I bought it,
[00:35:40] TK: still like it now.
[00:35:41] CR: Well, speaking of Stocks that are above their sell line, ASG,
[00:35:47] CR: you little beauty, ticked back up. It’s above its sell
[00:35:52] TK: Ah, you were waiting
[00:35:53] TK: for that, weren’t you, weren’t you? We’re next to the end.
[00:35:56] CR: Well, it was up above
[00:35:57] CR: it and then it dropped back below it again last week because the share price came back a little bit and
[00:36:03] CR: its sell line moved,
[00:36:04] TK: Mm hmm.
[00:36:05] CR: but then the price ticked back up again. So the sell line’s readjusted and it’s back above it
[00:36:10] CR: again now. So
[00:36:12] TK: So you pack for some, you
[00:36:13] TK: pack some fudge and the fudge tasted good.
[00:36:18] CR: Well, it’s not good yet.
[00:36:21] CR: It’s, uh, you know, it’s back
[00:36:23] CR: above it’s 3PTL and it’s real one. And, but, uh, uh, yeah, um, um, when it, when it’s 30, 40 percent up, then I’ll celebrate. But, uh, yeah,
[00:36:34] TK: Well, when I say
[00:36:35] CR: I don’t have to keep
[00:36:36] TK: it’ll be It’ll be ex dividend time next
[00:36:38] TK: half, and you’ll be going through the same cycle, probably. Yeah,
[00:36:42] CR: Yeah,
[00:36:43] CR: True. Uh, all right. MMS. What works on Wall Street? Tony.
[00:36:48] TK: so this week’s quote, again from Shaughnessy’s excellent book, What Works on Wall Street. Continuing on from, I guess, a bit of behavioural economics observations. So, This is the quote from O’Shaughnessy. Being a successful investor runs contrary to human nature. We love to make the simple complex and follow the crowd.
[00:37:09] TK: We allow our love of a story about some stock to inflame our emotions and dictate our decisions, buying and selling based on tips and hunches. We approach each investment decision on a case by case basis, with no underlying consistency or strategy. We are optimistically overconfident in our own abilities, Prone to hindsight bias, and quite willing to ignore over 80 years of facts that show these things.
[00:37:33] TK: To be so, when making investment decisions, we do everything in the present tense, and because we time weight information, we give the most recent events the greatest import. Indeed, behavioural economists call this tendency Recency Bias, which is the tendency to remember more recent events or observations more clearly, and to overweight recent information and underweight events from the more distant past.
[00:38:00] TK: We then extrapolate anything that has worked well recently, very far out in time, assuming that it will always do so. How else could the majority of investors have concentrated their portfolios in large cap growth stocks and technology shares right before the technology bubble burst in 2000? And the biggest bear market for the Nasdaq since the 1970s ensued.
[00:38:21] TK: More recently, on the heels of the market crash of 2008 2009, investors have learned a far different lesson. Because the decade from 2000 through 2009 was the worst for US stock performance in 110 years, investors have pulled trillions of dollars from stocks and moved their investments into bonds, the asset class that has done the best recently.
[00:38:44] TK: Ignoring the fact that 110 years of market history shows us that bonds almost never outperform equities over long periods of time. It’s extremely difficult not to make decisions this way. Think about the last time you really goofed. Time passes and you say, What was I thinking? It’s so obvious that I was wrong.
[00:39:02] TK: Why didn’t I see it? The mistake becomes obvious when you see the situation historically drained of emotion and feeling. When the mistake was made, you had to contend with emotion. Emotion often wins since, as John Junor said, an ounce of emotion is equal to a ton of facts.
[00:39:20] CR: Hmm.
[00:39:21] TK: she was writing after the GFC then and was pointing to the fact that People got out of stocks, um, after the GFC and that was the wrong thing to do because stocks went on a bit of a tear since then and they’ve been up ever since.
[00:39:35] TK: So, um, classic behavioural economics, economics covering both the recency bias but also too the fact that we can have periods where our system underperforms but doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. Get rid of the system and change our, our approach, um, and, um, I guess that’s pertinent. As you pointed out, dummy portfolios
[00:39:58] TK: underperform the STW, but over the long term, it’s, um,
[00:40:03] TK: 50 to 100 percent above the
[00:40:05] TK: STW.
[00:40:06] CR: Yeah, and with the US portfolio, you know, it’s massively
[00:40:10] CR: outperforming at the moment. Well, not massively. I
[00:40:13] CR: mean, it’s like, it’s not even double, you know, it’s close to double though, um, whether or not that will last. Over the course of the year, it hasn’t always performed that well. It’s been up and down. So yeah.
[00:40:27] CR: You know, I don’t expect over performance to that level of over performance to last forever too. But I, you know, my experience with the W portfolio over the five years shows that, you know, over time it’ll underperform, it’ll overperform and then it’ll sort of balance out, hopefully to close to double performance.
[00:40:45] TK: it’ll regress to the main. And that reminds me of when we first started QAV and our dummy portfolio went on a tear and you’re like, Oh, how easy is this? This is great. We’re going to outperform forever. And then I think the following year we underperformed and came
[00:40:58] TK: back to the median sort of performance that
[00:41:02] TK: I’ve experienced over the years.
[00:41:04] TK: So I guess the point is,
[00:41:05] CR: saying.
[00:41:06] TK: As Shaughnessy would say,
[00:41:09] CR: No, you go, yeah, sorry.
[00:41:10] TK: As Shaughnessy would say, the wrong thing to do at the moment is to take money out of the Australian market and put it in the U. S. dummy portfolio. It’s more likely, regression to the mean more
[00:41:19] TK: is, you know, means, it’s more
[00:41:22] TK: likely that the Australian dummy portfolio will improve and the U. S.
[00:41:25] TK: one will come back.
[00:41:26] CR: Yeah. I remember when, uh, during COVID, uh, the COVID recovery, when we were
[00:41:30] CR: doing like 40 percent and you were like, it won’t last forever,
[00:41:34] CR: and I just thought
[00:41:34] CR: you were being humble, although you were just like, uh, ah, sure. You’re trying to like talk down expectations because it was humble, but no, it came down.
[00:41:44] CR: You’re right.
[00:41:46] TK: Yeah. one of my rare predictions
[00:41:48] TK: that came
[00:41:49] TK: true.
[00:41:49] CR: Yeah. Yeah. All right Thank you for that. What else you got? Paul
[00:41:55] TK: pulled pork, pulled pork time. Interesting company, I’m going to do Judo Holdings, JDO, which just came onto our buy list as well. Um, this, this week, uh, after its results, and they were good results. And, again, it’s a financial services company, so I, um, haven’t had a chance to, um, Do a deep dive into their operating cash flow, but it could also be one of these companies that, you know, they’ve raised money and I’ve got it sitting there waiting to lend out, which could be a reason why I’ve got cash sitting there and had a good half for that.
[00:42:26] TK: But, um, like I said, I haven’t gone through the details of why, but at the moment it has good PropCaf and that’s usually all. I’m that worried about because, uh, uh, it is a good company, um, well run, uh, it’s just recently been included in the ASX 200 index, so that’s one of the reasons why the shares are up as well, um, it’s, it’s background’s interesting, so to give a Let me talk about the company first and give its history.
