QAV 752 — Time Capsule

QAV 752 Club

[00:00:00] CR: Give me the count­down. That

[00:00:06] TK: 2, 3, Count­down, Count­down,

[00:00:10] CR: I was gonna

[00:00:10] CR: say, it’s an oppor­tu­ni­ty for you to do a bit of Gavin. What’s his name? Gavin

[00:00:14] TK: oh yeah,

[00:00:17] CR: Some­body?

[00:00:18] TK: that’s a cab­in,

[00:00:19] CR: Any­way,

[00:00:20] TK: yeah,

[00:00:21] CR: wel­come back Mol­ly. This is QAV 752. 5 2 must mean we’re get­ting, get­ting close to the end of the year.

[00:00:32] CR: Uh, you’re in Cape Schanck, I’m in Bundy. We’re record­ing this in our, uh, oth­er record­ing stu­dios.

[00:00:39] CR: We’re on the road. QAV on the road. How’s Cape Schanck today?

[00:00:43] TK: Good. So, um, when I got down here, it was stink­ing hot, but the last few days there’s been a lot of rain, and it’s, today was

[00:00:52] TK: over­cast, cool in the morn­ings, and now it’s a love­ly after­noon.

[00:00:57] CR: That’s good. You got some golf in yet?

[00:00:59] TK: No, I played in Wag­ga on the way down, played two rounds in Wag­ga on the way down, um, with Rud­dy, which was good fun. But, uh, no, I’ve been, um, clean­ing and tidy­ing up down

[00:01:11] TK: here, declut­ter­ing so we can move stuff down from Syd­ney.

[00:01:15] CR: Yeah. How’s all that going? Good fun?

[00:01:18] TK: Oh man, I need a break. I’m ready for a few days off. It’s

[00:01:22] TK: been non stop now for about

[00:01:23] TK: a month.

[00:01:25] CR: Right. Oh well. You might dis­cov­er stuff.

[00:01:31] TK: I dis­cov­er plen­ty, but then I, like, the ratio­nal part of my brain has to go, look, you haven’t worn it in five years or ten years. Even though, even though it’s nice, it’s like shop­ping. It’s like, oh wow, that looks real­ly good. I haven’t seen that for a long

[00:01:44] TK: time. You just got­ta go, no, throw it out.

[00:01:50] CR: We’ve got a, we’ve got a lit­tle

[00:01:51] TK: for all the clothes that Jen­ny can’t do that

[00:01:52] TK: for.

[00:01:54] CR: Yeah, we’ve got a lit­tle clos­et, um, in our liv­ing room that had a box on the top shelf that no one’s looked in, I think, for 10 years. It just, at one point I stuffed a bunch of paper­work that was lying around, a bunch of crap that was lying on our cof­fee table in this box and shoved it up there and it, I swear, no one’s looked in it for 10 years.

[00:02:16] CR: I pulled it down the oth­er day and I was like, I got­ta go through it. And there were report cards from the boys from grade sev­en and. All this kind of stuff, and I threw 98 per­cent of the box out, but there was a cou­ple of fun things I found in there. So, often, not a, just like a time cap­sule. Unin­ten­tion­al time cap­sule.

[00:02:35] TK: exact­ly.

[00:02:38] CR: Well, speak­ing of time cap­sules, Tony, it’s been a

[00:02:40] CR: year. On the stock mar­ket, um, there was an arti­cle, it’s not in my notes to you, but you prob­a­bly saw it if you looked at the finan­cial review this morn­ing, the AFR win­ners and losers for the year. Did you have a look through

[00:02:51] TK: I have it now.

[00:02:53] CR: There’s a cou­ple of for­mer QAV stocks on the losers

[00:02:56] CR: list, um, none of our stocks are on the win­ners list, but we know why that is.

[00:03:03] CR: But I thought I’d just touch on some of the points on this. The stocks that did the most dam­age in 2024 and the ones that ruled Aus­tralian shares smashed records in 2024, but the bench­mark S& P slash ASX 200 index will fin­ish the year with only a six per­cent advance to show for it, because for every Com­mon­wealth Bank mil­lion­aire, There were plen­ty of lithi­um, casi­no, and fast food land­mines to hum­ble the wis­est investors.

[00:03:34] CR: I would argue that the wis­est investors weren’t invest­ing in lithi­um, casi­no, or fast food stocks, but that’s just

[00:03:40] TK: huh. Mm

[00:03:41] CR: and tech­nol­o­gy stocks, which jumped 26 per­cent and 47%, respec­tive­ly, defined this year’s win­ners. If the post Fed­er­al Reserve reck­on­ing and reset­ting of 2025 inter­est rate expec­ta­tions have fur­ther to run, those wins could be clipped as the BORS limps to Decem­ber 31st.

[00:04:03] CR: Goes on with a bunch of stuff from a bunch of peo­ple, but the big win­ners, um, it says the 358%

[00:04:14] CR: for the year, says just two years after suf­fer­ing the ignominy of being the ASX’s worst per­former of 2022, fin­tech zips resur­gent has proved spec­tac­u­lar. But then you keep read­ing, up more than 300 per­cent in the past 12 months, the stock is still 70 per­cent below its record high of 2021 at the peak of buy now, pay lat­er mania.

[00:04:38] CR: What a ride.

[00:04:43] TK: What? Yeah.

[00:04:43] CR: Would have been a good stock to buy at the begin­ning of this year. Dog of the Dow,

[00:04:47] TK: the Dow.

[00:04:47] TK: yeah.

[00:04:49] CR: we still don’t do that, it’s not part of our

[00:04:51] CR: strat­e­gy, should we?

[00:04:54] TK: Well, no. But it does some­times coin­cide, because they’re obvi­ous­ly, well, they’re usu­al­ly val­ue stocks.

[00:05:01] TK: Although I don’t think Zip would have been, but any­way, I don’t know if Zip

[00:05:04] TK: makes mon­ey.

[00:05:06] CR: And we’ve talked about Dogs of the Dow in the past, and the track record of Dogs of the Dow isn’t great, right, when you apply to Aus­tralia?

[00:05:13] TK: Oh, no, it’s okay. It’s prob­a­bly bet­ter than the

[00:05:18] TK: mar­ket, but it can have big swings, can have big down years.

[00:05:23] CR: Yeah, but it’s not like it’s doing dou­ble QAV’s

[00:05:27] TK: No.

[00:05:28] CR: it’s, yeah, it’s not, not that great. Noth­ing to be chang­ing a

[00:05:32] CR: strat­e­gy about. Some of the oth­er big win­ners, uh, Life360 up 206%. It’s always on my Stock Doc­tor down­load because its stick­er code is 360. It’s always at the top.

[00:05:47] CR: That’s all I know about it. It’s always on my Stock Doc­tor down­load. Stock Doc­tor down­load, nev­er real­ly looked at it. Uh, Sig­ma Health­care, ProMedicus, Telex, Phar­ma, Pin­na­cle Invest­ment, Hub24, Tech­nol­o­gy­One, NetWealth, Coden, and the only one that we’ve talked about, I think, on that list, Judo Cap­i­tal, up 87 per­cent

[00:06:08] TK: Now we spoke about that, it’s on the buy list, but so JB HiFi has been and so has

[00:06:13] TK: AMP, which you’re get­ting to soon. And Qan­tas and

[00:06:19] TK: West African Resources, believe it or not, West African Resources makes the list.

[00:06:25] CR: What list are you look­ing at? You’re not look­ing at the same list I’m look­ing at.

[00:06:27] TK: I’m look­ing, the arti­cle I’m look­ing

[00:06:29] TK: at is called The Stocks That Ruled in the Biggest Losers

[00:06:33] CR: Uh, well mine’s slight­ly dif­fer­ent. The stocks that did the most dam­age and the ones that ruled, they must have two dif­fer­ent, uh, head­lines. One for you and one for me. You get the dif­fer­ent one.

[00:06:43] TK: so,

[00:06:43] CR: I don’t, I don’t see those. Mine, mine fin­ish­es with Judo Cap­i­tal.

[00:06:47] TK: ah, well see. That’s okay. So mine goes on and straight after Judo is JB HiFi and a MP. And then, uh, aris­to­crat Ledger, Qan­tas Air­ways, which was, is on our buy list now. HMC cap­i­tal, the West African Resources, which sur­prised me, it’s up about 60%, uh, wise tech.

[00:07:09] TK: Despite all the CEO shenani­gans, Fish­er Health,

[00:07:13] TK: Fish­er Paykel Health­care, and Bega Cheese rounds out the list that I’m look­ing at. No, but it’s, oh, I’m look­ing at the ASX

[00:07:18] CR: Fendi’s not on it, huh?

[00:07:20] TK: 200 best and worst

[00:07:24] TK: per­form­ers here today.

[00:07:25] CR: Oh, okay. So it would­n’t be on

[00:07:27] TK: No.

[00:07:30] CR: Oh, this is ASX 202, yeah. So the biggest losers There’s a cou­ple of for­mer QAV stocks there, Coro­n­a­do Glob­al Resources down 54 per­cent and Min­er­al Resources down 50%. I think we got out of those.

[00:07:48] TK: been on our list?

[00:07:51] CR: I think so? I did­n’t go back and check, but I think it has been at some

[00:07:54] CR: point.

[00:07:54] TK: Okay. Might be a few years ago.

[00:07:57] TK: Um, I’m also see­ing Karoon Ener­gy, which was on our

[00:08:02] CR: Oh, okay. They had a bad year?

[00:08:05] TK: But you know what the worst per­former on my graph is?

[00:08:09] CR: I do know what that, and there’s no S in

[00:08:11] CR: it!

[00:08:12] TK: Yeah, they

[00:08:12] CR: one with no

[00:08:13] CR: S. Hehe­he­he­he­heh. Lion

[00:08:18] CR: Town Resources, the biggest los­er, and, not just that, here’s what they say about Lion Town Resources. Uh, dwin­dling cash reserves and a rapid col­lapse in the price of lithi­um this year sent Lion­aires As Lion­town’s fanat­i­cal West Aus­tralian investors were once known, scram­bling.

[00:08:37] CR: Down more than 60%, Lion­town is trad­ing a long way from the 3 a share suit­or Albe­mar­le was will­ing to part with before chang­ing its mind. In Novem­ber, the com­pa­ny slashed pro­duc­tion plans at its Kath­leen Val­ley mine in an attempt to sur­vive a pro­longed down­turn in the com­mod­i­ty price. Ana­lysts have also rebelled against the stock.

[00:08:56] CR: Citi down­grad­ed the shares to sell. Con­clud­ing high­er cap­i­tal expen­di­ture and tight mar­gins were adding to the com­pa­ny’s bal­ance sheet con­cerns. Like­wise, UBS ana­lyst Levy Spry, who also rates the share a sell, is uncon­vinced by the case for a 2025 recov­ery. Also, QAV’s been mak­ing fun of it, and, uh, they get them­selves into some trou­ble for it, but, uh, they have fun

[00:09:22] TK: Yeah, and we know noth­ing about min­ing stocks. So,

[00:09:26] TK: um, we did, did know enough to stay away from that

[00:09:29] TK: one though.

[00:09:32] CR: know any­thing about any­thing. So any­way, um, win­ners and losers. I mean, I know you like look­ing at these things. Did you deduce any­thing from this year’s list?

[00:09:43] TK: Not real­ly. I mean, I expect­ed to see four or five win­ners and a cou­ple of losers. So It’s the old 6 out of 10 thing, right? Um, that there are slight­ly more win­ners than losers. Um, I would think that some of those stocks on the win list are going to be on the los­er list next year. Uh, because if you look at, I mean, yeah, there’s, there’s some that have been on our list before, which are there like Karoo Ener­gy, which is a com­mod­i­ty stock.

[00:10:12] TK: We, we spoke about them dur­ing the year. They got into trou­ble because they were expand­ing rapid­ly, even though they have lots of cash. And I think there was an activist investor ask­ing for the mon­ey to be returned to share­hold­ers rather than to keep grow­ing. And then of course, they came a crop­per. So rou­tine­ly what I see is the growth com­pa­nies, which are roost­ers this year are going to be the feath­er dusters next year.

[00:10:37] TK: Um, so who, who knows which ones it’ll be. I’ve always had a big ques­tion mark on Life360. Pret­ty sure that’s the com­pa­ny that lets par­ents track their kids via an app. And I can’t for the life of me see how that’s dif­fer­ent to what Apple rou­tine­ly offers with, you know, Find My Phone and AirTags and things like that.

[00:11:01] TK: Um, it had a big shoot up this year because they start­ed to sell ads on their app. Yeah, peo­ple might get sick of that. So I’d be putting that on the watch list. Sig­ma Health­care, num­ber three on the list, deserves to be there. That’s the, that’s the, um, I think that’s where Chemist Ware­house will even­tu­al­ly emerge after it’s done its back­door list­ing.

[00:11:24] TK: And in fact, Sig­ma Health­care has been a QAV stock about a year or so ago. So that’s num­ber three on the, um, improvers. Um, I have a ques­tion mark around ProMedicus, even though it’s a. Fan­tas­tic busi­ness and rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing med­ical imag­ing. I mean, it’s trad­ing on a mas­sive PE. Plus, I read dur­ing the week that some of the, all the founders have sold down, um, I think some­thing like 500 mil­lion.

[00:11:51] TK: So they’re start­ing to ques­tion how long the run will go for with that stock, but it may not crash and make it to the worst per­form­ers list next year. Um, yeah, so the ones I look at may. Reverse are the ones which are on high PEs, don’t have cash flows or sus­tain­able cash flows, etc. Um, but you know, who knows what they’ll be.

[00:12:16] CR: Hmm.

[00:12:18] TK: Actu­al­ly, I’m just look­ing at the list now. The one I’ve got has big­ger cheese. On that too, which has also been on the QAV list in the last 12 months.

[00:12:27] CR: where is it?

[00:12:27] TK: Yeah,

[00:12:29] CR: Hmm. Well, mov­ing right along, some­thing else that’s Been on our buy list is Tel­stra. Some big Tel­stra relat­ed news this week. Appar­ent­ly, uh, Fox­tel is being sold. A news cor­po­ra­tion revealed that it has signed an agree­ment with glob­al sports stream­ing plat­form DAZN Group to sell its Fox­tel busi­ness for an enter­prise val­ue of 3.

