QAV AU 852 — Growth Over PE: The Metric That Ate 2025

 

Cameron: [00:00:00] Wel­come back to the Last QAV for 2025 tk. It is the 30th of Decem­ber. We’re record­ing this 12:04 PM in Bund­aberg in my, in the bed­room I grew up in, and that would make it 1:04 PM. Down in cope. Schanck. Tony, you said you’d been suf­fer­ing from the hay fever. Hap­py Christ­mas. How was your, how was your week off?

You went to Hillsville, is that right?

Tony Kynas­ton: I did. Yeah, that was good. Um. Busy, but it was nice. We went, I haven’t been to Hillsville for a long time it’s a love­ly place and um, a cou­ple of nights there. Caught up with lots of friends from all over Aus­tralia who came in for a par­ty. played golf. Alex had some of her friends up for a lunch the day before.

So yeah, just real­ly a nice

Cameron: you

Tony Kynas­ton: up. Then back to Mel­bourne. Alex came

Cameron: by me.

Tony Kynas­ton: with us. To spend Christ­mas morn­ing [00:01:00] with us and then back up to Mel­bourne for fam­i­ly lunch­es and fam­i­ly din­ners, and then back here, and then just recov­er­ing ever since. Tak­ing it easy.

Cameron: You got bad hay fever, you were say­ing?

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Yeah. It’s appar­ent­ly a thing down. I know if it’s a thing on the Morn­ing­ton Penin­su­la or Vic­to­ria, but yeah, it’s just, um, mak­ing it, uh, uncom­fort­able at the Mm

Mm.

Cameron: mm. Well, I’ve been at the beach. We were just down at, uh, the best beach in Aus­tralia. Ral­ly heads got back about half an hour ago, but we were chas­ing mil­lions of sol­dier crabs over the sand. Fox was hav­ing a absolute field day, pick­ing them up in a, with a ten­nis rack­et and watch­ing them scarp­er around.

Sol­dier crabs are fun to play with. You ever play with sol­dier crabs when you’re a kid?

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, I did. Yep. Lots of fun.

Cameron: They bury them­selves so quick­ly in the sand. Any who?

Tony Kynas­ton: of that beach? [00:02:00] Sor­ry, I did­n’t quite catch it.

Cameron: Elliot heads.

Tony Kynas­ton: heads. Okay.

Cameron: It’s about 10 min­utes from my moth­er’s place. Uh, every­one when they come up here, they go to B but uh, BGAs. Yeah. Okay. But Elliot heads is just, there’s nev­er any­one there, despite the fact that there’s a big car­a­van park and a lot of devel­op­ment going on, but there’s usu­al­ly, it’s usu­al­ly most­ly emp­ty and it’s just beau­ti­ful.

The finest white sand, blue sky, blue water. It’s just, uh, yeah, like some­thing out of a post­card every time we go down there. It’s our favorite place, and it was beau­ti­ful. We got down there about nine 30 this morn­ing and stayed for. Cou­ple hours and uh, it was just still pic­turesque. Amaz­ing.

Tony Kynas­ton: How lucky are we?

Cameron: Good ear­ly morn­ing swim.

Hmm.

Tony Kynas­ton: how lucky are we?

Cameron: Yeah, that was Fox. Fox was down there going. Aus­trali­a’s the great­est place in the [00:03:00] world.

Um, okay. Well let’s get into stock mar­kety stuff. I’d like to thank Scott for fill­ing in for you. Last week he came on the show, uh, and we had a great chat for an hour or so. So thank you again to Scott and. Con­grat­u­la­tions on the good year that he’s had. And, uh, the invi­ta­tion remains open. Any­one who wants to come on and have a chat had nobody apart from Scott vol­un­teer them­selves to come on.

But, uh, always love to have mem­bers come on and talk about what’s going on. Good, bad, or ugly. You know, it does­n’t have to be all blue sky sto­ries. If you’ve had a rough year, um, come on and tell us about it. But we’ve had a great year. Uh, I was doing, I did my week­ly like, uh, QAV light blog post update yes­ter­day, and it was like insane.

Um, for the cal­en­dar [00:04:00] year, the light port­fo­lio is up 37% ver­sus the index up 11%. So, you know, bet­ter than triple mar­ket. That’s for the cal­en­dar year. But if I just go for the last six months, ’cause that’s when all the growth has hap­pened. The pull the light port­fo­lio is up 27% in the last six months ver­sus 4% for the index.

It’s just been, uh, absolute­ly bonkers. Six months for our port­fo­lios. Um. Let me just, uh, bring up Navexa so I can have a look at the oth­er port­fo­lios while I’m at it because I think my, and I know, so there’s a col­lec­tion of large cap and small cap stocks there. If I look at my super port­fo­lio, which is all ASX 300 for the cal­en­dar year, it’s up 24% ver­sus [00:05:00] 10 for the index.

And if I just look at this finan­cial year. It’s up 15% ver­sus 3% for the index. I mean, if I go over the last, say three years, it’s still under­per­form­ing. ’cause that 22, 20 2022, 2023 peri­od was an absolute night­mare for my super port­fo­lio. Last three years, I’m up 9% ver­sus 13% for the index. So I haven’t even caught up.

But the last six months I’ve caught up a lot. The dum­my port­fo­lio, if I look, uh, this finan­cial year, it’s up 20% ver­sus three, and for the cal­en­dar year it’s up 27% ver­sus 10. So yeah, I assume your port­fo­lio, I know we talked about it a cou­ple of weeks ago, but it’s just been a good cou­ple of [00:06:00] weeks.

Tony Kynas­ton: I haven’t checked it recent­ly, but I, I guess it’s still up around 35%. Yep. No, it’s been

Cameron: It’s one of those years, right? It’s one of those years we hang out for.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. and I’ve been try­ing to, um, work out why, and, and per­haps it was because inter­est rates were cut a cou­ple of times and referred back to that bad year, which was when inter­est rates were ris­ing.

So there might be a les­son for that in this going for­ward, because I would­n’t be, it’s more like­ly inter­est rates will rise next year in 2026 rather than be cut, but who knows?

Cameron: Right. You think there might be some­thing we can fac­tor in, like if inter­est rates are ris­ing, we

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, look,

Cameron: use it as a sig­nal to some­thing.

Tony Kynas­ton: I haven’t been able to work out how to do that yet. Um, you know, I, last time it hap­pened, I spent time look­ing at, uh, like the, in like a three point trend line for the index and, um, it cer­tain­ly went crossed into a cell sig­nal when inter­est rates start­ed to rise. So. [00:07:00] That could be a thing, but I could­n’t work out any rules which were ben­e­fi­cial because, um, were past exam­ples where the inter­est, where the index was a sale, but my port­fo­lio still did well, or QIV still did well. So there was no clear evi­dence one way or the oth­er. So it could have just been a, you know, that was the bad year. It might not have been, um, inter­est rates relat­ed. It could have been relat­ed to some­thing else.