[00:42:56] TK: So Judo Holding, JDO, is a business lender focusing on the SME market, that’s small to medium enterprise market. And as they say, servicing a gap between private credit. So these are Non bank lenders who have really sprung up in the last couple of years as interest rates have risen and the banks have retreated back to being more like mortgage businesses, but private credit tends to service the high risk, high margin loan market, oftentimes with unsecured offerings, and in big banks, which are in the SME market, but tend to have a highly automated, heavily secured approach to the market, which generally means they’re focused on SMEs, which are taking out lines of 10 million or more, so that they can be, you know, the banking system can process them easily.
[00:43:52] TK: Judo sits between those two. Segments in the market and, um, they run a relationship based model. Uh, so they have lots of advisors out there talking to SMEs and winning business, um, through relationships. Uh, they have, um, uh, IT, which is from, uh, built recently and from the ground up, so they’re not encumbered by banking legacy systems, which, um, it’s probably one of the big issues in the Australian banking world is that the big banks have legacy.
[00:44:22] TK: Systems which go back decades, they’ve got patchwork overlays on them. It’s probably only CommBank which has made a bit of a fist of improving that situation from an IT investment point of view, but generally speaking they’re not as good as making fast decisions as small banks like Judo are. So Judo have a relationship management approach and can make a quick assessment as to whether the loan can be approved or not.
[00:44:48] TK: And that’s, um. That’s their operating model and has given them a bit of an advantage in the space. Uh, they, they say they have 2 percent of the market. Now, I’m not sure whether, how do you define market here? Is it SMEs overall? Is it SMEs below 10 million in loans? But anyway, at 2 percent of the market, they’ve got plenty of room to grow.
[00:45:10] TK: Uh, one of the founders of the business, and the business was founded back in 2018, a guy called Joseph Healy, uh, used to work in, um, some of the big banks with the other founder, David Hornery. Uh, he recently stepped down, and I’m going to say recently, I think it was about six months ago, as CEO. And he and the other founder wrote a book called Black Belt and the company’s called Judo.
[00:45:33] TK: The book’s called Black Belt and really the theme here is that they, they’re a small operator. The analogy is if you’re a judo, in a judo match and you’re a small player, you can still use leverage to overthrow a bigger opponent. Anyway, a quote from, um, from the book, uh, goes like this. Disillusion with the big four Australian banks, culture and strategy.
[00:45:56] TK: Joseph Healy and David Hornery started thinking about a startup that would improve and disrupt the immovable banking sector. Although they were self professed and no spring chickens who fell outside of the usual millennial startup entrepreneur demographic, they forged a plan to start a new bank that would serve small and medium sized businesses, a sector the big banks were neglecting, in a highly regulated industry monopolized by four of Australia’s biggest companies.
[00:46:21] TK: Inspired by the Netflix mantra that And that will never work. Joseph and David founded Judo Bank in 2016 and disrupted the Australian banking market against all odds. The name is a nod to the fact that in judo, the smaller, weaker person can overpower a stronger opponent through efficient use of energy.
[00:46:42] TK: In Black Belt, the authors share key lessons from the judo journey and their decades in business prior to the startup. This is a true masterclass in planning, launching, and scaling a business. So that’s from the blood. From the book, uh, there was also an interesting review which I’ll just quickly cover now.
[00:46:59] TK: Uh, Joseph Healy who led divisions at NAB and ANZ. Uh, had a different experience, which they describe in black belt. Uh, the root causes of the problems were crystal, crystal clear to them. Even though they were in very senior positions inside major banks, their ability to influence direction had been a growing source of frustration in what a highly political, heavily siloed, rigidly bureau bureaucratic and path dependent organizations where the cultural concrete was set and defined by a chronic and internally focused bureaucracy.
[00:47:33] TK: They wrote, Healy and Hornery decided over drinks at a Sydney pub. They wanted to start a different kind of bank, a better bank for staff and customers. They wanted to return decency to banking. They say throughout 2011 to 2014, they regularly discussed how the banking industry was industrializing and how to drive for constant profit growth had resulted in progressive poorer customer experiences.
[00:47:58] TK: Healy and Hornery deserve huge credit for creating a bank from an idea. Due to those lending to smallish businesses is good for commerce and the economy. They are rightly proud their lenders have an average of only 26 clients. They all, all staff, that all staff have equity in the bank. And their customers almost always repay their loans.
[00:48:18] TK: Healey is CEO and Hornery is on the board. According to this article by Aaron Patrick back in 2023. So yeah, so, um, startup founded by two banking executives late in life, who were pretty disillusioned with the banking sector. And I’ve heard that from a number of people. We’ve probably both experienced that working for large organizations, they can be some come solo path dependents.
[00:48:46] TK: I think. Uh, was called in black belt, uh, and they decided to do something about it, which was good. So, they launched it in 2018, gained a banking license in 2019, which was quite quick for banking licenses. Back then the line book was 200 million, today it’s 10. 7 billion, so they’ve been growing really well.
[00:49:08] TK: They listed on the ASX in 2021 and have been profitable since 2022. In their latest results, they call out the fact that their growth in lending is at three times the system, which is very good. Income was up 12%, underlying profit up 11%. I hate terms like underlying profit because it means there’s a, um, an abnormal in there somewhere.
[00:49:30] TK: And sure enough, their statutory profit before tax was down 3%. And when I looked into it, that was due to higher impairment charges due to Uh, writing off some of their bad loans and late repayments, but having said that, uh, their 90 days plus impaired assets is reducing. So, uh, my take on that is that, um, they’re sort of bedding down that large growth and will have Probably some more stringent processes in place to make sure that the loans they’re writing are going to be repaid.
[00:50:03] TK: They’re not big write offs, so it’s not worrying. They’re in the provision, so banks, you should always look at how much banks are providing for impaired loans. And that’s a key metric for banks. I think what they wrote, uh, what they, what they provided for last year is about the same as this year. So,
[00:50:22] TK: um, the same amount, even though the loan book is growing.
[00:50:26] TK: So it means that, you know, it’s probably a one
[00:50:28] TK: off problem as they improve their procedures.
[00:50:31] CR: Sorry. Can I stop you there? Impaired loans. Does that
[00:50:34] CR: just mean Loans that probably aren’t going to be paid back on time?
[00:50:38] TK: Yeah, correct. Yep. Which is a key metric for banking. Yeah.
[00:50:44] CR: It’s nice
[00:50:45] TK: Yeah. So, um, uh, in banking terms, what a bank has to do is if it becomes aware that
[00:50:50] CR: words.
[00:50:51] TK: they’re not going to
[00:50:52] TK: get 100 percent repayment on time, they
[00:50:54] TK: have to raise a provision to their balance
[00:50:56] TK: sheet, and that’s, you know, because of double entry bookkeeping, that’s a hit
[00:50:59] TK: to profit when they do that.
[00:51:01] TK: However, having, having raised
[00:51:03] CR: bad loans
[00:51:04] CR: that.
[00:51:04] CR: can’t be just bad loans or dodgy,
[00:51:07] CR: it’s impaired. It’s just, what does impaired mean? Like maybe
[00:51:12] TK: 100 percent repayment’s impaired. It’s not going to be repaid.
[00:51:16] CR: Right.
