QAV 749 — Aqualung

QAV 749 Club

[00:00:00] CR: I’m doing the same thing. Give me a one, two, three, Geoff.

[00:00:04] GF: One, two, three. How’s that audio, Cam? Is that okay?

[00:00:09] CR: You sound ter­rif­ic, Geoff.

[00:00:11] GF: thank you so much.

[00:00:12] CR: Wel­come to, QAV episode sev­en, four, nine, with my spe­cial co host this week, Geoff Flem­ing, QAV mem­ber, Geoff Flem­ing. How are you, Geoff?

[00:00:28] GF: Um, real­ly well, Cam, thanks for the wel­come and thanks for the intro. And, uh, yeah, I appre­ci­ate the invi­ta­tion to be here today. Hope­ful­ly I can be of assis­tance. It’s a big seat to fill in exper­tise terms

[00:00:42] CR: What are you say­ing about the size of Tony’s

[00:00:44] GF: now, as I said it, I tried to retract, but I could­n’t undo it. But what I meant was big shoes. Let’s go with big shoes.

[00:00:51] GF: He’s a tall man any­way,

[00:00:53] CR: He is a tall man. Yes, he has big shoe size. Yeah.

[00:00:56] GF: yeah, so hap­py to, and, uh, as you know, Cam always been a real­ly huge rav­ing fan of, um, QAV.

[00:01:03] CR: I appre­ci­ate that, Geoff. So for peo­ple who did­n’t lis­ten to last week’s episode, Tony’s play­ing golf. He’s got an annu­al golf tour­na­ment that he’s off on this week. And I put a shout out, asked peo­ple to help me out and come on and Geoff vol­un­teered. So I appre­ci­ate that very much, Geoff. Much more fun hav­ing some­one else to talk to than talk­ing to myself.

[00:01:20] GF: Wel­come. Thanks.

[00:01:22] CR: So. Tell us a lit­tle bit about your­self, Geoff, where you’re, where you’re tun­ing in from and a lit­tle bit about what you do and your back­ground with QAV and all that kind of stuff.

[00:01:33] GF: Okay. Yep. Cam, so we’re based in Vic­to­ria, so, you know, at times cool­er than up your way, like most of the time. Uh, I’m based region­al­ly, so I’m, um, semi retired. Uh, we live at a place called Newham Junc­tion, which is sort of half an hour north of War­rag­ul for any­one who knows Vic­to­ria. And, uh, most of the guys, we call it QAVM, which is a group of QAV mem­bers that we’ve con­nect­ed and, you know, struck up a friend­ship and com­pared notes over the years, know where we’re based.

[00:02:06] GF: And, uh, out here, as I said, semi retired on 15 acres. We’ve got, um, hors­es. I’ve got three hors­es, sev­en cat­tle and five sheep that’ll go down to three sheep at some stage. And, uh, do a lot of rid­ing, do a lot of horse rid­ing. And, uh, uh, busi­ness wise I’ve been involved in, we set up a nation­al train­ing com­pa­ny, which is going strong now.

[00:02:30] GF: And we’ve got a gen­er­al man­ag­er based in WA who’s doing a fan­tas­tic job. We’re, uh, suc­ces­sion plans come togeth­er nice­ly. Uh, I’m still part time cause I’m hav­ing trou­ble let­ting go. So I’ll be upfront about that one, but get­ting bet­ter at that and just let­ting him run the reins of that and just sort of enjoy­ing life more.

[00:02:48] GF: Being on 15 acres with. Ani­mals and things. There’s nev­er a short­age, just like at home. Any­one has a home. There’s nev­er a short­age of things to do and things to fix and, you know, weeds to get rid of and stuff like that. So, uh, yeah, life is, life is pret­ty good.

[00:03:03] CR: So tell us a bit more about the train­ing com­pa­ny. What do you train peo­ple to do?

[00:03:10] GF: Yeah. Good ques­tion. We, about 15, 16 years ago, my WA part­ner rang me and I’ll pref­ace this by say­ing I’m a very non ana­lyt­i­cal per­son. You know, I lis­ten to peo­ple talk­ing about, you know, on QAV about doing regres­sion test­ing and it’s sort of, I think I can spell regres­sion, but the rest of it sort of hazes over after that, so I guess my con­fi­dence in QAV is I’d let it do the heavy lift­ing and I’d do a bit of research after­wards and I don’t think that’s always worked out well, but Um, 15, 16 years ago, my busi­ness part­ner in WA rang and said there’s a USA com­pa­ny now called Cru­cial Learn­ing.

[00:03:44] GF: They’re look­ing for a short, short, I’ll short­en the sto­ry, look­ing for a licensee part­ner for Aus­tralian New Zealand and are we inter­est­ed? So we put our hat in the ring for that, uh, com­pet­ed against five or six oth­er, uh, com­pa­nies. Very large con­sult­ing com­pa­nies and through a bit of smoke and mir­rors picked up a license for that and ran it to sort of not mak­ing any mon­ey for about two or three years but picked up after that.

[00:04:08] GF: We teach a two day com­mu­ni­ca­tion pro­gram. Some of the lis­ten­ers may have heard of CAMCALD, Cru­cial Con­ver­sa­tions. It’s in 28 coun­tries. It’s taught in about 18 dif­fer­ent lan­guages. There’s real­ly noth­ing around like it and it’s real­ly, So we teach skills and prin­ci­ples to speak up when it’s the hard­est thing that you have to do.

[00:04:28] GF: You just can’t do it, but you have to speak up around safe­ty in min­ing, for exam­ple. Or if you don’t speak up in health­care, some­one’s going to get sick­er or you know worse kind of thing. So it’s teach­ing those skills. So we, uh, Teach that across some large orga­ni­za­tions. So, across a lot of min­ing com­pa­nies, we do a lot of work with most of the defense orga­ni­za­tions, gov­ern­ment and work as part of a glob­al group.

[00:04:52] GF: So we’ve got sort of 14, 15 peo­ple across Aus­tralia. We used to have a office in the Philip­pines, but we spon­sored our Fil­ipino team to move to Aus­tralia. So they’re up your way at the Gold Coast. But for 15, 16 years as a suc­ces­sion for me, It’s been a real­ly good jour­ney. I’ve enjoyed the prod­uct. I’ve enjoyed the jour­ney.

[00:05:09] GF: I’ve enjoyed all aspects. And, um, and then what’s sort of gone on top of that is, you know, pick­ing up QAV a cou­ple of years ago, for me, it’s been great just learn­ing a lot more. I did­n’t know a lot. I had, you know, we’ll talk about that in a sec­ond about invest­ing, but, and I’ve learned tons. And every time I’m lis­ten­ing to pod­casts, I just real­ized there’s so much more to learn.

[00:05:28] GF: So, but, uh, yeah, life is like, we almost did. I did­n’t say we near­ly tanked dur­ing COVID. Our train­ing com­pa­ny near­ly went under com­plete­ly dur­ing COVID, so we sort of had to, you know, like hang on tight and make some con­ces­sions and bor­row some mon­ey and do a few things. So you sort of, you could feel your bum dri­ving, you know, on the grav­el, which is sort of com­ing through.

[00:05:47] GF: But we man­aged to pick up again out of that with a bit of, you know, cross­ing your fin­gers and, you know, tongue in your left cheek and things like that, um, but picked up again and now every­thing’s going pret­ty well.

[00:05:58] CR: After 20 years of pod­cast­ing, my bum’s been on the grav­el for so long, I’ve got cal­lus­es.

[00:06:03] GF: Sor­ry.

[00:06:04] CR: Bum cal­lus­es. Yeah.

[00:06:06] GF: good.

[00:06:07] CR: Well, that’s great. And, uh, tell us a lit­tle bit about your invest­ing jour­ney pre QAV and, uh, post QAV. We were hav­ing

[00:06:16] GF: Um, I did a lit­tle bit of prop­er­ty and fig­ured this was going back a bunch of years ago. So I’m, as retir­ing now, I’m near­ly, I’m near­ly 70. So I’d go back. I had a strong back­ground in cor­po­rate up until sort of about 94, 95. That was real­ly my expe­ri­ence. And then I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to get in and run a small busi­ness.

[00:06:32] GF: I sort of bought a license to a small busi­ness sell­ing, to a A fran­chise kind of busi­ness sell­ing small busi­ness pay­roll, which was my sort of exit out of cor­po­rate and lots to learn took me years to sort of fig­ure all that out, but you know, in hind­sight, I thought, well, that was a, a great thing to do.

[00:06:49] GF: That’s the way it was meant to be. Um, but I start­ed in prop­er­ty invest­ing long time ago and that went real­ly bad­ly and I lost a bit of mon­ey and fig­ured out. I had no idea what I was talk­ing about. Um, and, uh, then I found out about ETFs a while back, I think through beta shares, some­one intro­duced beta shares.

[00:07:07] GF: And then as I start­ed get­ting involved with, you know, there’s every­one’s got sort of ideas, you know, Tony talks about, you know, stay, stay, stay away from the hearsay. Sor­ry, I’m bang­ing the micro­phone. Stay away from the hearsay about, um, shares and things like that. So, but I did a bit on, um, with exchange trad­ed funds through, um, Through beta shares and that, they sort of going okay, but they’re very much index like kind of thing.

[00:07:31] GF: And there was a cou­ple of sort of Aus­tralian inter­na­tion­al, but one day when I was want­i­ng to learn more, I lis­tened to Phil Mus­catel­lo on shares for begin­ners, it was inter­est­ing at the time. and I’ll see you next time. He just talked about a lot of ideas and I learnt more about, you know, ETFs and LICs and every­thing else to do with that and what pen­ny stocks were and every­thing not to do.

[00:07:55] GF: And on one of them, TK was on one of the, he was a, I think, and I think that’s it. Cam, I think he’s spo­ken on a num­ber of times, I think, with Phil Mus­catel­lo. So he spoke, and what he just said kind of made sense to me because he said, well, if you’ve got a sys­tem that you can, that you can use that takes the guess­work and sets, you know, I’d call it bound­aries.

[00:08:17] GF: It sets bound­aries. Well, you know, that’ll help me make, you know, You know, bet­ter deci­sions around it. I don’t know that I’ll ever be an expert, but so I got involved and was prob­a­bly not long after that. I think, you know, I’m not sure how long it was after­wards. You and I met in Mel­bourne at a, at a din­ner, you might remem­ber.

[00:08:33] CR: Prahran, a

[00:08:34] GF: And so from there I met up with. All the locals, so there was the peo­ple, some, some who are not so much involved these days with QAV, they’re doing oth­er things, but you remem­ber Brett, obvi­ous­ly we all know Brett, of Brett, a lat­er fame, was there, and, uh, Mon­sieur Samuel, and, uh, and John, and there was a few oth­ers who, as I said, are not around, in fact we had a catch up just recent­ly, as organ­ised by the one and only Andy Cody, the man who, with one or two words can, can Change, change the for­mat of pod­casts.

[00:09:07] GF: That man has enor­mous pow­er. But Andy was there as well. It was great because we con­nect­ed with every­one and Andy took me through the process through using Google Sheets and then, uh, using What­sApp and just the sys­tem to get, you know, get up. And that was sort of my intro, I guess, into, into QAV.

[00:09:23] CR: And how’s invest­ing for you these days? How are you find­ing using QAV? How’s it worked for you?

[00:09:29] GF: I, I think in the ear­ly days being very ana­lyt­i­cal and sort of fair­ly impa­tient. And I’m, I’m, I’m hope­ful there’s oth­er QAV mem­bers out there that would say, yeah, that, you know, amen to that. That sounds like me, but I think in the ear­ly days set­ting stop loss­es, but not real­ly set­ting them prop­er­ly. And then I remem­ber in some of the ear­ly, I think I men­tioned to you at some stage in a phone call that, cause I do a lot of, you know, lis­ten­ing to pod­casts on the run.

[00:09:53] GF: I was lis­ten­ing to some of the ear­ly pod­casts and Tony’s talk­ing about get­ting at his ruler. And, and, and on, you know, Stock, not on Stock­o­pe­dia, sor­ry, on Stock Doc­tor, draw­ing, you know, stop loss­es and stuff, and I think that’s hard. I’m, I can’t real­ly look at a screen, you know, cause I was out in the bush.

[00:10:09] GF: Um, But I think, I think from that sort of ear­ly learn­ing for me, I was lim­it­ed in set­ting stop loss­es and prob­a­bly not real­ly fol­low­ing. And I know there was a time you and I con­nect­ed and I sort of said, uh, I think I might need some help here. And you did it and, you know, very grate­ful for you doing an assess­ment.

[00:10:26] GF: But last year for me, it was pret­ty bad. Like I just, I think I men­tioned in a group, it just did­n’t go well for dif­fer­ent rea­sons. And I know that then I lis­tened to a pod­cast about some­one who says, Oh, look, I’m sit­ting at about 25, 28%. Instead, and I’m sort of going, ah, kind of thing, uh, but, but I, I think.