Cameron: Yeah, well we know the Ukraine inva­sion hap­pened that year and trade wars been going on and all that kind of stuff. Just look­ing at the stocks that have done the heavy lift­ing for the light port­fo­lio, um, WGN up 160%, this is just year to date, um, GMP up 138%. RRL up 132% SRG up 113 and RRLI hold in three light port­fo­lios.

G and PI hold in two PRN up [00:08:00] 109%. I hold that in all four of the light port­fo­lios. PRU up 85. I hold that in all four SHA up 107. That’s in one SASG is up, uh, 88%. It’s in three port­fo­lios. Like I said, so there’s some stocks that real­ly had amaz­ing years. If I go to the dum­my port­fo­lio, SRG was up 114% for the year PRN up 102 hun­dred 3%.

But they do the most of the lift­ing in the dum­my port­fo­lio. Um, the rest of them, PPN only up 30 KOV up, 36 SRV up, 36. There was SRG and PRN that real­ly, uh, were the out­per­form­ers, uh, by large in the dum­my port­fo­lio. This year was­n’t, I mean, the light port­fo­lios, obvi­ous­ly there’s four of ’em, so there’s 80 odd stocks to have a, have a chance to hit the sort of dou­ble bag­ger thing.

Um, if I look at my [00:09:00] super PRU up 117 NWH up 81, um. SSM up 44 PRN, uh, uh, up 45 a NZ up 24. So yeah, real­ly only one big one or two big hit­ters in my super port­fo­lio for the year. But the light port­fo­lios just had a, a big­ger room of, um, stocks to play with, but some real­ly great per­for­mances from some of those WGN Wow.

160%. Uh, what have, what have you noticed? PRN is the big one for you, I think. Is that right?

Tony Kynas­ton: PRN and pers were both big ones for me. And, um, when I was pulling togeth­er a pulled pork today, I, I start­ed off sort of try­ing to do a year in review on stocks and then pret­ty quick­ly land­ed on the ones that you’ve called out from, um, as being the best per­form­ers for the year. And then I start­ed to look through them and see you. You know what made them the best per­form­ers? And I think I’ve found the [00:10:00] answer. So we can jump to the pulled pork now if you want. Where I go into a bit more detail on what that is because it’s kind of to what you are say­ing.

Cameron: Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: so. The pool pork today was gonna be a review of Par­en­ti and still is, but um, I’ll jump off from there to some anal analy­sis I did on what made Par­en­ti so good this year. Um, so Par­en­ti has been in my port­fo­lio since Sep­tem­ber, 2024, and I bought it at a dol­lar six today it’s $2 82. So, um, includ­ing div­i­dends, that’s 122% CAGR over that peri­od of time, which is. A lit­tle bit over 12 months, I sup­pose. Um, and when I bought it, I remem­ber, uh, going through the buy list look­ing for a stock.

I was fil­ter­ing for high yield because I want­ed to a good div­i­dend stream income to sup­ple­ment my income. um, and Par­en­ti was kind of good. It was, I think it’s about. [00:11:00] and a half per­cent. So that’s pret­ty good. At the time it was­n’t scor­ing above the mort­gage rate though, so it was a bit of a fudge to, to use it also a bit of a fudge because it was­n’t the, it was a bit below my a DT cut­off. Um, I remem­ber at the time I thought, oh, I might put par­ent into the port­fo­lio for a bit of growth, because I think back then it was fore­cast­ing to grow EPS by. Or some­thing like eight or nine, times, eight or nine, sor­ry, score of. Earn­ings per share fore­cast over PE was eight or nine. So it was quite a high uh, earn­ings per share growth stock. I put it in the port­fo­lio and it’s been prob­a­bly the best per­former over that time peri­od. And it’s done what I want­ed it to do, which was to. a good yield­ing stock, but get some growth to coun­ter­act the oth­er stocks in the port­fo­lio, like NZ and super retail group, which are both good stocks and have done well, but they’re, um, not as their, their growth pro­files aren’t as strong as a, [00:12:00] a com­pa­ny like Par­en­ti. So a bit of a recap for the pulled pork. Part of this Par­en­ti is a, um, a drilling com­pa­ny a con­tract min­er um. It’s also grown by rolling up oth­er drilling com­pa­nies. So it’s a bit of a roll up. Uh, it, it’s, it’s pur­chased two, oth­er. QAV buy list stocks in the last cou­ple of years. The last one was and it also pur­chased Swic Drilling, had both been on the buy list.

Both were doing well. So, know, it gives me con­fi­dence that their acqui­si­tions, um, are mea­sured and, well thought out, and not just going for growth. So, uh, they’re buy­ing Bly stocks, which is good. And they start­ed life, um, has­n’t always been called Par­en­ti. It start­ed life as a com­pa­ny called Aus­drill, which I’ve owned in the past and was on my buy list back many years ago pri­or to QAV.

So it’s always had a, um, a good. Pro­file in terms of its oper­at­ing cash [00:13:00] flow and the price you pay for it and things like that. But I has­ten to add that it’s a drilling com­pa­ny, it’s a min­ing con­trac­tor, so it’s, it’s gonna be cycli­cal just like a lot of the gold mines are, that they’re in our port­fo­lios as well.

And it’s the clas­sic, um, com­pa­ny ben­e­fit­ing from the min­ing boom. So buy­ing picks and shov­els in the gold brush. Um, they oper­ate Aus­tralia and but also in West Africa where we have a cou­ple of QAV min­ing stocks as well. So. I, you know, you could almost say this is the quin­tes­sen­tial QAV stock.

It’s, um, it’s strong cash flow, oper­at­ing cash flow. We can buy it for a rea­son­able mul­ti­ple. It’s got a good yield. Um, it’s been mea­sured in its growth and, uh, it’s grow­ing. So it’s, it’s got a growth pro­file as well. And that’s what I paid atten­tion to I was look­ing at, um. how, what could have con­tributed to its, its growth this year.

