QAV 817 — Smart Metal and Dumb Markets

QAV AU 817

[00:00:00]

TK: But are record­ing this, aren’t you?

Cameron: I am record­ing this. Stop. That’s the only way to get you to stop talk­ing about Ben­ny Hill is to hit the record but­ton.

TK: Oh, man. I was hav­ing fun

Cameron: Yeah, well, you can still have fun. Just need to talk about invest­ing and have fun. Wel­come back to QAV.

TK: pages of dif­fer­ences in account­ing stan­dards ver­sus Aus­tralian account­ing stan­dards.

Cameron: Uh, well, you’re wel­come. I like the fact that you said you used, you used chat GPT to sum­ma­rize it, I said to Chris­sy, cracked Tony. He’s using chat GPT to sum­ma­rize stuff now. There you go.

TK: out, I pulled out the sum­ma­ry about two hours ago to prep for the show and I’m going, this sum­ma­ry’s use­less. It’s real­ly bad. it’s just too high lev­el. Does­n’t

Cameron: Oh, your sum­ma­ry that you made. Yeah. Right.

TK: don’t, not that I made the chat.

Cameron: Yeah.

TK: mate,

Cameron: Oh, yes. Yeah. It’s blame the, blame the,

TK: and we both agree it’s it was, it’s about the stan­dard that a [00:01:00] pret­ty poor grad in cor­po­rate life.

You’d have to dou­ble check their

Cameron: Wow.

TK: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: Well, yeah, there’s some truth to that, but

TK: Oh, thanks.

Cameron: depends.

TK: not

Cameron: The, it depends on what you’re doing with it. But, um, yeah, look, they’ve still got a long way to go before it’s as reli­able as it needs to be. And then fun­ny thing is the, the, the lat­est mod­els, the more advanced deep rea­son­ing mod­els like oh three that they came out with a few weeks ago, has a high­er hal­lu­ci­na­tion rate than the old­er mod­els. They haven’t quite worked out why that is yet. But, uh,

TK: It is prob­a­bly

Cameron: yeah.

TK: Ben­ny

Cameron: Yeah,

TK: Yeah,

Cameron: like you,

TK: it’s, yeah.

Cameron: wel­come back to QAV. This is episode 8 1 7. This is the 29th of April, 2025. Uh, how’s your week been tk?

TK: Yeah. Good, real­ly good. Thank you.

Cameron: That’s [00:02:00] good.

TK: had a nice din­ner on Sat­ur­day night. We can talk about this in after hours, I sup­pose, but Yeah. And good.

Cameron: Oh, okay.

TK: It was a birth­day

Cameron: Well it’s been a good week on the mar­ket too. The mar­ket’s been up again for rea­sons that escape me ’cause there’s noth­ing good going on in the world. But, uh, you know, the mar­kets swings and round­abouts, uh, real­ly, isn’t it? It’s,

TK: was the worst of times.

Cameron: is that you, you quot­ed that last week?

TK: age of increduli­ty. Yep.

Cameron: it’s, uh, it’s sort of a crazy time and, and now more than ever on this jour­ney of mine in QAV and invest­ing, I learned to just. Like, if I try and fig­ure out why the mar­ket’s hav­ing a good week or why it’s hav­ing a bad week, I can’t make any sense of it. I just sort of ignore it and, and just, uh, go, uh,

TK: out

Cameron: you know

TK: Yeah.

Cameron: who the, who the hell knows who, who try, who can make log­ic [00:03:00] out of it’s going.

TK: As some­one said to me today, like every­one’s focused on the US but we have an elec­tion com­ing up this Sat­ur­day as well in Aus­tralia.

Cameron: Who we,

TK: Yeah. And like is that gonna have any on the stock mar­ket? No, prob­a­bly not.

It’s

Cameron: I did the, um, I did the ABC’s Vote Com­pass ques­tion­naire ear­li­er. Have you done it this year?

TK: Not this year. I did it when it first came out a cou­ple of years ago. It must have been the last elec­tion. What did you come

Cameron: The ques­tions were inter­est­ing. I came out left of she Gue­vara man. It’s, uh, you know, they have a lit­tle, they have a matrix. They had to, my mine went out on the left hand side of the matrix. It sort of fell out of the matrix. Yeah, yeah. No, actu­al­ly it was fun­ny because

TK: to find your, uh, posi­tion on the, on the.

Cameron: they, um, they give you this [00:04:00] lit­tle, um, after­wards, results thing that shows you which can­di­dates you agreed with, uh, and what per­cent­age of the time. And I actu­al­ly had some, appar­ent­ly where I agreed with the one Nation par­ty and some where I agreed with the lib­er­als and with the greens. But, um, it was, I was, there you go.

So I’m spread across the board, but most­ly left of Shara. And it was just like, should the gov­ern­ment pay more for edu­ca­tion? Yes. Should it pay more for, um, cov­er the cost of abor­tions? Yes. Should, should we have the Abo­rig­i­nal and Tor­res Strait Islander flag at all events? Yes. Like, it was just all

TK: And

Cameron: seemed to me to be very,

TK: the

Cameron: very basic ques­tions.

TK: you ask, only good analy­sis for research is con­join analy­sis. The ques­tions need to be, [00:05:00] should I pay more for, should I pay more for edu­ca­tion if I have to pay more in tax­es to fund it? got­ta give peo­ple a choice between two.

Cameron: Uh,

TK: Yeah.

Cameron: that’s too com­pli­cat­ed.

TK: like you do research and you’d say, what do peo­ple think of fuel prices too high?

It’s like, yeah, okay, so you pay less for fuel and not have clean toi­lets? Would you pay less for fuel and not have a con­ve­nience store? Would you pay less for fuel and only be able to fill up between in busi­ness hours, et cetera, et cetera. So you got­ta do a con­joint to work it out. Would you dri­ve more than 20 Ks to pay less for your fuel, et cetera, et cetera.

Cameron: There you go.

TK: Yeah.

Cameron: That’s why you get paid the big bucks, Tony.

TK: why I did when I had the

Cameron: Yeah,

TK: depart­ment

Cameron: did.

TK: Yeah.

Cameron: And, uh, your mate, Mark Car­ney, looks like he’s won the Cana­di­an [00:06:00] elec­tion. Is that his name? Mark Car­ney.

TK: It is. Yeah. And it looks like,

Cameron: Mm.

TK: I saw some­thing before I jumped on the show on Face­book say­ing that, uh, the, the leader of the con­ser­v­a­tive par­ty may lose their writ­ing as well, which could be a pre­cur­sor to our elec­tions on Sat­ur­day.

Cameron: Mm. You know, we live next door to Dut­ton’s, um, elec­torate here, and he, there’s an inde­pen­dent run­ning against him, Ellie Smith, and she seems to have a mad sort of sup­port base. Um, peo­ple lin­ing up with her, they call ’em, lit­tle card things. And her bill­boards are up every­where and posters every­where, Face­book ads every­where. So I don’t know, uh, what the chances are of him los­ing his seat, but he seems to have some pret­ty stiff com­pe­ti­tion from the inde­pen­dence. So that’ll be inter­est­ing.

TK: It will be very inter­est­ing. I think he’s the nar­row­est mar­gin in Queens­land. [00:07:00] It’s like 1.6%, some­thing like that. And uh, giv­en that he’s got a cam­paign all over the coun­try and not just in his own elec­torate, it be dif­fi­cult.

Cameron: And I, I saw a thing on the A b, C today that said, uh, we will get to invest­ing peo­ple. Trust me. Um, that said,

TK: or

Cameron: that the 2020,

TK: the oth­er.