[00:10:44] GF: Oh, absolute­ly. I thought, you know, I’m about to vom­it. But, I think over the last sort of, um, 18 months, it’s just been a lot more strict and reli­gious. Again, we talk about, you know, DYOR. Um, there’s lots, and I know in our QAVM group, peo­ple like John and Sam do lots of research, and it’s good hang­ing off their research and lis­ten­ing to their, you know, wise words about things they’re find­ing with stocks.

[00:11:08] GF: I know Sam had been away recent­ly, and he point­ed out, you know, Some things about, I think, build­ing com­pa­nies and stuff like that, but I think I still let QAV do the heavy list­ing, but I’m very reli­gious now on man­ag­ing stop loss­es and, you know, rule ones and things a lot more, and as I’m doing that now, and I check them week­ly, it does­n’t take long, and I don’t do it because I have to, I do it because I want to, um, I’m much more con­fi­dent now about results than I have been, cer­tain­ly in the past, and got some good ones at the moment doing, I’ve put a cou­ple on the list of things to talk about, but, yeah, doing a lot bet­ter.

[00:11:40] CR: Well good, thanks for that back­ground. Yeah I think the Set­ting stop loss­es and fol­low­ing through on them is some­thing that a lot of peo­ple strug­gle with in the ear­ly days rather than just fol­low­ing the sys­tem by the book, but you learn over time. Well, let’s get into some news from the last week. I want­ed to start with fol­low­ing up.

[00:12:05] CR: I men­tioned to Tony last week about The Mooch, the Mooches book on Bit­coin that, uh, I bought a copy of, saw the Mooch on a, uh, a YouTube, I think Peter DI’s inter­view. Um, this is the guy that worked for Trump for 10 days. I think it was 11 days. Antho­ny Scara­muc­ci. And, uh, he’s a big Bit­coin pro­mot­er, talk­ing about how it’s the great­est invest­ment there’s ever been.

[00:12:39] CR: So I bought his book and told Tony I was going to read it and see what I could learn about Bit­coin and why it’s such a great invest­ment. So I read it, and there’s noth­ing in it. It’s just the same old bull­shit I’ve been hear­ing for 10 years from friends of mine. Like, my friend who’s the, was the pro­duc­er of our doc­u­men­tary, and he’s pro­duced two doc­u­men­taries on Bit­coin over the last ten years, which I’ve watched, and there’s noth­ing in them either.

[00:13:09] CR: Basi­cal­ly, The only thing I got out of the Mooch’s book on Bit­coin and why it’s like, most of the book is just talk­ing about how it’s going to change the world. It’s going to change mon­ey. It’s going to change this. It’s, you know, why fiat cur­ren­cies are so bad and all the usu­al jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for hav­ing a blockchain cur­ren­cy.

[00:13:28] CR: None of which I dis­agree with. I mean, I think that makes per­fect sense. And, um, I think. There’s a lot of ways that we can improve glob­al cur­ren­cies, but when it comes down to why it’s a good invest­ment, the only argu­ment I could get in the book, which is the same one I’ve heard before, is that there’s only ever going to be, what­ev­er the num­ber is, 21 mil­lion bit­coins pro­duced.

[00:13:53] CR: It’s a fixed sup­ply, a fixed quan­ti­ty, and because It is going to become so mas­sive­ly pop­u­lar and famous and cen­tral to glob­al cur­ren­cies. Those coins are then going to be worth a lot of mon­ey because there’s only a lim­it­ed sup­ply of them. And that’s the part of the argu­ment that, I don’t buy. That it is, has this big bright future ahead of it.

[00:14:17] CR: It’s spec­u­la­tion, essen­tial­ly. It might be, that might hap­pen. But there’s 20 oth­er things that might hap­pen where it could hap­pen. goes awry, includ­ing gov­ern­ments, you know, not allow­ing it to take that cen­tral place or com­pet­i­tive cur­ren­cies com­ing along or it get­ting hacked or all sorts of things. So my take­away on the Moochers book on Bit­coin is there’s noth­ing new in it.

[00:14:42] CR: It’s the same old argu­ments I’ve been hear­ing for­ev­er. There’s noth­ing that explains it from, uh, you know, from an invest­ing per­spec­tive. The ques­tion that I’ve asked peo­ple, we’ve said it on the show a mil­lion times, and this ques­tion I always ask Bit­coin evan­ge­lists is, tell me how to cal­cu­late the intrin­sic val­ue of one coin today so I know what I should pay for it if I’m going to buy it at a dis­count.

[00:15:08] CR: And they can’t because it has no intrin­sic val­ue. There is no intrin­sic val­ue of, uh, a Bit­coin. So you can’t val­ue it in the way that we like to think about invest­ing. It comes down to hope and spec­u­la­tion. It’s gam­bling straight up. And Pump and Dump. You know, you’ve got all these guys that are pump­ing it up by writ­ing books about it and doing pod­casts about it because they own a ton of it.

[00:15:36] CR: And they’re hop­ing that oth­er peo­ple will go out and buy it and dri­ve the price up so they can get out of it as a prof­it. That’s my per­son­al opin­ion. Don’t want to cast asper­sions on their moti­va­tions, but that’s what I think is hap­pen­ing. So, noth­ing to be learned from Antho­ny Scara­muc­ci’s book on Bit­coin.

[00:15:53] CR: You ever been tempt­ed by Bit­coin, Geoff?

[00:15:57] GF: No, not real­ly. And I have to say that I real­ly don’t think I under­stand it that much. I think I under­stand some of it, but not a lot. And I had some­one who worked for us a num­ber of years ago, Cam, that was huge into doge. And, you know, he said, well, what was the ratio­nale? He said, it must be good because Elon said so.

[00:16:17] GF: Well, you know, that may or may

[00:16:21] CR: There’s a the­sis.

[00:16:23] GF: That’s right. That may or may not be a good rea­son. I’m only hap­py with Elon because of what’s on our roof. We live in a val­ley and we’ve got Star­link on the roof, so thank you Elon for that. And we also have a 4G aer­i­al, oth­er­wise we would be out of com­mu­ni­ca­tion com­plete­ly.

[00:16:37] GF: But I don’t real­ly under­stand it and I haven’t real­ly had a desire to want to, but I take Um, apart from, I think Char­lie call­ing it, you know, rat poi­son squared or some­thing like that, that, um, Tony says what is it I’m actu­al­ly invest­ing in, which I guess just to test what you said, what, what is it I’m in, I’m invest­ing in West Gold or I’m invest­ing in, you know, PLS or, um, NRW Hold­ings or some­thing, I sort of under­stand, or I do under­stand that, but I don’t under­stand what I’m invest­ing in, I think is the main thing, so, maybe that’s why I haven’t real­ly looked a lot fur­ther.

[00:17:09] CR: Yeah. And I do think at the end of the day, maybe there is a lot of mon­ey to be made in the short term out of, out of buy­ing Bit­coin. I hes­i­tate to even use the word invest­ing because it’s not invest­ing, it’s gam­bling. But it comes, for me, it comes down to how you see your­self when it comes to invest­ing.

[00:17:30] CR: What are the rules by which you’re going to live? I think life comes down to rules, right? A lot of the time. It comes, you know, in my psy­chopath book, I wrote a lit­tle chap­ter on, How you set your morals and your ethics and your val­ues so you know what the rules are you’re going to live by and you know what you’re will­ing to do in ser­vice of your job or run­ning your busi­ness and what you’re not will­ing to do.

[00:17:55] CR: And I think that when it comes to invest­ing, Tony con­vinced me ear­ly on that, uh, I should be an investor that has a ratio­nal the­sis for every­thing that I do in the busi­ness. realm of invest­ing and not a gam­bler. And so any­thing, if I’m going to quote unquote, invest in some­thing, it needs to have a ratio­nal the­sis that I can under­stand that is some­thing oth­er than gam­bling.

[00:18:24] CR: It needs to have some sci­ence behind it rather than just. I’ve just tak­en a punt. There’s noth­ing wrong with gam­bling, but let’s just call it what it is, and say you’re not invest­ing in Bit­coin, you’re gam­bling on Bit­coin, and if you want to gam­ble, that’s fine. I’m just not a gam­bler. I’m just not wired that way.

[00:18:42] CR: Apart from all the mar­riages and star­tups I’ve had, which prob­a­bly, that’s where I gam­ble in life, is mar­riages and star­tups, and they haven’t worked out. So that’s my track record with gam­bling. I want to talk a lit­tle bit about Boom Logis­tics. I men­tioned last week that I could­n’t real­ly report on any of the port­fo­lios because Boom Logis­tics, BOL, was going through a 1 for 10 con­sol­i­da­tion.

[00:19:09] CR: I checked on it again this morn­ing and it’s still Has­n’t set­tled, the dust has­n’t set­tled on that, uh, look­ing at their web­site, they say nor­mal trad­ing would com­mence on the 5th of Decem­ber. It’s the 3rd of Decem­ber when we’re record­ing this. So, depend­ing on what I look at, if I look at Navexa, Navexa have actu­al­ly processed the one for 10, so instead of 18, I’ve got 800 shares, but they’re still show­ing the prices 14 cents and not 1.

[00:19:39] CR: 40. So my shares have been dec­i­mat­ed and the price has been dec­i­mat­ed along with it. Um, Stock­o­pe­dia, on the oth­er hand, aren’t show­ing the con­sol­i­da­tion. They’ve just shown the share prices changed from, from a 14 cents to 1. 40. So my port­fo­lio in Stock­o­pe­dia looks like, looks amaz­ing. Uh, none of those are true.

[00:20:04] CR: So we have to wait a cou­ple more days for it to bed down, for it to start trad­ing again, for the price to catch up with the con­sol­i­da­tion and then our port­fo­lios will. Make sense again.

[00:20:17] CR: Uh, what else? EHL, Trad­ing Update and Guid­ance, Ami­co. You fol­lowed any of the Ami­co stuff this week, Geoff?

[00:20:30] GF: No, look, I’ve, a bit, and I, I know you’re also allud­ing to, which I’d leave, but I, I saw that you’re also got on your list to talk about Fin­di, and I’ll, I’ll look, because I was lis­ten­ing to Hen­ry Jen­nings yes­ter­day, talk­ing exten­sive­ly, he calls it Findy, but talk­ing about Fin­di as well, but I’ll get to that one, but I, I, I, I was pre­vi­ous­ly invest­ed, but not for a lit­tle while in EHL, yeah.

[00:20:53] CR: So EHL came out with a Trad­ing Update and Earn­ings Guid­ance on the 20th of Novem­ber. Which basi­cal­ly said, let me open it up here,

[00:21:11] CR: Com­pa­ny expects oper­at­ing earn­ings before inter­est tax depre­ci­a­tion and amor­ti­za­tion, aka bull­shit earn­ings, Uh, to be at least 300 mil­lion for FY25, with a sim­i­lar H1S, H2 skew to FY24. This is in addi­tion to the mar­ket out­look com­ments pro­vid­ed in the Man­ag­ing Direc­tor’s Address. Annu­al­ized sec­ond half, 25 oper­at­ing EBIT expect­ed to dri­ve ROC to 18%. FY25 stay in busi­ness CAPEX expect­ed to be cir­ca 160 165 mil­lion. Basi­cal­ly, they’re, uh, say­ing that the pro­duc­tion out­look for gold and bulk com­modi­ties remains pos­i­tive despite weak­er mar­ket con­di­tions for nick­el and lithi­um. Share price bobbed up when this came out, uh, up about 7%, and it’s up anoth­er cou­ple of per­cent today, actu­al­ly, so Inter­est­ing for Eme­co to be report­ing sort of strong, uh, Pos­i­tive stuff for the future on that because as we know com­modi­ties are not look­ing good.

[00:22:18] CR: It’s been a very weak time for com­modi­ties the last few months.

[00:22:23] GF: Cam, you look at, um, um, the announce­ments too on EHL since real­ly Feb­ru­ary, and they’ve tak­en quite a few hits.

[00:22:31] CR: Yes, they have.

[00:22:34] GF: um, it’s, it’s, Ami­co deliv­ers strong growth with pos­i­tive FY25 and it went down near­ly 6%, so I guess some­one thought it was strong and then even back to sort of kind of Feb­ru­ary,

[00:22:47] CR: hmm.

[00:22:48] GF: 4D in Feb­ru­ary.

[00:22:50] CR: Well gold is Maybe as of today, it’s become a buy again. It was a Josephine. It obvi­ous­ly had a great run. The gold price over the last, oh my God, it’s been hav­ing a great run for quite a while now. It came off a lit­tle bit, but, um, they’re feel­ing pret­ty pos­i­tive about it, but there’s a lot of stuff’s up in the air with that too, as we’ve been talk­ing about on the show, uh, what’s going to hap­pen with Ukraine once the Trump admin­is­tra­tion is inau­gu­rat­ed in Jan­u­ary, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:23:20] CR: So we’ll see, but there was a nice lit­tle pos­i­tive announce­ment, uh, from EHL as opposed to Fen­di. Findy, Fin­di, um, I think India, so Fin­di is in Find­ia, because obvi­ous­ly that’s where they’ve got a big play. They came out with their half year report, and the share price dropped 30%, which was a bit of a shock to the sys­tem.