So I did was I went back to the start of the year and pulled out an old buy list from, I think it was about the 18th of Jan­u­ary, [00:14:00] some, some­time around sort of mid­dle to end of Jan­u­ary, I don’t think I had a buy list that I did ear­ly in Jan­u­ary. But any­way, I used that as my start­ing point and. Was still on the buy list then, it had a very high growth over PE ratio. I then decid­ed to, um, look at stocks from that buy list and rank them by their growth over. Uh, PE ratio and then com­pare them to a bench­mark. And the bench­mark I used was all the stocks on that, buy list. And, and if you bought and hold 30 odd stocks of maybe a lit­tle bit more on that buy list from Jan­u­ary, 2025, they’ve returned And, um, that’s, uh. On the basis of buy­ing one fifth of their a DT. So, there is a skew towards some of the large caps and, and I think this has been a year where small caps have done bet­ter than large caps, so has­n’t helped, but 8.4% about the index, [00:15:00] um, for the year. so I also then did a analy­sis on just sim­ply buy­ing a thou­sand dol­lars of each stock, so not weight them by a DT, but um, an equal weight­ing. And I just, uh. I also high­light the fact that the buy list does­n’t have stocks which have, which have an A DT below 15,000. There are some stocks that would’ve, um, been includ­ed, but I exclud­ed those below 15,000 and doing that, that. total buy list returned to health­i­er 18.7%. So that’s, um, more like the sort of mar­ket QAV num­ber that we’re used to. And that was for the whole, the whole buy list bought even­ly. Um, were some stocks which delist­ed over the year, like URW, so, um, that was the, uh, inter­na­tion­al West­fields. So I, I kept them in the analy­sis at their delist­ing price. And I also has­ten to add, this was a buy and hold. I, I did­n’t about. Um, com­mod­i­ty [00:16:00] trades or three point trend line trades or what­ev­er. I just sim­ply took the port­fo­lio and then put their cur­rent prices against them. Um, so that’s the, the bench­mark. If we say it’s, uh, what they say it was 18.7% for the whole wire­less, at that time, well, excuse me, we’re gonna have to have a sip of water here for a fever rea­sons. Um, I then went back and looked at that list and ranked them Per­for­mance and the best per­form­ing stock was Met­als X, uh, MLX, which was up 148%. Wag­n­er’s Plus per McMan and Perseus, and all of those were over a hun­dred per­cent. They all had triple dig­it returns. Um, and one thing I noticed about all of those was they all had a pos­i­tive growth over PE score. So this is the fore­cast, um, per share growth over the PE ratio. In the case of MLX, which was the best per­form­ing stock, that that score was 16 and [00:17:00] QAV lis­ten­ers will know that we look for a stock, uh, which scores above 1.5 to give the score on our, our buy list. Um, PRN had a score of 8.84. Uh, MAH.

McMa­hons was sev­en, so they were. Way, way above our, our cut­off thresh­old for scor­ing stocks for growth over pe. admit­ted­ly, some of the stocks were a bit more mut­ed, so Genus Plus was only 1.75, but still above the thresh­old. So then I looked at rank­ing the Jan­u­ary buy list by growth over PE to see what that showed. Um, and that showed that the top 20 stocks, um, by. Growth over PE had a per­for­mance of 26% on an a DT weight­ed basis. if I bought an even amount, the top 20 stocks made 43%. So, um, again, with­out the sort of skew to large mar­ket caps, um, the small caps were doing real­ly well on that basis. Um. [00:18:00] I also thought, well, that’s not gonna help all lis­ten­ers and me includ­ed, because I need a large a DT. of those 20 stocks that I pulled out, which had the high­est growth over PE rank­ing, I took out the four stocks which had an A DT above a mil­lion dol­lars, um, bought those even­ly and that returned for 50%. So even bet­ter results. And that list was Par­en­ti, a MP, MIUs and Qan­tas, and obvi­ous­ly Qan­tas and a MP. We’re very large a DT stocks and they had good per­for­mances, but not as good as Par­en­ti and Alius. So them on an even basis, um, made the return 50%, which was bloody good. Um, cou­ple of oth­er things to note. Uh, a lot of the stocks on the buy list have no fore­cast earn­ings per share growth, and that’s. we know, because a lot of the stocks that we look at aren’t cov­ered by ana­lysts, and so we don’t get a, an ana­lyst fore­cast for them, so we can’t score them. But if I looked at that group [00:19:00] alone, um, they returned only 8% on an even weight­ed port­fo­lio basis, and they lost mon­ey on an a DT weight­ed port­fo­lio basis. the a DT weight­ed. Port­fo­lio was dom­i­nat­ed by Beach Petro­le­um, for some rea­son did­n’t have a, uh, a fore­cast earn­ings per share, but was much, much larg­er than all the oth­er stocks because of the stocks that don’t have an, uh, an ana­lyst fore­cast are small. They’re too small to be cov­ered. So, um, you took out, um. If you took out beach, the, the per­for­mance improved. And in fact there were some good per­form­ers in that group. So stocks like plen­ty group returned 50%. So there’s still things to, um, say about that, uh, group of stocks that don’t have an ana­lyst fore­cast. The oth­er thing to look, I looked at them, was to see if there was a neg­a­tive cor­re­la­tion stocks, which had a fore­cast neg­a­tive growth in earn­ings per share. And indeed there was, they fore­cast­ed that they fared per, uh, poor­ly over the year. So an equal weight­ed port­fo­lio returned [00:20:00] 3.2% for 2025 if they had a neg­a­tive growth over pe. And the A DT weight­ed one did a lit­tle bit bet­ter at 8.5%. But, um, still not great. So a best index for neg­a­tive growth over PE stocks. So that, that kind of makes me think that we should up the wait­ing for growth over pe. Um, I’ll need to do some more research on that. ’cause it’s also pos­si­ble that this was a year which favored growth stocks. Um, you know, as I said, their inter­est rate cuts this year that often favors growth in the mar­ket.

When peo­ple like, uh, they can, the com­pa­nies have low­er bor­row­ing costs, but they also. have per­haps more, uh, mon­ey to invest ’cause they’re pay­ing less in mort­gages or what­ev­er. often tend towards going for high­er growth, uh, invest­ments. Um. So then I said, well, let’s look at the growth stocks in gen­er­al.

So I took the buy, took the down­load, is, uh, much big­ger than the buy list, and it includes all stocks with, um, pos­i­tive cash flows, [00:21:00] sort­ed them by growth over pe and took the top 20 of those. uh, all of those stocks as a, as a group return 92%. So very good. Inter­est­ing­ly enough. That group includ­ed five QAV stocks, those five QAV stocks alone returned 111%, so bet­ter than the the growth stocks by them­selves. So I think that makes sense. I think, um, it’s often been the case that peo­ple will pay up for growth and often over­pay for growth. And I think that the QAV dis­ci­pline of buy­ing val­ue with a growth pro­file is, um, is adding, adding to per­for­mance, which is good, but it does need, um, more research on my part. My hypoth­e­sis at this stage is to at chang­ing the scor­ing for QAV so that we use the growth over PE the score in that col­umn and give a, um, a, a real [00:22:00] big. Tail­wind to the scores or, uh, for growth over PE high ’cause that’s worked this year. But I’m gonna do some more research ’cause as I said, this year may be dif­fer­ent.

It may be the year that’s small cap shine. It may be the year that inter­est cuts have, have favored growth stocks over oth­er ones. So I’ll, I’ll do some more analy­sis. I’ll do also run some paper port­fo­lios to see if, um. You know, it’s occurred in the past years and it occurs going for­ward, but I think there’s some­thing in that based on what Par­en­ti and Per­cys and Wag­n­ers and oth­er com­pa­nies like that have done this year.

I think it’s some­thing to focus on.

Cameron: We’ve got buy lists going back five or six years now. We could take the. First buy list from Jan­u­ary for each of those years and do a sim­i­lar analy­sis. Right.

Tony Kynas­ton: Cor­rect,

Yeah, so I, I sort of did this analy­sis this morn­ing and yes­ter­day, so I haven’t had a chance to do that, but that’s my next step for sure.

Cameron: Yeah, that’d be fas­ci­nat­ing.

Tony Kynas­ton: And

Cameron: So growth over pe. Hmm.