[00:51:17] TK: And it could be, like, it’s, it could just be that it’s not going to be repaid quickly. It might get the money back still. And they often go on to, what they point out in their results is they go on to a negotiated settlement. So they get something
[00:51:27] TK: back. Might not be 100 percent of what was borrowed, but they get something
[00:51:32] TK: back.
[00:51:33] CR: Sorry. Impaired. Didn’t mean to, I just wanted to clarify that. I don’t,
[00:51:38] TK: Oh, that’s okay.
[00:51:38] CR: with that term exactly. Impaired loans.
[00:51:40] CR: Okay.
[00:51:41] TK: Yeah. Um, yeah. And so once they, Put a provision on their balance sheet once for that. They don’t need to do it again. They may have to increase it if they find it, you know, the economy turns down and they need to raise a bigger provision or in some cases they can sometimes write a back to profit and that’s a bumpy year when they can reduce impairments from their balance sheet.
[00:52:02] TK: So it’s something to watch. It’s now in a steady state, but they went through a bit of a hiccup during growth. Anyway, the QAV numbers are quite good. This is a large ADT stock with over 3 million dollars traded on average per day. I’m using a stock price of 1. 64. 5, which is over IV1 and IV2. IV1 is only 34 cents, IV2 is only 73 cents.
[00:52:29] TK: So it’s a long way over. But it’s close to Net equity plus 30%. So book, net equity per share is 1. 41. Net equity per share, so book plus 30 is 1. 83. So the share price of 1. 65 ish, it’s in between those two. So you’re basically paying for book value of the company. Interestingly, this is probably the first company on our buy list which I’ve seen for a long time, which has a share price above consensus target.
[00:52:57] TK: So we can’t score it for that. It’s one of the few I’ve seen for a while. Uh, zero yield on this company, which is not surprising. They’re a small, or they’re a growing stock, but they’re reinvesting in the business rather than paying dividends. Uh, Stock Doctor Financial Health and Trend is strong and steady.
[00:53:14] TK: Looked up the Stockopedia for this one. The score is, the F score is 5 out of 9 and there’s no Z score and I think that’s Yeah, I’ve seen enough of this now to suggest that there’s no Z score for financial companies in Stockopedia or an Altman Z score. So, um, that’s a thing. Stockopedia, all your rank is only 50, and total rank is 83.
[00:53:35] TK: So I think, you know, as I’m becoming more familiar with Stockopedia, if it’s a financial company, it’s not going to get as high a score, I think, because of, um, it’s getting a zero in the Z score for whatever reason that is. And as I’ve learned here in the past, and Stock Doctor was like this up to a point when they decided to rejig their metrics when it came to banks.
[00:53:58] TK: So for a long time, maybe the first 10 plus years of Stock Doctor, you wouldn’t get a financial health score for the banks or financial services industries because the bankruptcy metrics are built up on industrial companies, but then they rejigged it. So they did that. Obviously Altman hasn’t. PE for this company is high, 24.
[00:54:19] TK: 6, but not the highest. So we can, we’re not giving it a score there, but it’s interesting that we’re getting a good Prop calf for it, even though it’s a high PE stock. Uh, so prop calf for this stock is 2.8 times, uh, which is low earnings per share. Forecast growth is 14%, which is good, but uh, if I put that over the high PE of 24 times growth over PE is only 0.5 and we’re looking for, um, 1.5 or better.
[00:54:48] TK: So I can’t score it for that. Interestingly enough, I found this one of the interesting. Metrics and I did some research and couldn’t work out why, but the board only holds 3%, even though there’s two owner founders. Joseph Healy stepped down as CEO, but didn’t go on the board. I couldn’t tell what he’s done with his equity, but I couldn’t see it in the current shareholders.
[00:55:13] TK: Now, sometimes They’re still there as a nominee company or through a, you know, a business name or a blind trust or something. But prima facie, the directors are only holding 3 percent of the company, which I found to be interesting. So, um, we can’t score it for owner founder, even though one of the founders still sits on the board, Joseph Healy.
[00:55:32] TK: Oh, sorry, um, the other, other founder, uh, which was Mr. Hornery. Um, Other QAV metrics, uh, it’s a new 3 point trendline uptrend, equities are consistently increasing, uh, and so the quality score for this is 9 out of 16, or 56%, and the QAV score is about 0. 2. So, scores well for us. Again, financial services company, PropCaf may have a different meaning here.
[00:56:00] TK: Which means it may not stay on the buy list forever, um, but, you know, all the other metrics are good and it’s, um, this year price is going up, so I’m, I’m happy to look at it. Uh, a couple of risks for this company, um, competition for other banks is obviously a clear one, but I think that might go hand in glove with a takeover, um, opportunity as well.
[00:56:19] TK: So, if Judo Bank does grow dramatically and they become a thorn in the side of some of the major players, They might just decide to get into the space by taking over Judo Bank rather than trying to compete head to head and that I wouldn’t say it was a likely case, but it’s probably helped by the fact that the Judo Bank have good IT systems in this space, which the big banks don’t seem to have because of legacy issues, so it might be cheaper to take over Judo Bank than to invest in IT.
[00:56:53] TK: That’s the first comment to make. This kind of company is always going to have a problem if the economy does turn down, and as You said before, UBS was saying that small caps are doing it tough, um, and this is the market that this company plays in, so, you know, it may be unsurprising if the economy turns down that that provision for bad and doubtful debts and impairments goes up, so that could be a risk.
[00:57:16] TK: On the plus side though, these guys are focusing on, um, culture, which I think is good in banking. You know, it’s a bit faceless in the big banks, um, it seems to be, uh, they get good culture scores that they call out during their, um, annual report, and it’s a relationship banking model which seems to have gone out of a lot of the big banking, um, uh, environment, so,
[00:57:39] TK: you know, it was a I mean, gone are the days when,
[00:57:42] TK: I
[00:57:42] TK: mean, way
[00:57:43] TK: back when I was a kid, you build a
[00:57:44] TK: relationship with your local bank manager and then got a home loan from
[00:57:47] TK: them based on the fact that they knew you, and you,
[00:57:50] CR: you got a home loan when you were a kid?
[00:57:52] TK: no. When I was a
[00:57:54] CR: know that you’re
[00:57:55] TK: People who are getting
[00:57:56] TK: home loans, you, the person,
[00:57:57] CR: Oh,
[00:57:59] TK: individually,
[00:57:59] CR: okay. I knew you started in real estate early, but I didn’t realize it was that early.
[00:58:05] TK: By the time I did start in real estate, that wasn’t the case. But what was the case was that I had, you know, I was assigned a relationship banker. You know, fairly early on. And, um, but that’s disappeared now. Private banks are a thing of the past, at least in terms of my experience with them. We still have a private banker.
[00:58:24] TK: I hardly ever talk to them. Um, whereas, you know, along the way, they were there asking me questions and how’s it going and can we help you, et cetera. So that’s gone by the by. Um, they used to be a good source of people to tap for donations to charity auctions in the past, but that’s no longer happening.
[00:58:40] TK: Um, so yeah, so they’ve gone, it’s kind of the wheels turn full circle and now a small up and coming bank is using that model to foster relationships with more companies. Um, the other plus for this company is that it’s not offering residential mortgages. So, uh, one of the problems that, um, the small, some of the small banks like, you know, um, Bendigo Adelaide, uh, my state, maybe even Bank of Queensland to some extent, um, they’re having a problem because they’re offering residential mortgages, but they’re not a big player.