Cameron: the 2022 elec­tion the low­est pri­ma­ry vote for the lib­er­al par­ty since the par­ty was found­ed in 1944. And the Labor Par­ty had its low­est pri­ma­ry vote since at least 1934.

TK: Yeah. And if you break it down even fur­ther, I think you’re refer­ring to the coali­tion vote. The lib­er­al vot­ers now, I think bare­ly 20%.

Cameron: Wow.

TK: Hmm.

Cameron: Well, any­way,

TK: Yeah.

Cameron: it’ll be a, we’ll see what hap­pens on the week­end. Um,

TK: affect

Cameron: the, the, if the.

TK: I don’t think

Cameron: No, I don’t think it’s gonna have a [00:08:00] big impact on, oh, this is big. ’cause we know you don’t make pre­dic­tions.

TK: Although my, uh, my, um, bet on labor form­ing major­i­ty gov­ern­ment has now short­ened from sev­en to one to, I think it’s $2 20 now. It’s now the short­est priced odds BET fair.

Cameron: Right.

TK: Mm-hmm. So I’ve

Cameron: Well, let me just do a bit of a, I haven’t, I haven’t done a port­fo­lio update for a while, so let me do that. Uh, the dum­my port­fo­lio for this finan­cial year is cur­rent­ly up around 13%

TK: Gee,

Cameron: per annum for the finan­cial year. Cap­i­tal gain is about 7.2% and the income return is about five point a half. The, this is first the STW or the SPDR 200, which is up just under 8% for the finan­cial year. And if I do all time. The dum­my port­fo­lio is track­ing, uh, about [00:09:00] 13.15% per annum eight and a half for the bench­mark. So not doing twice as good for some rea­son.

TK: long term, has­n’t it?

Cameron: Yeah, it has dropped back a lit­tle bit, but hav­ing a good, uh, finan­cial year.

TK: Yeah, that’s a good return. I don’t

Cameron: Uh.

TK: much, else in the world get­ting dou­ble dig­it returns this, this year, giv­en what’s going on.

Cameron: Ah, well, there you go. And you know, there’s, let me see. Well, like what have I, uh, I think I have had to trade some­thing recent­ly. I sold RMSA cou­ple of weeks ago. That was the last thing I sold when we decid­ed that they got a red flag and replaced them with IGL. That’s real­ly been the only trad­ing I’ve done.

Oh, no. I also sold, sor­ry, on the same day, 16th of April, I also sold [00:10:00] SUL and MAH and bought TBR.

TK: sor­ry to inter­rupt my sto­ry of SUL as I bought, I, I hold it myself. I declare that and every, every time I get a night­ly, uh, alert to say the cell it, I check it the next day. And it was back above, its its cell

Cameron: Hmm,

TK: so I still

Cameron: hmm

TK: and it’s, it’s now head­ing up above its cell line again.

We’ll see.

Cameron: hmm. My super port­fo­lio not doing as well. It’s up about 6.2 or 3% for the finan­cial year, slight­ly less than the index. It’s come down, was doing a lot bet­ter than the index back in April, but it’s tak­en a bit of a beat­ing recent­ly for some rea­son. And what the light group, let me check the light group.

This finan­cial year, the light group, [00:11:00] all four port­fo­lios togeth­er is up 10 point some­thing per­cent ver­sus again, the bench­mark just less than eight. So doing well too. So there you go. That’s across the board. My port­fo­lio updates, not the US but we’ll do a US show after this and I’ll do it then.

TK: Very

Cameron: How’s your port­fo­lio doing? Do you know? You even looked?

TK: No, I haven’t looked.

No. Haven’t

Cameron: Okay, well, um, I know you’re gonna do a pulled pork on BIS lat­er, so I dun­no if I should skip my BIS thing, but I will men­tion it ’cause I near­ly bought, well, I, um, was gonna buy it or did buy it or some­thing yes­ter­day, uh, for a light port­fo­lio, I think. But I noticed that, uh, steel is a com­mod­i­ty sell and has been for quite some time sor­ry, this is, I, I, I hold BIS in one of the port­fo­lios, the light port­fo­lios.

TK: not, a buy on the

Cameron: No. [00:12:00] I hold it and for some rea­son had­n’t real­ized it was a steel thing and a steel cell. And steel has been a sell for like five or six months. So I went to sell it, but then I saw that the biz price has been going up

TK: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: and I was, again, I was like, I’m such a genius when it comes to screw­ing stuff up. And it always goes well for me. Uh, like the RMS buy the oth­er day. Um, and so then I looked into it a lit­tle bit more and saw that accord­ing to their web­site, they’re Aus­trali­a’s only man­u­fac­tur­er of high ten­sile and abra­sion resis­tant quenched and tem­pered steel plate. And of course I under­stood, uh, none of that. So I asked cha cha cheap PD what the hell that all means? it said, uh, yeah, they’re, it’s like very, very spe­cial­ty steel that goes into mak­ing, know, mil­i­tary. I think they make Iron­man suit and Cap­tain Amer­i­ca Shield and shit like that,

TK: Yeah, not quite.

Cameron: [00:13:00] so,

TK: port.

Cameron: right. But they’re not a straight steel play. Their, their share price does­n’t seem to fol­low steel price of, if I look at it over the last five years.

So I’m think­ing maybe we should­n’t clas­si­fy them as a steel com­mod­i­ty stock and sell them and buy them based on the steel com­mod­i­ty. Do you wan­na wait till you pulled pork before you com­ment on that?

TK: Um, no, Mike, well, I can do it now. No, I think they are a steel com­mod­i­ty stock still, and in fact, they called declin­ing steel price out as one of the issues that they’re bas­ing against, in either their lat­est finan­cial update or their annu­al report from last year. I picked it up when I was doing research, uh, into the com­pa­ny.

Yeah. So, no, that, it’s def­i­nite­ly a steel com­mod­i­ty stock. Um, we’ll cov­er it in the pulled port, but it’s been going up because it’s now part of the All Lords as of this year. And their steel is

Cameron: Oh,

TK: lot in the defense indus­try, which I think is a bit of fla­vor of the month now that, uh, [00:14:00] the US is kind of forc­ing coun­tries to raise their defense spend­ing.

Cameron: so should I sell it?

TK: If it was me, I would, if it’s going up, keep it and then sell it when it turns down.

Cameron: Right. Well, it’s,

TK: um, make the most of the, well, it’s not a sell, it’s a, it’s a com­mod­i­ty sell with steel. And, um,

Cameron: Hmm.

TK: again, fore­shad­ow­ing the pulled pork steel is a falling knife, but it’s, it actu­al­ly is pret­ty close to its buy, buy price.

Cameron: Right. Well, if I look at, um, let me see if I’ve got my alerts sheet open.

TK: point to make is I’m about to do it as a pulled pork, so you should sell it right now before I get, before I get into it.

Cameron: Good point. let me just, you know, [00:15:00] biz I’ve held since in light port­fo­lio since Octo­ber 23. It’s up 64%. Um, I’ve got the sell price at a dol­lar 51. It’s cur­rent­ly trad­ing at $3 43, so you know, it’s nowhere near any of my cell trig­gers. I’m not using the steel com­mod­i­ty cell as a trig­ger, it’s not gonna breach any of its oth­er cell trig­gers for a long time unless pants catch on fire.

So, I don’t know,

TK: I,

Cameron: what do I do? I wise one,

TK: I would, uh, check the steel price next week. Next time you do it, uh, a down­load and just, uh, keep your eye on it because I think it might turn up into a buy in which case you hold biz.

Cameron: in which case we just pre­tend this nev­er hap­pened. Okay, good.

TK: Well, [00:16:00] I, uh,

Cameron: Um

TK: It’s, um,

Cameron: hmm.