[00:23:51] CR: When it hap­pened, uh, was it Mon­day, I think, or maybe Fri­day? Um, but, they’ve recov­ered a lit­tle bit since then, I think this morn­ing. Let me see, yeah, they’ve recov­ered, they’ve recov­ered a lit­tle bit. So it was on the 29th, they dropped from, they opened the day at 7. 82, by the end of the day, they were at 10.

[00:24:19] CR: 5. 90. So it was a shock­er of a day. Um, kept drop­ping. Uh, they’ve recov­ered a bit today. They’re back up to 5. 40. Now I can’t com­plain because they’re still up about 65, 70 per­cent from when we bought them, but they were up like 100%, 110 per­cent a week ago. So it’s inter­est­ing though, look­ing at their finan­cials and try­ing to fig­ure out why they got whacked by the mar­ket so hard.

[00:24:52] CR: They’re say­ing rev­enue was 30. 65 mil­lion up 1 per­cent com­pared to 30. 37 mil­lion for the same peri­od in 2023. Post­ed a loss of 3. 5 mil­lion, 3. 55 mil­lion, which is prob­a­bly what scared the mar­ket a lit­tle bit, I think, because they’d post­ed a prof­it of. 0. 77 mil­lion in the pre­vi­ous year, which is a 560 per­cent decrease on prof­its, but they’ve been doing a lot of expan­sion.

[00:25:23] CR: Obvi­ous­ly in India, they’ve been buy­ing a lot of stuff over there. Net assets also decreased from 36. 86 mil­lion in March of this year to 32. 24 mil­lion. But, uh, I don’t know that it’s as bad as the mar­ket is mak­ing out here. We’ve talked about them a lot in recent weeks. These acqui­si­tions, the ATM acqui­si­tion that Tony was talk­ing about a week or two ago that they’ve made in India.

[00:25:51] CR: They own more ATMs now in India with this new acqui­si­tion added more ATMs than we have in the entire coun­try in Aus­tralia. They seem to be very well run. They seem to be doing a great job. I’m not, you know, it’s a big shock to me. to the sys­tem when any stock you own drops by 30 per­cent in a day. But I’m not over­ly con­cerned about, I don’t think there’s any­thing fun­da­men­tal­ly wrong with the busi­ness.

[00:26:15] CR: I think they’re, they’re grow­ing fast. They’ve got a few teething issues with cash­flow and that kind of stuff, but I’m still pret­ty con­fi­dent that they’re in a good posi­tion. You own, you own any Fen­di?

[00:26:29] GF: Now, and I’ve looked at them before, but I’m just, as you’re talk­ing, I’m think­ing about sort of pre­vi­ous pod­casts that we talk about, you know, and I would­n’t call this sov­er­eign risk per se, but I know Tony talked about, and you know, there’s prob­a­bly less chance of, you know, get­ting arrest­ed in Mali kind of thing and being held in a plush, you know, like a plush padded jail with soft, you know, ele­va­tor music play­ing, but, um, Is there a risk?

[00:26:53] GF: Like, you know, we talked about the risk, oh, you know, on pod­cast, talked about the risk with Nick Scali, deal­ing with the UK com­pa­ny, I can’t think of the name of the organ­i­sa­tion, and they’ve got, obvi­ous­ly got sep­a­rate, um, uh, what do you call it, drop ship issues now, you know, if the ships turn off, then you, then, you know, Hous­ton, we have a prob­lem, but, you The brand­ing, I think, was, um, was real­ly not con­sis­tent with Nick Scali in the UK, and they had to do a lot of work, and I think from Antho­ny Scal­i’s per­spec­tive, he said, you know, we’re up for the chal­lenge, we can make it hap­pen, but it’s a chal­lenge, I guess, because it’s on the oth­er side of the world, and is it the same in India, try­ing to deal with this kind of busi­ness?

[00:27:27] GF: I mean, it’s a huge, I don’t know if you’ve been to India, we were there, Oh, six or sev­en years ago. And it’s just a huge play. I think they’re one, I don’t know, maybe 1. 1 bil­lion peo­ple now and lots of tech­nol­o­gy. And so does that present a mas­sive oppor­tu­ni­ty, but we did a lot of train­ing over there and we had to jump so many hoops through gov­ern­ment and with­hold­ing tax just to deliv­er train­ing over there.

[00:27:48] GF: Is it a chal­lenge? You know, does it, with India, with, as you said, Find­ia try­ing to deal in India, and, uh, yeah, maybe you blow the doors off, but maybe it’s just some­thing that does­n’t work well. But again, you look at the announce­ments, obvi­ous­ly, and they’ve had some big hits over this, but in hind­sight with India, it’s prob­a­bly not that bad because it’s had some good growth.

[00:28:08] CR: Yeah, well, every­thing I know about India comes from Bol­ly­wood movies. Um, so I do believe that Shah Rukh Khan is a god in human form. Um, out­side of that, my knowl­edge of India, apart from his­to­ry, is fair­ly lim­it­ed.

[00:28:24] GF: Well, that’s all you real­ly need to know. There was a, what was the oth­er Indi­an movie? Now it escapes me, but Lin­da and I real­ly enjoyed it. It was the, oh, The Best Exot­ic Marigold Hotel. Filmed in Jaipur. That’s all you need to know about India with a stel­lar British cast, includ­ing Bill Nye and, you know, var­i­ous oth­ers, Helen Mir­ren, and I think Helen Mir­ren, any­way,

[00:28:41] CR: So it’s not real­ly a film about India, it’s a film about

[00:28:44] GF: it’s a film about the, yeah, that’s right, exact­ly, expats

[00:28:46] CR: Raj, the British Raj. Right. Uh, it’s not the first time that we’ve seen Fin­di take some big hits, uh, back in July of this year. I know they were trad­ing at 4. 80 and dropped quite quick­ly down to 3. 60. They seem to go through, and I don’t know if it’s prof­it tak­ing or what, they seem to go through big runs and then they’ll take a big sud­den hit.

[00:29:12] CR: And then they’ll go for anoth­er big run and a big sud­den hit. If you go back and look at their chart over the last 12 months, there’s a range of these. Noth­ing quite as big as this one, though, to be fair. This is real­ly a siz­able beat­ing that they took. Basi­cal­ly, the share price now has gone back to where it was.

[00:29:34] CR: In the mid­dle of Octo­ber. So it’s just wiped out. You want to six weeks of gains, but it did have a crazy run in that six weeks too. So it’s pret­ty volatile, Fin­di. Uh, but again. Um, there’s noth­ing here that real­ly scares me too much. I’ll see what Tony has to say when he gets back next week. We’re still try­ing to get the CEO to come on the show.

[00:30:00] CR: But, um, there you go. Still, we’re doing very well out of Fin­di, no com­plaints. I can’t com­plain about Fin­di. Where the share price has gone in the year or so that we’ve owned it.

[00:30:11] GF: But as you, to a point, they look at the announce­ments in Stock Doc­tor, it real­ly is quite volatile, isn’t it?

[00:30:16] CR: It is. Yeah. And I don’t real­ly under­stand why, whether or not that’s just lots of prof­it tak­ing or the mar­ket is, uh, chop­py when it comes to their announce­ments and what they’re doing in India. It just seems way too volatile for a busi­ness of this nature. It’s not like it’s a biotech start­up that’s com­ing out with, you know, research or some­thing like that.

[00:30:42] GF: Now, I enjoyed those recent­ly, as you said, there was some very Stan and Bar­ry kind of busi­ness names recent­ly, maybe talk about that last week and, uh. And what did Tony refer to it? It’s like the gam­bling end. Is that what he referred it to? Is that what he called it? The gam­bling end of the ASX. It’s like, you know, You can either do this or do Bit­coin and they both could go, well, both could go one way or the oth­er.

[00:31:02] GF: But they had some, but they had some pret­ty cool names though.

[00:31:05] CR: yes.

[00:31:06] CR: What have you got on your notes to talk about Geoff? You had some­thing about gold and WGX, I think?

[00:31:12] GF: Yeah, that was just again, more, um, I guess just shar­ing than, you know, me real­ly dig­ging deep on WGX, but I know that, um, I men­tioned before we caught up recent­ly, um, uh, Andy Cody orga­nized, we had din­ner in, um, at South Mel­bourne, um, with, um, John and Samuel and myself and, uh, Two oth­ers at the time, I think it was Mar­cus and Tom joined us as well.

[00:31:36] GF: It was a real­ly, real­ly good night. And Lydia Thor­pe was there, which was a big high­light. So she was on the table next to us. Not, not, not very vocal, but next to us. But, um, and we just shared. It was one of the things we talked about was shar­ing some good wins and some good results. And some, you know, we, you had to share the crash and burn.

[00:31:53] GF: And so we’ve all had at least one of those, but, Now, just look­ing at this, and that’s why I pulled in, I looked at, um, trad­ing eco­nom­ics a cou­ple of days, a cou­ple, you know, a cou­ple of times a week, and, um, I pulled up that, that graph which I shared today, which I think was a five year, and, uh, I think if you’re a, if you’re a set­ter and for­get­ter, which is my busi­ness part­ner, he says that if you’re not a set­ter and for­get­ter, you’re a trad­er, and I said I think there’s a cou­ple of oth­er clas­si­fi­ca­tions in there some­where, but any­way.

[00:32:19] GF: that’s his per­spec­tive. But if you’re a set of, again, and you looked at the gold and trade eco­nom­ics, you’d say, well, it’s, um, it’s, it’s one to hold like kind of for­ev­er. And giv­en what’s maybe hap­pen­ing in Chi­na and oth­er parts of the world, that might be the case. But, um, I think I, I bought my first tranche of WGX, uh, I think in ear­ly 2022.

[00:32:39] GF: Now, I think at the time, if I checked back, I think it did tank at one stage. And I sort of looked the oth­er way and looked, I should have been look­ing here, but I looked over there. Because I just want­ed to ignore it. So it did dip right down and come back, and I had anoth­er tranche again last year, and, um, yeah, right about now it’s actu­al­ly track­ing, it’s actu­al­ly track­ing pret­ty well.

[00:32:58] GF: I know we were talk­ing about this and talk­ing about Met­als X and a few oth­ers as well, but just my per­spec­tive, and I just went inter­est­ed, and I know we talked a bit about gold before, about, you know, You know, shar­ing the volatil­i­ty of the mar­ket ver­sus what’s hap­pen­ing in the world with wars and the changes in Chi­na and maybe longer term that, you know, gold is a longer term.

[00:33:16] GF: It’s either invest­ing in gold or com­pa­nies that, you know, dig, dig it out of the ground like the Gold­fields and, you know, WGX and oth­ers kind of thing. But is it, is it, is it, is it a good, it’s like spec­u­lat­ing, is it a good long term invest­ment? I guess that was prob­a­bly why I added it to my list.

[00:33:32] CR: Well, you know what, uh, War­ren and Char­lie have always said about gold, it’s, it’s, you can’t eat it, it’s, they don’t real­ly see that as an invest­ment, but I’m look­ing at the, look­ing at it’s per­for­mance over the last five years, so if we go back to Decem­ber 19, Gold was trad­ing at about 1, 746. Uh, today it’s up around 4, 084. So that’s, you know, that’s a lit­tle bit over dou­ble. In five years, that’s okay. You know, we expect QAV on aver­age, we expect to dou­ble our mon­ey every three and a half years. Uh, rule of 76. So, I mean, I think if you’re, if, if you don’t want to be an active trad­er and you just want to buy and sit on some­thing and get aver­age returns, that’s bet­ter than aver­age returns, gold may have done okay.

[00:34:43] CR: But in terms of the, the sit and for­get, Sort of mind­set and phi­los­o­phy. I know as Tony has point­ed out a num­ber of times, if you, if you just fol­lowed that dur­ing the GFC, if you just kept what you were own­ing in 2008 and just held onto it, it would have tak­en 10 years, took 10 years for the index to get back to where it was when it crashed in 2008.

[00:35:13] GF: And I

[00:35:13] CR: So,

[00:35:14] GF: sor­ry Cam, sor­ry Cam,

[00:35:15] CR: you know,

[00:35:16] GF: just going back to your point there, if you look at that trad­ing eco­nom­ics real­ly, and um, I was to draw, not using my ruler, but draw a line across, it real­ly was sort of fair­ly, I mean, obvi­ous­ly volatile, but real­ly trend­ing pret­ty flat, was it not, real­ly, up until maybe, you know, sort of late 23, late 24, and then from there it’s real­ly picked up from there, and then, what peaked at about, sort of, must have been a month or so ago, and sort of, Then, which, you know, pret­ty much mir­rors West Gold, uh, real­ly picked up since then.

[00:35:45] GF: So yeah, I would got in prob­a­bly about sort of, I think, yeah, I think it was about mid 2022. It took, and you can see where the dip was, that’s, that’s where I should have got out and, you know, bought some­thing else that was going up. But then from there it picked up, flat lined, and then it’s sort of up again.

[00:35:59] GF: So yeah,

[00:36:00] CR: well, if you go, if you look at the month­ly chart for gold, you go back to, let’s say, August 2011, it was trad­ing at about 1, 700, it was still trad­ing at about 1, 700 in Novem­ber 2018. So you’ve got 7 years. of it going side­ways.