Tony Kynas­ton: growth over [00:23:00] PE in gen­er­al see, um, you know, what the dif­fer­ence is for QAV stocks. The oth­er inter­est­ing thing was on that list of rank stocks in gen­er­al, a num­ber of those became QAV stocks dur­ing the year, like Fleet­wood, for exam­ple. So, um, it exhib­it­ed before it exhib­it­ed val­ue and came onto the buy list.

Cameron: And cor­rect me if I’m wrong here, but isn’t, isn’t Peg uh, Peter Lynch favorite met­ric? Um, which is sort of the inverse of our growth over pe. That’s

Tony Kynas­ton: is.

Cameron: same thing, but he just does it the oth­er way around. Yeah. Right. That was from mem­o­ry, one of the things that he always used as a key thing, key met­ric to look at.

Tony Kynas­ton: much so. Yeah, and that’s why I put it in the bias, but it looks like it’s hav­ing an out­sized effect, which we’re not tak­ing into account. So do some more research on that.

Cameron: Okay. Fas­ci­nat­ing. And WGN uh, Wag­n­er’s Group, um, [00:24:00] their con­struc­tion from mem­o­ry, um, uh, did they, did you see notice any­thing about them? They were the num­ber one per­former in the like, uh, port­fo­lio.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah,

Cameron: about their,

Tony Kynas­ton: they had a high

Cameron: um, growth overp? Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: Um, and the good thing about that was that they’re not a min­ing stock. So they,

Cameron: Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: as a cement hauler in Toowoom­ba. That’s still a large part of their busi­ness. And now they’re, they’re branch­ing off into, uh, mak­ing com­pos­ites out of recy­cled mate­ri­als and using it for con­struct­ing bridges and shel­ters and things like that.

Cameron: Right.

Tony Kynas­ton: So it’s not, I want­ed to be very care­ful. This was­n’t just a min­ing relat­ed thing because Par­en­ti was a min­ing ser­vices com­pa­ny. MIUs is a gold stock. But when you Hmm.

like Wag­n­er’s, it gives me, um, a bit more com­fort that it’s a growth over PE thing in gen­er­al.

Cameron: Hmm.

Tony Kynas­ton: too.

Fleet­wood’s a, a builder.

Cameron: Yeah. Very inter­est­ing. [00:25:00] Tk, thank you for doing that. So is that your Paul pork?

Tony Kynas­ton: It is, yeah,

Cameron: It’s growth over PE Paul Pork.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yes.

Cameron: All right, well, um, lemme get back into the news. Just talk­ing about get­ting back to mar­kets. I saw a, a chart this morn­ing look­ing at world stocks in 2025. It’s been bonkers all over the world this year. Glob­al equi­ties, um, the Europe stocks, S‑T-O-X‑X 600, up 16.6%. The s and p 500 in the US up 17.3 for the year.

The fts E in the UK up 21 and a half. Hong Kong’s index is up 28.8 and Japan’s index is up 34.6% for the year. Done absolute­ly no analy­sis on why Hong Kong and Japan are doing so well. But do you have [00:26:00] any uh, insights?

Tony Kynas­ton: About Hong Kong, but Japan, if you recall, was a, a hunt­ing ground for. Char­lie and War­ren a cou­ple of years ago. So they’re doing very well out of their analy­sis on

Cameron: Hmm.

Tony Kynas­ton: Um, a cou­ple of things I’ve noticed about Japan this year is that, uh, for a long time they were in a defla­tion­ary cycle they’re now start­ing to come out of that, so that will be help­ing and. Dur­ing that defla­tion­ary cycle, there was a lot of focus by Japan­ese com­pa­nies on just stay­ing in busi­ness. So there are a lot of cross share hold­ings. There are a lot of loans, inter­con­nect­ed loans. Um, a lot of will play it safe and not invest a whole heap of mon­ey into cap­i­tal. that’s now chang­ing from what I’m hear­ing.

I, I spoke to some­one who went to a pre­sen­ta­tion by the Japan­ese equiv­a­lent of the ASX. Um, CEO he was say­ing that he’s doing as much as he can to con­vince Japan­ese com­pa­nies that it’s a growth [00:27:00] era now, and they should be invest­ing in them­selves and their own busi­ness­es more. So just a ques­tion on that graph you shared with me.

So U‑S-S-M‑P is up 17.3%, so

Cameron: what it says.

Tony Kynas­ton: show, don’t we report a high­er num­ber for the US than that?

Cameron: Um, no. I’ve got my US port­fo­lio open in front of me for the last one year. Uh, it says s and p is up 15.66%. If I do, if I do year to date, that’s 17.8 about

Tony Kynas­ton: Okay.

Cameron: the same as that oth­er chart.

Tony Kynas­ton: Right. No, that’s inter­est­ing. I know that’s the top 500 com­pa­nies in the us so it dilutes the effect of the Mag­nif­i­cent sev­en, but I would’ve thought the US was doing bet­ter than that.

Cameron: Yeah.

well I think the Mag sev­en, uh, you know, obvi­ous­ly the out­per­form­ers over there and the rest of them are pulling it down.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Right. Yeah, no. Inter­est­ing. Inter­est­ing that Japan and [00:28:00] Chi­na are doing the best, or the Hong Kong index is doing the best. Hmm,

Cameron: hmm,

Oth­er things I’ve got on the news, uh, this is a week or so old, but, uh, Wood­side, CEO Mega O’Neal is leav­ing to become the CEO of bp. Appar­ent­ly it’s hap­pen­ing in April. So a bit of a, uh, long tran­si­tion peri­od there. Um. I haven’t had a look at what’s hap­pened to Wood­side’s share price since that was announced, but I’m pulling it up now.

Did it seri­ous­ly? Oh, it dropped down. Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: well she was high­ly regard­ed, um, and I guess that’s why she got the top job at, at bp, which is a big­ger com­pa­ny than Wood­side. Um, she’s done a lot of good for Wood­side. They, they acquired the BHP oil and gas assets under her watch. They, uh, have invest­ed heav­i­ly in the [00:29:00] US under her watch. Um, so she’s done a lot of good things.

I know she also came out with a lot of frus­tra­tions about the process­es in Aus­tralia, about how the envi­ron­men­tal red tape was mean­ing it would take four or five years to get new up in Aus­tralia com­pared to oth­er parts of the world. So, um, it’s a shame, but look, you know, it’s, chances are this is a nor­mal career pro­gres­sion for her to do a good job in a small­er com­pa­ny than move up to run a big­ger com­pa­ny.

But it’s, it’s a shame if we

Cameron: Hmm.

Tony Kynas­ton: Tal­ent like her to an Aus­tralian, the large cap Aus­tralian com­pa­ny because of the reg­u­la­to­ry envi­ron­ment in Aus­tralia. Um, and look, I I accept that you’ve got­ta have envi­ron­men­tal reg­u­la­tions. I know there’s been a review of them recent­ly. Um, whether that works out for the bet­ter or not, I don’t know, but, um, it’s, and it’s hard get­ting the bal­ance right, but, um, yeah, you, it’s got­ta be, it’s got­ta be good for both. Invest­ment, which is good [00:30:00] for Aus­tralia and the envi­ron­ment, which is good for Aus­tralia. So I’m not sure the bal­ance is right at the moment.