[00:13:00] CR: 4 bil­lion. Uh, uh, Tel­stra revealed that it has agreed to divest. Its 35% stake in Fox Tel to Din group. The Tel­co giant will receive 128 mil­lion in cash for repay­ment of share­hold­er loans. It will also hold a 3% share­hold­ing in D group Man­age­ment advised that the trans­ac­tion is not expect­ed to have a mate­r­i­al impact on Tel­stra’s FY 25 guid­ance, nor will it impact its prof­it and loss for the cur­rent finan­cial year.

[00:13:30] CR: So, Vicky Brady though, Tel­stra CEO, said it’s a, a vic­to­ry for share­hold­ers.

[00:13:38] TK: which ones?

[00:13:39] CR: not sure, yeah, not sure why.

[00:13:42] TK: or Tel­stra.

[00:13:45] CR: I had a look at my Tel­stra

[00:13:46] CR: shares, and uh, you know, it has­n’t been much of a vic­to­ry for me, I’ve got to say. This year it’s been trad­ing most­ly side­ways, since I’ve owned it. Any­way, what do you think of them offload­ing Fox­tel, what’s that going to mean?

[00:14:03] TK: Hope­ful­ly an improve­ment in Fox­tel as a client of Fox­tel. I’ll tell you a lit­tle sto­ry. I rang up last week to can­cel my Fox­tel in Syd­ney. And I got to the stage where I was just about yelling at the tele­call cen­ter oper­a­tor that there was just And I felt sor­ry for them, they’re just read­ing out the scripts, but it was like, Oh, where are you mov­ing to?

[00:14:28] TK: Oh, I’m going to, to a House we own in Vic­to­ria. Oh, can we put Fox­tel on there? No, I’ve already got it. Oh, what’s the deal you’ve got there? I see it’s with Tel­stra. We can do a bet­ter deal for you. I’m like, mate, I’m hap­py. It’s all good. Um, do you have anoth­er fam­i­ly mem­ber who can take the box over from you?

[00:14:44] TK: No, just one. And like, it lit­er­al­ly took me, I’d say, 15 min­utes to get this guy off the phone. I was lit­er­al­ly on the phone going, stop. Stop! I’m not inter­est­ed. If you had these great deals, why did­n’t you offer them to me when I was a cus­tomer? Why would I want to keep going with Fox­tel? The Fox­tel I’ve got in my house in Vic­to­ria runs via a satel­lite, so I can’t use the same box.

[00:15:11] TK: Oh, like he’s just like, was­n’t lis­ten­ing, going through scripts just to try and eke out anoth­er buck for Fox­tel, and it was just the worst cus­tomer expe­ri­ence ever. So, hope­ful­ly DASM will improve that, but I have my doubts. I don’t think Fox­tel has a long term future, which I think is why News Corp and Tel­stra are get­ting out.

[00:15:31] TK: Um, it’s, they’ve been migrat­ing slow­ly to the, um, to the stream­ing world, so it’s not going over their, over their cables any­more. But, um, I think that’s with mixed suc­cess. I sat down, my broth­er in law was telling me it’s bet­ter to sub­scribe to KO and Binge, rather than, you know, Fox­tel is cheap­er. So we sat down to watch some sport­ing event.

[00:15:52] TK: I can’t remem­ber what it was, a foot­ball match or some­thing. And all we saw was the buffer­ing refresh cycle. So,

[00:15:59] TK: um, they’ve got a long way to go to improve their tech­nol­o­gy if they’re going to, if that’s the future for them. But

[00:16:04] CR: won­der if they’re part of the deal, aren’t they? They’re all owned by Fox­tel, aren’t

[00:16:07] TK: yeah, so I think they? are. I think I read some­where that Kaon Binge was going across the

[00:16:14] CR: I don’t sub­scribe to Binge at the moment, but when I did, and I did for quite a few years, it was a ter­ri­ble expe­ri­ence. Just, uh, it would, it would not work as often as it would, it had like a 50 50 suc­cess rate of being able to get a show to actu­al­ly stream on Binge, and yeah, just Ter­ri­ble plat­form. They had some good con­tent.

[00:16:32] CR: I like the con­tent. They got a lot of clas­sic shows that I liked watch­ing, but just ter­ri­ble, uh, inter­face. Just you think you’re a mul­ti bil­lion dol­lar com­pa­ny, like build a, build an app that works. Why, why is it so hard?

[00:16:46] TK: Well, and I sus­pect Fox­tel’s nev­er made mon­ey, which is why they haven’t invest­ed too much

[00:16:50] TK: in it. So that’s why, that’s how it got to where it was. And now it’s been

[00:16:56] CR: Well, as

[00:16:56] TK: edged out by the

[00:16:57] CR: Har­ry Stokes will tell you, it’s, it’s all the gov­ern­men­t’s

[00:17:00] CR: fault for not

[00:17:02] CR: pro­tect­ing Free to air tele­vi­sion with, uh, free sport. Um,

[00:17:08] TK: how­ev­er, Fox­tel, you have to pay for it. So he’s actu­al­ly, he wants, he wants that to stay on

[00:17:13] TK: Chan­nel 7, not Fox­tel.

[00:17:18] CR: DTL, speak­ing of tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies, uh, became a rule one sell this week, for me. And in the light port­fo­lios. And I tried to drill down into why. All I could see was an announce­ment on the 16th of Decem­ber that Microsoft have been fid­dling with their part­ner agree­ments, um, in some way that was going to affect Data3 as a big Microsoft part­ner.

[00:17:46] CR: The head­line said Data3 well placed to adapt to Microsoft­’s increased focus on small, medi­um and cor­po­rate ini­tia­tives.

[00:17:54] TK: Great

[00:17:54] CR: Lat­er on in the release. It said there is no change, there is no change to the

[00:17:59] CR: FY25 H1 guid­ance pro­vid­ed the

[00:18:01] CR: data free AGM in Octo­ber of 31 to 33 mil­lion of pre tax prof­it and the FY25 finan­cial impact of the incen­tive changes is expect­ed to be imma­te­r­i­al.

[00:18:11] CR: The share price fell through the floor, uh, any­way. I bought it back in Novem­ber 2023

[00:18:25] CR: at 7. 39. And let me see, what’s it trad­ing at today? 6.

[00:18:33] CR: 43. So yeah, it was the day before the announce­ment, it was trad­ing at 7. 41. It dropped down to 6. 45 in a day because of this announce­ment and has­n’t recov­ered. I gave it a day or two to sort of bounce back think­ing, Oh, come on. I mean, they’re say­ing no change to guid­ance, et cetera, et cetera. Like this is a bit ridicu­lous.

[00:18:59] CR: So yeah, it took a big hit on that. Um, Um, but you know what, as I said, I bought it at like 7. 39 back in Novem­ber 23. At one point in August, it was trad­ing up at 9. 18. So it had been a great lit­tle per­former, uh, and then I end­ed up hav­ing to rule one it. So that always makes you want to kick the dog those things hap­pen, par­tic­u­lar­ly when there’s no obvi­ous rea­son. And they’re all like, yeah, Microsoft­’s chang­ing stuff, we’ll be fine, no big deal, no big deal. Well, the mar­ket did­n’t agree.

[00:19:36] TK: did­n’t

[00:19:36] CR: Mr. Mar­ket did not agree. Yeah.

[00:19:39] CR: Uh, anoth­er stock I had to sell yes­ter­day, which was not quite as annoy­ing, but still annoy­ing, was FPR.

[00:19:46] TK: That’s been a long term win­ner. yeah, Ware­hous­ing

[00:19:52] CR: it became a three point sell. It was up. I owned it in a bunch of port­fo­lios. Oh, includ­ing my super, which I still haven’t sold it from. I hope it’s gone up some today. Got side­tracked this morn­ing, went to sell it. Sold it from all of the light and dum­my port­fo­lio. Um, and it was up sort of 30, 40 per­cent on all of those. It had done well for us, but I had to laugh because I think we talked about it a week or two ago when it Dave from Newey asked about it and talk­ing about the change to the account­ing and you lit­er­al­ly, I looked up what you said and you lit­er­al­ly said, if I owned it, I’d use the three point sell line to deter­mine when to sell it.

[00:20:28] CR: And then I had to sell it because it breached its three point sell line. So, uh, what’s that done today? But I remem­ber we talked about FPR and these dif­fer­ent big leas­ing com­pa­nies a lit­tle while ago. And as I recall, you said some­thing about, Quite often it’s been con­tract relat­ed, and when one suf­fers, the oth­ers do well.

[00:20:50] CR: And I was won­der­ing if I should move my mon­ey to, uh, no, this is, this is the old Eclipse, right?

[00:20:55] TK: It is. Yeah.

[00:20:56] CR: who are the oth­er ones?

[00:20:57] TK: Macmil­lan Shake­speare, which is still on the buy list. And it lost a South Aus­tralian gov­ern­ment con­tract, so it has­n’t done well this year. Uh, and then the oth­er one is, um, SIG, Smart, Smart Group, I think, or Smart some­thing. SGX, sor­ry, not SIG,

[00:21:14] CR: right.

[00:21:15] TK: SGX is the oth­er

[00:21:18] TK: one.

[00:21:18] CR: So, fig­ure this, so the FPR shares were trad­ing about 3, 3. 01, 3. 02. the day before this announce­ment. At the close of busi­ness, no? Yeah, the close of busi­ness or the very begin­ning of the next morn­ing maybe. It says 9am on my thing which would be 10am in Syd­ney. It spiked from 3 up to 3. 10 and then with­in half an hour col­lapsed down to 2.

[00:21:52] CR: 90

[00:21:54] TK: Sor­ry, what’s, this is FPR, what’s the announce­ment,

[00:21:57] CR: sor­ry, uh, it was this, uh,

[00:22:00] CR: well, I don’t know, actu­al­ly it was a week before the announce­ment, the announce­ment was, no,

[00:22:04] TK: But what’s the announce­ment? We just spoke about it because there was a change to

[00:22:07] TK: the account­ing, to ware­house

[00:22:09] CR: oh yeah, well it was, it was­n’t that, was it?

[00:22:13] TK: Well, I think that’s con­tributed to the down­turn in the share price, but,

[00:22:17] TK: um,

[00:22:18] CR: yeah,

[00:22:19] TK: no, like, loss of con­tract announce­ment that I can recall.

[00:22:22] CR: no, get­ting con­fused with DTL. Any­way, share price spiked and then crashed, it spiked up to 3. 10 and then crashed down to 2. 90 like half an hour lat­er, went up, went down and then has kept going down ever since. And in fact, it’s gone down today, so I should have bloody sold it yes­ter­day when I meant to.

[00:22:41] CR: Hate that when, by the time I went to sell it out of my super, it was like four o’clock and the mar­ket was closed. I was like, oh shit, should have got to that ear­li­er. Any­way, FPR, I know a lot of peo­ple, QAV mem­bers would have held FPR, but we, you know, three points sell, we got out of it at a prof­it. So, noth­ing wrong with that, can’t

[00:23:06] TK: No stock lasts for­ev­er. No

[00:23:07] TK: tree grows to the sky.

[00:23:09] CR: Only oth­er thing I had to talk about today, Tony, was anoth­er one of House­l’s lit­tle ideas, Planck­’s Prin­ci­ple. And I often think about Planck­’s Prin­ci­ple, and um, I quote it, um, quite often. Max Planck, um, ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry,

[00:23:29] TK: prin­ci­ple. I’ve nev­er heard you

[00:23:31] CR: I don’t quote it as much as

[00:23:33] CR: talk about it. a lot,

[00:23:34] TK: Planck­’s

[00:23:35] CR: but it’s once I quot­ed Max Planck­’s prin­ci­ple, geez,

[00:23:46] TK: prin­ci­ple, and then the next time you said, some­one said, and the next

[00:23:48] TK: time you said, as I always say? Yeah.

[00:23:51] CR: It’s the rule of three. No, in fact, I can nev­er remem­ber who said it. I remem­ber the idea, but I nev­er, and it’s fun­ny because I, I read it in some­thing else, like last night, and then I was look­ing for a house or lit­tle idea and saw it in there and was like, ah, shit. So for those peo­ple who don’t know, Mier Max Planck, ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry physi­cist, um, quan­tum physi­cist, he said a new sci­en­tif­ic truth does not tri­umph by con­vinc­ing its oppo­nents and mak­ing them see the light, but rather because its oppo­nents even­tu­al­ly die and a new gen­er­a­tion grows up that is famil­iar with it.

[00:24:29] TK: What’s an exam­ple of that? I think sci­ence is pret­ty quick these days to, to,

[00:24:34] TK: bend if some­thing, if some­thing new comes along.

[00:24:38] CR: There are, um, uh, there are lots of, um, sto­ries of this in, um, the his­to­ry

[00:24:47] TK: Yeah, Max Planck­’s

[00:24:49] CR: Planck prob­a­bly said this in the, yeah, the 30s or

[00:24:52] TK: yeah, right. Yeah, like the Steady State The­o­rists and the

[00:24:54] TK: Big Bang The­o­rists and,

[00:24:57] CR: Yeah. And peo­ple would go to their deathbeds argu­ing for their tra­di­tion­al the­o­ry and then a new gen­er­a­tion would come up.

[00:25:06] TK: You think sci­ence has changed though? You think

[00:25:07] TK: it’s as bad as that these days?

[00:25:11] CR: I do, um, And I, and I think there’s a lot of bad sci­ence that still hap­pens out there. If you fol­low Sabine Hossen­felder on YouTube, she’s a big one for talk­ing about how bad the sci­ence is right now. You’ve watched any of her videos? Oh, she’s great. I read a book. She came out with a book a year or two ago, which I read too, which is great.

[00:25:32] CR: She’s this Ger­man physi­cist. Who is very dry and very direct and then tells lots of jokes but in a very dry Ger­man kind of way. She calls Ein­stein, Ein­stein, which I love, Ein­stein. She’s got a huge YouTube chan­nel. Yeah, she’s got this huge YouTube chan­nel where she talks about sci­ence and physics and she um, you know, calls bull­shit on a lot of stuff but she’s often talk­ing about how bad sci­ence is these days and how Keep bang­ing on on the same things

[00:26:11] TK: Like what?

[00:26:12] CR: things like, um, string the­o­ry, dark ener­gy, dark mat­ter.

[00:26:18] CR: There’s a lot of stuff that she says. They just, they’re, they’re, if, and I’ve, it’s not the first time I’ve read this, I remem­ber read­ing a book 20 years ago about string the­o­ry by Some­body’s name I can’t recall, physi­cist, who was say­ing, if we’ve spent 20 years try­ing to fig­ure out string the­o­ry and we still haven’t fig­ured it out, maybe we’re bark­ing up the wrong tree.