[00:36:20] GF: yeah,

[00:36:21] CR: Um, so it would­n’t have been great just to be sit­ting on gold for that peri­od of time, had a nice run up.

[00:36:28] CR: Then you’ve got the Trump years. So it sort of went North dur­ing the Trump years, um, dropped sub­stan­tial­ly when Biden got elect­ed and then went side­ways until the Ukraine inva­sion. Um, ear­ly 2022 and it’s had a mas­sive run up since Rus­sia invad­ed Ukraine. So yeah, I look, I, I, I, I would­n’t see that over­all as a great invest­ment strat­e­gy, just buy­ing gold and hold­ing it like for that long peri­od there where it did noth­ing.

[00:37:03] CR: If you, if you went back and looked at it, it’s from 2011 through to today, 2024, you’ve got 13 years where it’s bare­ly dou­bled in that 13 years. A lit­tle bit over dou­ble in 13 years, which isn’t great. You know, if you, if you man­aged to time it per­fect­ly, you did great. If you did­n’t time it per­fect­ly, you just bought it and held it for 13 years.

[00:37:29] CR: You’ve a lit­tle bit more than dou­bled it in 13 years, which, you know, you would expect with QAV with an active trad­ing, you would have had 13 years, three and a half, six and a half, four dou­blings in that peri­od of time, you know, so not that great.

[00:37:46] GF: yeah, there you go. It’s an inter­est­ing one,

[00:37:50] CR: Yeah. WGX though, as you say, has, um, you know, had a pret­ty good run in the last cou­ple of years as well. Except for that big tank that you men­tioned in ear­ly 2022, you know. Um, speak­ing of gold, Res­olute Min­ing. I haven’t had a look at them this week. I won­der what’s going on with them. Have they recov­ered?

[00:38:18] CR: No, no they have not. All right, well, that’s good for me. I was con­cerned that they bounced back their 30 per­cent after their CEO was released, but no, it has­n’t.

[00:38:32] GF: Yeah, not much, not much to see there, Ken.

[00:38:36] CR: Alright, well, uh, unless you’ve got some­thing else to talk about, I’ve got a pulled pork to do.

[00:38:41] GF: No, it just, that was inter­est­ing, we shared on the QAV the oth­er day, just that lit­tle arti­cle, and it came out of Nab­Trade, I don’t know if it’s else­where, but it was about share sell­ing, which I thought was inter­est­ing. I don’t know if

[00:38:51] CR: Oh, tell me about

[00:38:52] GF: that, but, well it’s just you reg­is­ter, um, I think you man­age to find some­one else’s HIN num­ber and you reg­is­ter sep­a­rate­ly under a, like a sep­a­rate trad­ing account and then you change the name of the trad­ing account.

[00:39:04] GF: I’ll pull up this lit­tle, I think I, as I said, I think I had it in QAV, but um, ASIC has advised that Aus­tralians are cur­rent­ly being tar­get­ed by crim­i­nals in per­son and indi­vid­u­als to steal their shares. How crim­i­nals are steal­ing shares in an exam­ple of crim­i­nal claim to be. John Cit­i­zen. or Tony Kynas­ton, cre­ates a share trad­ing account to sell shares owned by the real Tony Kynas­ton or John Sim­per­son.

[00:39:30] GF: The crim­i­nal uses stolen ID doc­u­ments as well as ille­gal­ly obtained chess and issuer spon­sored, um, hold­ing state­ments, so hid­den num­bers, to open a fraud­u­lent account and then trans­fer the shares to the own­er. into that account, these doc­u­ments could be stolen as a result of third par­ty breach or mail.

[00:39:45] GF: So, they trans­fer the shares over and basi­cal­ly sell them. And so you might check in one day and your ship, ship port­fo­lio is look­ing real­ly healthy, and the next day it’s like, it’s emp­ty. So, um, be it, they say it’s def­i­nite­ly that there was an arti­cle and a pod­cast on NABTRADE, I don’t know if it was else­where, and it said it is, like oth­er scams these days, it’s def­i­nite­ly on the rise.

[00:40:06] GF: It’s obvi­ous­ly work­ing well for those that man­u­fac­ture these, or fab­ri­cate these scams, and it’s actu­al­ly work­ing real­ly well. So, I just, you’ll assume on the plat­forms at a point in time, through CommShare and through NABTRADE and oth­ers, they’ll imple­ment some, you know, strate­gies around to block these things hap­pen­ing, but yeah, they are hap­pen­ing.

[00:40:24] CR: I’m on ASIC’s web­site where they say, What to do. How to be vig­i­lant and act if some­thing looks sus­pi­cious. Review your share port­fo­lios reg­u­lar­ly. Regard­less of whether they are issuer spon­sored hold­ings reg­is­tered with share reg­istries or held in share trad­ing accounts with stock­bro­kers so you’re quick­er to detect unau­tho­rized activ­i­ty.

[00:40:44] CR: Use past phras­es rather than sim­ple pass­words for online accounts. Turn on mul­ti fac­tor authen­ti­ca­tion. Authen­ti­ca­tion, if it’s avail­able, lock your let­ter box to pre­vent mail theft and check it fre­quent­ly. Ensure you have pro­vid­ed your most up to date con­tact details to your stock­bro­ker, share reg­istries, and finan­cial ser­vice providers.

[00:41:03] CR: If you receive a new bank card or cor­re­spon­dence that is unex­pect­ed, like an update on how your shares are held, the cre­ation of a new account, a noti­fi­ca­tion of sale of your shares, or con­fir­ma­tion of a change in con­tact details, don’t ignore the cor­re­spon­dence. If some­thing is unex­pect­ed or feels wrong, act quick­ly.

[00:41:23] CR: If you see some­thing, say some­thing, call your stock bro­ker, et cetera, et cetera. So basic secu­ri­ty advice. But yeah, hav­ing had, you know, Chris­sy and I had our bank accounts hacked, uh, a few years ago and we got cleaned out, um,

[00:41:40] GF: Got com­plete­ly cleaned out.

[00:41:42] CR: com­plete­ly cleaned out. Um, we were camp­ing at the time out of radio range.

[00:41:51] CR: And, start­ed get­ting a cou­ple of, uh, like when we did get a lit­tle bit of sig­nal, weird text mes­sages. Any­way, we got back to Bris­bane to find out some­body had hacked our bank accounts, com­plete­ly cleaned us out. So that was, um, that was scary stuff. Yeah.

[00:42:11] GF: That one too, we bought tick­ets on Unit­ed because we’ve been, because I mean, you and I have talked about Salt Lake City and um, the fact that we work with a Mor­mon com­pa­ny, so we’ve done a lot, we’ve been, I’ve been to Salt Lake City prob­a­bly 20 times over 15 years, but um, bought some tick­ets one time on Unit­ed Air­lines and before you know it, I bought a mas­sive pur­chase at Home Depot in Port­land, Ore­gon, Ore­gon.

[00:42:35] GF: I think it was maybe I bought about 30, 000 worth of stuff. And then the next day I’d flown from Atlanta, um, first class to maybe Chile or Cuba or some­thing like that, you know, to the, to the, to the val­ue of about 20, 000 USD. So in a cou­ple of days I spent 50 G’s USD. So it was good. Yeah.

[00:42:56] CR: Wow.

[00:42:57] GF: So yeah, same

[00:42:57] CR: recov­ery process? Was

[00:42:59] GF: Uh, look, it was­n’t, yeah, it took prob­a­bly a month to do it, I sup­pose, then, and it’s, I think, it took a while. I think recent­ly I had some­thing where I was look­ing at my PC, at my online bank­ing, and on my phone, and then one minute lat­er I got a phone call.

[00:43:13] CR: Mm hmm.

[00:43:14] GF: what are you doing? What’s going on? So I think they’re more on it.

[00:43:16] GF: But in those days, when I con­tact­ed them, it was prob­a­bly five or six years ago, um, I con­tact­ed them and there was a whole bunch of research and I got calls and then more calls and things and they final­ly sort­ed it out. Um, but, uh, I think, yeah, and I, well, I guess as, um, fire­walls become more sophis­ti­cat­ed, their method­ol­o­gy becomes more sophis­ti­cat­ed as well.

[00:43:35] GF: So they obvi­ous­ly keep hap­pen­ing, but, uh, yeah, great way to, great way to spend mon­ey, not par­tic­u­lar­ly.

[00:43:41] CR: Mmm. Yeah, I changed banks, uh, after that hap­pened. We moved over to Bendi­go because they had bet­ter, um, token based two sec­ond fac­tor authen­ti­ca­tion, um, which I think is an impor­tant thing to have these days.

[00:43:57] GF: They’re good for Bendi­go, because they’re a client of ours too, Bendi­go Laid Bank, but um, you know, they’re in, because we live region­al­ly, they’re all in the, still in, you know, there’s Albanese, you know, fin­ing banks these days for clos­ing region­al branch­es, but there’s lots of friend­ly sort of local small Bendi­go banks around all over the place.

[00:44:15] CR: Well, speak­ing of region­al banks, that leads me into my pulled pork for this week, which is ABA, Auswide Bank, uh, Bund­aberg based, my old home­town. Bund­aberg, Queens­land. We’ve done a pulled pork, Tony did a pulled pork in them before, and if you’d asked me, I would have said it was in the last six months. I looked it up, it was March 2022, last time he did a pulled pork on ABA as far as I can tell.

[00:44:43] CR: Uh, they’re not a high ADT stock, so they’re not going to be suit­able for larg­er investors, but they’ve, you know, Had a cou­ple of acqui­si­tions and merg­ers late­ly, which makes them inter­est­ing to look at, so I thought I’d talk about them for a lit­tle bit today. By the way, last time Tony did a pulled pork on ABA, 30th of March 2022, they were trad­ing at 5.

[00:45:09] CR: 66. Today they’re trad­ing at 4. 40. So, he had the, the pulled pork kibosh was applied to that one, was applied to that one. Ruined them when we did the pulled pork on it. It’s all our fault. Uh, I sold it out of the light port­fo­lios at 5. 40. It was a three point trend­line sell, I think, in April 2023, and they’ve gone down to 4.

[00:45:33] CR: 40, so, you know, it’s, uh, we, we some­times talk about whether or not our stop loss­es save us or hurt us, and we hope that, on aver­age, over time, they save us more than they hurt us. This one, it def­i­nite­ly worked, um, and I’ve actu­al­ly not had a Good track record with ABA over the years. I went back and had a look, I’ve bought them three times, bought them in July 2022 at 6.

[00:46:04] CR: 60, then sold them a cou­ple of months lat­er at 6. 17, bought them again in Feb­ru­ary, 2023, cou­ple of parcels around 5. 90, and then had to sell them in April, 2023 at 5. 38. So it has­n’t been a good run for. But as I said, they’ve recent­ly had some acqui­si­tions which might work out for them and it might not. So let’s go into a lit­tle bit of detail and I’ll talk about where they’re at.

[00:46:43] CR: So, as I said, Auswide Bank is head­quar­tered in Bund­aberg, Aus­tralia, Sug­ar­cane Cap­i­tal. I think also the MEF cap­i­tal of Aus­tralia now. Uh, High Youth Unem­ploy­ment, my mum still lives there, so, shout out to my mum, who’s not lis­ten­ing. Um, Auswide, pro­vides all your usu­al bank­ing ser­vices, deposits, loans, cred­it cards, insur­ance prod­ucts, per­son­al and busi­ness bank­ing ser­vices.

[00:47:13] CR: Used to be called Wide Bay Bank, and it It start­ed 1966 and then rebrand­ed to Oz Wide Bank in 2015. Lit­tle bit of Bar­ry and Stan brand­ing advice there. Uh, if you want to. Get out of think­ing, peo­ple think­ing you’re just Wide Bay. You need to change your name to Auswide. They’ve got 16 branch­es across Queens­land, which isn’t exact­ly Auswide.

[00:47:40] CR: It’s Queens­land wide. They serve about 92, 000 cus­tomers and they have a pri­vate bank­ing divi­sion cater­ing to high net worth indi­vid­u­als. Now, recent­ly they’ve. They’ve acquired a com­pa­ny called SELFCO, Spe­cial­ists Equip­ment Leas­ing Finance Com­pa­ny. They acquired 100 per­cent of that. They’re an SME asset finance lender.

[00:48:03] CR: They picked them up for 6. 5 mil­lion. They raised about 12 mil­lion in equi­ty to buy that and poten­tial­ly look at some oth­er acqui­si­tions. But they’re also in the process of try­ing to merge with a Tas­man­ian bank called MyS­tate. They were sup­posed to have a share­hold­er meet­ing to con­firm this yes­ter­day, the 2nd of Decem­ber, but for some rea­son, the Supreme Court in New South Wales pushed it out until Feb­ru­ary.

[00:48:40] CR: Gonna have to wait until the It’s, we’re see­ing whether or not that’s going to go ahead. But at this stage, it looks like it’s prob­a­bly going to go ahead. Um, it’s going to end up with a new com­pa­ny that will be owned 35, uh, 34 per­cent by Oz wide share­hold­ers and 66 per­cent by. MyS­tate Share­hold­ers, which is inter­est­ing because it’s like a reverse takeover is what it looks like to me.