Cameron: Hmm.

Well, yes, get­ting the bal­ance right is dif­fi­cult and lots of things. I’ve been doing a lot of deep dive analy­sis on the hous­ing cri­sis sit­u­a­tion, try­ing to fig­ure out, you know, what the path for­ward for that might look like over the last cou­ple of weeks and try­ing to get the bal­ance right there is prov­ing to be dif­fi­cult in lots of places.

But, you know, includ­ing here at the moment,

Tony Kynas­ton: I think it’s easy.

Cameron: um, do you, what’s the solu­tion?

Tony Kynas­ton: I’ll take you back a cou­ple of days from your dri­ve from Bris­bane to Bund­aberg. How much emp­ty space did you dri­ve through along the Lots,

So why all emp­ty space. Well, that’s part of the prob­lem. I mean, you’ve, you’ve got to, uh, get the infra­struc­ture built to. You know, pro­vide for peo­ple. So you need to have [00:31:00] water and elec­tric­i­ty and san­i­ta­tion and shop­ping and edu­ca­tion, and you need to invest in all of those things and have plat­forms for those.

How much

Cameron: also I think we, no, none. No, yeah, none of that. But also, you know, we, we can build up in the places where we do have those things. We, we can start to build, uh, walkup size four to six sto­ries a lot more in parts of Aus­tralia, where we already have all of that infra­struc­ture, but we don’t wan­na do that where we have NIMBY sit­u­a­tions every­where and we have peo­ple with vest­ed inter­ests where they don’t want mid-lev­el high ris­es going up,

Tony Kynas­ton: and but that’s what,

some sym­pa­thy for that.

Cameron: yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Well, if I, if I, well, if I buy a house some­where and, uh, some­one [00:32:00] 10 years lat­er, 20 years lat­er, buys a place next door and puts a night­club in and they play loud music all night, I’ve got a right to say. Turn it down

Cameron: I’m talk­ing about a night­club. We’re talk­ing about res­i­den­tial accom­mo­da­tion.

Tony Kynas­ton: if you build a 10 sto­ry apart­ment block next to me I’ve been there liv­ing qui­et­ly for 20 years, I’ve got a right to say fuck off.

Cameron: Do you.

Tony Kynas­ton: Absolute­ly. I bought into

Cameron: Okay.

Tony Kynas­ton: and now it’s being

Cameron: You thought noth­ing was gonna change you. You bought in think­ing every­thing was gonna stay the same for­ev­er. Like noth­ing ever changes real­ly.

Tony Kynas­ton: but.

Cameron: Okay, well calm down. Things change.

Tony Kynas­ton: No, I’m a, I’m a, I’m a con­firmed nim­by. do Yeah.

that, but I,

Cameron: Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: anti NIMBY bash that goes on, because impos­ing

Cameron: The anti NIMBY Bash.

Tony Kynas­ton: you heard that

Cameron: That’s my favorite. That’s my favorite New Year’s Eve par­ty. That’s what I’m going to is the anti NIMBY Bash for New Year’s Eve.

Tony Kynas­ton: again, there’s got­ta be a

Cameron: Yeah. Look, things, yeah, that’s what [00:33:00] I’m say­ing. There has to be a bal­ance. Look, I, I, I respect that. Uh, peo­ple who bought some­thing think­ing noth­ing was gonna change.

You’re gonna be upset and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the flip side is. We have seri­ous prob­lems. We have cost of liv­ing issues that are gonna affect gen­er­a­tions of Aus­tralians and we need to do some­thing dif­fer­ent. So, um, yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: but again, I come back to, um, you know, you dri­ve. An hour out of any, like I dri­ve between here and Mel­bourne, which is a lit­tle over an hour.

Cameron: Hmm.

Tony Kynas­ton: there’s so many what I’ll call super­an­nu­a­tion farms along the way. Some­one’s bought 10, 10

and they’ve been

Cameron: Well, they don’t think any­thing’s ever gonna change. I.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, true.

But you’re not affect­ing them real­ly. ’cause they don’t live there If you do sub­di­vide there a lot, but, Oh,

but

Cameron: they don’t get to call, they don’t get to cry. Nim­by.

Tony Kynas­ton: no, they can, if they like.

Cameron: Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, I look, I total­ly agree with you though.

Tony Kynas­ton: area should have a big say in what hap­pens to their [00:34:00] local area. it’s got­ta

Cameron: They should have a say, but not the only say.

Yeah. Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: They should have a big say in it.

Cameron: They should have a say, but you live in a soci­ety and we have to bal­ance the needs and inter­ests of every­one in the soci­ety. That’s part of the social con­tract.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. But like, Prob­a­bly a lot of politi­cians and NIM­BYs though too. I think that’s part of the issue.

Cameron: And the peo­ple fund­ing their cam­paigns.

Tony Kynas­ton: big­ger than that, most of the politi­cians in Can­ber­ra, three or four hous­es them­selves, so

Cameron: That’s what I’m say­ing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They’ve got deep, deeply vest­ed inter­ests. Um.

Tony Kynas­ton: But yeah, look, it, it,

Cameron: there’s lots of land.

Tony Kynas­ton: you could­n’t dri­ve the way we do in Aus­tralia and Europe and not see rows of,

Cameron: Hmm.

Tony Kynas­ton: or three ter­ror­ist hous­ing.

Cameron: And even in the us like I, I’ve dri­ven cross coun­try the US quite a few times, and like there’s a lot of farms and there’s a lot of stuff. But you know, the, the bush even here in Bund­aberg, like I’m dri­ving around, [00:35:00] uh, between, I go to Elliot, heads from my mom’s place, which as I said is a 10 minute dri­ve.

90% of that is just open land. There’s some farms, but there’s also just a lot of scrub, emp­ty scrub that just, you know, could have, could fit 250,000 peo­ple between here and just one road down to Elliot heads. Um. In in, in a year if, you know, Chi­na was run­ning things.

I did a lot of com­par­i­son with GPT too, talk­ing about how’s Chi­na actu­al­ly able to build stuff so quick­ly and we can’t build stuff quick­ly here.

And it was like, well, it’s the ben­e­fit of hav­ing an auto­crat­ic gov­ern­ment that just says go build shit.

Tony Kynas­ton: well that’s it. You talk to devel­op­ers and they’ll say, yeah, we’d love to take that land of Bund­aberg and turn it into a, a, a nice urban devel­op­ment. But we can’t because of the red tape.

Cameron: There is urban devel­op­ment going on down at Elliot Heads, but it’s been going on for six years. New estate com­ing soon and [00:36:00] they’ve cleared the land and stuff, but I don’t see

any­thing going up there.

Tony Kynas­ton: bet you. if you research that they, they want­ed to build it and they’ve been held up with coun­cil and state approvals ever since.

Cameron: Envi­ron­men­tal red tape and all that kind of stuff, which is all good. But yeah, that’s what I was say­ing, start­ed this whole thing. It’s the com­plex­i­ties in doing stuff. Any­way, where were we? Uh, yeah. Meg O’Neill, Wood­side, et cetera. Good. Good. Um, Scott sent me, uh, this arti­cle, uh hum. Chair bought $11 mil­lion worth of shares days after takeover approach.