TK: it’s a, you can sell it. It’s a sell. Come on. Do these a sell, you’ve just real­ized. But if you have a look at the, the graph, it’s, it’s like cents away from the, from a buy price. So I just give it a cou­ple of days to see if it becomes a buy in which case can you con­tin­ue to hold it?

Cameron: All right. Well, the oth­er thing I want­ed to update every­one on is the Wikipedia Pr/OpCaf sit­u­a­tion. So just to remind peo­ple, a few weeks ago now, one of the shows we were doing, I think it was a US show, you picked up on the fact that the calf num­bers for a stock that I had bought made no sense. And I cre­at­ed a new col­umn in my Stock Edia check­list did a man­u­al calf cal­cu­la­tion that sits along­side their prop calf cal­cu­la­tion.

And I com­pared the two across the whole list of stocks. And yeah, they were [00:17:00] way off, uh, way, way, way off. Yeah.

TK: Oh

Cameron: So I emailed Elio di toma­to and then did­n’t get a reply, and then found out that the Aus­tralian Wikipedia team vapor­ized late last year and just nev­er told us. So I reached out to their British team and they took three weeks to reply to me until I pinged their CEO on Twit­ter and said, uh, does any­one still work there?

Then some­body got back to me and they said, in our cal­cu­la­tion, we use mar­ket cap and divide it by the oper­at­ing cash flow to get price over oper­at­ing cash flow. Note that for both, we would use the state­ment cur­ren­cy to ensure, like, for like, you should be able to ver­i­fy this by adding mark cap oper­at­ing cash flow and price to oper­at­ing ca price to oper­at­ing cash flow to your tables, and then check­ing that they match. And I [00:18:00] said your num­bers and because they asked me what my, how I cal­cu­lat­ed mine and I said, I take the price per share and I divide it by the oper­at­ing cash flow per share. And my price to oper­at­ing cash flow num­ber. Right. Is that right? It’s pret­ty straight­for­ward.

TK: Now, now, hang on. You need to get the cash­flow per share first. Oper­at­ing

Cameron: Yeah. They have, they report an oper­at­ing cash flow per share in their

TK: Gotcha. Okay.

Cameron: table. So I take the price per the clos­ing price per share,

TK: Yep.

Cameron: divide it by the oper­at­ing cash flow per share.

TK: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: Yeah, that’s my price to oper­at­ing cash­flow num­ber. Right? It’s pret­ty sim­ple. did check it with chat GPT to just make sure I had­n’t gone com­plete­ly insane and said, no, no, that’s right. So their num­bers and my num­bers are com­plete­ly way off. So, um, I shot them an email back and, and I includ­ed a table to show them the dif­fer­ences. So just to give, and these are US stocks. Just to give you [00:19:00] an exam­ple, um, we have, uh, so this is from the buy list, us buy list that I did the oth­er day. Um, tk, their price to oper­at­ing cash flow is 1.39 minus 5K EP.

Theirs is 1.01 minus three. SYF, theirs is 1.93 minus one. So in that case, mine is low­er. theirs is 2.42 minus sev­en TEN. Theirs is three, uh, 1.53 minus five. So, big dif­fer­ences, um, and I asked Chachi Kapi about it and it said there could be adjust­ments to the oper­at­ing cash flow fig­ure, nor­mal­iza­tions or smooth­ing dif­fer­ent time­frames being used, EEG for­ward esti­mates ver­sus TTM use of an aver­age mar­ket cap instead of a point in time mar­ket cap. between basic [00:20:00] and dilut­ed share counts affect­ing per share val­ues. Point being, it’s, um, it’s a big dif­fer­ence and it, and it affects every­thing in stock. Edia, so I know a few of you out there in Aus­tralia are using stock edia. My rec­om­men­da­tion is cre­ate your own col­umn. Price per share divid­ed by oper­at­ing cash­flow per share. And use that one your scor­ing, or your fil­ter­ing, uh, as well as the scor­ing. Actu­al­ly, I dun­no if I’ve changed my algo­rithm to change the scor­ing on that. I should remem­ber to do that.

TK: So their cal­cu­la­tion should still be right, ’cause it’s mar­ket cap divid­ed by oper­at­ing cash flow total, which should be the same as divid­ing both sides by shares to get a cash flow per share and the stock price per share. they should be the same results. So then the, the dif­fer­ence has got­ta be on [00:21:00] the num­ber of shares that we’re using.

Right. So yeah,

Cameron: Yeah.

TK: yeah, but yeah.

Cameron: You would think

TK: You would think, all right,

Cameron: you.

TK: have to do some dig­ging around in that myself and try and work it out too.

You haven’t, you haven’t done it line, line by line for the Aus­tralian buy list, have you? ’cause I remem­ber you did all that to rec­on­cile it back. Before we com­mit­ted to using Stock Edia.

Cameron: I haven’t checked the Pr/OpCaf cal­cu­la­tions, ours ver­sus theirs in the Aus­tralian list. No. What?

TK: You did. Orig­i­nal­ly when you were putting togeth­er the, you used to do a

Cameron: Yeah.

TK: Edia ver­sus Stock Doc­tor, and then com­pare them.

Cameron: Yeah. So I, I did com­pare the BS to make sure that the BS up, which they did.

TK: Hmm.

Cameron: Um, I did also at some stage do. The, the raw [00:22:00] data, um, Wikipedi­a’s raw data for a stock and Stock Doc­tor, raw data for a stock, um, on top of each oth­er. So I could see if there was any that were wild­ly out. And there were a cou­ple of things like the a, a aver­age dai­ly trade was one that was

TK: Right.

Cameron: very, dif­fer­ent that I spent some time work­ing out. So,

TK: The only rea­son I’m ask­ing is

Cameron: uh

TK: up in Aus­tralia, but they don’t in the us then

Cameron: hmm.

TK: it could be a like a dif­fer­ent account­ing prin­ci­ple or some­thing in the US that we don’t know about.

Cameron: Well, there’s anoth­er 17 page report I can

TK: Good.

Cameron: pre­pare for you.

TK: I’ll far up the Ben­ny Hill YouTube chan­nel.

Cameron: All right, well, I’ll check those things, but that’s just an update for peo­ple. Be care­ful of that. Once you’ve got on your list of things, tk.

TK: Yeah. I got noth­ing but the pulled pork.[00:23:00]

Cameron: Good. We got a ques­tion from Dave.

TK: sure. Go hit me with it.

Cameron: Well, we’ll do that first then.

TK: Yeah.

Cameron: He says, I’m hav­ing a look at last week’s Paul Pork CWP Cedar Wood prop­er­ties.

TK: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: I noticed the oper­at­ing cash flow is neg­a­tive based on an as report­ed basis in Stock. Doc­tor oper­at­ing cash­flow is pos­i­tive on an annu­al­ized basis. Can you remind me why we use annu­al­ized and not as report­ed?

Thanks, Dave from Newie.

TK: Yeah, good ques­tion Dave. Um. I guess that I have a bias towards smooth­ing the oper­at­ing cash flow. ’cause com­pa­nies can be a, they can be sea­son­al. So if you think of a depart­ment store like Mey­er, they will always have a good Christ­mas and get lots of cash in, and then have a lean time the sec­ond half where the cash flow drops.