[00:26:37] CR: Like, there’s got­ta be a time lim­it on how long, it used to be every 5 to 10 years. Physics would, you know, have a major break­through and we’ve been stuck on string the­o­ry now. Then it was 25 years. It’s been anoth­er like 15, 20 years since I read that book. And we still can’t agree on any­thing. Like it’s not hap­pen­ing.

[00:26:59] CR: Pack it up, go home. Yeah, yeah. That kind of stuff. We’re stuck on a lot of things like that.

[00:27:04] TK: But don’t you get stuck in that dead end until some­thing

[00:27:07] TK: comes along as a bet­ter the­o­ry for what String The­o­ry is try­ing to prove

[00:27:12] CR: but I think their point is that if you’ve got all of the finest minds in the world work­ing on this and they can’t agree, I on what it’s telling us or what the results are, then some­thing’s wrong. The thing that I, the, the thing where I come across this a lot is in free will, talk­ing about the point of view of sci­en­tists on free will.

[00:27:34] CR: It start­ed to change just in the last five years, but you know, I’ve been bang­ing on about this for 30 years, but when there’s not only no sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ry that explains how free will would work and every­thing that we know about sci­ence And chem­istry and biol­o­gy and physics says there is no room for free will.

[00:27:52] CR: And yet you still have sci­en­tists pub­licly say­ing that they believe that free will prob­a­bly exists. There’s a prob­lem, right? They’re not lis­ten­ing to the sci­ence. They’ve got pre estab­lished state­ments of belief that they’re stick­ing to. And it does­n’t mat­ter what the sci­ence says. They just got their fin­gers in their ears going, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

[00:28:14] TK: Well, we’ve had this con­ver­sa­tion before. It’s a sign of a weak mind, I think, rather than the sign

[00:28:18] TK: of an unsci­en­tif­ic mind. It’s like, They

[00:28:22] CR: Well, these are pub­lished sci­en­tists that are very well respect­ed in their

[00:28:26] CR: field, but they’ve got a blown spot, I think.

[00:28:30] TK: yeah, and sci­en­tists are often like that. It’s one of the, one of the themes of The Death of Sci­ence, the book that was writ­ten about 20 years ago, that sci­ence has become so spe­cial­ized that, uh, it’s not advanc­ing, right? So you can be a spe­cial­ist in, I don’t know, neu­roanato­my in the brain, but if some­one asks you does free will exist, you don’t, you just think to your­self, well, it’s not my

[00:28:52] TK: spe­cial­ty, I can’t real­ly tack­le that.

[00:28:54] TK: Top­ic.

[00:28:57] CR: Yeah, that could be part of it

[00:28:58] CR: too. Any­way, I always want­ed to talk to you about Planck­’s Prin­ci­ple in Invest­ing. That’s what I want­ed to

[00:29:04] TK: Oh, he’s got one on invest­ing too, has he? Good.

[00:29:08] CR: No, I’m ask­ing you. Yeah.

[00:29:12] TK: well, if I know Planck­’s prin­ci­ple on invest­ing, no I

[00:29:15] TK: don’t.

[00:29:18] CR: So I was hav­ing a debate with some­body on Face­book in the last cou­ple of weeks. We may have already talked about this. I can’t remem­ber, but, um, about bit, about Bit­coin. Yeah, I know. Uh, some­body was pro­mot­ing Bit­coin and how it’s a great invest­ment and it’s up and it’s over a hun­dred thou­sand, what­ev­er.

[00:29:34] CR: And I was, I had to be the one that goes in and go, well, look, con­grat­u­la­tions and good luck to you, but. My under­stand­ing of invest­ing is that, you know, you, invest­ing is real­ly when you deter­mine the intrin­sic val­ue of a unit of some­thing and deter­mine that you can buy it for less than its intrin­sic val­ue.

[00:29:53] CR: And then you’ll wait for the mar­ket to catch up and re grade. The val­ue of the val­ue, that’s invest­ing. What you’re talk­ing about is spec­u­la­tion or gam­bling because there’s no way of cal­cu­lat­ing the intrin­sic val­ue of a sin­gle unit of any sort of cryp­tocur­ren­cy that I’m aware of. And then I quot­ed Char­lie Munger, Rat Poi­son Squared, and the guy said some­thing like, well, Char­lie Munger was in his 90s when he said that.

[00:30:21] CR: And I was like, you say that like it’s a bad thing. Like, I, Char­lie was sharp as a tack. Up until the day he died, we were watch­ing inter­views with him like a month before he died, and he was as lucid as hell. And B, com­bined with the fact that he’d seen every scam come and go for the pre­vi­ous 80 years, so he could smell a scam a mile away.

[00:30:47] TK: I read,

[00:30:48] CR: whole idea, but it’s sort of the inverse of Planck­’s Prin­ci­ple, right, is what I was think­ing, is that

[00:30:53] CR: it’s not that the old gen­er­a­tion has to die so a new sci­en­tif­ic truth can emerge, It’s that it’s all of these new peo­ple try­ing to say the old guard don’t know what they’re talk­ing about because this is new and you just don’t get it.

[00:31:07] CR: You just don’t. You just don’t under­stand it.

[00:31:09] TK: yeah, there are some key words you’ve got to watch out for. One of them is, or phras­es, one of them is, you don’t get it.

[00:31:15] TK: I don’t? Explain it to me. Ah, you don’t get it.

[00:31:19] CR: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:31:21] TK: I’ve read two, in the last cou­ple of weeks, I’ve read two inter­est­ing arti­cles about Bit­coin. They’re both, um, in oppo­si­tion to each oth­er. One was an arti­cle on the five ways of valu­ing Bit­coin, which I found inter­est­ing, but I think you can refute them. Uh, I can’t remem­ber what the five were. One of them was the rar­i­ty val­u­a­tion.

[00:31:42] TK: So there’s only a cer­tain num­ber of them and they tried to extrap­o­late Rare coins and rare stamps and rare art­works and rare sneak­ers. Some prin­ci­ples from that sort of uni­verse to Bit­coin. Okay. That’s, that’s fine. If you want to treat it like a piece of art, but it’s still not nec­es­sar­i­ly an invest­ment.

[00:32:01] TK: Uh, there was anoth­er one, which was, um, uh, cost plus. So they, laid out how much it costs in elec­tric­i­ty and invest­ment to mine a Bit­coin. So that’s the cost, but it’s got to be at least worth that. And again, you can refute that. There’s plen­ty of things you can buy, you pick up after the fact for less than what they cost to build.

[00:32:22] TK: It’s buy­ing some­thing out of bank­rupt­cy hap­pens all the time. And there were three oth­er ways of doing it. I can’t remem­ber what they were, but, but they were all fair­ly neb­u­lous. I thought in their ways of valu­ing Bit­coin, but the arti­cle which I, I liked the most was one which was a basic, basic sort of, um, analy­sis of the major groups of scams that the author had seen, and one of them was an ear­ly bird scam, which he put togeth­er.

[00:32:48] TK: Ponzi schemes into. So basi­cal­ly it means that the peo­ple who get in first and then can sell to some­one com­ing in lat­er are the ones that ben­e­fit and it’s the ones that come in lat­er which lose and he put Bit­coin into that cat­e­go­ry and I think that’s where it fits fair­ly and square­ly, frankly.

[00:33:05] CR: Yeah. and

[00:33:06] CR: I think it’s going to have an inter­est­ing few years, obvi­ous­ly, with the, um, incom­ing Musk admin­is­tra­tion in the Unit­ed States.

[00:33:15] TK: You see there’s a,

[00:33:16] CR: going to be

[00:33:17] TK: Trump wants to have a fed­er­al reserve of Bit­coin, like he wants to Yeah, I think it was Steven Mayne in one of the arti­cles I read by him this week who said, yeah it makes you have a Fed­er­al Reserve of casi­nos and a Fed­er­al Reserve of Power­ball tick­ets. It’s like they’re all, why is the Fed­er­al Reserve stock­pil­ing

[00:33:38] TK: spec­u­la­tive assets like that?

[00:33:40] CR: Uh, so I asked Chat­G­PT to think about how to apply Planck­’s Prin­ci­ple to invest­ing and here’s what it came up with. Pas­sive invest­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly through index funds and exchange trad­ed funds, serves as a prime exam­ple of Planck­’s Prin­ci­ple in action with­in the finan­cial mar­kets. For decades, active man­age­ment dom­i­nat­ed the invest­ment land­scape.

[00:34:02] CR: Planck­’s out­per­form the mar­ket through stock pick­ing and mar­ket tim­ing. Active investors often viewed pas­sive invest­ing as infe­ri­or, argu­ing that it mere­ly tracks the mar­ket with­out adding val­ue. Ear­ly pro­po­nents of pas­sive invest­ing faced sig­nif­i­cant skep­ti­cism. Crit­ics argued that pas­sive strate­gies could­n’t out­per­form active man­age­ment, espe­cial­ly after account­ing for fees and expens­es.

[00:34:26] CR: Despite resis­tance, pas­sive invest­ing began to gain trac­tion. Espe­cial­ly as aca­d­e­m­ic research high­light­ed the chal­lenges active man­agers face in con­sis­tent­ly out­per­form­ing bench­marks. As younger investors entered the mar­ket, often more tech savvy and cost con­scious, they found pas­sive invest­ing appeal­ing due to its low­er fees, sim­plic­i­ty, and trans­paren­cy.

[00:34:47] CR: The rise of online bro­ker­age plat­forms and robo advi­sors made pas­sive invest­ment prod­ucts more acces­si­ble to the aver­age investor, dri­ving fur­ther their adop­tion among new­er gen­er­a­tions. Today, pas­sive invest­ing accounts for a sub­stan­tial por­tion of the assets under man­age­ment glob­al­ly. Major finan­cial insti­tu­tions have expand­ed their pas­sive offer­ings, and many finan­cial advi­sors now incor­po­rate pas­sive strate­gies into their rec­om­men­da­tions.

[00:35:11] CR: Apply­ing Planck­’s prin­ci­ple to invest­ing high­lights how par­a­digm shifts often occur not mere­ly through con­vinc­ing exist­ing stake­hold­ers, but through the nat­ur­al pro­gres­sion of gen­er­a­tional change. The rise of pas­sive invest­ing exem­pli­fies this, where a new invest­ment phi­los­o­phy gained promi­nence as a new gen­er­a­tion of investors embraced it, even­tu­al­ly trans­form­ing the invest­ment indus­try’s land­scape.

[00:35:34] CR: What do you think about that?

[00:35:36] TK: Yeah, that makes com­plete sense to me. It’s exact­ly what hap­pened with pas­sive invest­ing. Um, before it came along, which I think was thanks to Jack Bogle, uh, it was, the only way he could invest was via fund man­age­ment, fund man­agers, um, who charge fees, lots of them too. Uh, and then, um, index­ing called on, and it’s, I would­n’t say it was the dom­i­nant way to invest now, but it’s cer­tain­ly a large, uh, And there has been plen­ty of papers that we’ve spo­ken about over the years where active man­agers strug­gle in the long term to beat the index.

[00:36:15] TK: And, you know, for the sim­ple rea­sons that they’re con­strained. They are mea­sured quar­ter by quar­ter, where­as the index just chugs along through good times and bad. Uh, if a fund man­ag­er, an active fund man­ag­er has a bad quar­ter, then they lose. Um, they have redemp­tions. Peo­ple take mon­ey out of the fund, so they’re very care­ful to, um, lim­it the down­side, which means they tend to hug the index any­way them­selves.

[00:36:41] TK: Um, they have style con­straints, so peo­ple want to invest in a val­ue fund, or a growth fund, or a com­modi­ties fund, or an infra­struc­ture fund, or what­ev­er. And as we’ve seen through our jour­ney over the last five or six years, sec­tors come and go. They rotate. All the time. So if you’re just in that one mar­ket, you’re going to have good years and bad years.

[00:37:02] TK: So yeah, I under­stand com­plete­ly why active man­agers strug­gle. And I think that’s our edge. I was think­ing about that today. You know, I’m an active man­ag­er. I’m in there man­ag­ing my own fund rather than putting it into the index. You know, being able to out­per­form the index over time. I’ve had good years and bad years though, so if you judge me on a short term, it could be very good or it could be, could be bad.

[00:37:28] TK: But the ben­e­fits I have are that I don’t have to con­strain myself. I can chop and change or refine what I’m doing. I don’t have peo­ple with­draw­ing mon­ey if I have a bad quar­ter or any­thing like that. So I think that’s an impor­tant advan­tage that we have. And we can just do our own think­ing. Decide if we want to play in the mar­ket or not.

[00:37:51] TK: And I think that’s, you know, why peo­ple like Buf­fett have been suc­cess­ful. He’s dis­tanced him­self from Wall Street and has tried to do the right thing for him­self and his share­hold­ers over the years, rather than nec­es­sar­i­ly being mea­sured every quar­ter. And he active­ly rejects being mea­sured quar­ter­ly.

[00:38:08] TK: I don’t think they put out quar­ter­ly announce­ments. It’s usu­al­ly the barest of fil­ings that are required. Um, and then they have the AGM at the year where they talk in more detail than any­body else about the com­pa­ny and what they’re doing. So it’s, it’s, um, very dif­fer­ent, I think, to an active man­ag­er, the way that they oper­ate.

[00:38:26] TK: So, yeah, so, um, Planck­’s the­o­ry makes great sense. But, like, I can see what he’s say­ing now, basi­cal­ly, is that there are a lot of vest­ed inter­ests. Um, in the share mar­ket and they’re not about to go. Oh, yeah, that’s a good idea here. You take you take all your mon­ey back and we’ll do that instead. They’re gonna poo poo the new idea.

[00:38:46] TK: They’re maybe even that hos­tile­ly Um Go against it in the mar­ket, um, short­ing that idea or what­ev­er. They try and keep the price down. Uh, and um, and yeah, it’s not until the, the, it’s almost evo­lu­tion­ary. It’s not until enough of momen­tum, the snow­bal­l’s got­ten big enough that they even­tu­al­ly let go.

[00:39:10] CR: Well, I think this whole idea of a new gen­er­a­tion grows up with­out those emo­tion­al or eco­nom­ic vest­ed ties to the old way of doing things and is open to the log­ic of a new par­a­digm. Um,

[00:39:26] TK: Well, and also they have the ben­e­fit of see­ing how that the new ideas work for a peri­od of time for a gen­er­a­tion. I think that’s impor­tant too. I mean, index­ing

[00:39:35] CR: Mm

[00:39:35] TK: in my life­time has only real­ly tak­en off in maybe the last. 10 years tops to become a real main­stream way of invest­ing. Any­way, it’s been around for a long time.