This is in the finan­cial review, Decem­ber 24th. One of Hum group’s larg­er share­hold­ers has accused its board of all, but ignor­ing red flags for insid­er trad­ing when allow­ing Chair­man Andrew Aber­crom­bie to pur­chase near­ly $11 mil­lion in shares at a time when the buy now pay lat­er com­pa­ny was con­sid­er­ing a takeover pro­pos­al.

Reaper [00:37:00] Cap­i­tal founder, unfor­tu­nate­ly named Jere­my Rap­er. He said the share sales from Decem­ber 17th to 19th were high­ly unusu­al and pos­si­bly unheard of. Giv­en a aber­crom­bie’s acqui­si­tion of 15 mil­lion shares, equaled about 3% of HUMS equi­ty just days after it received the buy­out pro­pos­al from Rival Cred­it Corp.

Well, that’s the first piece of use is that there’s a buy­out offer from Cred­it Call for HUM to com­pa­nies that have been on our buy list a lot. Um, over the years. Uh, but what do you think about this, uh, chair­man buy­ing 15 mil­lion shares? Tony, does that strike you as high­ly unusu­al?

Tony Kynas­ton: Uh, I think it’s unusu­al. I don’t think it’s ille­gal. So, um, as the arti­cle says, Mr. Aber­crom­bie start­ed buy­ing after Hum, announced the Cred­it Corp takeover, and then he bought on mar­ket for a cou­ple of days, so. Unless there was some­thing they did­n’t dis­close, [00:38:00] which we’ll even­tu­al­ly find out, then he did the right thing.

He declared a takeover offer and then bought on mar­ket. Um, know­ing that the share price would prob­a­bly go up towards the takeover price. So it’s unusu­al nor­mal­ly if, if there’s a announce­ment of a takeover offer, um. Senior man­age­ment don’t buy or sell, um, because they are in the mid­dle of those takeover talks, but I don’t think there’s any­thing ille­gal in doing it.

So it’s, um, yeah, it’s, it’s. I think it’s fine under the let­ter of the law. It looks a bit strange if you’re look­ing at it from an investor point of view, but it’s also per­haps a sig­nal that yes, Aber­crom­bie thinks the com­pa­ny’s under­val­ued. He did, um, he did launch his own takeover offer on the com­pa­ny dur­ing the year, was low­er than the Cred­it Corp offer, and that was knocked back. Um, it’s, it’s been a fun­ny year for hum. So, um, it’s on the bias at the moment. It’s, uh, peo­ple may recall it. Um, uh, it’s a, it. now, pay lat­er com­pa­ny. But it’s also [00:39:00] a com­pa­ny that does a lot of, um, in-store pur­chas­ing financ­ing.

Cameron: Right.

Tony Kynas­ton: you know, I, I dun­no if it still does it used to do the Kohl’s cred­it card when I was work­ing at Kohl’s. I think, well that might’ve been lat­i­tude, sort of com­pa­ny. Uh, it does, it does those kinds of buy now pay noth­ing for five year type inter­est. Inter­est rate deals that Har­vey Nor­man and depart­ment stores do from time to time. So that’s its busi­ness. Um, and as I said, there was actu­al­ly a takeover offer for by Lat­i­tude, which was knocked back then the share price tanked.

And then Mr. Aber­crom­bie, who’s the major share­hold­er, and I think the founder from Mem­o­ry, made an offer which was knocked back. And then the accounts were delayed. And there was some ques­tions about, um. think it was the car­ry­ing val­ue of soft­ware in the accounts, were final­ly released, and then ear­li­er in Decem­ber, the CFO [00:40:00] resigned. it’s been, it’s been kin­da limp­ing to the fin­ish line for this com­pa­ny in the last cou­ple of months. they, then they, the inter­est­ing thing about, which I find even more inter­est­ing is that the, the offer from Cred­it Corp came a month before it was announced, it came late Novem­ber. And then they announced it in Decem­ber. And as Mr. Rap­er points out, they only, announced at the same time that they announced his motion to spiel half the board. So, um, I mean, his, I think his insin­u­a­tion is that they’re only announc­ing it now to look good, to coun­ter­act. Motion to hold a spe­cial meet­ing and spill the board. So if that’s true or not. Um, again, I, I don’t think it’s ille­gal to delay announc­ing the takeover. ’cause hap­pens in these sit­u­a­tions is, um, and if you read the fine print of the. Cred­it core, um, offer, it’s talk­ing about it being uncon­di­tion­al and need­ing to look at the books first, due dili­gence, et cetera, [00:41:00] et cetera. So if, um, if a com­pa­ny receives such an uncon­di­tion­al, or sor­ry, such a high­ly con­di­tion­al offer, They’ll talk to the com, the co, the um, which is tar­get­ing them try and beat out, uh, some­thing more defin­i­tive to take to the mar­ket. some­times, um, in the past there’s been cas­es where a board has­n’t the, the fact that there was a, approach made because the board felt like it was nev­er gonna go ahead, uh, only to be cas­ti­gat­ed by the share­hold­ers for not being trans­par­ent and say­ing that there was mar­ket inter­est.

So, it’s. Bit of a fine line here. Uh, the way I would like to see it hap­pen is that harm should have announced the date that they received the offer from cred­it court, they received an offer even though it was high­ly con­di­tion­al and required due dili­gence, et cetera, et cetera. the mar­ket’s ful­ly informed and. It would prob­a­bly, if there was some­one else look­ing at the com­pa­ny, flush out a com­pet­ing offer, which is a good thing. So per­haps crit­ic, uh, per­haps [00:42:00] harm did that behind the scenes and its bro­kers were work­ing furi­ous­ly to see if there was anoth­er offer or not. We don’t know. Any­way, it’s all out in the pub­lic now and the, the. share price today was a cou­ple of cents low­er than the cred­it core er, and the cred­it core is in two stages. One is, I think from mem­o­ry it’s 77 cents a share. If they can get the board to agree a scheme of arrange­ment, which is an, um, an eas­i­er way of mak­ing a takeover than, uh, going hos­tile on mar­ket. if they can’t get that, then Cred­it Corp has said. they get access to the books and due due dili­gence and they’re hap­py with what they find. um, offer 72 cents a share on mar­ket and until they get the major­i­ty of shares to, um, sell into that bid. Um, and I think the share price is about 69 cents.

So the mar­ket’s kind of say­ing, we think it’ll go ahead, but we’re not a hun­dred per­cent sure it’ll go ahead and. of all the, um, hic­cups with the release of the lat­est results and the fact [00:43:00] the CFO resigned, I think it’s very fair of Cred­it Corp to say, Hey, to look at the books our­selves before we can firm up our office.

So it’s very much in, in a state of flux. Um, I don’t think any­thing ille­gal has hap­pened in, my read­ing of it, but um, it’s cer­tain­ly a bit unusu­al.