So Stock Doc­tor just by default adds half and the pro­ceed­ing half to get her to give you a rolling num­ber, [00:24:00] which smooths out cash­flow, which is how I like to look at it as well. So you can smooth out sea­son­al­i­ty. I guess also prob­a­bly the case for a devel­op­er, like see the Woods where they may have had a big trans­ac­tion, like they a whole bunch of apart­ments or some­thing in one half and have a high cash flow, and then half they’re buy­ing land and have a low cash flow or what­ev­er.

so smooth­ing, it’s good, but that’s the only rea­son. I mean, there’s, it’s, it’s real­ly a pref­er­ence. You could do it half by half and then you’re prob­a­bly more like­ly to get in and out of. Stocks and if you smooth the cash flow, um, you know, it could be, the dif­fi­cul­ty is for a com­pa­ny like Cedar Woods is, is the half with neg­a­tive cash flow the start of a trend or is it just sim­ply the tim­ing of Um, since you know, it’s, it’s a pret­ty good com­pa­ny on all its oth­er met­rics, it’s prob­a­bly gonna be a cycli­cal thing. So that’s why I like smooth­ing out 12 months worth of [00:25:00] cash­flow. But it’s real­ly just a, a pref­er­ence and it’s some­thing Stock Doc­tor always lent towards as well and those num­bers eas­i­ly.

So that’s kind of where I’ve default­ed over the years.

Cameron: Hey, did we wan­na talk about the sale of Stock Doc­tor?

TK: Yeah. What do you wan­na say about it?

Cameron: Well, uh, I did­n’t know until you told me that they have been sold. I don’t know what hap­pened to my, the press release, but, um, they’ve been sold to some sort of finan­cial ser­vices busi­ness.

TK: Yeah.

a com­pa­ny called Prime Finan­cial Group. I, I’ve got a feel­ing that may have been on the buy list many, many years ago.

Cameron: Right.

TK: is,

Cameron: Yeah. Sounds famil­iar.

TK: yeah, so, uh, wealth man­age­ment, finan­cial plan­ning group. Uh, I guess, you know, they’ve, they’ve bought a data­base of cus­tomers plus a cou­ple of funds, which kind of fits in nice­ly to what they do.

Um, [00:26:00] so it makes sense. But yeah, uh, I

Cameron: A roll up.

TK: don’t know the rea­son why the sale hap­pened. Tim’s get­ting prob­a­bly around at my age, so he is prob­a­bly think­ing about retir­ing. Uh, I don’t know. I don’t know what the rea­son is. I think he’s got a, an earnout peri­od, so I’ll still keep work­ing. I don’t know what changes there’ll be.

It’s a bit of a watch this space. But yeah, it was inter­est­ing to see

Cameron: Hmm,

TK: Well, they’re, they’re, I guess they’re now part of a list­ed com­pa­ny, so they’re enter­ing the, the ASX

Cameron: hmm hmm. All right. Well, why don’t you get into your pulled pork then? Tk.

TK: Yeah, biz alloy. So one of the rea­sons for pick­ing this com­pa­ny is that I haven’t talked about it before and it’s get­ting. Hard these days to find a com­pa­ny that’s, um, has pos­i­tive sen­ti­ment, um, and is hav­ing, not hav­ing a Josephine moment, uh, giv­en the tur­moil on the mar­ket. So I’ve picked biz alloy steel group to talk about [00:27:00] a, it’s inter­est­ing.

Uh, b it’s way above sell price, but it is below, its by price, so it’s not a buy at the moment. And as we talked about before, the under­ly­ing com­mod­i­ty, which is steel, is still a sell, but is a few cents below. Its by price. So this is, I guess for back­ground and, um, it’s a watch the space. I’m not sug­gest­ing any­one should race out and biz Oy steel.

And it’s, uh, you know, not, not trig­ger­ing our bings at the moment, but it is on the buy list wait­ing for sen­ti­ment to, um, improve in the steel mar­ket. What is it? Um, a, it’s a com­pa­ny that sells a par­tic­u­lar type of steel as, as we dis­cussed before. does that via a cou­ple of, um, major­i­ty owned dis­tri­b­u­tion busi­ness­es.

One in Indone­sia called B PT Bim­mer, B alloy in Thai­land B Alloy Thai­land, and, uh, has a part of a joint ven­ture called the [00:28:00] ESE Coop­er­a­tive Joint Ven­ture. Um, which is, oh, sor­ry. It’s, it’s, it’s, the busi­ness is a Chi­nese coop­er­a­tive joint ven­ture and the com­pa­ny is called Biz Alloy Gang. Brack­ets Shang Dong Steel Plate Com­pa­ny.

So it sells basi­cal­ly mar­kets, um, uh, tem­pered steel into Aus­tralia and into Asia and Chi­na. What they say about them­selves from their web­site, their prod­ucts are engi­neered for extreme envi­ron­ments sup­port­ing key indus­tries such as min­ing and defense in the resource sec­tor. Biz alloy pro­vide high wear pro­tec­tion steel while our pro­tec­tion plates are designed to safe­guard per­son­nel.

Biz alloy steel’s is Aus­trali­a’s only proces­sor of quenched and tem­pered high strength abra­sion resis­tant and pro­tec­tion grade alloy steel plates, biz alloys, unique stand­alone heat treat­ment facil­i­ty in Anand near Wol­lon­gong is a high­ly [00:29:00] auto­mat­ed and effi­cient oper­a­tion, pro­vid­ing a rel­a­tive­ly low cost base, allow­ing it to com­pete with a vari­ety of import­ed prod­ucts dur­ing the six months end­ed.

31 Decem­ber, 2024. uti­lized green feed steel sup­plied main­ly by ne neigh­bor­ing blue BlueScope Steel in Wol­lon­gong com­pli­ment­ed with, uh, select­ed sup­ply from inter­na­tion­al Green feed sup­pli­ers. So, um, that’s, uh, they do. Uh, guess the ques­tion is how is their prod­uct dif­fer­ent to some­thing that BlueScope Steel will pro­duce?

And, uh, they use what’s called quench­ing and tem­per­ing pro­duce steel plates that, uh, are more resis­tant to, um, to, bend­ing and brak­ing. So what is quench­ing and tem­per­ing? Uh, they are process­es that strength­en and hard­en mate­ri­als like steel and oth­er iron based alloys. The process of quench­ing or quench hard­en­ing involves heat­ing the [00:30:00] mate­r­i­al and then rapid­ly cool­ing it to set the com­po­nents into PA place as quick­ly as pos­si­ble.

The process is tight­ly con­trolled with the heat­ing tem­per­a­ture cool­ing method. Cool­ing sub­stance and cool­ing speed, all depen­dent upon the type of mate­r­i­al being quenched and the desired hard­ness. A typ­i­cal heat­ing range is between 800 and 900 degrees Cel­sius with extra care being tak­en to keep the tem­per­a­ture as sta­ble as pos­si­ble, um, after the mate­r­i­al has been quenched to its hard­est state.

The process of tem­per­ing is used to achieve even greater tough­ness and duc­til­i­ty by dec, by decreas­ing the hard­ness. Tem­per­ing is achieved by heat­ing the quench mate­r­i­al to below the crit­i­cal point for a set peri­od of time, then allow­ing it to cool and still air, and that’s usu­al­ly around 500 degrees.

The ben­e­fits are that it becomes, the steel becomes less brit­tle more duc­tile with­out sac­ri­fic­ing too much in the way of hard­ness. In the [00:31:00] com­bi­na­tion of these two process­es that pro­duces a hard­er, tougher steel, that’s more weld­able and duc­tile and ordi­nary car­bon steel, while it takes longer to man­u­fac­ture the increased strength, makes up the delay.

Um, what does duct duc­tile mean? uh, duc­til­i­ty is how much the steel can deflect before it frac­tures, so it can move a lit­tle bit bend before it breaks. so. What you use that kind of steel plat­ing for, it’s used very wide­ly. Uh, it’s used for things like, um, drag line buck­ets for buck­ets in, so trac­tors, uh, it’s used for steel plat­ing on tanks, defense mate­ri­als, that kind of thing.