[00:59:12] TK: So APRA is making it harder for them to do that, uh, when they compete with the big largely through what’s called capital ratios. So, um, a large bank. Well, we went through this once before in a, in a detailed way, but large banks have the lowest obligations to hold capital for what they lend out. And this all comes back to APRA wanting to make sure that in a downturn, banks can survive a run on the banks and potential downturns in people’s ability to repay loans.
[00:59:45] TK: So big banks or any bank is required by APRA to hold a certain amount of capital in reserve in order to pay out. Depositors who get antsy or to cover bad loans as they get worse. Um, but the big banks as a percentage have to hold less of a provision, um, or less capital than the small banks. Uh, and that gives the big banks an advantage.
[01:00:08] TK: So think of it this way. If I’m a small bank and I’m, um, And just say I’m funding everything through deposits, which isn’t the case. We know that banks will issue bonds and there’ll be a mix of ways that they raise money to then repackage as residential mortgage loans. But if I’m, if I’m taking in 100 percent of my Assets or, um, assets I’m going to lend out as a deposit and I pay, um, deposit rates of, I don’t know, 2 percent and I can then, um, lend all that money out to mortgages, um, who are, uh, residential mortgages and I’m charging 6%, I make 4 percent to do that.
[01:00:45] TK: APRA steps in and says, no, no, no, you can’t lend out 100%, you’d better have something for a rainy day on your balance sheet. You’re not a big bank, you’re a big bank you might have to hold, I’m just picking out some numbers here I’ve seen in the past but they may have changed, big bank you might have to hold 12 percent of those deposits up your sleeve, and a small bank might have to hold 15%.
[01:01:04] TK: So, it’s a, it means, it’s a hit to their profitability, So, it’s a hit to their profitability, And it means that, um, if I want to make the same sort of return as a big bank, I have to get a bigger margin, um, on the 85 percent I’m lending out, compared to the big bank, um, and that makes me less competitive in the market.
[01:01:25] TK: So that’s, it’s a bit more intricate than that, but that’s, um, that’s it in a nutshell. Anyway, long way of saying, um, Judo don’t have to worry about that because they don’t offer residential mortgages. So they have an advantage in the space when they’re competing against the smaller banks who are also active in this space and that they’ve got less encumbrances on their capital that they can allocate to loans.
[01:01:48] TK: So yeah, so it’s an advantage for them. They do take deposits, and they do raise money by offering bonds and getting other sources of income. That’s a plus for them, I think, when they’re competing against the smaller banks. Um, again, it may come to be a problem if, if, um, as it seems to be, if interest rates are going to get cut
[01:02:08] TK: and come down, there could be a fight for deposits, which might affect them somehow as
[01:02:13] TK: well.
[01:02:13] TK: So it could be a risk. But at the moment, it’s a plus. So that’s Judo
[01:02:16] TK: Bank.
[01:02:17] CR: Whatever you do, don’t upset the chairman,
[01:02:20] CR: Peter Hodgson. I’ve got an article here, I don’t know if you saw
[01:02:24] CR: this. It was from October last year in The Fin. Tudor Bank Chairman Peter Hodgson and Chief Executive Joseph Healey lashed out at investors. Who they claim crushed the lenders valuation, saying they are variously frustrated and disappointed that the share price does not accurately reflect the performance of the business.
[01:02:47] CR: Mr Hodgson said the board was taken aback. By the fall, especially after a 107. 5 million pre tax profit in the 2023 financial year and attacked short term vicissitudes in the market during his annual address to shareholders. As a board, we express our disappointment at the market’s reaction and the performance of our share price against these solid achievements.
[01:03:13] CR: I think he knows how we feel when we see companies come out with good looking results and then the share price drops by 20%. We’re like, the hell?
[01:03:21] TK: I think that was a prior year, wasn’t it? That wasn’t
[01:03:22] TK: the current year. I saw that one as
[01:03:24] TK: well.
[01:03:24] CR: That was October last year, was that article. Yeah,
[01:03:27] TK: yeah.
[01:03:28] CR: the share price is doing well at the moment. So obviously all of the investors don’t took heed of what he was saying and was like, Oh, sorry, Mr. Hodgson. Well,
[01:03:39] CR: well, we’ll treat your share price with more respect in the future.
[01:03:44] TK: Yeah, it’s um, it’s, I mean, it’s, he’s frustrated and he’s letting the market know about it. He, um,
[01:03:54] TK: not sure if, um, if you’re a chairperson, if you’re bullying investors, whether
[01:03:58] TK: that’s the best way
[01:03:59] TK: to get people to take notice of you, but it seems to have
[01:04:02] TK: worked, so maybe it is.
[01:04:04] CR: Share price was around 85 cents at the time. It’s up to 1. 65 now. It’s
[01:04:09] TK: No, it definitely
[01:04:09] TK: works. I’ll have to start bullying things more. I’ll have to
[01:04:12] TK: be more bullish, more
[01:04:13] TK: bullying.
[01:04:14] CR: I was, we should buy some and then ask him to yell at investors again. And yeah, apparently that’ll see if that works.
[01:04:21] TK: Yeah.
[01:04:22] CR: All right. Judo. I love the brand. I think that’s a good brand.
[01:04:24] TK: Mmm. Thought you would.
[01:04:27] CR: Never. And yeah, I’ve never really heard of them before, but I like that.
[01:04:31] TK: Maybe you should launch a company and call it Sifu or
[01:04:34] TK: something.
[01:04:35] CR: no Wing Chun, the Wing Chun Bank. Use your opponent’s force
[01:04:38] CR: against them.
[01:04:39] TK: Mmm.
[01:04:40] CR: Go to the blind side, small
[01:04:41] CR: circles. Come up with lots of
[01:04:43] CR: ways to pretend that it makes sense. Well, thank you, Tony. I think that’s all for that side of things. Got one question this week from Robert. Um, should we treat SMSF any different to the general investing, keeping in mind I’m 57 and only have 300, 000 in my super that I personally contribute to with employer contributions.
[01:05:06] CR: Thank you, Robert. Well, we’ve talked about S M S F, on and off over the years. Um, anything different to investing via an SMSF, Tony, from your perspective? Not
[01:05:23] TK: I don’t think so.
[01:05:24] CR: but the way that you would
[01:05:25] CR: handle it?
[01:05:26] TK: I can’t give Robert financial advice, um, I can give general advice and talk about how I handle it, as you say. Uh, over the years, I’ve had investments in family trusts, um, in personal names and, uh, SMSFs. I guess you could also have them in companies as well. And I don’t Differentiate between the class of asset as to how I invest, I guess from time to time, perhaps the only exception to that is, um, I have a mortgage and so if I have a choice of buying something outside an SMF and it’s got a good yield, I’ll do that so I can use the dividend to help pay off the mortgage and to live off the dividends.
[01:06:07] TK: So if I have, like if I’ve sold a few things and I’m going to buy two stocks and one has a good yield and one doesn’t, I’ll probably put them on without the good yield in the SMSF for now and use the other one to have dividends fund, uh, interest on my debt or on living expenses, but, um, you know, that, that’s just my personal circumstances.