[00:49:09] CR: Uh, as I said, Auswide have 92, 000 cus­tomers, MyS­tate have 180, 000 cus­tomers. Cus­tomers. So they’re twice as large, cus­tomer wise, as Auswide, and that’s reflect­ed in the amount of the final com­pa­ny, Merge­Co, as it’s called in the merg­er doc­u­ments, that the MyS­tate share­hold­ers will own. So, yet to be con­firmed, as I said, but some­thing’s got to hap­pen for ABI, because They’re not doing well.

[00:49:49] CR: Um, their FY24 per­for­mance was pret­ty tight. NPAT, statu­to­ry NPAT was down 55. 2 per­cent year on year. Return on equi­ty was down 3. 9%, net inter­est mar­gin was down 1. 42%. Now, That may have some­thing to do with net inter­est mar­gin decline. Appar­ent­ly, that’s declined over the last year from 1. 88 per­cent down to 1.

[00:50:27] CR: 42 per­cent due to ris­ing fund­ing costs and com­pet­i­tive home loan pric­ing, so they’re being squeezed in the mar­gins. Their cost to income ratio increased by 79. 9%. Sor­ry, increased to 79. 9%, up 14. 9 per­cent year on year. So it’s more expen­sive for them to gen­er­ate rev­enue. Their net inter­est mar­gins are down.

[00:50:56] CR: Their net prof­it is mas­sive­ly down. Their return on equi­ty is down. On the pos­i­tive side, their loan book growth was up, uh, 26 mil­lion. In hos­ing. Hous­ing loans made up 97. 88 per­cent of the loan book, which was a slight growth, their deposits were also slight­ly up, their loan arrears were still fair­ly low.

[00:51:22] CR: So, some of that stuff seems to be work­ing okay, like the fun­da­men­tals of them as a bank seem to be okay, but they’re just not mak­ing mon­ey. Um, they’re los­ing mon­ey. Not los­ing mon­ey, but they’re going back­wards, um, at a, at a rapid rate of knots in terms of their prof­itabil­i­ty. So it looks like they need a life­line.

[00:51:44] CR: And it, it looks to me like this, MyS­tate merg­er could be the life­line that they need. It’s going to expand their reach. Rumour has it that these two tried to merge about 10 years ago and that the share­hold­ers For what­ev­er rea­sons, uh, did­n’t let it hap­pen. But I think the, my state’s try­ing to get out of Tas­ma­nia.

[00:52:06] CR: Auswide is try­ing to increase, increase their reach out of Queens­land. So it seems like it makes sense for both of them, but it’s a tough time for these region­al banks, as we know. And, uh, these guys are look­ing for a life­line. So. Uh, I can go through the QAV num­bers, uh, just because it is on our buy list, and it’s been sort of a falling knife, as I explained ear­li­er, for the last cou­ple of years.

[00:52:37] CR: But has some pos­i­tive sen­ti­ment turn­around at the moment, but a lot of it sort of depends on whether or not they can pull off this merg­er. I think the cur­rent share price when I did the analy­sis was 4. 50. Uh, that was over the week­end. I think it’s a lit­tle bit low­er than that today, like 4. 98 or some­thing, uh, 4.

[00:52:58] CR: 48, some­thing like that. It was, the share price though was above our IV1 and our IV2. Even with the falling knife that they’ve had for the last cou­ple of years, share prices dropped a lot, they’re still priced above our intrin­sic val­u­a­tions, which sug­gests they might still be prof­itable. Over­val­ued, at least from that per­spec­tive.

[00:53:29] CR: Aver­age dai­ly trade is about 169, 000. So it’s a small cap stock. It’s suit­able for small­er investors, but it’s going to be tricky for larg­er investors. Um, you know, we, our gen­er­al rule of thumb as our mem­bers know is about 20 per­cent of the ADT. You don’t want to go above that, which would be about parcels of around about 33, 34, 000.

[00:53:54] CR: You would be able to buy into this. safe­ly. Their yield is low­er than the cur­rent mort­gage rate. Um, so that’s gonna be a prob­lem for cer­tain kind of investors if they’re look­ing to use the div­i­dend to pay off their mort­gage or to use it to cov­er some sort of lever­ag­ing of their mort­gage for an invest­ment port­fo­lio.

[00:54:19] CR: That said, from a Stock Doc­tor per­spec­tive, their finan­cial health assess­ment is pret­ty good. It’s rat­ed as strong and the trend is rat­ed as sta­ble. Cur­rent P. E. ratio is 18. 56, which is pret­ty high. It’s def­i­nite­ly not a record low, so we don’t score them for that. There’s no earn­ings per share fore­cast avail­able either, pos­si­bly because of the, uh, Flux that they’re in at the moment.

[00:54:51] CR: So it’s going to be pret­ty tricky for an ana­lyst to fig­ure that out. The price to oper­at­ing cash cash­flow ratio though, is real­ly low. It’s a 1. 6. So basi­cal­ly if you were buy­ing it as a busi­ness, you could expect to get your invest­ment back in under two years, about one and a half years. So, you know, that counts for a lot.

[00:55:15] CR: We know that Prop­Caf in the QAV sys­tem is sort of the heavy hit­ter as well in the regres­sion analy­sis that we’ve done or Tony’s done with the interns over the last cou­ple of years and the regres­sion test­ing that I’ve done using the soft­ware sys­tem that we’ve got. Uh, it Prop­Caf, it seems to be the heavy hit­ter, the thing that accounts for cer­tain­ly the vast major­i­ty of QAV returns.

[00:55:47] CR: So, that’s prob­a­bly why this is on the buy list when the rest of the met­rics don’t look that great. It’s real­ly, real­ly cheap from a Prop­Caf per­spec­tive. The cur­rent share price, though, is below the book price, and it’s also, of course, then below book plus 30. So you’re not only get­ting it cheap­ly from a cash flow per­spec­tive, but in terms of a book price per­spec­tive, we are able to buy it quite cheap­ly.

[00:56:19] CR: Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the board and the direc­tors don’t agree. Own a sig­nif­i­cant share of the com­pa­ny. Their hold­ings are around 0. 06 per­cent of shares, so we don’t score them for that. Uh, as I said though, they’ve had a recent new 3 point upturn. Uh, but they’re also real­ly close to their sell line. So it’s one of those things.

[00:56:42] CR: I did put these out as a pos­si­ble buy for Lite sub­scribers yes­ter­day. With that caveat. They’re not far off their three point sell line, so it could go either way with these ones when you buy them and they’re very close to a sell line. Um, I think we actu­al­ly have talked about this with some regres­sion analy­sis work recent­ly that maybe we should hold off buy­ing stocks until there’s a lit­tle bit more of a buffer between the sell line and where the share price is, so you’re not sub­ject to as many sud­den three point trend line sells.

[00:57:21] CR: I don’t think that’s been rat­i­fied by the, uh, Holy QAV Coun­cil of Tony yet, so, for the time being, um, if it’s a buy, I’m buy­ing it and tak­ing our chances. But, uh, you know, you sort of got a 50 50 chance. Based on my Not very sci­en­tif­ic, uh, mem­o­ry of how these things play out when you buy them and they’re that close to their sell line.

[00:57:49] CR: It could go either way. Uh, they do not have con­sis­tent­ly increas­ing equi­ty, so we can’t score them on that. The qual­i­ty score at the end is about 62%, which isn’t Ter­rif­ic, like we ide­al­ly want it to be over 75%, but the QAV score came in at 0. 38. So it’s quite a high QAV score. Again, I think they’ve got a cou­ple of things that look good from a val­ue per­spec­tive, the Prop­Caf and the price in rela­tion to book val­ue.

[00:58:23] CR: Uh, and their finan­cial health is sort of con­sid­ered strong and sta­ble. They’re going back­wards in, in terms of their net prof­it, but they’re still mak­ing a net prof­it. So, you know, that’s not to be sneezed at when you can buy it as cheap­ly as you can buy this one. So, that’s basi­cal­ly my pulled pork on, uh, the, uh, ABA.

[00:58:49] CR: And, and I think a lot of it, uh, You know, it’s going to depend on, A, whether or not this merg­er goes through ear­ly in the new year, and B, whether or not they can pull it off, um, merg­ers, par­tic­u­lar­ly com­pa­nies from Queens­land and Tas­ma­nia com­ing togeth­er, there’s a bit of a dis­par­i­ty, as I said, between the sizes of these busi­ness­es, my state has twice as many cus­tomers as ABA, um, how the merg­er.

[00:59:20] CR: How you bring cul­tures togeth­er, how you bring pro, I mean, I, when in my time at Microsoft, I was wit­ness to sev­er­al acqui­si­tions, not merg­ers, but acqui­si­tions by Microsoft of oth­er com­pa­nies. And I’ve seen a lot hap­pen, oth­er busi­ness­es over the years, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the tech sec­tor where com­pa­nies merge and then they try and, you know, they’re on paper, it looks good these merg­ers.

[00:59:46] CR: You know, you can reduce your cost of deliv­er­ing ser­vices, uh, in the­o­ry. And you can, you can, uh, reduce the sort of exec­u­tive and admin­is­tra­tive over­head that you have to deliv­er cer­tain ser­vices by con­sol­i­dat­ing them. But exe­cut­ing them is way hard­er than it looks, uh, for all the obvi­ous cul­tur­al and busi­ness process rea­sons.

[01:00:15] CR: So Yeah, this might be a, might be a great boon for ABA share­hold­ers. I don’t real­ly know how the merg­er affects, uh, the share­hold­ers. Like if, if, you know, it’s not an acqui­si­tion, obvi­ous­ly, so we’re not going to expect any short term appre­ci­a­tion of the share price as this goes through. It’ll just depend be deter­mined by how the mar­ket val­ues the poten­tial of the merged enti­ty if it goes ahead.

[01:00:47] CR: And that’s the oth­er thing that could hap­pen here too, is if it falls apart in Feb­ru­ary, for what­ev­er rea­son it’s not vot­ed on, then the share price for ABA could go south real­ly quick­ly if the exist­ing share­hold­ers decide that their future does­n’t look bright and rosy with­out the Date merg­er. So, uh, yeah, again, my sum­ma­ry is it’s on sev­er­al met­rics.

[01:01:15] CR: It looks pret­ty cheap, has a very good QAV score, but I think a lot of it depends on what hap­pens come Feb­ru­ary. And then even if that gets approved, how well they exe­cute on that, the two com­pa­nies exe­cute on that over the next year or two, how quick­ly and how well they exe­cute. So that’s my take on ABA.

[01:01:38] CR: Got any thoughts on ABA? Geoff.

[01:01:41] GF: it just looked like look­ing here and it reminds me of stocks over the years. I’ve got, uh, just a cou­ple of set­tings and I know a while back when I was talk­ing to Brett about, you know, set­tings that I thought suit­ed me and maybe stocks with high­er yield, but this one was sort of fair­ly low, but it remind­ed me of stocks over the years where they’re sort of hard to get in and impos­si­ble to get out.

[01:02:01] GF: Like you want to get out. It’s like Yan­coal, like, let me out, let me out. And you just like, you can’t because of the nature of the way that Yancoal’s struc­tured. So, and for those, I think that’s prob­a­bly been a big rea­son. If you look at my port­fo­lio now, I’ve got about 18 in there and I’ve got a cou­ple that are dou­bled up, um, but not much big­ger.

[01:02:17] GF: And they seem to be just eas­i­er to get in and get out. And if you want anoth­er trench kind of thing, so, but I think the oth­er thing, inter­est­ing, we’ve talked about lots of dif­fer­ent finan­cial ser­vices. All Ords, Scali, Kynas­ton, buy, sell, Fortes­cue, Sol­ly Lew, Chat­G­PT, Steve Mabb, Navexa, Fin And if you’ve ever been in one of those, and you might remem­ber this from Microsoft days, you see, merg­ers land on peo­ple like a, like a, like a ton of bricks, you know, from a cul­tur­al per­spec­tive, and we merged with IBM, and I think that, that, that, in those days, their cul­ture state­ment was some­thing like, you know, beat­ings will con­tin­ue until morale improves, sort of thing.

[01:03:00] GF: And so they just came in like an absolute ham­mer.

[01:03:03] CR: Mm hmm.

[01:03:03] GF: left the organ­i­sa­tion in droves and the cul­ture went through, and it took prob­a­bly 12 to 18 months kind of thing.

[01:03:09] CR: Mm

[01:03:10] GF: But, but back to the Oswald, I think for me, that’s not ones I’d prob­a­bly look at. I think I’ve got in my own sort of, um, fil­ters, I just would rule it out to, you know, I think if I do a down­load of Stock Doc­tor, I’ve got about 70 on there kind of stuff and they sort of suit, you know, my buy­ing cri­te­ria kind of thing, so.

[01:03:27] GF: But inter­est­ing analy­sis any­way, so thank you.