So, and it’s that kind of area, which I think has giv­en it a bit of a tail at the moment. Um, the fence stocks are being bought since, uh, Trump came into pow­er. Um, and, [00:32:00] uh, the world is start­ing to real­ize that it can’t nec­es­sar­i­ly rely on the US uh, as an ally and they have to start spend­ing more on them­selves.

It’s part of the Aus­tralian elec­tion. Both par­ty major par­ties have come out and said that they’re going to com­mit more to defense going for­ward. Um, biz alloy have been select­ed as a sup­pli­er to the orca sub­marines when and if they come to Aus­tralia and get built an Ade­laide. Um, they were hop­ing. To, uh, lead into, um, a busi­ness in the US based on that.

I guess that’s up in the air now with the tar­iffs that have been. Applied to over­seas man­u­fac­tur­ing, although it was­n’t clear from my research whether they were gonna open a plant in the US just work from Aus­tralia. So, uh, defens­es is, um, one part of the busi­ness and it’s doing well. does come with some risks.

They, there have been, I don’t know, know, what Part B is play­ing in sup­ply­ing the [00:33:00] Israeli defense forces with steel, but there have been some protests at their plant, around what’s going on in, uh, Pales­tine at the moment. Um, uh, the sort of fair­ly basic research I did, I could­n’t find any­thing to sub­stan­ti­ate that they were sup­ply­ing the idea forth with, um, with, uh, ten­sile steel, but they could be.

But look, it’s always gonna be the case if you are a defense con­trac­tor that you’re gonna have, um, some con­tro­ver­sy attract­ed to you. So that’s just for, for back­ground. What else can I say about them? They, as I said before, they were added to the, your Lords as of March, 2025. And peo­ple know from the past pulled porks that that can, um, give a com­pa­ny a leg up as index funds have to buy them.

Um, uh, that’s anoth­er rea­son why they’ve had, they’ve been, um, turn­ing up in the most recent, uh, sort of trend peri­od. It cer­tain­ly isn’t because of their results. If I looked at their most recent results for the [00:34:00] half 20, 24, I, I, sor­ry, I should­n’t say it’s, um, their, their bad, but the rev­enue was down 7.5%.

Prof­it, how­ev­er, was up 5.2%. So the com­pa­ny has had, sales decline and there’s a num­ber of rea­sons for that, that they go into. A of of those issues are that, uh, um, with all the tar­iffs com­ing on, com­modi­ties have tak­en a bit of a down­turn. I’m talk­ing about coal and iron ore in par­tic­u­lar, and they, they are sup­plies of, uh, of this kind of ten­sile steel to the min­ing sec­tor.

So some of that busi­ness­es has been cool­ing and they’ve also faced issues in Indone­sia. kind of, uh, I guess as a, um, fore­shad­ow­ing of what’s hap­pen­ing with the us, Indone­sia is now in the last sort of 12 months, has, has, um. Placed import restric­tions on over­seas com­pa­nies send­ing steel into Indone­sia.

they’ve, they’ve [00:35:00] been able to, um, their busi­ness to, um, respond to that de decrease in rev­enue by, um, get­ting the prof­it mar­gins up, um, on what they do cur­rent­ly off offer. So, prof­its up, rev­enue’s down. on the pos­i­tive side of things, gear­ing is down to almost noth­ing, which is prob­a­bly one of the rea­sons why they’re start­ing to appear on buy list.

Um. Anoth­er thing to note is the chair­man owns 16% of the com­pa­ny. Um, but he’s not a founder. So a guy called Balkan, or Balkan, B‑A-L-K-I‑N, was a, uh, glob­al basic mate­ri­als indus­try spe­cial­ist through 25 years as a con­sul­tant and senior part­ner and leader of McK­in­sey and Com­pa­ny’s glob­al basic mate­ri­als prac­tice.

So he joined the com­pa­ny, um, uh, a few years ago now as a, as a major share­hold­er earn­ing 16%. Not a founder, but cer­tain­ly some of the large expe­ri­ence in the, uh, in the sec­tor. Uh, [00:36:00] the QAV num­bers, um, a DT for this com­pa­ny is 250,000. So it’s, uh, it’s, it’ll suit. You know, peo­ple with port­fo­lios of sort of three quar­ters of a mil­lion to a mil­lion dol­lars.

Um, not a, not the large investors, but cer­tain­ly, um, a lot of peo­ple, um, can buy it. share price that I’m using for the analy­sis is $3 43, which is way above the ib, one of a dol­lar 71. this com­pa­ny does­n’t have much ana­lyst cov­er­age, so we don’t have a fore­cast earn­ings per share. So we don’t have an IV two or a con­sen­sus fore­cast to com­pare.

The share price to equi­ty per share is only a dol­lar 61, and even with, um, a 30% bump to that, tak­ing it to $2 and nine, we still can’t buy this com­pa­ny for book val­ue or book val­ue plus 30. can’t score it for that. It does have a strong yield. It’s 5.67%, so it’s get­ting close to our, um, thresh­old to score it, but just slight­ly below it so it does­n’t, [00:37:00] does­n’t score for that Stock Doc­tor finan­cial health.

Uh, and trend is strong and steady. So it scores well for that. Edia qual­i­ty rank is 92 out of a hun­dred, and F score is sev­en out of nine. So a rat­ing at high­ly for qual­i­ty as well. give it a val­ue rank of 87, but a very low momen­tum, uh, rank­ing of only 32. Um, so over­all rank is 79 ency­clo­pe­dia.

So they’re not con­vinced it’s a buy yet, either. Not sure why they are, mark­ing down momen­tum ’cause it’s, as I said in the short term, it’s been strong. Um, and it, but it’s not a buy on the be the bread lady yet either. So it could be that, uh, that’s one of the rea­sons why they’re also it down. Um, can’t, don’t know why, uh, but it’s not a buy with them on a momen­tum basis or with us ROE.

And if any­one’s inter­est­ed, is pret­ty good at 21%. So, um, like I said, they’re con­cen­trat­ing on mar­gin at the moment, not [00:38:00] vol­ume. So, um, that’s pret­ty good. cap is 6.6 times, which is good. PE is 10.3 times, um, lit­tle bit above what it was at the last results of, uh, 9.6 times, which is not the high­est.

Uh, so we can’t score it for PE was increas­ing pret­ty well, but dropped off in the last half, so it, uh, does­n’t score for that either. Over­all though, the 10 things we could score gets an eight out­ta 10 for qual­i­ty or 80%, and a QAV score of 0.12 based basi­cal­ly on, its on its prop calf. this kind of com­pa­ny’s not with­out its risks and they, they’re being mag­ni­fied at the moment with all the tar­iff changes that are going on in the world.

So prob­a­bly cov­ered up on the issue. It’s, it’s, uh, fac­ing tar­iff issues, um, in Indone­sia where it has a joint ven­ture oper­a­tion. And there are prob­a­bly gonna be road­blocks now for its work on [00:39:00] orcas, which it can do in Aus­tralia. But if it was look­ing for more work in the US it, it may, um, prob­lem for it, but they may well be able to find their way around it.

one of the oth­er things, inter­est­ing­ly enough about steel in Aus­tralia is that this com­pa­ny relies on, anti-dump­ing pro­tec­tion to stop cheap imports fly­ing from oth­er coun­tries. So, uh, there is a gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tor in Aus­tralia that looks at, um. Uh, pro­tect­ing indus­tries from over­seas com­mod­i­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly com­mod­i­ty type, uh, dumped into the mar­ket, still being one of those.