[01:06:29] TK: Otherwise I treat them both the same, but given, um, Robert’s age, I’m hoping he’s getting some financial advice from his accountant on, on SMSS because, uh, yeah, he will be getting to a stage where he, he can, um, Think about what role the SMSF will play in his retirement, I guess. There are tax advantages for putting things in SMSFs.
[01:06:55] TK: Um, he may want to contribute more than he’s talking about he’s putting employer contributions in. Um, uh, I know there’s one strategy which is that if he’s got assets and investments outside of the SMSF, he may want to run those down. Um, as he contributes more to the SMSF for tax purposes. But again, that’s, I don’t want to strain the personal advice here.
[01:07:18] TK: I don’t know his circumstances and he should go and talk to his accountant about it. But in terms of which bucket I invest in, it doesn’t,
[01:07:26] TK: doesn’t
[01:07:26] TK: worry me really,
[01:07:28] TK: um, which one I buy
[01:07:29] CR: the strategy doesn’t change.
[01:07:31] TK: No.
[01:07:32] CR: I hope that helps, Robert.
[01:07:34] CR: And that’s it for questions this week. Tony, what’s going on in After Hours? How are the
[01:07:40] CR: horses?
[01:07:42] TK: Yeah, we’re running a bit slowly at the moment. We had Caste running on the weekend. She ran seventh, I think, which is probably two sevenths in a row. So not showing the form she’s showing at the training track, but that’s okay because we thought she’d be better off further out in distance and maybe third or fourth start.
[01:07:59] TK: So
[01:08:00] TK: she’ll run again Saturday week at Flemington. So I’m going to stay on at Cape Schanck and go up and have a look at her run
[01:08:07] TK: then. Um,
[01:08:10] CR: Do you wear a top hat and tails?
[01:08:12] TK: No, I couldn’t do that.
[01:08:15] TK: Couldn’t do that. I had the chance of going to Ascot and just couldn’t bring myself to do it.
[01:08:20] TK: To go and hire a morning suit. Um, yeah, I struggle to wear a suit these days.
[01:08:26] TK: I hate doing it, going to the members even. So anyway, um, I must have, I’ve always struggled all my life with dress codes. Like it’s like, you know, who are you to impose a dress code on me? Um, and you want my money to be a member? So anyway, um, when I was younger it made sense because, you know. The girls dressed up and the guys dressed up and we mingled and it was fun.
[01:08:50] TK: Um, I don’t mind dressing up, but yeah, anyway. So no, I’m not wearing a top hat and tails. Um, I’ll be going to Flemington. I’ll be chafing at the bit to get back to the car and take my tie off when it’s all over. But, um, uh, Saturday week, Cas will run and also Poifect will probably have her first start. And they may even run in the same race.
[01:09:11] TK: So that’ll be interesting. Um, there’s two options for both of them, so they may run in different races, but they may be up against each other, which, you know, hopefully they’ll run one and two. Um, Quello Dorato, the horse that’s had a couple of starts at Geelong and run third both times, unfortunately has a bone chip in its knee, so.
[01:09:29] TK: Now she’s, or he’s out for six months, which means we’ll miss the spring with him. That’s Bella Nipatina’s younger brother, or half brother. So, um, we had been looking forward to starting him again because, um, after a couple of thirds we thought he might win something, but, um, we’ll have to wait and see on that, which is a bit of a shame, but that’s racing.
[01:09:47] TK: And I’m sorry to report, but, um, again, very, very emotional morning for me. I was on the phone a lot with one of my partners. We have a broodmare called Loading Zone. And people may recall, if I listen to this, uh, we sold one of her progeny at auction earlier on in the year, the sales for about 95, 000. Um, she was due to foal over the next couple of weeks, but became sick overnight.
[01:10:12] TK: And, um, they operated on her early this morning and had to euthanize her, unfortunately. Um, and, uh, a lot of to and froing, um, where the vets were saying we can operate and there might be a chance of success. Or if we leave a bee, the foal might die and we might. You know, she’ll have a 30 percent chance of living.
[01:10:31] TK: She had some kind of colicky obstruction in her intestine and when they opened her up this morning on a table, it was worse than they thought. Um, they did a caesarean and took the fall out, who’s now in intensive care, so the fall may not survive. So it’s just been a very emotional morning for us, um, this morning.
[01:10:48] CR: god. That’s So sad. Mmm.
[01:10:52] TK: as we’re commercial operators, it does have a, you know, humane side to it. It was pretty sad. Yeah.
[01:11:00] TK: Yes, and the person who I was talking to who operates the stub was clearly very shook up by it all.
[01:11:06] CR: Mmm.
[01:11:07] TK: Yeah, so difficult.
[01:11:09] CR: Mmm.
[01:11:10] TK: um, thank you, um, to the horse, it was,
[01:11:15] TK: you know, it’s, emotionally it was hard for us, but, um, you know, obviously harder for the horse, but I think the, the right thing to do was probably to, Put her down while she was on the operating table.
[01:11:25] TK: Look, the prognosis wasn’t good, um, she’d lost a baby, she would have been stitched up, um, having to recover from that, and, you know, she may have just blinked through and then died, so it just wasn’t, it was a hard decision to make.
[01:11:39] CR: Mmm, I bet.
[01:11:42] TK: Yeah, I’m at Cape Schanck otherwise, um, Jenny’s gone back today, back to Sydney. I’ll probably play a couple of days of golf and I’ve got some more mates coming down on the weekend, which will be nice. And then, um, yeah, get some time to myself next week and catch up on the maintenance and stuff that has to be done.
[01:11:58] TK: Once a year down there, a bit of gardening, that kind of stuff, and then Flemington on Saturday week, and then probably back out after that, back to Sydney. But it’s been a good trip, lots of weather, lots of bad weather. And I found, well I’ve been sort of, leave some books down at Cape Schanck, and I came across one I started reading, and uh, it was Dave Grohl’s autobiography that came out a year or two ago, and I was halfway through it last time I came down, left it here, and picked it up again.
[01:12:23] TK: It’s not bad, good light read. It’s cool, the storyteller. I’m guessing he named that himself. I’m not sure I’d say he was an A1 storyteller, but still an interesting read. Obviously ghostwritten by someone, but, um,
[01:12:36] TK: you know, great to relive those kind of early days of grunge and Nirvana and
[01:12:43] CR: Really?
[01:12:43] TK: punk in the US.
[01:12:44] TK: Yeah.
[01:12:46] CR: I didn’t pick you as a grunge Dave Grohl Foo Fighters fan.
[01:12:50] TK: Um, I am, but probably not as much of a Foofighters as I was around when Nevermind came along and
[01:12:58] TK: probably a bigger Pearl Jam fan than Nirvana, because they weren’t
[01:13:01] TK: around for a long time, but big Pearl Jam fan, yeah.
[01:13:04] CR: Really? There you go.
[01:13:07] TK: Seen them many
[01:13:08] TK: times,
[01:13:10] CR: Really? Chrissy ever told you her Pearl Jam stories?
[01:13:13] TK: She did actually, yeah. Didn’t she play a violin with them or something
[01:13:17] TK: at one stage?
[01:13:18] CR: Not with them. She opened for them, um, at some charity event in Seattle once where she was in a band, playing violin in a band that opened for them and went to the house of the guitarist, I think at the time, took it, you know, had a party or something, but yeah, she got to know them a little bit. Um, very good.