[01:03:30] CR: Mm. You’re wel­come. Yeah, like um, we’ll see how it goes this time around. As I said, I haven’t had a good per­son­al his­to­ry with them over the last cou­ple of years. They’re obvi­ous­ly doing it hard. And it’s been chal­leng­ing finan­cial con­di­tions in Aus­tralia, too, I guess, for the last cou­ple of years.

[01:03:45] CR: Although, with ris­ing inter­est rates, there are obvi­ous­ly oppor­tu­ni­ties for banks to, to make mon­ey, and some of the banks have done okay. Some of these inno­v­a­tive banks seem to have a good sto­ry to sell, but I’m not sure these region­al banks are feel­ing all of the upside from that yet. Well, that is that part of the show, and we don’t have any ques­tions.

[01:04:09] CR: So, we’re into after hours. Geoff, we get to, get to talk about cool stuff. Yeah. What, what cool stuff have you been doing late­ly?

[01:04:23] GF: Uh, look, prob­a­bly, prob­a­bly, well, apart from obvi­ous­ly, you know, we fin­ished our house. on our prop­er­ty in this, uh, sort of moved in here in Jan­u­ary and, um, since then there’s a sort of a range of things needs to be done like fenc­ing obvi­ous­ly and then, um, get­ting solar sys­tems set up which is a fair­ly, you know, sol­id invest­ment and then kind of, you know, all, all those things that had to be done, done, which means we real­ly did­n’t do any trav­el or do any­thing at all but, um, Um, I, I, I think, I think apart from lis­ten­ing to it, I know you and I com­pare notes, I remem­ber recent­ly we were talk­ing, com­par­ing notes on music and you were talk­ing about, the gen­tle­man’s name, well maybe Tony referred to it, his name’s Ian Ander­son, he was the lead singer for Jethro Tull, and he was a very cool, we saw, I saw Jethro Tull about 4 or 5 times and prob­a­bly a lot of lis­ten­ers have nev­er even heard of Jethro Tull, but, like they were pret­ty amaz­ing.

[01:05:15] GF: So I think we sort of have some com­mon­al­i­ties like sparks in, in the sort of music we enjoy, but,

[01:05:21] CR: Mm. Mm.

[01:05:22] GF: no, I enjoyed a cou­ple of, there’s a show I just shared in my notes to you today. We’re just enjoy­ing the moment and it’s real­ly out there. We don’t get any free­ware chan­nels where we are. Cause we’re sort of down in a, like a val­ley.

[01:05:34] GF: So we’ve got, as I said, we’ve got Elon’s on the roof and, you know, I’m real­ly thank­ful for that. And, um, we’ve also got a 4G aer­i­al, which points down the val­ley to the near­est Tel­stra tow­er. So if you don’t own Tel­stra around here, you don’t get, you don’t get noth­ing. Um, but, uh, so we get, I, we watch the app.

[01:05:51] GF: So, you know, there’s a sev­en plus app and a nine plus app and 10 and SPS on demand. And I real­ly enjoy SPS on demand, but there’s a series watch at the moment. And I had­n’t, I saw clips of it and I nev­er watched it. And it was called, it’s called The Old Man with Geoff Bridges. And I real­ly liked Geoff Bridges.

[01:06:07] GF: He was in Seabis­cuit years ago and just a bunch of movies. And now was he the son of? Lloyd Bridges, is that the sign? That’s him. And there was a few oth­er Bridges as well, was there not? There was some oth­er Bridges sib­lings? Yeah, any­way, but he’s real­ly good. Seabis­cuit’s a great, great movie. And I’m, again, because I, you know, enjoy and love rid­ing and being around hors­es.

[01:06:27] GF: But The Old Man is just a very intri­cate, I don’t know if you’ve seen it or heard it, but I’m real­ly enjoy­ing it. My wife’s, we have dif­fer­ent tastes of watch­ing. I watched anoth­er series recent­ly called From. I’ve just seen From. It’s pret­ty gory. I can’t. and very bizarre and twist­ed and I think it sort of for me fell off a bit towards the end it got the end of sea­son three and it was wide open for anoth­er sea­son which appar­ent­ly is not com­ing out until like 2026 but the old man with Geoff Bridges it’s a very macabre kind of like it starts slow and it’s and it’s sort of dark but it’s and it’s got a sort of sto­ry that you real­ly have to like it’s not like you can’t mul­ti­task while you’re watch­ing it but I real­ly enjoyed it it’s real­ly good we’re up to sort of I don’t know part of way through to sea­son two and I hope­ful­ly it does fin­ish on a high you know some­times sea­sons They’re like wide open.

[01:07:11] GF: You go, well, like, where do we go now? Um, but no, real­ly, real­ly enjoy­ing it. I enjoy those. There was anoth­er one a cou­ple of years ago, a Ger­man one that was all sub­ti­tling to Eng­lish called Dark. I don’t know if you saw Dark. So if you real­ly want to com­plete­ly con­fuse your­self and fry your brains, then you’d have, you could watch Dark.

[01:07:28] GF: But now the old man I’ve enjoyed, I’ve enjoyed very much. Cam, what about, what about, what about for you?

[01:07:34] CR: Well, there’s a lot to unpick in what you just said. Let’s start with Geoff Bridges and The Old Man. I did watch The Old Man and I thought it start­ed well. And then I thought it went off the cliff pret­ty quick­ly. I remem­ber I’ve talked to Tony about it. When I’ve watched the first cou­ple of episodes, I said, Oh my, it’s real­ly good.

[01:07:49] CR: And then a cou­ple of weeks lat­er, I was like, nah, it’s not good. So it, I liked the premise of it. And then I thought the exe­cu­tion of it. Sort of was­n’t great over time. It just became a lit­tle bit kind of too sil­ly. Two, sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief is, is okay up until a cer­tain point. And then I can’t do it unless it’s a Bol­ly­wood film.

[01:08:11] CR: And then appar­ent­ly my sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief has

[01:08:14] GF: Every­thing’s, every­thing’s good again.

[01:08:16] CR: Chris­sy and I talk about that all the time. But like, if this was a Hol­ly­wood film, we’d have called bull­shit and turned it off an hour ago. But because it’s Bol­ly­wood, for some rea­son, we’ll just go with it. But Geoff Bridges is one of the greats.

[01:08:27] CR: I mean, you know, I, obvi­ous­ly going right back to his ear­ly career, uh, The Last Pic­ture Show, 1971, which was like a great film when he was very, very young, um, writ­ten and direct­ed. Direct­ed by Peter Bog­danovich, I think co writ­ten by Lar­ry McMurtry too, but it was him and Sibyl Shep­herd, and I think it won Acad­e­my Awards or some­thing, straight out the gate when he was a very young man, and then, um, Thun­der­bolt and Light­foot, have you ever seen that?

[01:09:04] GF: I have.

[01:09:05] CR: Tony and I talked about that not long ago, him and Clint East­wood, which was great in the ear­ly 70s, Star­man, and of course the big Lebows­ki, I think, as the dude is prob­a­bly what he’s most famous for, but

[01:09:18] GF: Was­n’t he in Tron? Was he in Tron? Yeah, he was in Tron as well.

[01:09:21] CR: Tron. I remem­ber see­ing him in Tron. I tried to show Fox Tron a lit­tle while ago, and he was like bored after five

[01:09:28] GF: Yeah. It’s inter­est­ing, isn’t it? Yeah, it is. Yeah. Ear­ly days of sort of, um, I don’t know, you know, the sort of com­put­er assist­ed graph­ics and stuff like that. Like some of the ear­li­er ones kind of stuff. You won­der if they’ve made it again now. I don’t know how old it was, what it was like these days, if it did it again.

[01:09:44] CR: well, they did a sequel to it, not that, not that long ago. So the first one came out in about 81, 82, I think. Yeah, 82. The first one came out. They did a sequel, let me see, 2010 called Tron Lega­cy. Which, uh, had much bet­ter spe­cial effects.

[01:10:08] GF: Was that again, Geoff Bridges in Tron Lega­cy? Was he?

[01:10:11] CR: Yeah, he was. Yeah. He, he resumed play­ing the same char­ac­ter, but you know, he’s a great, great actor.

[01:10:18] CR: One of my favourites. And unfor­tu­nate­ly I just did­n’t think the old man was that well exe­cut­ed, but I want to get back to, um, Jethro Tull and Ian Ander­son. You know, one of my favourite things to do is to go back to songs, uh, from the sev­en­ties and eight­ies and look at the lyrics and think, yeah, would that fly today?

[01:10:37] CR: And of course, every time Aqualung. Buy Jethro Tull comes on my playlist. I have to laugh. So for peo­ple, uh, who aren’t famil­iar with Aqualung, 1971, Very, very famous

[01:10:52] GF: Every­one knows that

[01:10:52] CR: the, yeah, but the lyrics, sit­ting on a park bench, eye­ing lit­tle girls with bad intent, snot run­ning down his nose, greasy fin­gers smear­ing shab­by clothes.

[01:11:05] CR: Hey Aqualung, draw­ing in the cold sun, watch­ing as the frilly panties run. Hey Aqualung, feel­ing like a dead duck, spit­ting out pieces of his bro­ken luck, um, about some sort of, an old home­less man check­ing out the lit­tle girls in the play­ground, very trou­ble­some song.

[01:11:26] GF: Well, I remem­ber talk­ing to my son, because my old­est and I, we have very sim­i­lar tastes in music, so we see a lot of stuff. We like, we saw, I don’t know if you’ve heard of Alter­bridge, a USA com­pa­ny, or Incubus, we love Incubus. Um, but, uh,

[01:11:41] CR: they used to be Primus, or are they the same band,

[01:11:43] GF: I don’t think so. No, I think they’ve been around for about 25 years.

[01:11:46] GF: We’ve seen them. We saw them recent­ly with Live as in, Ed, Kowal­czyk and Live. We saw them recent­ly, they blew Live out of the water, but um, lost my train of thought. What was it? Oh no. And I was talk­ing to my son about say­ing we saw, Jethro Tull, myself and some friends who I went to school with and I’ve just kept, you know, peo­ple you just keep in touch with for­ev­er.

[01:12:07] GF: We saw them at Fes­ti­val Hall, which is an old venue which I think is still open here in Mel­bourne. Com­plete­ly non air con­di­tioned and so on a hot sum­mer’s day, it’s a bit sweaty, but uh, we saw Jethro Tull play one song. Real­ly, there might’ve been oth­ers, but that was when Thick as a Brick came out, which effec­tive­ly is one song through the whole album.

[01:12:24] GF: So I thought, and my son, I think fair­ly cyn­i­cal­ly said, gee, that must’ve been a, that must’ve been a hoot, but that was just the nature of their kind of, you know, music. And then Ian Ander­son play­ing a flute on one leg. So inter­est­ing kind of music.

[01:12:37] CR: I remem­ber see­ing Meat­loaf at Fes­ti­val Hall and I saw the Baby Ani­mals play Fes­ti­val Hall

[01:12:44] GF: Me too. I was there see­ing baby ani­mals as well.

[01:12:47] CR: Was­n’t that a great show? They were so tight. I remem­ber being just blown away by how tight they were. That was a great, I love their

[01:12:56] GF: And she had, we saw her again, we saw them maybe two years ago, and like a bit sort of, I don’t know, dat­ed, but, uh, what’s her, what was the name of the lead singer? What was her name? Did­n’t she have a seri­ous voice, like

[01:13:07] CR: Yeah, fan­tas­tic.

[01:13:08] GF: she just belt­ed it out, did­n’t she? Yeah.

[01:13:11] CR: They’re in my, they’re like in my Spo­ti­fy playlist all the time. I’m lis­ten­ing to Baby Ani­mals. I thought they were great. Well, speak­ing of music, I, um, uh, you know, I, I tend to have music on and the big TV cause I, you know, work from home and these days work from the liv­ing room a lot because the air con is bet­ter in the liv­ing room.

[01:13:28] CR: And um, I had Pink Floyd live, sort of 90s era con­certs, Pulse and a cou­ple of oth­ers just play­ing, um, on that, doing all the hits. And then I got onto Roger Waters and his. The Wall con­cert in Berlin in 1990, I think it was, when The Wall came down and he did what they say is still the biggest con­cert ever done.

[01:13:58] CR: It’s esti­mat­ed there were 450, 000 peo­ple in the audi­ence for his Wall con­cert that had a whole slew of guest stars includ­ing Van Mor­ri­son and I don’t know who else was in it, like a whole bunch of peo­ple. But, um, Real­ly? Like I’ve nev­er saw Pink Floyd live. You ever seen Pink Floyd?

[01:14:21] GF: No, I haven’t heard a lot of this stuff and haven’t, I got­ta say, I haven’t been a huge fan, but, um, I know they’ve always been, you know, mas­sive, and there’s always, like, you’d see videos of con­certs where there’s this sort of haze of, you know, blow­ing a num­ber in a big con­cert hall or sort of some­one out watch­ing, watch­ing Pink Floyd, but, no, per­son­al­ly, nev­er been a huge fan, Ken.

[01:14:42] CR: Right. I think it must’ve been, it must’ve been amaz­ing con­certs. I mean, I remem­ber hear­ing, you know, peo­ple were like obsessed with Pink Floyd con­certs in the eight­ies and nineties. They had a big pro­duc­tion. It just looked amaz­ing. Any­way, I real­ly enjoyed dig­ging into that. Uh, what else? I cooked Chrissie a.