[00:39:45] TK: Um, but, uh, it’s only in the last five to 10 years that I’ve heard peo­ple seri­ous­ly make it a big part of their port­fo­lios. I think it’s in dan­ger now of going the oth­er way because, you know, to me, when I talk about index­ing, I’m talk­ing about buy­ing, um, some­thing that tracks the ASX index or the U S index or the world index, basi­cal­ly those three things.

[00:40:10] TK: Uh, But these days, I mean, there’s a pro­lif­er­a­tion of ETFs out there. You can, you can track AI, you can track Bit­coin, you can track all sorts of dif­fer­ent things, um, via an index fund. It’s basi­cal­ly an active fund with low fees. So, um, they’re not real­ly what I would call, even though they’re ETFs and they’re exchange trad­ed, they’re kind of active funds.

[00:40:34] TK: When I’m talk­ing about index­ing, I’m not talk­ing about all ETFs, I’m talk­ing about a very sim­ple few that track the mar­ket. Microsoft And, and the, the estab­lished mar­kets, the ones we know about, not, not, um, the bricks or Emerg­ings or South­east Asian, not that they’re not legit­i­mate mar­kets, but the the­mat­ic they, and I think that’s almost antithe­sis and the antithe­sis of index invest­ing, which is not to be the­mat­ic, I’m just gonna buy the world index and hold onto it for the rest of my life is legit­i­mate strat­e­gy.

[00:41:05] TK: I think the oth­er ones that involve

[00:41:06] TK: mar­ket tim­ing.

[00:41:12] CR: Well, from a QAV per­spec­tive, is, uh, are there risks that you can think of in terms of our approach towards invest­ing where we’re being blind­sided by some­thing because it’s a new way of think­ing that we, uh, Avoid­ing because of our emo­tion­al ties to his­to­ry? Or is that the strength of QAV in that we’re going, we’re just stick­ing to what has always worked.

[00:41:45] CR: And yeah,

[00:41:48] TK: Um, look, I think if QAV becomes more main­stream, some­one will chip away at its armour and start to game it against us, would be my, um, only poten­tial con­cern. And what I mean by that is, um, if, if it becomes main­stream that peo­ple ignore what CEOs say and focus on their cash flow state­ments, then, um, Man­age­ment will focus on gam­ing the cash flow state­ment.

[00:42:14] TK: They haven’t today because it’s hard to do and not as many peo­ple in the invest­ment com­mu­ni­ty focus on it as we do. And there’s still heaps of mon­ey out there to be made by hav­ing an idea and tak­ing it to the stock mar­ket in a float that, um, you know, peo­ple don’t have to wor­ry about it. But even­tu­al­ly if enough investors Um, do what we do, then yeah, it’ll, it’ll start to hit some road bumps, I think, as peo­ple gain that to their own advan­tage, use our knowl­edge against us, in some respects.

[00:42:44] TK: Um, I think that’s the way the mar­ket oper­ates. Peo­ple are always try­ing to get an edge, uh, and, um, use it against the new ideas, so to speak, just as they have with ETS, like as I said. List­ed invest­ment com­pa­nies were around for a long time and there was, you know, Aus­tralian foun­da­tion invest­ments been around for as long as, just about as Aus­tralian stock mar­ket.

[00:43:08] TK: It’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly, it’s, it’s a qua­si index fund. I think it does­n’t, it does­n’t exact­ly track the index, but it holds enough big, big, holds enough posi­tions in the big stocks that, it, its per­for­mance tracks the index. It may as well be an index fund. Uh, but it’s, it’s suf­fer­ing now too, because The index funds which are out there as ETFs are try­ing to under­cut the expense ratio.

[00:43:33] TK: AFIC always had the low­est man­age­ment expense ratio, they called it, in the stock mar­ket. It was about a quar­ter of one per­cent and now ETFs are out there at about 0. 15. 1%, so peo­ple are drift­ing away to that. So there’s always going to be some­one who under­cuts a good idea with some­thing bet­ter. That’s not a bad thing.

[00:43:52] TK: That’s, I guess that’s evo­lu­tion, but, um, there will be at some stage in the future, some­one

[00:43:57] TK: gam­ing against QAV, I think.

[00:44:00] CR: I was think­ing more though, in terms of new ideas that we’re blind­sided to because of our, because of our attach­ment to estab­lished prin­ci­ples. And I mean, the cryp­to thing is part of that con­ver­sa­tion, con­stant­ly hav­ing to ques­tion our. Refusal to, um, par­tic­i­pate in cryp­to invest­ing because it does­n’t map to our schemat­ic for what invest­ing looks like.

[00:44:29] TK: hmm.

[00:44:30] CR: Is that a, is that a strength or a weak­ness? And are there oth­er things like that, new ideas that fun­da­men­tal­ly chal­lenge our para­me­ters about invest­ing that maybe we should loosen up on.

[00:44:46] TK: Well, it depends on your time hori­zon. I think, I mean, we cer­tain­ly haven’t grown as much as the Mag 7, for exam­ple. Or even Bit­coin. Um, and you know, but, but the, I’ve seen, I’ve seen this process come and go where growth stocks, if I just bun­dle them all togeth­er, which the Mag7 are, is they have a great run for maybe five years.

[00:45:09] TK: Um, some­times it’s short­er than that. And then they crash and they crash so heav­i­ly that the whole mar­ket goes down with it. So, um, it’s, as you know, from time to time, I’ve test­ed my mod­els on and try­ing to come up with the anti QAV process to find a way of invest­ing in gross stocks and valu­ing them and get­ting out safe­ly.

[00:45:30] TK: And I just haven’t been able to crack that wal­nut because, um, I think because, um, Gross stocks are inher­ent­ly based on emo­tion, on hype, on peo­ple’s pre­dic­tions for the future, uh, and not nec­es­sar­i­ly on the under­ly­ing busi­ness prin­ci­ples, not the trail­ing busi­ness­es. That, um, that they leave behind. And so we get dot com bub­bles and then they explode and the NASDAQ goes down 80 per­cent in a cou­ple of months.

[00:45:58] TK: And I, I, you know, I think that’s one of the con­cerns I’ve got for the mar­ket going for­ward that, um, The Mag 7, or at least some of the play­ers in the Mag 7 are going to have a moment like that at some stage. It may even just be a stum­ble, but it’ll rip­ple through share mar­kets because they, again, the num­bers that come into my head from read­ing about this dur­ing the year, the US stock mar­ket, if you buy a world­wide index, is some­thing like 70 per­cent of the mar­ket by mar­ket cap.

[00:46:27] TK: Because index funds are typ­i­cal­ly mar­ket cap weight­ed. Um, and then if you look at the MAG 7 with­in the US stock mar­ket, it’s like 30, 40 per­cent of the US per­for­mance. So, you know, you, if the, if the MAG 7 come off by 20 or 30%, which is a typ­i­cal type cor­rec­tion in a growth stock, that can see the, the world­wide mar­ket down 10 or 20 per­cent as well.

[00:46:51] TK: Which will just rever­ber­ate through our mar­ket even­tu­al­ly, um, which is an issue, but, you know, I think that would be a buy­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty even­tu­al­ly. We just got to hold the course and the rules are set up to deal with those kinds of things. But, you know, I think back to a cou­ple of occa­sions when there’s been mar­ket cor­rec­tions, when I’ve had a friend who’s had, who’s been wiped out by it, and it’s just heart­break­ing to watch peo­ple do that.

[00:47:17] TK: You know, the GFC was one occa­sion of that, the dot com bub­ble was an occa­sion of that. And so, um, QAV may not be per­fect, but QAV But it has some risk mit­i­ga­tion in it by focus­ing on shares that have strong cash flows that have qual­i­ty met­rics around them and by hav­ing our process of get­ting out when, when things do turn south and then wait­ing on the side­lines for it to get bet­ter.

[00:47:44] TK: So, yep, I’m real­ly hop­ing that one of our lis­ten­ers will come for­ward with improve­ments and rev­o­lu­tion­ize QAV going for­ward. That’d be great. Hap­py to be a part of that rev­o­lu­tion. And be con­signed to the dust­bin of

[00:47:59] TK: his­to­ry, but it has­n’t hap­pened yet.

[00:48:02] CR: Maybe AI will do that. All right. That’s all I’ve got notes wise. What have you got on your list?

[00:48:07] TK: noth­ing, noth­ing notes wise. I did won­der if we give our­selves a leave past for this one show to look at some pre­dic­tions for next year. Um,

[00:48:18] TK: whol­ly, whol­ly on the basis that we nev­er pre­dict, but, um, it’s the kind of year that, kind of time of the year that every­one’s pre­dict­ing. And Bit­coin would be one of the things I’d ask for pre­dic­tion on.

[00:48:29] TK: Not, my guess is it’s going to go back­wards. Um,

[00:48:33] CR: Real­ly?

[00:48:34] TK: I think there’s a Trump bump. Going on, uh, but when, when things do set­tle down, but the peo­ple who’ve made a lot of mon­ey in the last six months are going to sell out. So I’m going to say Bit­coin at 70 grand US next year at some stage.

[00:48:49] CR: Okay.

[00:48:51] TK: Um, what else can we pre­dict? What, what’s going to hap­pen with Elon Musk next

[00:48:57] TK: year? Is he going to stay the world’s rich­est man? Prob­a­bly, I think.

[00:49:02] CR: he and Trump going to have a falling out before the inau­gu­ra­tion? I’m still call­ing that.

[00:49:07] TK: That’s a good

[00:49:08] CR: I called that the day after the elec­tion. I still think they’re going to try and kill each oth­er before the inau­gu­ra­tion

[00:49:13] CR: and then Musk will win. So then what hap­pens? I’m not sure.

[00:49:19] TK: He’s prob­a­bly rich enough to short the US mar­ket and kill it and that’ll be the end of Trump by the midterms. Yeah.

[00:49:25] CR: Yeah.

[00:49:26] TK: Well, he’s pret­ty, Musk is pret­ty smart. I don’t like, you know, is he see­ing Trump as a

[00:49:31] TK: use­ful idea or is he see­ing Trump as a, as some­one to step over? Right. All right. So

[00:49:36] CR: Well, I, I think he sees him as a use­ful idiot. There are, there’s already rum­blings that the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, the tran­si­tion peo­ple, are get­ting upset by the fact that most of the media, includ­ing the Democ­rats increas­ing­ly, are refer­ring to Musk as the real pres­i­dent and Trump as the pup­pet. They’re not gonna, Trump’s ego’s not gonna like that.

[00:49:55] CR: Soon­er or lat­er, he’s gonna, Put his foot down and how Musk han­dles that will deter­mine the course of their rela­tion­ship mov­ing

[00:50:05] TK: Musk out by end of Jan­u­ary. That’s a good

[00:50:09] CR: Musk out or Trump out?

[00:50:10] TK: Oh, oh, you, okay. Well, they’re falling out between them both.

[00:50:15] CR: Yeah.

[00:50:15] TK: I’m

[00:50:16] CR: I think if there’s a falling

[00:50:17] TK: was out. I can’t see how can Trump get

[00:50:19] TK: out.

[00:50:19] CR: Well, who knows? But Musk, Musk is not to be toyed with as the Biden admin­is­tra­tion just found out. So the Democ­rats just found out like, uh, if he can take down the Democ­rats, he can prob­a­bly take down Trump just as eas­i­ly.

[00:50:35] TK: And what hap­pens to Truth Social that Trump has a big stake in when he becomes

[00:50:40] TK: pres­i­dent? Isn’t he meant to divest him­self of that kind of asset? But no,

[00:50:46] TK: I guess I’m lead­ing up to the fact, does it, does it go into Twit­ter or X? Does Musk

[00:50:51] CR: Prob­a­bly gets, yeah, absorbed into Twit­ter. Yeah, Yeah,

[00:50:53] CR: prob­a­bly.

[00:50:54] TK: Musk has a deal with Trump to buy out Truth Social and then sell it back in four years time.

[00:51:00] CR: Yeah, some­thing like

[00:51:01] TK: Although my pre­dic­tion for Trump is that he or his fam­i­ly will always be in pow­er in the U. S. going for­ward.

[00:51:08] CR: Yeah, Well, that’s cer­tain­ly the

[00:51:09] TK: At least dur­ing his life­time to keep him

[00:51:11] TK: out of jail.

[00:51:12] CR: Well, Steve and I did a Futur­is­tic last week where we did a pre­dic­tion seg­ment at the end. Did you hear that?

[00:51:19] TK: Uh, yes, I did. I did get to the end of Futur­is­tic Ops. The only rea­son I hes­i­tate was I

[00:51:25] TK: may only be halfway through. I’ve been lis­ten­ing to it and a few oth­er things.

[00:51:29] CR: Well, the only pre­dic­tion that I had, and most of Steve’s rolled up into this any­way, is next year will be the year of agents, or agen­tic AI.

[00:51:38] TK: hear it. Yep.

[00:51:40] CR: So that’s gonna be inter­est­ing to watch how that unfolds. And I think it’ll unfold slow­ly. I think it’ll be a cau­tious start, but that is going to have pret­ty pro­found impli­ca­tions.

[00:51:55] CR: And cer­tain­ly from a QAV per­spec­tive, I think that’ll be inter­est­ing. Like it’ll be agents will be the point where I can say. To an AI, you know, go and have a look at the, um, here’s a list of stocks. Go and have a look at the last annu­al report for each of them. Look for any indi­ca­tion of a qual­i­fied audit

[00:52:14] TK: that’ll be a huge

[00:52:15] CR: come back to me with a report on those and also read all my news alerts every day and, uh, you know, send me a text mes­sage if you ever read any­thing, that’s an indi­ca­tion that a com­pa­ny’s He’s maybe adjust­ing it’s pro­jec­tions.

[00:52:33] CR: Or if there’s hint of some­thing going on with the CEO or the CFO. You know, just hav­ing, uh, AI sys­tems that are oper­at­ing behind the scenes 24 sev­en with­out any real data. You active­ly hav­ing to direct their efforts. It’ll just be code run­ning in the back­ground, look­ing for stuff, doing stuff, research­ing stuff, build­ing stuff on your behalf,

[00:53:00] TK: Which is kind of a quant fund real­ly, isn’t it? It’s what goes on now, isn’t it?

[00:53:05] TK: Um,

[00:53:06] CR: I guess, yeah, they’re mas­sive­ly, yeah, mas­sive sys­tems that have been built. This will just be AIs, you just give them a prompt, an instruc­tion, it’ll go off and fig­ure out how to do the rest of it by itself and just do it.