Um, and it, I guess it pro­tects BlueScope, but it also pro­tects this com­pa­ny. Um, but the risk here is that, uh, this is, um, this is cur­rent­ly, you know. Um, reliant on the gov­ern­ment or the gov­ern­ment body that reg­u­lates this to con­tin­ue to say, it’s Fin­land and Japan can’t sell their steel here at, uh, dis­count­ed prices.

Um, [00:40:00] but you know, as we’ve seen before with oth­er com­pa­nies that rely on gov­ern­ment man­dates, that can change, um, espe­cial­ly if we have a change of gov­ern­ment, um, on the week­end. So, uh, there is always a risk, um, that goes with com­pa­nies that rely on gov­ern­ment, uh, sup­port either in the way of tar­iffs or in of anti-dump­ing leg­is­la­tion.

could change. Um, the com­pa­ny calls out the fact that they oper­ate in Aus­tralia and there­fore their elec­tric­i­ty, gas, and labor costs are high­er than for their over­seas q and t, uh, plate com­peti­tors. So, um. You know, they, they have been suc­cess­ful at sell­ing into Asia and they, they have been suc­cess­ful at oper­at­ing in Chi­na.

But, um, some mar­kets will just always be dif­fi­cult for them to get into because, uh, they’re fac­ing, uh, com­pe­ti­tion with much cheap­er, uh, cost struc­tures. And they have, on the pos­i­tive side of things, they, they are doing a bit of IT devel­op­ment or, or I should­n’t say tech­nol­o­gy devel­op­ment. It’s not it nec­es­sar­i­ly, but they are [00:41:00] pio­neer­ing the devel­op­ment of sen­sors.

Which can, um, be placed on their steel plates to, uh, give a com­pa­ny a, a real­ly accu­rate of how that plate is going in terms of its wear and tear, when it might need to be replaced or if it’s if get­ting close to brak­ing. So, they were talk­ing about patent­ing that tech­nol­o­gy and if they can that of course, we’ll, you know, give them anoth­er, um, arrow in they quiver when they go to sell this kind of prod­uct, um, uh, around the world.

So that’s a poten­tial pos­i­tive for them. So that’s, um, biz oil, steel. I think it’s a bit of a watch at the

Cameron: Smart,

TK: but it could, uh,

Cameron: smart mid­dle.

TK: Yeah. Smart met­al. That’s right. Tea, TT 1000

Cameron: are on our buy list. Yeah, they are on our buy list. But, uh, you don’t think they’re quite a buy

TK: No, I think, well the bread lat­er has them below there, buy

Cameron: lin­er,

TK: and, uh, steel I think is a bit of a watch to space too. It’s a falling knife, even though it’s

Cameron: Yeah,

TK: byline or by [00:42:00] price.

Cameron: right. I’m just bring­ing them up in, uh, my bread lat­er. See how close they are? oh yeah. Hmm. Okay. Well thank you for that, tk. I still haven’t decid­ed if I’m gonna sell ’em or hold, but what did you say? Wait and see where the steel price is. Okay.

TK: wait for a week.

Cameron: Well, that’s it. Lit­tle bit of after hours, then we can go talk about the Amer­i­can mar­ket. Uh, what have you got? What’s on your what, what have you done this week? That was fun.

TK: Uh, had a real­ly good din­ner on the week­end. Um, I. I can’t remem­ber the name of the restau­rant, so I can’t give him a plug. I think it’s called Bun Goer. Any­way, um, it was a birth­day present from Jen, but the restau­rant was ful­ly booked out, um, for a long time into the future. And Jen­ny got on the wait list for Sat­ur­day nights.

So we went around, it’s, it’s lit­er­al­ly around the cor­ner from us. It’s on the farm at Cape Schanck on the way out, down to the light­house. Uh, and it’s, um, it’s mak­ing a name for itself [00:43:00] by basi­cal­ly set­ting a menu every day based on what they take from their farm that day. So we had a deger sta­tion, fixed edu, deger sta­tion, was real­ly nice.

So it was a, yeah, great, uh, great night out.

Cameron: What was the high­light of the dig­ger sta­tion? I.

TK: Uh, good ques­tion. Um, I. They, I think the ossobu­co would be my high­light. Be dif­fer­ent to

Cameron: Mm

TK: um, she’s not real­ly a meat

Cameron: hmm.

TK: but, um, had, uh, real­ly nice, um, pas­try at the start with local veg­eta­bles in it, which was good too. I,

Cameron: Hmm. What is your diet like at the moment? You work­ing on any­thing in par­tic­u­lar?

TK: no,

Cameron: I,

TK: it’s work­ing for me. We call Jen­ny and I call it Cape Schanck Heat­ing. So, uh, that was prob­a­bly the first time we’d been out for a long time. Um, unless it was to like a fam­i­ly din­ner with Alex or my [00:44:00] fam­i­ly or what­ev­er, or her sis­ter, Jen­ny’s sis­ter’s fam­i­ly. Um, so we have switched from liv­ing in King’s Cross where we ate at almost every night to cook­ing a lot at home, which is,

Cameron: mm-hmm.

TK: basi­cal­ly, you know, basic meals, meat, and three veg.

But it’s, yeah, it’s pret­ty

Cameron: Mm-hmm.

TK: It’s good.

Cameron: Hmm. You’re try­ing to eat health­ily.

TK: Yeah. But sort of, you know, basic health, you’re not fol­low­ing any par­tic­u­lar diet things. How about sug­ar? Which has, which has, um, helped

Cameron: How long you, are you still off the bus?

TK: Yeah.

Cameron: How long have you been off it now?

TK: Two and a half years. I,

Cameron: Wow. Wow,

TK: yeah.

Cameron: wow. Look at you.

TK: Yeah,

Cameron: Chris­sy, just, Chris­sy just had her 13th sobri­ety anniver­sary about some 12. 12 15th of April 12th, or 15th of April, I can’t remem­ber. But yeah, 13 years since she’s touched a drop, she’s [00:45:00] now been sober for longer than she drank, which is crazy. Um, yeah. But, uh, yeah, it’s good. I’m proud of her.

TK: Yeah. No, that’s great.

Cameron: Uh, what else?

TK: what I, found was when I got off the booze, I still had sug­ar crav­ings. So I’d

Cameron: Mm-hmm.

TK: you know, dessert and B and stuff. So I’ve, in the last sort of three to six months, I’ve been whin­ing that back and now it’s pret­ty much elim­i­nat­ed, which has been a big help.

Cameron: So how have you done that? What’s, how do you wean your­self off The sug­ar?

TK: You just have to go cold Turkey, like you do with the booze, real­ly.

Cameron: You haven’t replaced it. Yeah. You, you’re doing ste­via or any­thing like that?

TK: Oh look, I drink, um, sure it’s in, you know, no sug­ar soft drinks and stuff that I drink. Um,

Cameron: Mm-hmm.

TK: how healthy that is either ’cause you’re drink­ing chem­i­cals, but, um, I, it’s too hard­core for me just to go green tea and [00:46:00] water, so I’ve got­ta have

Cameron: Mm-hmm.

TK: Um, I do try and just do a fla­vored min­er­al water, um, which isn’t too bad.

Yeah. But occa­sion­al­ly I’ll have a zero sug­ar lemon­ade or some­thing.

Cameron: Ste­vie is sup­pos­ed­ly okay, but you know, some of the oth­er arti­fi­cial sweet­en­ers they reck­on are not good for you.

TK: Yeah, right. Um,

Cameron: Very good.

TK: we, um, con­tin­ue to watch Lamb, which is fan­tas­tic. Um,

Cameron: mm-hmm.