[01:15:00] CR: Pump­kin pie for Thanks­giv­ing. That’s my way of giv­ing thanks and help­ing her with her Amer­i­can her­itage. Uh,

[01:15:09] GF: pie. I don’t think I’ve ever had pump­kin pie.

[01:15:12] CR: all those trips to Salt Lake City and you haven’t had pump­kin pie.

[01:15:15] GF: the best part about it was stay­ing at the Lit­tle Amer­i­ca Hotel and their apple pie there. It was worth import­ing because it’s Apple and cher­ry pie were out­stand­ing, but no, def­i­nite­ly not pump­kin pie.

[01:15:28] CR: well, pump­kin pie is great. I mean, it sounds, I think to Aus­tralians, it sounds weird, but there is some­thing about roast­ing, I mean, roast­ed pump­kin is fan­tas­tic. And, uh, that’s all it is. Like you just roast the pump­kin and then blend it up. And whack it in a pas­try and it’s fan­tas­tic. Well, I don’t put a lot of sug­ar in it.

[01:15:46] CR: They can, they can be very sweet. I go very easy on the sug­ar because I think roast­ed pump­kin is sweet enough. It’s caramelized. You roast it for 75 min­utes or some­thing like that on low heat. And it’s very caramelized. Any­way, I did that. Giv­ing thanks that she is with me and that she moved to Aus­tralia and left her home coun­try and also giv­ing thanks that she got out of her home coun­try and we don’t have to live there right now because I would­n’t like to be liv­ing there right now, I got­ta say.

[01:16:14] CR: It’s, uh, does not bode well what’s going on

[01:16:19] GF: Now I’d be inter­est­ed to see what hap­pens when all the tar­iffs, assum­ing that’ll hap­pens, kicks in and what impact that has glob­al­ly. And I guess as impor­tant, what impact it has on our, on our port­fo­lios.

[01:16:30] CR: Yeah, uh, any­who, so, that, um, I’ve been dig­ging into Bauhaus recent­ly, you in the, not the band, the um, artis­tic move­ment, you ever got­ten to Bauhaus? Bauhaus is this, is this big inter­war war. artis­tic move­ment in Ger­many, between World II, that was real­ly the foun­da­tion. It was like a lot of mod­ernism. It was also a lot about less is more.

[01:17:01] CR: It was about form fol­lows func­tion. A lot of the stuff that, you know, Apple’s design strat­e­gy under Steve Jobs and John­ny Ive, uh, when they, you know, came out with the, the iPod and the orig­i­nal iPhone and they revamped all their, their design prin­ci­ples in the, um, you know, late 90s into the ear­ly 2000s.

[01:17:27] CR: That them­selves, they sort of bor­rowed from Dita Rahms peri­od at Braun in the 60s. And Dita Rahms had bor­rowed a lot of that from the Bauhaus move­ment of the 20s and 30s. So I’ve been read­ing up and study­ing a lot on Bauhaus last week, which has been inter­est­ing to get my head around that. Um, I’ve been read­ing The Life of Apol­lo­nius of Tiana by Philo­stra­tus.

[01:17:54] CR: You ever heard of him? Geoff,

[01:17:56] GF: Have not, but I think you’ve talked about, I think you’ve men­tioned that name before. And can I also add. Um, in lis­ten­ing to pod­casts, your abil­i­ty to quote, cite back 25 years ago, movies, the direc­tors, the actors, the cre­den­tials, their cre­den­tials, uh, Cam nev­er, nev­er ceas­es to amaze me. You are so incred­i­bly well read and just recite all this stuff.

[01:18:19] GF: So, uh, again, a big part of what I enjoy about QAV as much as learn­ing from TK, but you do do that well.

[01:18:26] CR: I think you’re one of the few peo­ple over the years that said, you know, keep up After Hours. I think you’re the only per­son who lis­tens to After Hours. Every­one else turns it off. And you know, for Tony, in my per­spec­tive, I think After Hours is what we do the show for. It’s just our chance to catch up and talk about stuff that we’ve been enjoy­ing and share notes on stuff each week.

[01:18:44] CR: The invest­ing stuff is just what we have to do to get to After Hours. Jus­ti­fy hav­ing a chat about film and TV and music for an hour. Um, well, so for peo­ple, like, uh, who are lis­ten­ing and are inter­est­ed, this is real­ly impor­tant. You know, I did this doc­u­men­tary, Tony and I did this doc­u­men­tary on ear­ly Chris­tian­i­ty a few years ago.

[01:19:05] CR: Um, there was a guy who real­ly exist­ed around about the same time as Jesus sup­pos­ed­ly exist­ed. His name was Apol­lo­nius of Tiana and he was a Preach­er who walked around the ancient Roman empire and the area of Greece, most­ly Greece, Turkey, and he, uh, sort of preached phi­los­o­phy and he had long hair and wore sim­ple linen robes and had bare feet or wore san­dals on his feet and he preached love and for­give­ness and he was sup­pos­ed­ly born of a god and sup­pos­ed­ly died and his corpse went up to the heav­ens and all this sort of stuff and he healed peo­ple and brought them back from the dead and all the usu­al sort of sto­ries and it was he had a pret­ty big cult and tem­ples and fol­low­ings of him around that area at the time and In the ear­ly 200s, I think it was about 217 or some­thing, the Empress of the Roman Empire at the time was a fol­low­er of Apol­lo­nius and asked a guy called Philo­stra­tus to research and write a biog­ra­phy for him.

[01:20:25] CR: on him. So he went around the empire for years and went to Tiana and all the places where Apol­lo­nius had been and col­lect­ed all of the mem­oirs and the sto­ries about him which exist­ed but she did­n’t think they were very good or very well writ­ten they were sort of dull and turgid and she asked him to write a bet­ter one.

[01:20:46] CR: He was a you know an ora­tor and a rhetori­cian and uh and a philoso­pher and so he went and col­lect­ed them. Col­lat­ed all this stuff, includ­ing the exist­ing let­ters that Apol­lo­nius had writ­ten to peo­ple. Unlike Jesus, he was actu­al­ly lit­er­ate and could write stuff. So Philo­stra­tus col­lect­ed all of this and wrote these, uh, wrote the defin­i­tive and the only sur­viv­ing biog­ra­phy.

[01:21:15] CR: There were Apol­lo­nius before his, but unfor­tu­nate­ly not much of those have sur­vived. Bits and pieces that were quot­ed in oth­er books. But when you read sort of the, um, A lot of the mod­ern schol­ar­ship on ear­ly Chris­tian­i­ty, one of the things that is often brought up is the com­mon ele­ments of the sto­ries of Apol­lo­nius of Tiana and the sto­ries of Jesus and how there’s way more his­tor­i­cal evi­dence that Apol­lo­nius, who lived at the same time, exist­ed than there is for Jesus.

[01:21:49] CR: And so I’ve been read­ing Philo­stra­tus recent­ly and it’s great stuff. Like, what are the first sto­ries? That, uh, he tells of Apol­lo­nius. Apol­lo­nius was like a child prodi­gy. As a teenag­er was going to dif­fer­ent philo­soph­i­cal acad­e­mies, Aris­to­tle and Pla­to, and test­ing them out and debat­ing their senior lead­ers and test­ing them for strengths and weak­ness­es and to see what made sense to him.

[01:22:17] CR: And when he was like 14, he was He was in a tem­ple and watch­ing the sac­ri­fices. Oh, he was a veg­e­tar­i­an, by the way. He became a veg­e­tar­i­an because he did­n’t believe in eat­ing ani­mals or killing ani­mals, which was, you know, sort of the main way of sac­ri­fic­ing to the gods at the time. He called bull­shit on all of that.

[01:22:35] CR: But, uh, he was watch­ing these sac­ri­fices hap­pen and he, he inter­ro­gat­ed the priest of this par­tic­u­lar tem­ple and he said, let me ask you some ques­tions. Are the gods all know­ing? And they said, yes, the gods know, uh, watch every­thing that hap­pens, they know all things. And he said, uh, do the gods know every­thing about human affairs?

[01:22:59] CR: Oh yes, yes, the gods know all about human affairs and what we do. He said, are the gods good? Are the gods just? They’re like, oh yes, the gods are very good and the gods are just. He said, well, it seems to me that when peo­ple come in and pray to the gods, what they’re doing is, uh, Ask­ing for stuff. Can you grant me health?

[01:23:19] CR: Can you grant me suc­cess in this enter­prise or what­ev­er? Should­n’t the peo­ple just, should­n’t the only prayer be, give me what I deserve? And if you’ve been good, then you will get good. And if you haven’t been good, then you will get what you deserve. And should­n’t you just accept that if the gods are the, um, Insti­ga­tors of every­thing that hap­pens in our lives, that what you have right now is what you deserve based on your, your thoughts and your actions and your deeds.

[01:23:47] CR: And I thought, wow, that’s, that’s pret­ty great. It’s a very sort of karmic approach to, uh, the idea of reli­gion and prayer, instead of try­ing to nego­ti­ate with gods for some­thing you don’t deserve, just to say, hey, just give me what I deserve and I’ll accept it. Kar­ma for how I’ve act­ed and lived my life.

[01:24:08] CR: So that was some of the ear­ly insights of Apol­lo­nius of Tiana, which I’ve just been real­ly enjoy­ing read­ing his sto­ries. It’s real­ly good stuff. Good phi­los­o­phy.

[01:24:18] GF: Obvi­ous­ly had a fair­ly trag­ic end­ing. He said he tried to. Use mag­ic to con­spire against the Emper­or and it did­n’t end well, appar­ent­ly. So

[01:24:25] CR: Yes, that’s what they say

[01:24:27] GF: do that. Stay

[01:24:28] CR: He got exe­cut­ed. Yes, well, like any good, uh, uh, prophet of the time, he had to upset the rulers and get exe­cut­ed like Jesus. Uh, what else? I’ve, we watched the final episode of Cobra Kai the last sea­son or the cur­rent half sea­son. You into Cobra Kai at all, Geoff?

[01:24:47] GF: Well, I know we talked, you know, a lot about Kung Fu and which I enjoy because I did, um, uh, Goji Kai for prob­a­bly like 10 years, did a bit of com­pe­ti­tion stuff, got kicked in the head a lot, you know, non com­pe­ti­tion, got a lot of hits. So real­ly enjoy, real­ly enjoy it. And, uh, I think I’d enjoy Cobra Kai per­son­al­ly, because I’ve watched the fight­ing style, to me, it looks real­ly bad.

[01:25:10] CR: it is.

[01:25:11] GF: It looks real­ly, real­ly bad. Like, you know, you look at it, you know, you’re obvi­ous­ly an Asian, you get, you get, um, stunt peo­ple that help, you know, in movies. If you’ve got Jet Li or what­ev­er fight­ing, well, they did­n’t do any of that. They did­n’t do any of that when they filmed it. So,

[01:25:27] CR: No, but that’s part of the fun of it is it’s real­ly, it’s real­ly bad like an 80s karate kid film. Like it’s real­ly ridicu­lous and over the top. We always laugh about it. These kids who joined the Cobra Kai school, they’re like begin­ners on day one and they’ve got a black belt with­in like a month and they’re doing, you know, triple back kicks and flip­ping around.

[01:25:49] GF: The fast, the fast, the fast track. It’s like watch­ing, what was the movie with, um, what was the, what was the new­er, who was in the new­er, um, Karate Kid movie? Oh, Will Smith’s son

[01:26:00] CR: and Will Smith’s kid, yeah, Jaden Smith,

[01:26:02] GF: that sort of stuff and, you know, he had­n’t done any­thing in with­in a month, you know, he’s win­ning com­pe­ti­tions I’m think­ing.

[01:26:07] GF: That

[01:26:07] CR: yeah,

[01:26:08] GF: fast track. That’s right. I think if Bruce Lee was around he’d say, no, you need to do a bit more work than that.

[01:26:14] CR: I had to, oh, did­n’t have to, I was explain­ing to a guy at our Kung Fu class this morn­ing, who’s only been doing it for a cou­ple of months, I was explain­ing sort of the fin­er points of some tech­nique and I was say­ing, but lis­ten, there’s no speed run for this, it’s just thou­sands of hours, just got to put in your time and your body will fig­ure it out, like, don’t wor­ry about it, don’t stress, just do it.

[01:26:36] CR: Take it one day at a time and you’ll fig­ure it out over time.

[01:26:40] GF: But yeah, what’s it Mal­colm Glad­well and 10, 000 hours or what­ev­er. It’s the prac­tice, prac­tice, prac­tice. Yeah,

[01:26:46] CR: Yeah. And I often tell peo­ple at Kung Fu, like when we start­ed there a few years ago, um, I had to learn that the hard way, you know, Chris­sy used to get frus­trat­ed with me because as a vio­lin­ist and a vio­lin teacher, she under­stands that. Some things that you learn that involve your body and your brain work­ing togeth­er, it’s just time.