[00:53:18] TK: so you used some terms there I’m not famil­iar with. So you said

[00:53:21] TK: an agent, but a par­tic­u­lar type of

[00:53:23] TK: agent, I think. I did­n’t quite catch that.

[00:53:27] CR: No, just agent or agen­tic AI is how it’s some­times referred. The basic con­cept of an agent, which is fun­ny because that’s what they were called in The Matrix, so that, I don’t know which came first, but An agent is just basi­cal­ly an idea of an AI based You give an instruc­tion to an AI that is com­plex and requires a series of steps, or tasks, or process­es that need to be per­formed Either sequen­tial­ly or con­cur­rent­ly over time, but you don’t need to direct its efforts to do all of that stuff.

[00:54:06] CR: You give it the ini­tial instruc­tion, go do some­thing. Like a sim­ple exam­ple might be, um, go and research, uh, the best, uh, Hol­i­day from my fam­i­ly and I to take to Europe, to go to Europe. Um, this is, you know, we kind of, we want to stay in four star and above hotels that have got a good, you know, uh, recent cus­tomer reviews that are eco­nom­i­cal and we want tours that involve the sort of things that we’re inter­est­ed in.

[00:54:38] CR: Art gal­leries, muse­ums, his­tor­i­cal sites, et cetera, et cetera. Some good restau­rants, and it will go away and fig­ure all that out for you. Build it, do the research, do the book­ings, um, and come back and ask you for con­fir­ma­tion. This is what I’ve set up for you. How does that look? Do you approve? From that through to more com­pli­cat­ed things like, um, Research busi­ness plans.

[00:55:04] CR: Come up with busi­ness ideas for me. Go and research what are needs in the mar­ket­place that are cur­rent­ly unmet that could be solved with a bud­get of a mil­lion bucks to build a start­up that could have a ten times return over a peri­od of a cou­ple of years and, you know, Go and go and fig­ure out all of this for me.

[00:55:26] CR: It goes out and does the research and comes back to you with some ideas. So things that are way more com­pli­cat­ed than here’s a ques­tion. Give me an answer, uh, where it can do the rea­son­ing and the think­ing and the action­ing semi inde­pen­dent­ly or autonomous­ly,

[00:55:43] TK: So that’s final­ly a busi­ness idea that has a 10x poten­tial. I mean, that may well be how QAV gets replaced, because if that’s, if that’s in any way sort of legit­i­mate and works, that’s a, that’s a much bet­ter

[00:55:56] TK: return than invest­ing in the stock mar­ket, isn’t it?

[00:55:59] CR: right. But it’s a busi­ness idea that needs to be exe­cut­ed suc­cess­ful­ly. And, you know, that’s a lot dif­fer­ent to

[00:56:06] TK: Yeah, true.

[00:56:07] CR: you know, I’d say the risk sce­nario for that is a lot high­er than the risk sce­nario for QAV. The returns are high­er, but so is the risk, but yeah, so that’s, Agents is going to be big next year.

[00:56:19] CR: I think that’s, it’s going to launch most peo­ple in the indus­try expect us to see the begin­ning of the agent era hap­pen­ing next year and where that goes, what it leads to and how quick­ly is any­one’s guess.

[00:56:34] TK: So when you’re say­ing it’s an agent, how does it, how does it look

[00:56:36] TK: dif­fer­ent to say Chat­G­PT does now? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:56:39] CR: It’s far more resource­ful on the back end. So again, you can give it an out­come that you want, and it might take a week to come back to you with that out­come, but it has, it has to go and do, and it will fig­ure out what all the sub­tasks are required to achieve that out­come. It fig­ures out what the tasks are.

[00:57:03] CR: It goes in a, does those actions and then comes back to you with the sum­ma­tion of the results of every­thing that it’s done. So Chat­G­PT right now, you ask it a ques­tion, it’ll think for a cou­ple of sec­onds to a minute, depend­ing on how com­pli­cat­ed it is. O3 will think for a lot longer than that. I don’t know if you’ve heard about O3 yet, but that was the thing they launched.

[00:57:26] CR: On Sat­ur­day, our time, they start­ed off Ope­nAI just did this thing called the 12 days of Ope­nAI that we talked about on Futur­is­tic. Day one, they launched O1 for pub­lic avail­abil­i­ty. That’s their advanced rea­son­ing mod­el that had been in pre­view mode for a few months. On day 12, they said, Oh, but now we have O3.

[00:57:47] CR: Which is, accord­ing to the bench­mark­ing, twice as pow­er­ful as O1 in all of its bench­mark scores with maths and cod­ing and stuff like that. They’re going into, um, pre­view for safe­ty test­ing with that now, but it’s already bench­marked. So, their advanced mod­el got dou­bled 12 days lat­er by a mod­el that’s twice as pow­er­ful as their advanced mod­el.

[00:58:12] CR: That’s where we are in terms of the asymp­tot­ic part of Kurzweil’s sin­gu­lar­i­ty.

[00:58:19] TK: And what’s your pre­dic­tion for how

[00:58:21] TK: Elon Musk cor­ners the AI mar­ket?

[00:58:23] CR: Yeah, well, I said the day of the elec­tion, Elon got big gripes with Ope­nAI, with Google, he wants to own, not just wants, believes that it’s absolute­ly

[00:58:37] TK: Because

[00:58:38] CR: cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly impor­tant that he con­trols AI

[00:58:42] TK: AIs work with­out

[00:58:44] CR: sur­vival of the human race. Well, his argu­ment,

[00:58:48] CR: not just that it’s woke, but that it’s lim­it­ed.

[00:58:51] CR: It’s respons­es are being delib­er­ate­ly guardrailed and lim­it­ed and that’s not a good thing for the future of humans and AI to get along togeth­er and, or for the poten­tial of AI. It needs to be com­plete­ly open and unlim­it­ed in its abil­i­ty to think and rea­son and respond. It should­n’t be lim­it­ed by, um, social mores or ways of, modal­i­ties of think­ing that are trendy, in his view.

[00:59:18] CR: In the West at the moment. Um, but any­way, I, you know, I think it’s, I think it’s going to be inter­est­ing. I think he is going to use his pow­er as long as it lasts to lim­it, curb, uh, open AI and Google and pro­mote his own. Offer­ings, which are not to be laughed at either. Like he’s done an incred­i­ble amount of work, uh, on grok X ai, x’s AI in the last cou­ple of months.

[00:59:48] CR: It’s astound­ing what he’s built and how quick­ly he’s built it. Like he built this mas­sive, the biggest AI data cen­ter, I think still in the world, which nor­mal­ly takes about a year to build. And his guys did it in like four weeks. Um, I’ve seen in Jensen, Huang, the CEO of Nvidia talk­ing about it, and he’s just like, it’s just insan­i­ty.

[01:00:09] CR: Like we could not believe what they could do and how quick­ly they did it. Like his abil­i­ty to get engi­neers to do super­hu­man things on tight dead­lines is appar­ent­ly legit. So any­way. Oh yeah, no, it’s going to be inter­est­ing to see how that plays out. I don’t know what this has to do with invest­ing. Let me get off of that.

[01:00:30] CR: You were pre­dict­ing, you got invest­ing pre­dic­tions to do

[01:00:33] TK: nah, I’m done. How about we do a pulled pork? Get back onto invest­ing.

[01:00:37] CR: Let’s do that. Yeah.

[01:00:40] TK: All right, so this is going to be very bor­ing com­pared to our last

[01:00:42] TK: dis­cus­sion. It’s a pulled pork on a com­pa­ny called Wag­n­er’s Hold­ing Com­pa­ny. Toad is

[01:00:48] CR: Oh, I bought some of them yes­ter­day.

[01:00:50] TK: Ooh, do you want to sell them while I’m talk­ing? WGN. Uh, I should say at the out­set, it’s a low ADT stock. 55, 000 is its aver­age dai­ly trade, and so it suits small port­fo­lios with maybe 100, 000 to 200, 000 to invest. On the upside though, I think the ADT is low large­ly because the chair­man and his fam­i­ly speak for about half the stock. So, um, the free float is small, it’s con­strained by that.

[01:01:23] TK: Uh, based in Toowoom­ba, um, the com­pa­ny list­ed in 2017, but has been around for longer than that. Uh, start­ed in 1989, um, read­ing from their web­site, Wag­n­ers is a diver­si­fied Aus­tralian con­struc­tion mate­ri­als and ser­vices provider and an inno­v­a­tive pro­duc­er of new gen­er­a­tion build­ing mate­ri­als. Estab­lished in 1989 in Toowoom­ba, Queens­land, Wag­n­ers is an ASX list­ed busi­ness oper­at­ing in domes­tic and inter­na­tion­al mar­kets.

[01:01:55] TK: Wag­n­ers are a pro­duc­er of cement, con­crete, aggre­gates, new gen­er­a­tion com­pos­ite prod­ucts and are world lead­ers in devel­op­ment of new tech­nol­o­gy to reduce the impact of heavy con­struc­tion mate­ri­als on the envi­ron­ment. Wag­n­ers are also providers of trans­port ser­vices, pre­cast con­crete and rein­forc­ing, rein­forc­ing steel.

[01:02:17] TK: So there you go, you get a feel for the com­pa­ny. Um, Con­cre­tor, basi­cal­ly, uh, but expand­ed over the years into ser­vic­ing the min­ing sec­tor and into doing a lot of inno­va­tion in pro­duc­ing new, uh, new types of mate­ri­als. Um, does­n’t always work though. Uh, so to quote from the annu­al report, this is the chair­man’s address.

[01:02:42] TK: I did say last year that we have an unwa­ver­ing con­fi­dence and a real com­mit­ment to the tech­nol­o­gy of our earth friend­ly con­crete. As men­tioned ear­li­er, we have tak­en an impair­ment on these assets. But our strat­e­gy is to pro­tect the intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty and our invest­ment until we see the mar­ket will pos­i­tive­ly sup­port car­bon reduc­tion tech­nol­o­gy.

[01:03:03] TK: So it does­n’t always work for them. One that seems to be work­ing for them is what they call com­pos­ite fibre tech­nolo­gies. Uh, and again, from the address of the annu­al report, the com­pos­ite fibre tech­nolo­gies busi­ness has had a much bet­ter year in FY24, show­ing signs of being a real con­trib­u­tor going for­ward.

[01:03:24] TK: And, uh, just, just what is a com­pos­ite fibre? Tech­nol­o­gy. CFT prod­ucts designed by Wag­n­er’s are durable con­struc­tion mate­ri­als that are used as sub­sti­tutes for oth­er build­ing mate­ri­als, for exam­ple, steel, alu­mini­um and tim­ber. CFT is light­weight, resis­tant to rust, cor­ro­sion and chem­i­cal attack. The prod­ucts are designed and man­u­fac­tured in house by cus­tom pul­tru­sion machines, both in Aus­tralia and the US.

[01:03:53] TK: Wag­n­er’s CFT prod­ucts are increas­ing­ly being spec­i­fied in Aus­tralia and over­seas for board­walks, bridges, walk­ways, mari­nas, and as cross arms and poles for elec­tri­cal dis­tri­b­u­tion net­works. So that’s what the com­pos­ite fibre tech­nol­o­gy is. Have you heard of pul­tru­sion before CAM? So I had to Google that myself.

[01:04:15] TK: So, um, plas­tic is often made through an extru­sion method. So you, You shove a whole heap of chem­i­cals in one side and pull it through a process and it comes out in a roll at the oth­er end. A pul­tru­sion, uh, adds to that, that process by pulling the, the com­pos­ites out as well as, um,

[01:04:36] TK: push­ing them through. So it’s, it’s a, I guess an add on to that

[01:04:40] CR: How, how do, how do you pull it?

[01:04:44] TK: Uh,

[01:04:45] CR: Wet cement?

[01:04:46] TK: it’s not cement. It looks like it’s kind of a plas­tic replace­ment for, um, for, uh, steel, for exam­ple, or tim­ber, but it’s, it looks like it’s made out of, um, envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly mate­ri­als. So I guess you either chem­i­cal­ly mix it or you heat it, put it through a process, but as it’s start­ing to cool, you pull it through a whole bunch of rollers to turn it into tubes or, or beams for use in con­struc­tion.

[01:05:12] TK: That’s my lay. Lay Pricey of what it is, um, but CFT, Com­pos­ite Fibre Tech­nol­o­gy, is about 10 per­cent of this busi­ness and grow­ing, and they’re using it, um, as anoth­er, uh, basis for their expan­sion over­seas, um, although they have writ­ten off about 4 mil­lion bucks this year, or, or lost 4 mil­lion dol­lars or so, uh, in expand­ing into North Amer­i­ca, and, uh, the chair, the chair­man again said, USA has been a chal­lenge in FY24, um, and the main rea­son for it, if I para­phrase again, is to get more knowl­edge of the com­pos­ite busi­ness and that mar­ket and why it’s ben­e­fi­cial.

[01:05:53] TK: And, uh, read­ing between the lines, my take on that is that, uh, Some­where else in my research, the exec­u­tives talked about the com­pos­ite fibre tech­nol­o­gy prod­uct being bet­ter on a life cycle cost basis than what it was replac­ing. Which says to me it’s prob­a­bly more expen­sive to install, but it lasts longer and does­n’t need as much main­te­nance.

[01:06:20] TK: You know, I can see why they have dif­fi­cul­ty sell­ing into a cost focused mar­ket, and you’ve got to edu­cate cus­tomers that it’s a life cycle cost that they should be look­ing at. But, you know, it could well take off. They oper­ate, Wag­n­ers oper­ates in sev­en coun­tries through­out FY24, and they have man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­i­ties in both the US and the UK, so they are Um, rea­son­ably well estab­lished over­seas.

[01:06:47] TK: I think a big ben­e­fit for this com­pa­ny is, um, is that they’re based in South­east Queens­land. A lot of their busi­ness comes from con­struc­tion in South­east Queens­land. And as they said, um, again, in the annu­al report, um, The con­struc­tion mate­ri­als sec­tor in South East Queens­land should enjoy a good for­ward order book for the fore­see­able future and com­ing into the con­struc­tion for the Bris­bane 2032 Olympic and Par­a­lympic Games.

[01:07:12] TK: So I think that’s a good tail­wind for a com­pa­ny well estab­lished in South East Queens­land. Uh, going on to their lat­est results, um, the one I want­ed to focus on was that net prof­it after tax dou­bled in the last 12 months, notwith­stand­ing the fact that they, um, they lost 4 mil­lion, uh, estab­lish­ing a CFT busi­ness in North Amer­i­ca.