TK: Richie thing Tom Hardy, who’s great and Pierce Bros­nan and, uh, for­get­ting the lady’s name, actress in it. Any­way, she’s real­ly good. Um. we start­ed watch­ing Land­man, which was­n’t too bad, although it’s kind of to about episode six now.

It’s get­ting a bit too soap opera push for me. But cer­tain­ly the start was real­ly good, which is the Tyler

Cameron: What’s that?

TK: Tyler Sheri­dan, uh, series set in the Tex­an oil patch. So it’s about, um, inde­pen­dent drillers [00:47:00] and the prob­lems they face. And, um, Bil­ly Bob Thorn­ton is the, is the guy, and John Hams in it, de Moore’s in it, which is a real­ly strange sort of inclu­sion because it’s almost like she, they, she’s lend­ing her name to it.

They, every time she appears, they kind of briefly pho­to­graph her and then switch away. So I’m not sure what’s going on there. But, um, Bil­ly Bob Thorn­ton’s fan­tas­tic. You know, real­ly, real­ly good. Just play­ing a no non­sense oper­a­tions guy deal­ing with car­tels and. Wild­cat­ters and, you know, e explo­sions and, uh, all sorts of things.

It’s great, but it’s, it, like, then his ex-wife’s come on the scene. It’s got­ten a bit too sort of for me, but I’m hop­ing it’ll pick up again. I

Cameron: Sheri­dan, is he the guy behind Yel­low­stone that,

TK: is,

Cameron: those sorts of shows? Mm-hmm.

TK: Which I don’t, did­n’t like, but, um, this one’s good. Um, [00:48:00] but he’s also behind hell or high water, which is a great movie, which is how I first came across him. You ever seen that?

Cameron: Was that? No. Was that um, Bob­by Devale.

TK: No. It’s the dude. It’s um, Jeff Bridges and, uh,

Cameron: Oh right.

TK: Pine, cap­tain Kirk.

Cameron: The dude. No, I nev­er saw that. Yeah.

TK: good. Real­ly enjoyed it.

Cameron: Good.

TK: Hmm.

Cameron: Well, I watched, I’ve had a great week of watch­ing stuff. Um, I’m not sure if I talked to you about this, but I watched Unfor­giv­en a week or two ago. Um, took me a while to get through it, but just had­n’t seen it since it first came out, I guess in the ear­ly nineties or what­ev­er.

Just loved it. Such a great, great film on every lev­el. Then I watched Face Off for the first time in

TK: okay.

Cameron: decades. Absolute­ly loved it. Com­plete­ly bonkers, but [00:49:00] absolute­ly tr fun. Just fun like crazy fun. Cage and Tra­vol­ta. Just, I think it’s the last good movie Tra­vol­ta made. I mean, it was, his per­for­mance in it was great. And, uh, then last night I watched the French Con­nec­tion for the first time in

TK: it?

Cameron: decades too. So good.

TK: Yeah.

Cameron: So good such a strange film. Like it’s, noth­ing hap­pens in most of the film. It’s just Roy Schnei­der and Hack­man stak­ing out guys

TK: Yeah.

Cameron: with noth­ing going on until the big train car chase and the big shootout at the end.

But then, this is real­ly just noth­ing on, like, it’s such a mid or ear­ly sev­en­ties film, right, where you could get away with that kind of a thing. It’s just hours of ten­sion build­ing and noth­ing else hap­pen­ing. Ter­rif­ic. [00:50:00] How­man won an Acad­e­my Award for that, I think, and, and it’s great. I mean, his per­for­mance is.

TK: It was a

Cameron: Just great, just

TK: from mem­o­ry was a char­ac­ter. No.

Cameron: Pop­eye Doyle. Yeah. And it’s based on a true sto­ry. I read up on the last night, um, a cou­ple of New York cops that bust­ed a French hero­in smug­gling ring that was bring­ing, using an actor to bring it in. Yeah. Marse and with Corkin con­nec­tions and the whole thing. But yeah. Um, the, the guy in the movie who plays Hack­man’s Supe­ri­or Eddie Egan, who was the actu­al cop that Pop­eye Doyle was based on.

He, after the movie came out, he. Retired as a cop and became a full-time actor. One of those guys that just had the right face and the right gruff­ness and I guess just prob­a­bly played cops for the rest of his career. [00:51:00] Um, the wire was full of guys like that. The wire was full of real cops and real drug deal­ers play­ing dif­fer­ent roles.

But, you know, any­way, it’s been great catch­ing up on some of those old films again, rewatch­ing them.

TK: I watched an old film last week, uh, called The Book of Eli. Have you seen that?

Cameron: Uh, no, I heard of it.

TK: Den­zel

Cameron: seen it,

TK: Um,

Cameron: right?

TK: two thou­sands I think. had to watch it and final­ly got around to watch­ing it for Gary Old­man, where he plays one of the,

Cameron: Oh, right,

TK: you know, deranged, deranged, bad guy leader, gang

Cameron: yeah,

TK: uh, in

Cameron: yeah, yeah,

TK: Amer­i­ca. It’s great.

Cameron: yeah. Yeah.

TK: Yeah,

Cameron: Yeah.

TK: Like the sto­ry’s

Cameron: can’t believe I haven’t seen that.

TK: post, post-apoc­a­lyp­tic first 10 min­utes or 15 min­utes of stan­dard sort of, you know. Den­zel

Cameron: on the Waste­lands.

TK: Max Leah life on the [00:52:00] Waste­lands. Yeah. um, but then he arrives in a town where is the, um, the sort of unap­point­ed may­or. Um, and it just

Cameron: Right.

TK: like the whole thing explodes.

It’s just great.

Cameron: Alban was so good in those roles back in his day.

TK: yeah. So good.

Cameron: Do you, um, do you, you know who Rober­to Rodriguez is? Robert Rodriguez, the

TK: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: Yeah. He just did like a three hour inter­view on Lex Fried­man’s. Pod­cast. And I’ve watched the first maybe hour of it, and it’s great. Like he’s talk­ing about his career as a low bud­get film­mak­er and the guy who does every­thing, he writes, directs, edits, does the music, does the pro­duc­tion design. bit I thought I did­n’t know, I mean, I fol­lowed this guy since El Mari­achi came out in the ear­ly nineties. Like I’ve been a fan of his for decades. But, um, said, you know, the, you know, the sort of the, the Hol­ly­wood trope [00:53:00] now of the, the, the hero sort of walk­ing slow­ly towards the Cameron slow motion while every­thing behind them explodes and

TK: yeah, yeah.

Cameron: the, the hero does­n’t turn around, just walks.

TK: Yep.

Cameron: He said, so he said he invent­ed that. And it was in,

TK: that’s a big

Cameron: it was in, well, yeah, maybe, but it was in, he claims it was in Des­per­a­do,

TK: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: remake of El Mari­achi that he did with Anto­nio Ban­deras and Sal Maha. And the sto­ry was, they were, the heroes were on a rooftop and there was guys try­ing to get at them down on the ground floor. And I think, uh, Ban­deras threw a grenade down and blew them up. But when they orig­i­nal­ly did the explo­sion, it did­n’t go high enough to see it over the rooftop. So they had a cou­ple of cracks in it and his effects guy could­n’t get it to be big enough. So even­tu­al­ly the effects guy said, look, [00:54:00] I can just put a whole bunch of kerosene there.

It’ll drums and just blow the whole thing up. It’ll go high, but it’ll be real­ly quick. It’ll just flare up and you won’t. any­thing. And he said, that’s fine, I’ll just slow the cam­era right down. So it’s slow motion. he told Ban­dera and Sal Mabb Hayek just to, he said, look, there’s gonna be this huge explo­sion behind you.