Cameron: Well, we don’t hold either Cred­it Corp or hum in any of our port­fo­lios. Um, and then ne nei­ther of ’em are on the buy list this week as far as I can tell. I just had a quick look, so

Tony Kynas­ton: I thought harm washum. So

Cameron: think so.

Tony Kynas­ton: when I do my bio list, I include the holds. So it’s prob­a­bly got a QAV score, but it’s not across its byline. Lemme just have a look at my bio list.

Cameron: looked at the dum­my. No. Um, yeah, I think it’s, um, a Josephine,

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: I just brought it up a sec­ond ago. Yeah. It’s still a Josephine. It’s not above its s byline.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. But actu­al­ly, [00:44:00] um,

Cameron: that’s all.

Tony Kynas­ton: I

Cameron: Hmm.

Tony Kynas­ton: the

mine and Hum has a score, has a very high QAV score at the moment of, um, let me get to it. It is 0.47 on the B list

Cameron: Hmm.

Tony Kynas­ton: bist.

Cameron: Hmm. I’m read­ing a book on, um, crowd psy­chol­o­gy at the moment that I got tipped off from a bond nov­el. One of the most inter­est­ing things about read­ing these bond nov­els is he like sprin­kles in ref­er­ences of stuff that obvi­ous­ly. He found inter­est­ing and I’ll go, oh, that’s inter­est­ing. What’s that Mr.

Big in Live and Led Die says Some­thing to Bond when he is tor­tur­ing him. At one point about, uh, some crowd psy­chol­o­gy ref­er­ence that I’m sure you are aware of, we’ve both read it and I was like, I’ve nev­er heard of this one before. So I dug it up to, [00:45:00] uh, read it and um, yeah, it’s inter­est­ing. But I was think­ing about, just think­ing about our sen­ti­ment, uh.

Score as part of, while I was read­ing that like, you know, it’s, um, my, my take on it is even if we think the num­bers look good and the com­pa­ny’s per­form­ing well and it hits all of our met­rics, you know, it’s, uh, good qual­i­ty com­pa­ny and it’s under­val­ued, et cetera, et cetera, we, we respect the crowd psy­chol­o­gy behind

Tony Kynas­ton: Oh.

Cameron: buy­ing in.

If, if, if the crowd is against it. For some rea­son, we’re not gonna fight the crowd psy­chol­o­gy as much as we might believe in the, the the­sis of the com­pa­ny. We’re just gonna wait until the crowd psy­chol­o­gy turns around because you could be fight­ing the crowd for a long time, right?

Tony Kynas­ton: Cor­rect, and it’s, it’s pos­si­ble that our analy­sis has­n’t picked up on the thing which the rest of the mar­ket knows. Um, and it’s pos­si­ble [00:46:00] that, um, the rest of the mar­ket don’t, like ana­lysts don’t cov­er the stock. So the rest of the mar­ket will nev­er know about stock and there­fore will nev­er buy it office.

So the game isn’t so much, the game is an ana­lyz­ing com­pa­nies, but the game is also sell­ing them. And, um, you’ve got­ta have a liq­uid mar­ket to sell into.

Cameron: Yeah. Good point. Well, that’s all the news I have. You got any­thing else, tk?

Tony Kynas­ton: No, I think you cov­ered up those two things I was gonna talk about, um, uh, Meg and the Cred­it Corp takeover, so that’s me.

Cameron: After hours I’ve been watch­ing Alien Earth. Uh, still it’s the only thing I’m real­ly watch­ing at the moment. Lov­ing it, love it,

like sur­pris­ing­ly,

Tony Kynas­ton: Hmm.

Cameron: much I’m lov­ing it and lov­ing Tim­o­thy Olefins char­ac­ter, Kirsch in it. As it goes on, he becomes more and more inter­est­ing. And boy Cav­a­lier, but the, the actor who plays Boy Cav­a­lier has to be the next doc­tor.

I don’t know who that guy is, but, oh, he’d make such a [00:47:00] good doc­tor if they ever, if they ever make me any more doc­tor. It’s up in the air at the moment, I think. And, um. And, uh, Adri­an Edmond­son gets more to do as the show goes on. Still not a lot, but he’s great in his role as a con­cil­iary. Yeah. But yeah, and I’m real­ly, I’m real­ly, real­ly enjoy­ing the, all the sto­ry­lines, um, includ­ing how intel­li­gent the eye­ball alien seems to be.

Although there was one stu­pid point I saw when the boy Cav­a­lier. Uh, is try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate with the sheep, with the eye­ball, and he writes 3.14 on his hand and then says, what’s the next num­ber? I’m like, how’s it gonna go? How’s it gonna under­stand Ara­bic numer­als? I mean, it, it’s, it. That’s a human num­ber sys­tem.

How is some alien gonna know what, what a 3.14 on a human hand looks like? I mean, any­way, out­side of that,

Tony Kynas­ton: I thought yeah, pret­ty good.[00:48:00]

how he, you know, the boy Cav­a­lier thought if, if it’s smart enough to know what pie is, it’s an intel­li­gent eye­ball.

Cameron: Sure, I, I like the premise, but how does it rec­og­nize the num­bers? You know, he could have banged it out and see if it rec­og­nized the sequence of 3.1 4, 1 5, 9, et cetera, et cetera. Any­way, no good show. Um, have you watched the low down?

Good show, uh, Al. Also on Dis­ney, I think Stars Ethan Hawke.

And it’s

Tony Kynas­ton: episode. Yeah.

Cameron: right, it’s writ­ten and direct­ed by the guy who did reser­va­tion dogs, which we enjoyed, which was a series about a bunch of teenagers on an Indi­an reser­va­tion. Um. Yeah, so we’ve been enjoy­ing that. It’s kind of a bit of a Elmore Leny type thing set in Tul­sa.

Yeah. It’s kind of cool.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Thomas what else? Yeah, yeah. [00:49:00] Um, read­ing Bond, I’m up to Moon­rak­er now. Real­ly enjoyed live and Let Die. It was, had a lot more pace to it than, um, casi­no Royale. Yeah. So into Moon­rak­er. Well, I’ve only read the first two, so Live and Let Die would be my favorite out­ta those two. But yeah. Um, yeah, read­ing a, a book by, um, an his­to­ri­an on Rus­sia, Ukraine, uh, and the US called the Defeat of the West, talk­ing about how, you know, the west is going to.

Cameron: Suf­fered defeat at the hands of Rus­sia over Ukraine and that it was pre­dictable all along. As John Muir Shi­er said in back in ear­ly 2022, he pre­dict­ed that Rus­sia would win, the west would give up on Ukraine even­tu­al­ly, because as he said, you know, for Rus­sia, Ukraine, and NATO is an exis­ten­tial threat for the [00:50:00] West.

Ukraine is a. Side project. It’s, it’s incre­men­tal gains. It’s not an exis­ten­tial threat. We’ll wave ban­ners and give speech­es and throw mon­ey at it for a lit­tle while, but even­tu­al­ly, even­tu­al­ly we’ll get tired of the whole thing and give up. Uh, but Rus­sia isn’t gonna give up because it’s you, you know, they, they remem­ber World War II and World War I and what hap­pens when you have ene­mies on the bor­der and they’re not gonna let that hap­pen again.