[01:07:32] TK: Uh, so, um, It’s been a good year for them. QAV num­bers, I’m using a stock price of a dol­lar 38, uh, which is 88% of the con, 88% of the con­sen­sus tar­get barred above both the IV one 28 cents and IV two 87 cents. So not, not show­ing up too well on our val­u­a­tion met­rics. Uh, not a strong yield­er, so the yield is 1.8%, but fair­ly, um, prob­a­bly very.

[01:08:02] TK: Very good from a qual­i­ty per­spec­tive. Stock Doc­tor finan­cial health is strong and the trend is steady. Stock­o­pe­dia scores this com­pa­ny 92 for qual­i­ty and the F score for finan­cial health is 8 out of 9. So Stock­o­pe­dia is scor­ing it well on the qual­i­ty met­ric. Stock­o­pe­dia also ranked this 98. Um, over­all, which is very high, so it ranks well on Stock­o­pe­dia.

[01:08:28] TK: Uh, the PE is 25 times, which is in the mid­dle of its range for the last three years, so we don’t score it for that. But it’s pret­ty high, um, 25 times PE, giv­en that the Prop­Caf for this com­pa­ny is 3. 5 times. So throw­ing off lots of cash, but not all of it’s get­ting to the bot­tom line. Um, and, and so per­haps that’s because of the, um, The push into inno­va­tion and over­seas expan­sion, but, um, it’s, I guess it’s a poten­tial upside for the com­pa­ny, but also a poten­tial risk, the fact that it’s PE is 25, but it’s Prop­Caf Like­wise, we can’t buy this on a book val­ue basis, net equi­ty per share is 0.

[01:09:13] TK: 72, which is well below the stock price of 1. 38. What we can give it a good score for is fore­cast earn­ings per share growth, which ana­lysts are call­ing at 67%, and there­fore the growth over PE is 2. 62, which is very good, so we score it 2 on our check­list for that. The oth­er strong, uh, scor­er on our check­list is the fact that the direc­tors hold some­thing like 53 per­cent of stock and one of the founders, there’s four broth­ers, and one of them is the chair­man, uh, con­tin­u­ing, so, um, we have an own­er founder.

[01:09:49] TK: Uh, it’s also a new three point trend­line uptrend since its last results, uh, so we give it a score, a dou­ble the score for that. Uh, it does­n’t have con­sis­tent­ly increas­ing equi­ty, so it has had a, um, a whole, you know, lis­ten Stel­la. A cou­ple of years even though the lat­est results are good. All in all the qual­i­ty score is 12 out of 16 and the QAV score is 0.

[01:10:11] TK: 21. So it scores, you know, pret­ty high­ly on the buy list for us. It’s def­i­nite­ly high­ly on the Stock­o­pe­dia list. The risks, it does do a fair bit of work in ser­vic­ing the min­ing and con­struc­tion indus­try and in fact 90 per­cent of its work is in those areas. Um, it does a lot of work in haul­ing things to mines and it also can man­u­fac­ture.

[01:10:36] TK: Con­crete items at min­ing sites. So if there is a down­turn in the min­ing indus­try, the busi­ness will suf­fer. And like­wise with con­struc­tion. Con­struc­tion, the kind of work they do, they have been doing is to pre build con­crete walls for tun­nels. And, you know, cer­tain­ly been a lot of gov­ern­ment expen­di­ture on infra­struc­ture recent­ly.

[01:10:59] TK: All the peo­ple in Vic­to­ria say­ing it can’t last and so that there might be a down­turn com­ing in the in the gov­ern­ment infra­struc­ture sec­tor but at the moment it’s going strong. Oth­er risks is the over­seas expan­sion just proves too cost­ly and they get out and close it down. Of course we’ve seen that a lot before with many Aus­tralian com­pa­nies stum­bling when they go over­seas so we’ll see how that goes.

[01:11:25] TK: The oth­er risk I think is that, um, is that the founders are get­ting old, um, and there’s no appar­ent suc­ces­sion plan in place. Some­times we see, like in the case of Ker­ry Stokes, his son Ryan comes in and becomes promi­nent in the busi­ness and maybe it’s a bit too soon for that, for this founder, for this founder fam­i­ly.

[01:11:44] TK: But a risk for this busi­ness would be that they stum­ble on suc­ces­sion. Oppor­tu­ni­ties? Well, I think the Olympics in Bris­bane is a big one for them. A lot of their work is based in South East Queens­land. And the oth­er oppor­tu­ni­ty, of course, is they get the tech­nol­o­gy right and the com­pos­ites side of the busi­ness takes off.

[01:12:02] TK: And they can sell these more eco friend­ly replace­ments for tim­ber and fram­ing. and Con­crete and Steel, uh, and, uh, they’re, you know, they’d be well placed to get a big por­tion of that mar­ket going for­ward. So have a look, that’s Wag­n­er’s if any­one’s inter­est­ed.

[01:12:21] CR: When you were look­ing at the direc­tor’s hold­ings, I looked at it yes­ter­day, and it said there were two guys that had 66 per­cent each. Den­nis Wag­n­er and John Wag­n­er, 66. 9%, 66. 5%. I said in my light email, obvi­ous­ly that’s a lot of per­cents, um, but either way, it’s 10%, so they’re going to get a score, but, uh, some­thing wonky with the num­bers.

[01:12:48] TK: So the Stock Doc­tor down­load had num­bers like that in it, but when I go to the web­site in Stock Doc­tor and look at the share­hold­ing pie chart, it looks like there’s four broth­ers who are hold, I think some­thing like 11. 4 per­cent each. And then they have anoth­er share­hold­er, which I think is called some­thing like Wag­n­er’s Prop­er­ty Com­pa­ny, which holds anoth­er sev­en.

[01:13:09] TK: And if you add all that, what­ev­er the num­bers were, I added them all up and it came to

[01:13:12] TK: 53%. So that’s the num­ber I was rely­ing on for my analy­sis.

[01:13:18] CR: why are you look­ing at that?

[01:13:19] TK: in Stock Doc­tor, in the,

[01:13:22] TK: yeah, so let me get to it. So is the share com­pa­ny details? Yeah.

[01:13:27] CR: Oh, the share­hold­ers page. Okay. Yeah. Right. Den­nis has got 11. John’s got 11. Yeah. Joseph’s got 11. Neil’s got 11. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That’s good. I’d nev­er looked at that page before. Good to know. All

[01:13:45] TK: I rely on it because we’ve had this prob­lem before with Stock Doc­tor down­load­ing

[01:13:50] TK: extra

[01:13:51] TK: extra num­bers in that sec­tion of our down­load. Don’t know why.

[01:13:55] CR: Yeah. Hmm. All right. Well, hope­ful­ly. You don’t crash the stock, cause I just added it to a light port­fo­lio.

[01:14:05] TK: You’re going to go to the Olympics in

[01:14:06] TK: 2032, Cam? Be a vol­un­teer?

[01:14:08] CR: Dude, I was just laugh­ing when you said that, like, uh, I’m going to be most­ly robot by 2032. I think the Olympics will be most­ly robots in 2032. Who wants to watch humans do stuff when you can watch robots do stuff?

[01:14:23] TK: well, maybe it’ll be

[01:14:24] TK: quite, maybe it’ll be, look kids, this is what we used to, how we used to run

[01:14:28] CR: Humans ver­sus robots. Now that would be inter­est­ing. yeah, Yeah.

[01:14:33] TK: Well, I’ve often, I’ve often argued that they should relax the drug pol­i­cy for the Olympics so you can have Cyborgs and like Arnold

[01:14:41] TK: Schwartz and they go bat­tling it out with Sylvester Stal­lone.

[01:14:44] TK: Be a lot more enter­tain­ing.

[01:14:47] CR: I’ll just have a sep­a­rate com­pe­ti­tion that’s, you know, open.

[01:14:51] TK: well, there’s one of the busi­ness ideas

[01:14:53] TK: to get 10x. Yeah.

[01:14:55] CR: There you go. Yeah. Enhanced humans ver­sus enhanced humans. You can have a claw. You can have a chain­saw, you can go full Ash, have a chain­saw attached to your arm. Well, hel­lo, Mr. Fan­cy Pants.

[01:15:12] TK: that from?

[01:15:13] CR: Sor­ry, I watched Evil Dead 3, Army of Dark­ness.

[01:15:18] CR: I watched it again recent­ly. It’s great. Ash, uh, uh, you know. Bruce, uh, Camp­bel­l’s char­ac­ter, it starts off, he’s been sent back to like the mid­dle ages and he’s arrest­ed by some, you know, King’s army and he’s tak­en off to some camp and he’s with this some guy who’s dressed in some fin­ery and the guy goes, I am Lord So and So, first of his name, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[01:15:45] CR: Bruce goes, well, hel­lo Mr. Fan­cy Pants. It was good to be there, it was good.

[01:15:53] TK: haven’t seen it. I

[01:15:53] CR: Okay, well that’s it. After Hours,

[01:15:58] TK: Yeah.

[01:15:59] TK: I’m gonna kick off with a sad one. R. I. P. Michael Leu­nig.

[01:16:02] CR: Michael Leu­nig.

[01:16:04] TK: passed away Fri­day, I think.

[01:16:07] CR: Real­ly, I did­n’t hear

[01:16:09] TK: Yeah. And, uh, and then, um, maybe because of that, iView had as the top choice a doc­u­men­tary that was made on Leu­nig about, um, I think it was back in about 2012. Which I watched again, and very poignant, was um, love­ly doc­u­men­tary, I mean, the guy’s kind of out there, and uh, it took five years for the film­mak­er to make this doc­u­men­tary, and the film­mak­er’s kind of part of the process, because it’s been such an effort to film Leu­nig, and he’ll just dis­ap­pear every now and then, or have a per­son­al cri­sis, or what­ev­er, or does­n’t want to be filmed draw­ing, um, but even­tu­al­ly, you know, puts togeth­er a very good doc­u­men­tary.

[01:16:50] TK: About Leu­nig, which I’d rec­om­mend. Have a look at it. It’s very good. But I’ve always loved Leu­nig. He’s been one of the,

[01:16:57] TK: one of the things you grow up

[01:16:58] TK: with, which has just been love­ly,

[01:17:00] CR: hmm, yeah, what a huge part of the fab­ric of Aus­tralian cul­ture from as far back as I can remem­ber.

[01:17:08] TK: par­tic­u­lar­ly in

[01:17:09] CR: And I know noth­ing about him. Right.

[01:17:13] TK: Yeah, well, the doc­u­men­tary goes through. I don’t, I don’t think. He did­n’t go to Viet­nam. I’m not sure if he was a con­sci­en­tious objec­tor, but cer­tain­ly grew up of age to be con­script­ed. So that was a part of his upbring­ing and polit­i­cal awak­en­ing. And then that informed a lot of his art work after that.

[01:17:34] TK: So he was involved in the anti Viet­nam war move­ment and start­ed car­toon­ing for var­i­ous Polit­i­cal fanzines that popped up at the time because of that. And that was his kind of foot in the indus­try. And, uh, even­tu­al­ly became the news­pa­per car­toon­ist for the age. And, you know, talks about how hard it is to work on a dead­line and come up with some­thing.

[01:17:55] TK: But often, often­times I won­der whether he even had to have a dead­line because his car­toons were so whim­si­cal that they weren’t real­ly about The Dai­ly Events. So you prob­a­bly had 10 or 20 ready to go at any one stage. With the return­ing char­ac­ters, Mr. Curly and the Duck. And it did­n’t touch much on it in the doc­u­men­tary, but he grew into an indus­try.

[01:18:19] TK: And you know, I think I got a learn­ing cal­en­dar for Christ­mas last year. And you can buy Mugs and t shirts, etc. And Alex said that she thought he had two or three peo­ple work­ing for him con­stant­ly turn­ing that stuff out because they would drop into her gallery with prints for fram­ing every now and then in Fitzroy.

[01:18:42] TK: Yeah, but that side of things was­n’t real­ly touched on in the doc­u­men­tary. It went into his art space, his work space, his stu­dio, which looked like it was kind of a com­mer­cial space, like maybe a shop front some­where in Mel­bourne, maybe Fitzroy, did­n’t tell you where, but it was love­ly to go into it because he had it half paint­ed.

[01:19:04] TK: paint­ings all around and he’d walk along and put a few dots on one and touch up one and then walk onto some­thing else and it was just a love­ly sort of space and to see him work­ing was great as well and yeah maybe the doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er over­stepped the mark but he tried to film tak­ing his after­noon nap on the couch in the work­space and loony would then riff on The kind of meta expe­ri­ence of being filmed while you’re asleep and know­ing the cam­er­a’s there and how you could­n’t rest and yeah, so it was, um, learn­ing with some­one who just con­tin­ued to explore an idea right to its bit­ter end.

[01:19:40] TK: I think, and did that a lot in the doc­u­men­tary as well. But well worth watch­ing, it’s on

[01:19:44] TK: iView at the moment.

[01:19:48] CR: I was just think­ing how I would explain Leu­nig to an out­sider like Chrissie. Like, how would you explain his

[01:19:57] TK: Yeah, well it’s very whim­si­cal it’s car­toon, they’re car­toons usu­al­ly. I have one of these orig­i­nal art pieces Jen­ny bought it for me for a present a lit­tle while ago, and even though it’s a paint­ing, an oil paint­ing. It’s still car­toon­ish in nature. Very, uh, his art­work is very, um, naive. I think they call it a naive style of paint­ing, uh, naive.

[01:20:21] TK: And, um, but he, he, I mean, the recur­ring themes are iso­la­tion, uh, mod­ern life over­tak­ing peo­ple, you know, lots of famous car­toons of, um, kids sit­ting in front of a TV set watch­ing the sun­set and the sun set­ting out­side the win­dow, that kind of thing. Um, yeah. Yeah, um, Looney hav­ing a cup of tea, or Mr Cur­ley hav­ing a cup of tea while mis­siles fly from one side to the oth­er above him.

[01:20:53] TK: Just that kind of detach­ment from the mod­ern world and try­ing to focus on a more mean­ing­ful

[01:21:00] TK: life than the hurly burly of what’s going on.

[01:21:03] CR: Yeah, very, very poet­ic, I, I think. You know, car­toon is poet­ry, almost. It’s, um, inter­est­ing.

[01:21:12] TK: And he wrote poems too, he did write poet­ry as well.

[01:21:16] CR: Mm. Quite

[01:21:17] TK: think one of his sons, they

[01:21:18] CR: poems in them.