Don’t turn around, don’t look. Just keep walk­ing. What­ev­er hap­pens, look at the cam­era and slowed it down. And then they have the big shot. he said that was the first time it had ever been done. And he said, then it was like every film after that had the, includ­ing from Duster Dawn, his own film, the Big Explo­sion with the heroes, just talk­ing to each oth­er, non­cha­lant­ly, Quentin Taran­ti­no style as they away from it.

So I haven’t fact checked that, but I’m sure he is prob­a­bly telling the truth.

TK: Now it

Cameron: That’s pret­ty cool.

TK: sub point where they, at the end, every­thing blows up as the, as the, uh, char­ac­ters. I think they might [00:55:00] dri­ve away in that rather than walk away.

Cameron: Right. Uh, what else? Doc­tor, new sea­son of Dr. Who been watch­ing that with Fox.

TK: any good? I sort of gave up on that. Yeah.

Cameron: Yeah. No, not real­ly. Not real­ly sil­ly. Does­n’t make any sense.

TK: Yeah, right.

Cameron: It’s kind of not real­ly grab­bing me. Fox does­n’t mind it, but even he gets bored, he’ll watch half an episode and we’ll be halfway through and they’ll go, ah, I wan­na go do some­thing else now. So,

TK: We start­ed

Cameron: uh,

TK: three episodes of and, or which were released dur­ing the week. Don’t both­er.

Cameron: yeah, nah, giv­en up on Star Wars. I, I can’t Star Wars any­more. They’ve ruined, they’ve

TK: Mm

Cameron: ruined the whole fran­chise for me. It’s, I can’t do it.

TK: of reminds me of Star Trek. You know, like in the lat­er sea­sons it just devolves into to the fan boys who wan­na see the arcane, you [00:56:00] know, the wed­ding feast on this plan­et with the cling on and what they do and the It’s just like end­less expo­si­tion and there’s noth­ing hap­pen­ing.

Yeah,

Cameron: We also did watch the SNL 50th Anniver­sary Spe­cial Gala thing that they did. It was real­ly good, sur­pris­ing­ly good.

TK: I loved it

Cameron: Uh. Will Fer­rell and Eddie Mur­phy in the Scared Straight Sketch Will Fer­rell with his shorts on and his sort of red wig and um, uh, just lots of, lots of great cameos. Adam San­dler’s lit­tle song that he did and yeah, Andy Sand­berg’s anx­i­ety song.

I mean, it was just real­ly well done. I was sur­prised. I thought it, I expect­ed it to be kin­da lame and I thought the lamest bit was Steve Mar­t­in’s mono­logue at the begin­ning just fell real­ly flat to me. But after that it, it was, uh, a real­ly, [00:57:00] real­ly well done. Mm.

TK: Espe­cial­ly the high, the high­light for me was, um, Tina Faye and Amy Poller talk­ing to the celebri­ties in the, in the crowd who they had to fit into the show some­how.

Cameron: Yeah, yeah,

TK: Yeah.

Cameron: yeah. It was there 10 sec­onds they got to do some­thing in the show. Yeah.

TK: It was good.

Cameron: Um, are you a Jim Stein­man fan? I.

TK: Not real­ly,

Cameron: So sad. Okay. I, I’m a huge Jim Stein­man fan, and I dis­cov­ered a band, I dis­cov­ered a band, an album that he made an all girl band in the eight­ies that I’d nev­er heard of before, called Pan­do­ra’s Box. It was like a meat­loaf album when he could­n’t get meat­loaf. So he had this all girl band and they did like this, you know, sort of Tyler or Meat­loaf, mas­sive Jim Stone­man thing that’s just bonkers over the top Stone­man stuff. [00:58:00] it was like, like, he’s been dead for a cou­ple of years now. And it was like a, it was like a gift from the grave for me to dis­cov­er this entire album of bonkers Jim Stein­man stuff from the eight­ies that I’d nev­er heard of before. Can’t believe I’ve been on the inter­net since 1993, and it had­n’t put this in front of me before.

Now it’s like, what the hell is going on? I point­ed out to my boys the oth­er day that I was the age they are now. When I first got on the inter­net, prob­a­bly give or take a year, my first pc sort of 1995. I think I bought my first pc, got on the net, prob­a­bly 93, 94. But, um, in inter­net cafes, just to put it in per­spec­tive for them, that’s, you know, I’m the age you were now when I first got the inter­net, like it’s

TK: Yep, it is. I still remem­ber get­ting my first edi­tion of Wide Mag­a­zine around that time as

Cameron: Oh, I

TK: That was a, that

Cameron: don’t remem­ber my first [00:59:00] wired, but oh, wired in the day was fan­tas­tic. Uh, the last thing is I’ve been read­ing a book called Social­ist Eco­nom­ic Devel­op­ment in the 21st cen­tu­ry, a cen­tu­ry after the Bol­she­vik Rev­o­lu­tion by El Alber­to Gabriele and Elias Jaba. Real­ly good man, you know. I’m call­ing it now. The Com­mu­nists won.

TK: Are there real­ly any com­mu­nists in the world care

Cameron: Yeah, they are. Uh, and uh, they won 30, 35 years after the end of the Cold War the cap­i­tal­ists were all cel­e­brat­ing and danc­ing on the graves of com­mu­nism. The US is crum­bling and Chi­na’s just going from strength to strength. The com­mu­nists won. It just took a lit­tle bit longer than they thought, but they got there in the end.

TK: So you, are call­ing Chi­na a com­mu­nist coun­try, eh?

Cameron: No, I’m call­ing it a social­ist coun­try, uh, head­ing towards com­mu­nism.

TK: All right.

Cameron: Com­mu­nism is a, is an [01:00:00] end point. It’s not where they are. are social­ism with, uh, state mar­ket, um, cap­i­tal­ism, um, social­ist social­ism with Chi­nese char­ac­ter­is­tics. Well, Aus­trali­a’s cap­i­tal­ist with a lit­tle bit of social­ism thrown in to stop the, stop the work­ing class­es from grab­bing a pitch­fork and a torch and down in the north Syd­ney. Um, Chi­na’s a, a social­ist coun­try that allowed ele­ments of tight­ly con­trolled cap­i­tal­ism into it to bring cap­i­tal and and into the coun­try back in the late sev­en­ties.

TK: like B Alloy

Cameron: We’ll see how, yes, we’ll see how it plays out, how, where they end up. But no, this book is, this book is, is a very, very aca­d­e­m­ic, dense, dense aca­d­e­m­ic tone.

These two guys are [01:01:00] econ­o­mists, uh, with a spe­cial­ty in social­ist. Um, eco­nom­ics and you know, they, you know, well aware that a lot of peo­ple in the west to say that Chi­na’s not real­ly com­mu­nist or social­ist any­more. And so they go into a lot of detail in the first few chap­ters say­ing, well, how do you tell what, what are the ele­ments that you would look for deter­mine?

They basi­cal­ly say social­ism and cap­i­tal­ism are both sort of a spec­trum, so what are the dif­fer­ent ele­ments that you would look for and how would you rate them and how would you mea­sure them and judge them and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, it’s inter­est­ing. Any who that is, uh, all we have for this week, just over an hour.

There you go. We had noth­ing to talk about. We did an hour. Look at that.

TK: Oh, I had

Cameron: Let’s go. Have we now? We have, yeah. Yeah. Now we have noth­ing to talk about for the US show. Let’s see how far we get with that.

TK: All right.

Cameron: Thank you tk.

TK: Thanks

Cameron: a good week every­one.

TK: Yeah. Hap­py ASX.

[01:02:00] [01:03:00]