[01:13:40] CR: I do love, I mean, I’m a big Nirvana fan back in the day, still like Nirvana, never really got into Foo Fighters that much, but I do love watching Dave Grohl play drums. I mean, no one,
[01:13:51] TK: yeah,
[01:13:52] CR: since Pete Moon, I don’t think there’s been a more entertaining drummer than Dave Grohl. He,
[01:13:56] TK: maybe Taylor
[01:13:57] CR: so
[01:13:57] TK: who replaced him, yeah, he passed away recently too unfortunately, yeah, no I agree, and it goes, um, I mean he talks about his drumming style and how it started when he was, you know, 12 or 13, just loving heavy metal and hitting the pillows in his room, trying to learn the drums from the records and turning it up and all that kind of stuff.
[01:14:17] TK: But the interesting, the really interesting bit I thought was when he joined his first band Scream who took him on the road and great stories and anecdotes from that about, you know, living on five bucks a day and all that kind of stuff in squats and traveling to Germany and living in squats over there.
[01:14:33] TK: But, um, I He said an epiphany for him was when the bassist who he really admired and had a good relationship with in Scream took him aside one day and said we’re just going to play together for half an hour and every time you play on the drums don’t put a fill in just play the beat and he said I’m going to play a bass line you play with me and just play the beat because the Grohl was kind of Keith Moon just rolling across the drum kit all the time and he said the bass guitarist started up he started laying into the drums bass guitar would look over and shake his head bass guitarist would look over shake his head and Dave would go oh okay get back to just thrashing out the beat bass guitarist would nod five minutes would go past Dave Royal couldn’t help himself, would start playing into it.
[01:15:24] TK: Bass guitarist would shake his head. Royal would go, Oh, okay. And after half an hour, he
[01:15:28] TK: realized that, you know, even though it could be loud, less was more in playing
[01:15:33] TK: the drums. And that’s how his style got better down.
[01:15:36] CR: Hmm. Interesting.
[01:15:38] TK: Yeah.
[01:15:39] CR: I saw a video on YouTube recently of him playing along to Smells Like Teen Spirit. I think it was, um, just, you know, it was being played through speakers and he was just drumming along to it and it was just, it was so delightful just to see him beat the hell out of the drums to that track.
[01:15:58] TK: And that opening
[01:16:00] TK: cello of the drum beat,
[01:16:01] TK: it’s just, I mean, it’s a part of
[01:16:05] TK: the soundtrack to our lives, really, isn’t
[01:16:06] TK: it
[01:16:08] TK: Yeah. Ah,
[01:16:10] TK: yeah.
[01:16:12] CR: my early twenties when that came out and it was like, it was so huge. Um, well this week, Chrissie and I watched The Room
[01:16:18] CR: again, um, for about the 50th time and it’s just never fails to bring us joy and delight. And I’ve been reading Greg Sestero’s book, The Disaster Artist, that the Franco film was based on just, you know, Learning more of the behind the scenes stories of the making of the film.
[01:16:39] CR: And it’s just, it’s just astounding. It’s just really astounding stuff. So it’s been fun. Oh, I listened to the Man of Steel soundtrack after you recommended it last week, I’ve listened to it several times
[01:16:49] TK: Yeah, it’s
[01:16:50] CR: really great recommendation. Yeah. Really good, work music. I’ve enjoyed it.
[01:16:55] TK: Yeah.
[01:16:55] TK: good.
[01:16:57] CR: My other work soundtrack this week has been, um, Glenn Gould playing Brahms Intermezzi.
[01:17:04] CR: Uh, just a whole bunch of beautiful piano plays. I’ve been trying to, I’ve never really been into Brahms that much, so I’ve been going through Brahms quite extensive catalogue over the last couple of weeks, trying to find my place in Brahms. And the symphonies, uh, really don’t get me, but the Intermezzo, the Intermezzis, uh, quite like that, quite like that, very Beautiful music.
[01:17:27] CR: So that’s, I think where I’m at with that. Hello Fox. Speaking of animal. Um, and I’ve been watching, uh, old Jackie Chan and old Donnie Yen films. That’s been my background stuff when I’m cleaning the kitchen. Can highly recommend Donnie Yen’s first starring role was in a, uh, Yuen Woo Ping film from 1984 called Drunken Tai Chi.
[01:17:58] CR: Donnie Yen would have been, I don’t know, 20 or something. Um, man, he was, his flexibility, and it’s sort of very Jackie Chan y, like a lot of comedy, sort of comedy kung fu, that kind of thing. But his, His flexibility and his speed and his ability to do stuff like really just astounding like, you know, really, really astounding stuff.
[01:18:25] CR: So, you know, I, I haven’t really seen a lot of any of his early stuff, uh, until this, but, um, big fan of Donnie Yen. Obviously he, uh, for people who don’t know Donnie Yen, um, he was in the Last Matrix film as a blind guy, which was funny. He was in one of the Star Wars. Side movies, Rogue One is another blind guy.
[01:18:47] CR: Blind Kung Fu guys are his go to at the moment. But,
[01:18:50] TK: one
[01:18:50] TK: who was, is he the one who
[01:18:52] TK: says the
[01:18:52] TK: force is with me?
[01:18:54] TK: I am the force or something. He’s got
[01:18:55] TK: that little mantra. He’s
[01:18:57] CR: Little Mantra, yeah, and
[01:18:58] TK: Emerald
[01:18:58] TK: One? Yeah, that’s great. Yeah.
[01:19:01] CR: But he also, most famously, I think in the last 15, 20 years, he did a series of films where he plays Yip Man, who was, who’s our
[01:19:12] CR: Grandmaster in my style of Wing Chun. So, uh, my Sifu’s grandmaster is William Chung. William Chung studied under Yip Man in Hong Kong.
[01:19:22] CR: Bruce Lee and William Chung both studied under Yip Man. So, uh, Donnie played Yip Man. I think they’ve made like four Yip Man movies where he plays a highly fictionalized account of Yip Man. Uh, including, I think in the last one, Yip Man goes to America to watch Bruce in a tournament, which. He
[01:19:41] CR: never did. Um, so yeah, very
[01:19:44] CR: fictionalized, but um, yeah, I think he’s, it’s sort of those, the popularity of those films have introduced a lot of people to Wing Chung and
[01:19:53] CR: to the legacy of Yip Man and those sorts of things.
[01:19:56] CR: Anyway,
[01:19:56] TK: that?
[01:19:57] TK: It’s on
[01:19:57] TK: YouTube. Was it Tubi?
[01:20:00] CR: Tubi or No Plex is the one I’ve been
[01:20:03] CR: watching a lot of stuff on and I think very similar. They both have all
[01:20:06] CR: of the, you know, Stuff that you would have found in the back corner of the VHS store back in the day, which are my go to movies. You know, like, there’s, uh, a lot of, like, and, and, both of them, and particularly, I think, with Plex, a lot of very, when I look up these films, like, Very highly rated films from the 40s and 50s and 60s.
[01:20:29] CR: Things with like 94 percent Rotten Tomatoes ratings that I’ve never heard of
[01:20:34] TK: Yep.
[01:20:34] CR: You know, um, so I’m looking forward to making my way through those. Chrissy and I started watching Like Water for Chocolate on the weekend, got about halfway through that. We have to finish that, which I’d never seen, which again was on Plex.