[01:21:19] TK: one of his sons who now describes

[01:21:22] TK: him­self as a poet,

[01:21:24] CR: Mm hmm. Mm. Well, when you said a sad one, some­body, Michael, died, um, I thought you were going to talk about my friend. So, on Sun­day morn­ing, I was hav­ing break­fast with the boys and I got, I hap­pened to check Face­book and saw that one of my old­est friends died that day. Mike Val­len­der, um, played a huge role in my 20s, my involve­ment in the tech indus­try.

[01:21:52] CR: Um, in 1996 he came from Perth with a crew of peo­ple that he brought with him. to become the state man­ag­er of Oze­mail in Vic­to­ria. And he just explod­ed like an ICBM in our office. We’d been rud­der­less for like six months. The pre­vi­ous state man­ag­er had quit and they could­n’t find some­one to take on the job.

[01:22:16] CR: And then they brought over Mike. He ran a start­up in WA that was sort of a Soft­ware PC build sort of start­up thing. Came over with his crew, three or four of his key guys, tech nerds with him, and just explod­ed. And I said in his obit that Mike was the first super tech nerd I ever real­ly knew. Like full on, Tech nerd.

[01:22:46] CR: It’s going to be great, Cam. It’s going to be fan­tas­tic. We’re going to build this. We’re going to build this data cen­ter. We’re going to put this stuff in and it’s going to be awe­some. I was 26 or so when I met him and I was already in the tech indus­try. I was work­ing at Aussie Mail as a sales guy, but he just, he, um, turned me into a tech nerd.

[01:23:03] CR: Like it was because of Mike that I start­ed read­ing books on tech­nol­o­gy and the indus­try and the his­to­ry of the indus­try, because he knew all about the his­to­ry and he was a huge Microsoft advo­cate. And I end­ed up work­ing at Microsoft as a direct result of Mike. You know, build­ing up Microsoft in my mind is the great­est thing that ever hap­pened in human his­to­ry and we part­nered with Microsoft when we were at Oze­mail and I met some peo­ple from Microsoft and then I end­ed up work­ing there.

[01:23:33] CR: Um, and we used to, and he intro­duced me to gam­ing because I think the real rea­son he took the job at Oze­mail was so he could play online gam­ing with a T1 pipe out the back end. So we would spend nights just doing Age of Empires tour­na­ments on the back of Ozemail’s mas­sive cable that they had when the rest of the coun­try had dial up inter­net.

[01:23:53] CR: And then he went on and did, he float­ed Hot Cop­per in 1999, uh, he and his mate Rob took it over and float­ed it when it was just a lit­tle back­yard thing out of Gee­long, I think, a back­yard web­site. They float­ed it, sold it three weeks lat­er to Bourse Data. short­ed, short­est list­ed com­pa­ny, I think in ASX his­to­ry at the time.

[01:24:21] CR: And then he took over Bourse Data and sold that to St. George Bank, I think, uh, a few months lat­er when the com crash, after the com crash, and this is, we’ve talked about my his­to­ry with invest­ing. So I invest­ed five or six grand in the hot cop­per float at the time I got in on the IPO and then it was worth noth­ing, um, very quick­ly after it all got rolled up.

[01:24:44] CR: So that was my one. Big involve­ment in invest­ing pre QAV. But I kept in touch with Mike over the years. And if I remem­ber like five, six, sev­en years ago, pre QAV, but he was in Bris­bane and we had din­ner and he want­ed to do a pod­cast project. We were talk­ing about ideas and I think his project was basi­cal­ly me just fol­low­ing him around and doing a pod­cast of his life and how amaz­ing it was.

[01:25:12] CR: And, uh, I was like, yeah, Not sure that’s what I’m look­ing for right now. Let’s keep work­ing on it. Any­way, he was a cou­ple of years old­er than me. So prob­a­bly some­where between you and me and had a brain aneurysm some­time Fri­day night, they think, and was­n’t dis­cov­ered by his flat­mate because he was unmar­ried for 24 hours and then was in a coma by the time they found him in his room and was dead.

[01:25:39] CR: It’s like 24 hours lat­er, so, did­n’t drink, did­n’t smoke, used to live a very wild life in the 90s and ear­ly 2000s, years ago decid­ed to sort him­self out in his late 40s, gave up booze, gave up cig­a­rettes, gave up hard­er drugs, ate healthy, did the land­mark course I think, he did that whole thing and sort of took con­trol of his life and so yeah, he was in pret­ty good shape last time I saw him, which was a few years ago and pret­ty good shape appar­ent­ly right

[01:26:11] CR: Aneurysm, brain ves­sel, burst. And that was him. And I, so I went back and I found a pod­cast that I did with him. He was, I did a pod­cast with him in Decem­ber, Decem­ber 22nd, 2004, about a month after G’day World start­ed. He was one of the first on the pod guests that Mick and I had. And I got him to tell the whole sto­ry of com­ing to Aussie Mail and the hot cop­per float.

[01:26:40] CR: At that time, he was the CEO of a wind farm busi­ness. 2004. Um, so he was talk­ing about wind farms and all this kind of stuff. I record­ed the pod­cast almost 20 years to the day before he died, because he died on Decem­ber 22nd. And we put the pod­cast out on Decem­ber 22nd, 20 years pre­vi­ous­ly. So how about that?

[01:27:03] CR: But the fun­ny thing was lis­ten­ing to it the oth­er day, it was me, him and Mick Stanek on the show. Mick­’s dead. Mike’s dead. I’m the only per­son on that pod­cast that’s still alive, and they were all rough­ly my age.

[01:27:17] TK: But you

[01:27:17] CR: I was like Yeah! WINNER! Hehe­he­he

[01:27:22] TK: a toine where the last per­son stand­ing gets the trea­sure,

[01:27:26] CR: Well, um, no, it’s

[01:27:28] CR: more like High­landers, I absorb their ener­gy when they die, so now I’m effec­tive­ly immor­tal unless you cut off my head.

[01:27:34] TK: So how come you haven’t played, uh, how, how come you haven’t played? Uh, Sergeant Pep­per?

[01:27:40] TK: It was 20 years ago

[01:27:41] CR: 20 years ago. Yeah, yeah, because copy­right, you know. Can’t play music on pod­casts. But it’s been one of those things, I imme­di­ate­ly, well not imme­di­ate­ly, but that day I reached out to all the guys I went to high school with, And I’ve actu­al­ly been using GPT to go back over my his­to­ry and try and remem­ber all of the peo­ple who played a role in my life, an impor­tant or sig­nif­i­cant role, that I’m not cur­rent­ly in con­tact with.

[01:28:08] CR: Just to reach out to them. Because, you know, I talk to you every week, and I talk to Ray every week, but there are guys, like even my high school bud­dies, like the guy I caught up with for cof­fee this morn­ing, we talk. I mean, we see each oth­er on Face­book and he’ll com­ment on some­thing or I’ll com­ment, but we don’t.

[01:28:23] CR: Talk. Talk. That often. Like once a year, once every cou­ple of years, if we’re in the same town we’ll catch up for break­fast or lunch or cof­fee or some­thing. But we don’t talk. You catch up with Rud­dy on a reg­u­lar basis and you talk to him, but

[01:28:37] TK: Yeah.

[01:28:39] CR: Like I had­n’t spo­ken to Mike prob­a­bly in five years, like one to one. It’s like Markham, I try and sched­ule calls with Markham and I don’t talk to Markham, like Face­Time, talk to Markham that often. Um, we chat on Face­book every now and again, but I made, I decid­ed to make a con­cert­ed effort to reach out to all of the guys that have been a sig­nif­i­cant part of my life and just sched­ule a thing, like once a month I’m going to reach out to them and go, hey, you still alive?

[01:29:07] CR: What’s going on? Let’s catch up. Let’s do Face­book. Cause I’m just sick of peo­ple dying on me. It’s rude. It’s incon­sid­er­ate.

[01:29:13] TK: not going to save them. Do you, but, but do you ever think that peo­ple drift away because,

[01:29:18] TK: you know, for a rea­son, busy in their own lives? I don’t mean that neg­a­tive­ly, but that’s what I found is that,

[01:29:24] CR: I thought you were say­ing because of me.

[01:29:25] TK: we were, we were friends at school

[01:29:27] TK: because we had to be at school every day togeth­er.

[01:29:28] TK: But, you know, after that.

[01:29:30] CR: No, but yeah, no, like, but there are guys that I’m still friends with, but we just don’t, you know, because we’re busy, you know. Nick, I caught up with this morn­ing, is the prin­ci­pal of a school with 1400 stu­dents and he’s got kids and what­ev­er. He’s busy. I’m busy. We’re all busy, but I don’t know. Then, then peo­ple die and you go.

[01:29:50] CR: Well, shit, I should have spo­ken to him more often. Like, that’s ridicu­lous. And par­tic­u­lar­ly because Mike was the guy that intro­duced me, real­ly, to being a tech nerd, that I’ve then, basi­cal­ly, that’s been my iden­ti­ty for the large part of my adult life. I’ve been a tech guy in one way, shape, or form. And now we’re in this era of the pro­lif­er­a­tion of AI.

[01:30:14] CR: He would have been, no, he was, I’ve been talk­ing to our mate, Rob, who was with us at Aussie Mar­lin, was Mike’s best mate, and I’ve, I’ve, was still very close. He actu­al­ly, he, he was um, the flat­mate when she was call­ing out to Mike and did­n’t hear from him, she rang Rob and said I’d have, Mike’s not answer­ing and he jumped in his car and drove over there just in time to find her putting Mike in the ambu­lance.

[01:30:39] CR: But, yeah, Um, he said, yeah, Mike was total­ly into AI, was super excit­ed by every­thing that was going on. I did­n’t even have a con­ver­sa­tion with him about that. I should have got him on a pod­cast. I should have talked to him like you and I, you know, get to talk about this stuff. And I’m just, uh, it just piss­es me off that have Face­book.

[01:30:57] CR: We fol­lowed each oth­er on Face­book. I saw all of his pho­tos. He saw mine, but we did­n’t carve out time to say good day. How’s it going? You know, what’s going on? What do you think about this?

[01:31:11] TK: nice that you have that regret about some­one. It

[01:31:13] TK: meant you felt for them.

[01:31:14] CR: Oh, most­ly I’m. Just pissed off that he died with­out telling me. That’s like just rude and sen­si­tive and die with­out say­ing good­bye. Like, what the fuck, dude?

[01:31:27] TK: Oh, it’s pret­ty hard if you have a brain

[01:31:28] CR: one of my favourite

[01:31:29] TK: he was going slow­ly. He

[01:31:30] TK: could have even­tu­al­ly got­ten round

[01:31:32] CR: me excus­es.

[01:31:33] TK: to you, but yeah.

[01:31:35] CR: I know I’m being face­tious, but it’s this thing about, you know, I know

[01:31:38] CR: three or four guys. that I liked and was friends with that have died in the

[01:31:42] TK: No, I get that.

[01:31:43] CR: and I’m like Mick Stanek died like my co founder and we had­n’t spo­ken in 10 years and he died and I did­n’t even know for like three years I was like oh shit like that’s

[01:31:54] TK: He’s ghost­ing you.

[01:31:55] CR: We’re more con­nect­ed than ever.

[01:31:57] TK: Yeah.

[01:31:58] CR: Yeah, lit­er­al­ly. We’re more con­nect­ed than ever, but then we’re not, you know?

[01:32:02] TK: Yeah. No, I get that. Yeah. But look, I, I mean, I’ve been through stages of my life where I’ve kept in con­tact with lots and lots and lots of peo­ple, but I guess I’ve fall­en into the rou­tine of talk­ing to a hand­ful, keep­ing in con­stant con­tact with a hand­ful of peo­ple. And that suits me fine.

[01:32:21] TK: I actu­al­ly pre­fer it that

[01:32:22] TK: way. Have deep rela­tion­ships

[01:32:24] CR: too, but still.

[01:32:25] TK: yeah,

[01:32:27] CR: I mean, Yeah, I mean, yeah,

[01:32:30] CR: Any­way, Fox got his offi­cial ADHD diag­no­sis last week too,

[01:32:35] TK: yeah, you get like a badge, a stamp.

[01:32:39] CR: Well, she, Chris­sy said in the car on the way home, I think we should have a par­ty to cel­e­brate. And I was like,

[01:32:44] TK: And

[01:32:44] TK: Sir Fox lots of red cor­dial. Did you read the arti­cle in the Fin Review though on the week­end about how it’s very easy to get a ADHD diag­no­sis now, and be pre­scribed a med­ica­tion for it?

[01:33:00] CR: no, I did­n’t.

[01:33:01] TK: I think it was in,

[01:33:02] CR: Has­n’t been our expe­ri­ence.

[01:33:04] TK: yeah, well, there was an arti­cle in the Fin Review about it, the infer­ence being

[01:33:08] TK: that the doc­tors are mak­ing mon­ey out of it, so it’s, um, it’s hap­pen­ing a lot more than it should.

[01:33:13] CR: Well, I have read that if you’re will­ing to spend the

[01:33:16] CR: mon­ey, you can get into a spe­cial­ty clin­ic, but it’s going to cost you thou­sands and thou­sands of dol­lars to get it done. There are doc­tors, um, pae­di­a­tri­cians and psy­chol­o­gists that are get­ting paid a mil­lion bucks a year to join these clin­ics. Because they’re just charg­ing through the nose because par­ents are so des­per­ate to get some relief.

[01:33:37] TK: was what the arti­cle was

[01:33:38] CR: We did­n’t

[01:33:40] CR: Yeah, right. But if you’re not will­ing to spend five to ten grand to get your kid

[01:33:43] CR: diag­nosed, then it’s very dif­fi­cult if you’re in the pub­lic

[01:33:46] TK: reporter in this arti­cle was say­ing that she put her­self through the process, does­n’t have ADHD, but was in like with­in five min­utes was diag­nosed with ADHD and sent the bill for a thou­sand bucks and the

[01:33:58] TK: bill for the med­ica­tion to solve it.

[01:34:02] CR: Right. So does she fake ADHD

[01:34:05] TK: No, she said they did like a five minute con­ver­sa­tion and it was ques­tions like, Are you sleep­ing well? And do you some­times get dis­tract­ed? She’s like, well, yeah, some­times I do. And yeah, some­times I don’t sleep

[01:34:18] TK: well. Right. You got ADHD.