[01:27:07] CR: You can’t speedrun it. It’s just hours and hours and hours of prac­tice, and your body and your brain fig­ure out how to do these things, but it’s just time. For my entire adult life, any­thing I’ve need­ed to learn, I just go and read 20, 30 books on it. And com­press it into my brain over a cou­ple of weeks.

[01:27:28] CR: And then I know what I’m doing, right? That’s my approach is just give me 20 books and I’ll engorge them and plug them into my cor­tex and I’ll know what I’m talk­ing about. And she kept say­ing, she was like this when we start­ed learn­ing Ital­ian too, say­ing, yeah, it does­n’t work that way. It’s, it’s a slow, process of your brain stitch­ing togeth­er the right neu­rons and in the case of Kung Fu, the right mus­cles and the ten­dons and the fibres and the nerves and your ner­vous sys­tem.

[01:27:59] CR: And I reck­on it took me two years to come to terms with that in Kung Fu before I real­ized, okay, just stop try­ing to intel­lec­tu­al­ize this. Just let your body learn it, uh, step by step.

[01:28:13] GF: But obvi­ous­ly still enjoy­ing it, Kim.

[01:28:16] CR: Oh, love it, man. It’s yeah. The high­light of every

[01:28:18] GF: I used to love

[01:28:19] CR: I mean, I’ve. I’ve got a half bro­ken fin­ger that I’m get­ting an x ray done on tomor­row, but you know, you have injuries all the time, but that’s just part of the fun of it. The only oth­er thing I had to talk about is the Baby­lon film. Uh, Brad Pitt, Mar­got Rob­bie, Damien Chazelle film that came out a cou­ple of years ago and I just watched.

[01:28:39] CR: You see that at all? What did you think? It got trashed by the crit­ics.

[01:28:45] GF: I don’t know why, you know, it’s like years ago, I remem­ber when I was at this was, I was, I was at school and we saw the, it was the sec­ond mak­ing, I think it was made three times, the Marathon Man. Remem­ber they made a third one, which was called what­ev­er it was called, but it’s the same store was made in the fifties and maybe the

[01:29:00] CR: What was it? I don’t know, the Dustin Hoff­man, Lau­rence Olivi­er one, it was, that was the sec­ond?

[01:29:05] GF: But the Marathon Man, a Marathon Man, oh, now the movie I’m think­ing of, this is more of those sort of dystopi­an, if I’ve got the name right, not

[01:29:12] CR: Oh, the run­ning man you’re talk­ing about. It’s based.

[01:29:14] GF: of anoth­er one, and this one had Charl­ton Hes­ton,

[01:29:18] CR: The Last Man on Earth?

[01:29:20] GF: yeah, one of those, and it was remade with, with lots of AI effects with, um, Will Smith.

[01:29:25] GF: Now it was­n’t called Marathon Man, it was called some­thing, I know, Greek

[01:29:29] CR: Man on Earth.

[01:29:31] GF: Greek Alpha­bet, what was the last,

[01:29:33] CR: Oh, The Ami­ga Man?

[01:29:34] GF: Omega Man, that’s it, sor­ry, not the Marathon Man, Omega Man, Charl­ton Hes­ton, we saw it at school and it just blew, like, real­ly no offence, blew us away and it just got carved up.

[01:29:44] GF: Buy the press. I’ve seen it two or three or four times and Will Smith’s a dif­fer­ent one because there’s lots of AI effects. It did­n’t have that. They just had creepy look­ing dudes who were white and stuff like that but and I’ve seen num­bers of movies like over the years like that. We loved it and I’d still love to see it but it just got absolute­ly shot to pieces by the crit­ics.

[01:30:02] GF: Just one of those. I real­ly, but I, back to the Brad Pitt movie, I real­ly enjoyed it.

[01:30:07] CR: I real­ly did too. And, you know, and I watched it because Damien Chazelle, the guy, the direc­tor, he did La La Land, he did Whiplash, he’s done a range of films that all were real­ly, real­ly good. He’s a very, very com­pe­tent direc­tor. And I thought, it can’t it’s real­ly that bad? So, um, yeah, I’ve I’ve Watched, I just watched it on Net­flix while I’m doing my stretch­ing rou­tines every night over the last cou­ple of days.

[01:30:31] CR: At my age now, I have to do like 45 min­utes of stretch­ing every night to work out my low­er back and my knees and my toes and my shoul­ders and every­thing. And, uh, yeah, I thought it was, it was real­ly inter­est­ing and it was obvi­ous­ly, For peo­ple who haven’t seen it, it’s sort of telling the sto­ry of the tran­si­tion from silent film to the talkies in the late 20s ear­ly 30s and these actors who were big stars in the silent era strug­gling to make the tran­si­tion to talkies and this big tran­si­tion of the indus­try in gen­er­al and the strug­gles with it And I think, like, the sub­text to that is, Hol­ly­wood’s obvi­ous­ly going through anoth­er big tran­si­tion, sev­er­al tran­si­tions, now they’re going through the stream­ing tran­si­tion, out of cin­e­mas and into stream­ing, they’re strug­gling to get peo­ple back into the cin­e­mas to see movies, and there’s so much com­pe­ti­tion in stream­ing now, it’s hard to make mon­ey, And then they’ve got all obvi­ous­ly the AI rev­o­lu­tion that’s com­ing to eat their lunch and they’ve got peo­ple spend­ing all much so much time on social media where you’ve got to com­press your sto­ry down to 60 sec­onds, uh, or stuff on YouTube and they’re, you know, it’s a very, very tricky time for the enter­tain­ment indus­try again.

[01:31:54] CR: And I think that’s part of the sto­ry of. We’ve been through these times before, and the good times don’t last for­ev­er. And you need to come up with new busi­ness mod­els and you need to evolve and inno­vate. I thought Mar­got Rob­bie in par­tic­u­lar did a great job. She plays an absolute­ly off the wall, crazy actress, drug­gy, Nympho­ma­ni­ac, Wild­child, uh, star.

[01:32:22] CR: And I thought she did a fan­tas­tic, fan­tas­tic job of that. Brad Pitt was his usu­al sort of cool, almost like his, uh, What was that last Taran­ti­no film he was in about Hol­ly­wood? Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood char­ac­ter? sort of cool dude?

[01:32:41] GF: when you look at this, it says, why did the movie flop? And I thought, well, it’s going to tell me a rea­son, but it says, the film strug­gled to con­nect with view­ers, which led to dis­ap­point­ing tick­et sales. Well, it does­n’t real­ly tell you too much, does it? But, uh, it, it, and Rot­ten Toma­toes says it’s about 57%, so it just, for what­ev­er that means.

[01:32:58] GF: But, uh, you’re right, just did­n’t do well at all.

[01:33:01] CR: Yeah, I thought it’s, I mean it’s, it’s a bit Felliniesque, par­tic­u­lar­ly the first half hour of it is this wild Hol­ly­wood par­ty in the late 20s and it has very much a feel­ing of like eight and a half or sort of a Felli­ni film where there’s just Jam packed with bizarre char­ac­ters and over the top sort of action, um, part La Dolce Vita, part Eight and a Half, part, uh, Salome, uh, like this sort of real­ly, real­ly almost sur­re­al lev­el of wild par­ty, uh, which I think is the point.

[01:33:43] CR: It’s try­ing to give you this depic­tion of, The good old days of Hol­ly­wood, pre the stock mar­ket crash and every­thing else that kicked in in the late 20s, just the roar­ing 20s, lots of mon­ey, lots of exu­ber­ance, just peo­ple doing moun­tains of cocaine that would put Tony Mon­tana to shame. It’s, uh, Yeah, yeah, any­way.

[01:34:10] GF: Reminds me, when you men­tioned Felli­ni, Mum, when I was a kid, I saw Fellini’s Satyri­con, maybe when I was six or sev­en, and it just freaked me out.

[01:34:19] CR: Yes.

[01:34:19] GF: just right. I remem­ber I went home, I reck­on I went

[01:34:21] CR: and it freaked me

[01:34:22] GF: It real­ly, it real­ly did freak me out. My God,

[01:34:25] CR: is still a very dif­fi­cult film

[01:34:28] GF: it’s right in, right in your face.

[01:34:30] GF: Unbe­liev­able. I

[01:34:33] CR: I think there’s a lot of inspi­ra­tion tak­en from Felli­ni in that part of it, at least, any­way. So any­way, check it out if you’re into that kind of film. It’s a huge, epic scale film, the likes of which we don’t see.

[01:34:48] CR: And that’s like the Cop­po­la one, which I still haven’t seen, Mega­lopo­lis. I missed it in the cin­e­ma and I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing that because it got trashed by crit­ics as well, but I have a feel­ing that I’m prob­a­bly gonna like it. I know it’s sort of a retelling of the fall of Rome, which is obvi­ous­ly right in my wheel­house.

[01:35:06] CR: So, uh, and I, you know, I’m a, Devot­ed fan of Cop­po­la and his daugh­ter and all of the mem­bers of the fam­i­ly actu­al­ly, every­thing they do from Nico­las Cage through to, you know, peo­ple always turn up in Wes Ander­son films. So, um, have you seen that? Mega­lopo­lis?

[01:35:25] GF: have not heard of it, but have not,

[01:35:28] CR: Hmm. Well, that’s about, that’s been my enter­tain­ment exer­cis­es and read­ing exer­cis­es for the last week, Geoff. Uh, nev­er a dull

[01:35:38] GF: You have, as I said, you have, uh, so many in your, um, men­tal port­fo­lio of movies and direc­tors and casts and things. And love, love, love to hear about it.

[01:35:51] CR: I haven’t even talked about like the shows that I did on the Renais­sance in the last cou­ple of weeks where we’re still talk­ing about the First Cru­sade. I could talk in length about all the stuff I read about on the First Cru­sade. And then on our Cold War show, Ray and I recent­ly inter­viewed a guy who was a senior intel­li­gence, um, oper­a­tive in the Cold War.

[01:36:12] CR: In the Unit­ed States, uh, for his entire career, he’s now retired, but we were talk­ing about why 1983 was the most dan­ger­ous year in his­to­ry until this year. The four nar­row miss­es that the Sovi­et Union and the Unit­ed States, where they near­ly went to nuclear war in 1983. And we talked about all of those sto­ries and how and why that hap­pened and how his­to­ry is kind of play­ing out.

[01:36:41] CR: repeat­ing itself today with the lev­el of ten­sions between Rus­sia and the Unit­ed States and their allies. So, and how we haven’t learned any of the lessons from the Cold War real­ly. It’s, uh, ter­ri­fy­ing and, um, dis­ap­point­ing that, uh, the world lead­ers, uh, repeat­ing the, the things that near­ly led to the anni­hi­la­tion of most of the species 30, 40 years ago. That is QAV for this week. Thank you again, Geoff, for com­ing on and chat­ting. Good to have you here.

[01:37:20] GF: Yeah, wel­come, Tam. It’d be good. I know that it was obvi­ous­ly with Tony being away, but great to also, maybe as a three way, get some oth­er mem­bers. I’ve, as I said, enjoyed the whole jour­ney and con­nect­ing with peo­ple like Andy, Cody and Brett and just, um, Sam and just a bunch of oth­ers in Mel­bourne has just sort of added to the, I guess, the whole jour­ney.

[01:37:41] GF: But, uh, no, we’ll con­tin­ue to enjoy it and hope­ful­ly over time, my skills will con­tin­ue to improve.

[01:37:46] CR: Yeah, I’m sure they will and, um, yeah. And I know Tony was dis­ap­point­ed that he was­n’t going to be here because he loves to chat to peo­ple when they come on, so. And Ed Nixon sug­gest­ed that we should have peo­ple come on who haven’t had suc­cess. Over the last cou­ple of years with QAV and to talk about why.

[01:38:06] CR: So if any­one’s lis­ten­ing and you know, you don’t have to have a good sto­ry to tell, if you’ve had a tough time, come on and tell us why, and we’ll see what we can learn from it. There are no sto­ries that we don’t want to hear. Um, you know, I know Tony and I have, our own port­fo­lios haven’t had the best cou­ple of years.

[01:38:23] CR: I mean, the dum­my port­fo­lio is doing great. The light port­fo­lios have, you know, Have been hit and miss over the last cou­ple of years. Um, some big suc­cess­es, some mid­dling, depend­ing on when they start­ed. Like any­one who start­ed around about late 21 or ear­ly 22 has prob­a­bly had a rough few years. I mean, I know we’ve had some lis­ten­ers say they’ve had great years.

[01:38:45] CR: But it’s also, there’s been a lot of trou­bling con­di­tions in the mar­ket. And we know that QAV stocks haven’t nec­es­sar­i­ly all done well and we’ve been trapped by rule one and three point trend line cycles. So we, you know, we also believe that there’s sort of a short term view that these things play out.

[01:39:05] CR: over time and we’ll come out on top, but any­one who wants to come on over the next cou­ple of weeks or over Christ­mas, Tony will prob­a­bly take anoth­er few weeks off over Christ­mas. If any­one wants to come on and be my co host and tell me about your sto­ries, I’d love to hear from you. With that, QAV a good week.

[01:39:24] GF: Thanks again, Cam. All the best.

[01:39:26] CR: Thanks Geoff, you too.