[01:20:48] TK: Ah, okay. Good movie.
[01:20:49] CR: You know, yeah, free services, they’re ad supported, um, so you get an ad every 10 minutes or something. Um, uh, usually it’s the same ad, because they obviously struggle to find advertisers for these things.
[01:21:05] CR: But anyway, lots of really old Kung Fu movies, which is, which I’m enjoying. And, and, and, and old things like, a lot of Roger Corman films.
[01:21:14] CR: Little Shop of Horrors, Dark Star, Cannonball,
[01:21:21] TK: on Tubi,
[01:21:21] TK: isn’t it? I’ll have to look it up. I love Dark Star. Yeah.
[01:21:24] CR: I finally watched Dark Star,
[01:21:26] CR: like, sometime in the last year, after hearing Tarantino and people like that talk
[01:21:32] CR: about it? for years, uh, finally watched it. And absolutely loved it. Just what a, what a fun, fun sci fi film. And for people who don’t know, the guy who wrote it, um, Dan, Dan O’Bannon, I
[01:21:49] TK: Mm hmm. Yep.
[01:21:51] CR: was one of the writers of the first alien film that Ridley Scott made.
[01:21:55] CR: They took Dark Star and then turned that into, well, they sort of rebounded off that and
[01:22:00] CR: made the alien, wrote the alien film. So that was his biggest legacy. But yeah, Dark Stars, like the, the, the alien.
[01:22:08] TK: Yep.
[01:22:09] CR: There’s, yeah, like a beach ball. Yeah, that’s, like,
[01:22:13] CR: talk about low budget when your, your,
[01:22:16] CR: your, uh, uh, scary
[01:22:18] CR: alien monster is a beach ball with eyes on it, googly eyes or something, but yeah, no, it’s really fun, really well done,
[01:22:26] TK: Well, my great regret is, um, I’m friends with some people in Sydney and we moved there. Just after Ron Cobb passed away, who was the other contributor to Dark star
[01:22:35] TK: with um, Dan O’Bannon. And he lived in Sydney and he was friends with these friends of mine. And they’re like, Oh yeah, we could have introduced
[01:22:43] TK: you.
[01:22:43] TK: We see him all the time.
[01:22:45] TK: It’s a
[01:22:45] CR: wow, yeah, there you go,
[01:22:50] TK: And the other, other link to what you’re talking about was, um, I’m pretty sure Glenn Gould from Toronto
[01:22:57] TK: and at the end of our street around the corner was a little parkette with a bench with his
[01:23:02] TK: plaque on it. He must have lived in the area or played in the
[01:23:06] TK: area or something. Yeah.
[01:23:07] CR: Right. I’m very familiar with his, uh, a lot of his Bach interpretations, but, um, Yeah.
[01:23:14] CR: listening to him play Brahms has been lovely.
[01:23:17] TK: We’d
[01:23:17] CR: Hunter is off yeah.
[01:23:19] TK: No, go ahead.
[01:23:21] CR: Oh, I was just saying, my son Hunter’s off to New York to go to Fashion Week again tomorrow.
[01:23:25] CR: Um, hot off his, uh,
[01:23:28] CR: uh, modelling session
[01:23:30] CR: with me a week ago, so,
[01:23:31] TK: huh. You’ve propelled him to New York, have you?
[01:23:35] CR: yeah, well, he’d already been there as the guest
[01:23:38] TK: you took your,
[01:23:39] CR: months ago, but
[01:23:40] TK: you took your invitation and said, hey, I can’t make it, I’m doing QAV,
[01:23:43] TK: here, you go,
[01:23:45] CR: right. yeah,
[01:23:46] CR: you’d go without me this time. Um, so I’m about to go out to coffee with him and his brother, but, uh,
[01:23:52] TK: nice, say hi,
[01:23:54] CR: be fun. It’s his first trip overseas by himself. He’s been over a few times with
[01:23:58] CR: Taylor and some friends, but his first international trip by himself to the Big
[01:24:03] CR: Apple. So that’s kind of exciting, I guess, for him.
[01:24:07] CR: And as a father, it’s always exciting when your kids are off having adventures like that. You feel, wow, look at that.
[01:24:14] TK: did you give him,
[01:24:16] TK: did you give him a list, like the Blue Note Cafe, or
[01:24:18] TK: the,
[01:24:19] TK: where did we go, to the cigar bar near
[01:24:20] TK: the
[01:24:21] TK: Carnegie Hall, yeah, yeah,
[01:24:24] CR: you know my sons well enough, Tony, that they’re not going to do anything that I, any recommendations I
[01:24:30] CR: have, they will go 180 degrees in the opposite direction. No, he’s going to be hanging out with shallow models. Talking about cheekbones and lighting and camera angles and TikTok and jazz clubs, cigar, you know, things, um, going to the Guggenheim.
[01:24:52] CR: No, they’re not, no, he is not going to do any of those things. No,
[01:24:56] TK: the Met, yeah, okay,
[01:24:58] CR: not, not,
[01:24:59] CR: not until he gets a little bit older and wiser and more mature, I
[01:25:02] TK: Yeah, well, true. I don’t think I was in New York when I was, what is he,
[01:25:05] TK: 24, 24, 23,
[01:25:08] CR: 23, in October. They’ll be, yeah.
[01:25:11] TK: probably would have done
[01:25:11] CR: I don’t know, man. Like
[01:25:12] CR: I
[01:25:13] CR: was 28 the first time I went to
[01:25:15] CR: New York
[01:25:15] CR: And the first thing I did was hit jazz
[01:25:17] CR: clubs. Like I couldn’t believe that I was going to these little jazz clubs and getting to see some, you know, world class jazz musicians. Play for play a set for an hour for like 10 bucks.
[01:25:31] CR: I’m just walking in off the street. No booking. Just walk in, buy a martini, sit down and see these world class, uh, Lonnie Smith. See Lonnie Smith played the Hammond B3 in a little club, uh, near the Village Vanguard. It was at the Village Vanguard, actually. Um, for like 10 bucks, you just walk in off the street.
[01:25:51] CR: Holy shit, Lonnie Smith’s there with his turban. Came up and shook my hand afterwards. Thanked me for coming to the gig. Like, you know, like
[01:25:59] CR: Anyway, that was, that’s my New York Museums and Jazz. My kids don’t care about such things.
[01:26:06] TK: Yeah. Mine’s museums as well. Um, I don’t think I went to America until I was like well into my thirties. Late thirties probably. I had no desire to go there as a younger
[01:26:15] TK: person. And partly it was expensive. Like the dollar was so
[01:26:20] TK: high compared to the Australian. But I just always wanted to
[01:26:23] TK: go to Europe
[01:26:24] TK: before I went to the US.
[01:26:26] CR: Yeah. I wanted to go to Europe too, but Microsoft didn’t wanna send me to Europe. They didn’t want to take me to Micro take
[01:26:33] CR: me America.
[01:26:36] TK: well, I went to Seattle. My first
[01:26:37] TK: trip to the U. S. was to Seattle with work.
[01:26:40] CR: really? Which work.
[01:26:42] TK: How was mine?
[01:26:44] CR: Oh, you went there to go to Microsoft.