[01:34:21] CR: Like get­ting a pre­scrip­tion for med­i­c­i­nal mar­i­jua­na. Do you have any pain? Yeah, I do. Okay. You need weed. Um,

[01:34:29] CR: no, well with this one, we, we got a hun­dred ques­tion ques­tion­naire that we had to answer and his teach­ers got the same ques­tion­naire that they had to answer inde­pen­dent­ly. Then they were sent to the pae­di­a­tri­cian and they get run through a, you know, a, scor­ing

[01:34:47] TK: Right.

[01:34:48] CR: And then she inter­viewed Fox first for half an hour and then us for half an hour. And at the end of that, she said, I’m hap­py to, you know, on the scor­ing for the two tests, he scored off the charts for every­thing. So she said, I’m hap­py to give you an offi­cial diag­no­sis, but did­n’t rec­om­mend med­ica­tion. She rec­om­mend­ed Uh, an occu­pa­tion­al ther­a­pist to deal with some of his anx­i­ety issues and sleep issues.

[01:35:12] CR: And we’d already been down that path a lit­tle bit. So we can prob­a­bly can get him med­ica­tion if we want to in the future, but that was­n’t her approach. She said, you know, ther­a­py, um, learn­ing some new tools, um, might be the best approach for him. So, but I sat down with him that night and I said, look, I want you to know that this changes noth­ing.

[01:35:40] CR: Every­body has. Strengths and weak­ness­es. Every­body has things that come easy to them and every­body has things that they strug­gle with. ADHD is just a series of things that some peo­ple are good at or strug­gle with that have been grouped into a label. That they’ve been able to diag­nose that are rel­a­tive­ly com­mon, like one in 10 peo­ple in the U S now, I think one in 10 adults have been diag­nosed with ADHD.

[01:36:10] CR: You’re just like every­body else though. There are just some things that you’re going to find easy. You’re going to be some things that you find hard. You’re going to need to make the most out of the things that you find easy. And work on the things that you find hard, just like the rest of us, that’s all.

[01:36:24] CR: It’s just now that you can go, oh, okay. It’s not that I’m dumb, or it’s not that I’m lazy, or it’s not that I’m flighty, it’s just that my brain strug­gles to focus on things that are not enjoy­able, or more than most peo­ple strug­gle. It’s a lit­tle bit hard­er for me to do cer­tain things than it is for nor­mal peo­ple, I just need to fig­ure out how to hack my brain.

[01:36:48] CR: To do those things bet­ter. ha.

[01:36:51] TK: And you did­n’t say it and it’s genet­ic and we’re very sor­ry. It’s

[01:36:56] CR: ha ha ha ha.

[01:36:57] TK: not your fault. It’s not you. It’s me.

[01:37:01] TK: Oh, Squir­rel!

[01:37:01] CR: moth­er more, real­ly. Yeah. Chris­sy said that she thinks she always says this. She thinks I should be diag­nosed. You should be diag­nosed.

[01:37:11] TK: hmm.

[01:37:12] CR: I said, look, I diag­nosed myself when I was about five. When I was five, I went, I think dif­fer­ent­ly to most of the peo­ple around me. Yeah, I did. Oh, you must’ve been like this too.

[01:37:22] CR: Like as kid, as a kid, I went, yeah, I think dif­fer­ent­ly to the peo­ple, my fam­i­ly and my par­ents and what­ev­er. Okay. That’s it, you know?

[01:37:31] TK: was obliv­i­ous. I had no self aware­ness at all when I was a kid. I remem­ber it was­n’t until I was about 35 that my sis­ter told this sto­ry about how when I was at school in Grade 1, the teacher used to send me out­side with some of the kids and teach them how to read because she could­n’t keep me

[01:37:47] TK: up, like, engaged because I just moved ahead so much.

[01:37:51] TK: I did­n’t remem­ber it. But yeah, I nev­er, I nev­er had any sort of self aware­ness about how I thought or how I fit­ted in.

[01:38:01] CR: I was very aware from a very ear­ly age that I was dif­fer­ent.

[01:38:06] TK: I was always a fish out of water. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. But, um,

[01:38:14] TK: prob­a­bly because I was just not fit­ting in. Always felt like there was some­thing bet­ter than chas­ing a foot­ball or, you know, um, watch­ing TV

[01:38:24] CR: give me a book.

[01:38:25] TK: Yeah, and would be the only

[01:38:27] TK: per­son who’d vora­cious­ly read in our neigh­bour­hood. that kind of thing.

[01:38:31] CR: I’m sure I’ve told you the sto­ry, but I remem­ber, um, in pri­ma­ry school, my teacher

[01:38:37] CR: mark­ing one of my essays and call­ing me up to his desk and say­ing, what’s this word? And I said, amoe­ba. He said, that’s not a real word, you made that up. And I said, look it up in the dic­tio­nary. Mm hmm. Mm

[01:38:51] TK: I remem­ber I used to, I used to go to the library at lunchtimes at school and sit and read a book, usu­al­ly sci­ence fic­tion, but could be any­thing, pret­ty much read the whole library. And I remem­ber I got sick one day because I was asth­mat­ic as a kid and, um, would, I got tak­en to the doc­tors and the doc­tor, my father was com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent to me.

[01:39:10] TK: He’s a real man’s man, um, in that, uh, If you, you know, fol­low rug­by league or, um, play the sport, knock the, knock­about sort of guy, you were dad’s, you were num­ber one in dad’s book. Any­way, so he, he was real­ly hap­py that the, um, Doc­tor for the Aus­tralian rug­by union team was, had joined the clin­ic that we used to go to, and so he, we sort of grav­i­tat­ed to go and see him.

[01:39:36] TK: Any­way, long sto­ry, so I’m, I’m, I’m there, I’ve got some kind of chest infec­tion, and the doc­tor’s going, look I keep see­ing you with these infec­tions, tell me about what you do, you know, what’s your lifestyle, I’ve told him. He said, what do you do at lunchtime? And I said, I usu­al­ly go to the library, and he grabbed me and shook me and said, get out and run around kid.

[01:39:56] TK: I’m like, I’m sick.

[01:39:58] TK: That was the solu­tion. So I just always felt like I was a fish out of water. Because Bris­bane was, that was your typ­i­cal Bris­bane per­son when I was grow­ing up. Out­doorsy. That’s

[01:40:08] TK: fine. That’s, I was just dif­fer­ent. Did­n’t real­ly fit in.

[01:40:13] CR: And I think there are some

[01:40:14] CR: of us as kids that real­ize we’re dif­fer­ent and we’re okay with that. And there are oth­ers that don’t, like Chris­sy spent her whole life feel­ing that there was some­thing wrong with her because she strug­gled with things that oth­er peo­ple did­n’t strug­gle with and her inter­nal mono­logue was I’m not good enough, I’m, I’m lazy, I’m flighty, I’m not what I should be.

[01:40:38] CR: Prob­a­bly a result of grow­ing up in the Mor­mon church and hav­ing a, you know, Nar­cis­sis­tic father who told her those things and etc, etc, you know.

[01:40:47] TK: Yeah,

[01:40:48] CR: And if you, if you have a father that tells you those things and you love or respect that per­son, you take it on board. If like me, you hat­ed your father and want­ed to stab him to death at an ear­ly age, you’re like, screw you.

[01:40:58] CR: What do you know? You’re the one with the prob­lem, not me. So you, you, you respond to it dif­fer­ent­ly deter­mined depend­ing on your, your make­up, I think, you know.

[01:41:07] TK: Yeah, I mean, it’s com­pli­cat­ed. I remem­ber feel­ing dif­fer­ent as being an incred­i­ble moti­va­tor for me to get out, just to, as soon as I could, um, just move, get out. There’s a whole big wide world out there. There was more than just catch­ing up with the rel­a­tives every week and mow­ing, mow­ing the yard and watch­ing the foot­ball.

[01:41:27] TK: Um, uh, and, and I just, I was out. I was just so moti­vat­ed. My ears were pinned back as soon as I could. Um, and you know, and it was also kind of rebelling because mum and dad were so con­ser­v­a­tive that, you know, there had to be some­thing bet­ter than the way they lived their life. And of course, they were good peo­ple.

[01:41:45] TK: They did­n’t live their lives bad­ly. It was just

[01:41:47] TK: bor­ing, in my opin­ion. Um, and I’m prob­a­bly more like them now than what I was when I, when I

[01:41:53] CR: Ha ha

[01:41:53] TK: But for me, that was, that was my reac­tion to the fish out of, Water sort of sit­u­a­tion. It was just a, just a, it just moti­vat­ed me like a rock­et to get out of there as soon as I could to improve.

[01:42:05] TK: I’ve always been that way. I’ve, I’ve always told peo­ple, Hey, don’t com­plain if you don’t like it, do some­thing about it. And that was, you know, my own reflec­tion on not lik­ing where I was in life. That life could be bet­ter.

[01:42:17] CR: Yeah.

[01:42:18] TK: Just got out as soon as I could

[01:42:21] CR: Mm. Yeah, I left home like

[01:42:24] CR: a month after high school fin­ished. I moved to Mel­bourne from Bund­aberg. Like, first bus out of town. I’m gone. See ya, suck­ers.

[01:42:32] TK: I went to uni­ver­si­ty and moved out I think in year three or some­thing like that and as soon as I was earn­ing enough mon­ey to pay for my own rent, moved out with my girl­friend and, um, I still held a job at the local Coles, uh, and, um, I remem­ber one of the ladies, the elder ladies who worked there came over to me and she said, do you real­ize you’ve bro­ken your

[01:42:52] TK: moth­er’s heart?

[01:42:54] TK: And that was just, you know, just cut me like a knife, but I had to do

[01:42:58] TK: it. I had

[01:42:58] CR: I’m mov­ing

[01:42:59] TK: Yeah, liv­ing with my girl­friend. Yeah.

[01:43:02] CR: Mm. Uh, cause you were liv­ing in sin?

[01:43:04] TK: Well, I don’t think my moth­er cared about sin, but it was­n’t what she had in mind as a, as the way to, to progress through life. Yeah.

[01:43:11] TK: But again, that was just part of me rebelling. And like, you know, my sis­ter got mar­ried at a young age, and, but I knew that she, what she was get­ting up to before she got mar­ried.

[01:43:19] TK: So it was like, there was a cer­tain amount of hypocrisy that was tol­er­a­ble. Um, I just was­n’t that kind of per­son I was going to be upfront with it. Here’s what I’m doing. I’m liv­ing that with my girl­friend. Any­way. Every­one’s dif­fer­ent, but yeah, that sort of my fish out of water motive was a real moti­va­tion for me to

[01:43:40] TK: hur­ry up and get on with life and improve

[01:43:42] TK: things.

[01:43:43] CR: hmm. But I think dif­fer­ent peo­ple han­dle life’s

[01:43:49] TK: Oh, yeah,

[01:43:50] CR: chal­lenges in dif­fer­ent ways. You know, you and I are far more the rebel, stick it to the man. We’re going to go do our own thing. Not every­body is con­struct­ed that way.

[01:44:03] TK: no, And I, you know, it’s a very sim­ple analy­sis, but I think it comes down to where you are in the fam­i­ly as you’re grow­ing up. Like I was the eldest. So, you know, a com­mon trait, I think, of elder peo­ple are you’re inde­pen­dent. Like there’s a cer­tain age you become a sur­ro­gate par­ent, you’re respon­si­ble for the younger kids.

[01:44:22] TK: And.

[01:44:22] CR: Mm hmm. Mm.

[01:44:23] TK: And you know, you’re left to your own devices a lot more. Um, and so I was always inde­pen­dent from that, from an ear­ly age, being brought up in that kind of envi­ron­ment. Um, you know, as soon as anoth­er kid came along, they got all your atten­tion. Um, so you were kind of for­got­ten after that. And, which is good and bad.

[01:44:41] TK: You can get off and do what you want to do with­out any sort of, um, some­one watch­ing over you. But, you know, you sort of real­ize that you’re on your own. You got to make it your­self, make things hap­pen for your­self. So. I found that sort of com­mon trait in old­er peo­ple, but like, um, peo­ple who are mid­dle, like a Rud­dy, who’s the mid­dle child, they’re much more about keep­ing the peace and, um, for­giv­ing of peo­ple’s trans­gres­sions, because they’re always the kid in the mid­dle of all the mael­strom, and they’re try­ing to pad­dle and, you know, tread water and keep every­thing togeth­er.

[01:45:10] TK: So I think, I think where you fit in the fam­i­ly and what your fam­i­ly was like

[01:45:14] TK: is a big part of how you end up.

[01:45:17] CR: Mm. Lots of deter­mi­nants. Lots of fac­tors go into it.

[01:45:24] TK: Yeah. and Fox being an only child will have a, you know, dif­fer­ent upbring­ing

[01:45:28] TK: to your twins had, when they had each oth­er.

[01:45:31] CR: Mm. Mm.

[01:45:33] TK: Alex is an only child and I think, you know, it made her what she is. She’s, she was

[01:45:37] TK: always an adult from about the age of about six. Because she would just hang

[01:45:43] CR: I can vouch for that.

[01:45:44] TK: yeah.

[01:45:46] CR: Yeah, I’ve always said Alex has always been an adult. She’s just got­ten old­er, but she’s always been an adult as long as I’ve done. She’s always been Alex. Yeah, mature beyond her

[01:45:59] TK: Yeah, no, exact­ly.

[01:46:01] CR: All right. That’s the show for this week. QAV a good Christ­mas.

[01:46:05] CR: Every­one,

[01:46:06] TK: Mer­ry Christ­mas

[01:46:07] CR: with a Q, Q some­thing.

[01:46:12] CR: Are we going to do a show next week or are we going to take it off?

[01:46:15] TK: I think I was think­ing of tak­ing it off. I mean, because it’s new, it’s New Year’s Eve and we’re hav­ing our last of the fire­works watch­ing par­ty

[01:46:23] TK: back in Syd­ney. So I’ll either be

[01:46:24] TK: trav­el­ing or set­ting up for that. So I’d prob­a­bly pre­fer to have it off.

[01:46:28] CR: I’ll either put out the inter­view with Phil or I’ll do a best of or none of the above, depend­ing on what hap­pens.

[01:46:35] TK: a week off your­self, mate.

[01:46:37] CR: I might do

[01:46:37] TK: yeah.

[01:46:38] CR: Go to the beach, get some sun.

[01:46:42] CR: Thank you, TK. Thank you, every­body. I hope you’ve had a great week. We’ve had some nice emails from peo­ple thank­ing us late­ly, which is nice.

[01:46:49] CR: We’ve had a good year. Thank you for that. Thank you for every­one who’s been lis­ten­ing this year. And we will talk to you in 2025.

[01:47:01] TK: Thanks, Cam. Thanks for all your good work.