[01:26:46] TK: No, no, no. I went there to a worldwide direct marketing conference. Yeah,
[01:26:54] TK: with one of the marketing people from Kmart. Um, and, you know, working with Flybuys and setting up a big customer marketing database, blah, blah, blah. And, um, yeah, went across to Seattle. Go to the Strict Marketing Conference where I sort of learned
[01:27:09] TK: that the US wasn’t really ahead of us on direct marketing.
[01:27:15] TK: I remember the keynote address was by a guy called
[01:27:18] TK: Seth. Oh, I’ve forgotten his
[01:27:20] TK: last name
[01:27:21] TK: now. I was going to say Gordon, but is he
[01:27:24] TK: the
[01:27:24] TK: actor?
[01:27:25] TK: No.
[01:27:26] CR: No, he’s the, he’s The
[01:27:28] CR: Seth Godin’s The marketing
[01:27:29] TK: Yeah. So he got up
[01:27:31] CR: cow, he
[01:27:32] TK: Yes, that’s the guy, Seth Godin. I met him and had a few beers with him afterwards, and, um, his address was entitled, Why Amazon is worth 400 a share, and it had just gone to 100 a share.
[01:27:44] TK: And this would have been 2000, I think. I think it fell all the way back to about
[01:27:49] TK: 13 a share at its low point after that. Um, but yeah, like it was, Seattle was
[01:27:55] TK: just in the grip of dot com
[01:27:57] TK: mania at the time.
[01:28:00] CR: I, speaking of New York, I spoke
[01:28:02] CR: at a, at a seminar in New York at the, um, at the Copacabana, I think it was, with Seth, uh, with Seth Godin. We were both speaking at the same event in
[01:28:16] CR: 2005, I think, in New York at the beginning of, uh, this was when I, uh, Uh, I was on stage talking about podcasting and somebody asked, what’s the ideal length for a podcast?
[01:28:26] CR: And everyone was saying five minutes, 10 minutes. And I said, it’s as long as it needs to be. And I said, you know, most of my podcasts are at least one to two hours long. And everyone laughed and guffawed and said, no, one’s ever going to listen to an hour long podcast. And I said, well, you know, they got a pause button.
[01:28:43] CR: I said, how, I used to say, well, how long should a book be? It’s as long as you need it to be to tell the story, right? You can put a book down and pick it up. You can put a podcast down, pick it up. Everyone thought I was crazy. What’s the average length of a podcast these days? They’re all an hour long.
[01:28:59] CR: I reckon 99 percent of podcasts are at least an hour long.
[01:29:02] CR: Bloody Lex Friedman put out a podcast where he was interviewing Elon and a whole bunch of people from Neuralink recently. It was eight and a half hours long, was the podcast, because just like all of the interviews tacked in, you know, it was one thing.
[01:29:15] TK: And acquired guys do four in the five hour podcasts as well.
[01:29:19] CR: Do they? Really? There you
[01:29:21] TK: Yeah. Well, it’s, that’s interesting. Like you were talking before about ads and Tubi, I think it’s, you know, the streamers are becoming like broadcast tv. Netflix is, I think in some cases has ads. Amazon’s just started with ads. They’re all gonna have ads.
[01:29:34] TK: I was on YouTube, like I, I’m struggling to find decent things to watch as to watch on the streaming. platforms, and our TV at Cape Schanck has YouTube as one of the options, so I went to that, and I mean, that’s got ads. Like the interrupter videos. Tell you what, I know you know a golfer, but there’s a funny one out there.
[01:29:56] TK: So a golfer called Bryson DeChambeau has been, is one of the, I guess, probably one of the first big influencers for golf, like has been posting for a long time on Instagram, etc. Anyway, he’s got a, um, a series where he tries to break 50 on a golf course. So it won’t mean much to you, but that’s a very, very good score.
[01:30:18] TK: But he’s known for being a guy who can hit the ball 350 yards, you know, so, and they play from the front tee, so it brings all of the holes into his ability to hit them, the greens in one. Anyway, long story short, I was watching one night, and he’s playing with John Daly, and it’s hilarious. So John Daly is a, Looks like Father Christmas now.
[01:30:40] TK: He was a, he was the kind of Bryson DeChambeau from about in the 90s where he used to be able to drive the ball further than anybody else and he’s always been a larger guy and he’s larger than life and he drives around in his own, he’s got, you know, his knees are gone now so he can’t walk a golf course so he takes his own golf cart and he lifts the hood and it’s full of vodka tonic.
[01:31:01] TK: drinks and he that’s his warm up so he has three or four of those to warm up and plays them bare feet and just starts to sing country and western tunes it’s completely off his
[01:31:13] TK: face the whole way around and it’s hilarious just to watch that youtube clip so
[01:31:18] TK: even though you don’t like golf it’s fun to watch
[01:31:22] CR: Yeah. Well, I feel the same way about the streaming networks. I’ve unsubscribed from most of them now.
[01:31:29] CR: Um, the couple that we’ve got is mostly for Fox to watch
[01:31:32] CR: stuff. But for me, it’s all about Plex and Tubi. Watching all of these films from the 40s, 50s. The Magnificent Ambersons, I’ve been re watching. I haven’t
[01:31:42] TK: haven’t seen that. I haven’t seen it.
[01:31:44] CR: Chrissy and I went and saw a screening of it at, um, the, whatever, the GOMA here,
[01:31:53] TK: yeah.
[01:31:55] CR: 15 years ago, um, but, uh, I didn’t remember much about it, so I’m re watching it and, um, you know,
[01:32:03] CR: famously, you know, the, the, the edit was taken away from Orson because he was down in Mexico shooting a documentary, um, and he kind of disowned it, but it, it, you know, Because it got, they, they reshot some stuff and he wasn’t happy with it.
[01:32:19] CR: But it, he did believe at the time it was his, uh, greatest film. It was better than Cain. And it’s sort of, even though it was butchered, people still today say it’s probably a masterpiece. And, uh, yeah, I’ve been really enjoying watching it again. Like, it’s a terrific story. Um, I really enjoyed it. I remember really enjoying it the first time I saw it.
[01:32:41] CR: So anyway, stuff like that, that, you know, just great classics that, um, I really should see before I die.
[01:32:49] TK: Yeah. I’m wondering whether, like, I’m close to cancelling all my streamers too, but I wonder if we’re in a bit of a lull because of the Rioters strike. Was it last year? And, you know,
[01:32:59] TK: they’ll improve again. But for a while there, like, I couldn’t wait
[01:33:02] TK: to watch Get Back and
[01:33:04] TK: stuff like that that were being released all at once.
[01:33:06] TK: And now there’s been
[01:33:06] TK: nothing for the last 12 months or so.
[01:33:09] CR: Yeah. I figure if something, if I hear something good comes in, it’s must watch, I can get a subscription for a
[01:33:14] CR: month and
[01:33:15] CR: watch it and then turn it
[01:33:16] CR: off, right? I’m not just going to keep it
[01:33:17] TK: Good point. Yeah.
[01:33:19] CR: all year.
[01:33:21] CR: Alrighty, gotta go TK,
[01:33:23] TK: hi to the boys.
[01:33:24] CR: time out, Say hi to Alex, I will, and
[01:33:27] TK: We’re going to hang out for a while now. Have some dinner.
[01:33:30] CR: lovely.
[01:33:31] TK: Happy ASX.

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