So, yeah. Um, read­ing some more stuff about that. Hmm. Crowd psy­chol­o­gy. Yeah. And then most­ly just enjoy­ing the beach.

Tony Kynas­ton: I saw Hmm.

on Ed Hirsch came up on, um,

Cameron: Sey­mour Hirsch.

Tony Kynas­ton: sor­ry. Yes.

Cameron: Yeah. One of my, one of my lis­ten­ers sent me an email yes­ter­day and men­tioned that I haven’t had a look at it yet. But, you know, I’m a huge fan of Cy Hirsch’s work over the last 60 years or 70 years, what­ev­er it’s been since the Melo mas­sacre, um, revealed that he did in the six­ties.

[00:51:00] 60 years, I guess. Yeah. Have you seen it?

Tony Kynas­ton: I haven’t, it just popped up on my feed yes­ter­day, so I’m look­ing for­ward to it. we’re up to four of which we’re.

Cameron: What’s that on again? I tried look­ing for it. What are you watch­ing it on? Is it Oh, right. Okay. One I don’t have, yeah. Oh, you got fur­ther than I did. I think I only got into like sea­son two or some­thing. It gets bet­ter. I heard it gets bet­ter.

Tony Kynas­ton: yeah. About the same. I would­n’t say it gets bet­ter or worse, but about the same.

Cameron: Right. Okay.

Tony Kynas­ton: yeah, we’re enjoy­ing it. And appar­ent­ly they’re gonna make anoth­er series by the same author. Um.

Cameron: Okay.

Tony Kynas­ton: The expanse has been so pop­u­lar. Yeah. So that’s com­ing out next year, which I’m look­ing for­ward to.

Cameron: Inter­est­ing­ly, the pulled pork I’m gonna do in our US show next is A‑M-C-X-A-M‑C net­works, not the cin­e­ma chain, but the net­works. And you know, it’s, um, it’s been inter­est­ing to drill down into their [00:52:00] back­sto­ry, going right back to the Play­boy chan­nel, um, but also. You know, they, they, A MC had all of these ground­break­ing shows, mad Men, break­ing Bad, bet­ter Call, Saul, the Walk­ing Dead, and now they don’t have any of those defin­ing shows and why, what hap­pened between sort of 2007 and 2025 to the eco­nom­ics of cable, which I don’t real­ly under­stand, even though I’ve read what­ev­er that.

Rag­ing Tiger’s sequel book was about the TV things, because we did­n’t have cable here. It’s kind of a, the eco­nom­ics of cable are still a lit­tle bit of a

Tony Kynas­ton: We do

Cameron: mys­tery to me.

Tony Kynas­ton: We have Fox­tel.

Cameron: Fox­tel. Yeah. Wow. It’s not the same thing, but yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: Pop dis vision. And we had a third one for a while too. Used to be on a satel­lite feed.

Cameron: Right.

Tony Kynas­ton: But But not like they did in the US though. It was a very dif­fer­ent, uh, ball [00:53:00] game over there. The cable thing?

yeah, I think it’s pret­ty sim­i­lar. Yeah. Okay.

Toron­to was any com­par­i­son, it was fair­ly sim­i­lar to Aus­tralia,

Cameron: Right,

Tony Kynas­ton: chan­nels. I mean, there was 200 plus chan­nels on the, um, Rogers cable TV offer­ing in, in Toron­to. Um,

 mar­ket, so you expect that. But yeah, I think cable’s strug­gling.

I mean, I don’t think Fox­dale is gonna stay around much longer in Aus­tralia either.

Cameron: Yeah. Well, what I’ve been learn­ing is, you know. Net­flix came along and just sort of dis­in­ter­me­di­at­ed the whole cable thing and peo­ple were like, why am I pay­ing a hun­dred bucks a month for cable when I don’t watch any of the shows? And

Tony Kynas­ton: Yep.

Cameron: a MC was mak­ing mon­ey off of just hav­ing their shows licensed on cable net­works.

And when peo­ple cut the cord, as they call it over there, a MC los­es those view­ers and los­es the ad rev­enue and, uh, can’t afford to make. [00:54:00] You know, mad Men two or Break­ing Bad two. I, I like that. Pluribus has fin­ished, oh, we fin­ished the pluribus thing that’s, uh, had its full run. And inter­est­ing­ly that Vince Gilli­gan made that with Apple and not with a MC, where he made Break­ing Bad and Bet­ter call Saul because they got more mon­ey to throw around.

Um, so now it’s the guys with the deep pock­ets. Any­way, we’ll get into that next. Uh, you got any­thing else after hours wise? Hors­es, golf.

Tony Kynas­ton: Not real­ly, um, been tak­ing it easy over the Christ­mas week­end, which was nice. Um, read a, read a Matthew Riley page Turn­er called the Detec­tive, which was good. Kind of turn your brain off and read it in the one sit­ting, which was nice. Um, kind of like a John Grisham thriller. But a bit of a soft spot for Matthew Riley being a suc­cess­ful Aus­tralian com­mer­cial author. So that was good. Uh, I’m about to start a book by a guy called Ed Zwick, which I just arrived [00:55:00] this

Cameron: I know that name.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. It’s called, um, hits Flops and Oth­er Illu­sions about his life in Hol­ly­wood. So Hol­ly­wood direc­tor back in the eight­ies. And,

Cameron: Hmm.

Tony Kynas­ton: it because like the, all the blurbs are by peo­ple say­ing this is the next. Easy Ride Rag­ing Bull book about Hol­ly­wood

Cameron: Ed Edward Zwick 30 some­thing.

Tony Kynas­ton: made movies like Glo­ry, um, courage Under Fire, 30 some­thing, a TV show.

Cameron: Right? You nev­er watched The Wire, did you? You weren’t real­ly into the wire. Oh, he made Shake­speare in love. Hmm. Uh, one of the, uh, one of the actors who was a major cast mem­ber in the sec­ond sea­son, uh, took his own life last week, which was sad. He was quite young. Uh, what else? Hol­ly­wood News. See, um, Brid­get Barau died.

Tony Kynas­ton: did. Yeah,

Cameron: She an inter­est­ing [00:56:00] life. Hmm.

Tony Kynas­ton: I remem­ber see­ing her in movies when I was a kid and she epit­o­mized the sort of six­ties sex siren or fifties, six­ties sex siren, and

Cameron: Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: retired young and became an ani­mal rights activist.

Cameron: And said, get­ting famous was the worst thing that ever hap­pened to her. She, she despised it, despised fame and all of that kind of stuff said it was just hor­ri­ble. Yeah. Which I can kind of under­stand.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, I guess that, but um, I saw a let­ter from Frank Sina­tra to Who was the guy from Wham, George Michael. I recent­ly came across it in my feeds, and George Michael had said the same thing. He want­ed to retire and get away from fame, and it was a bur­den. All this, and Frank Sina­tra just tore him a new one. Frank Sina­tra tore him a new one.

Cameron: Real­ly?

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah,

Cameron: Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: dream­ing about being famous from when you were a lit­tle boy and when you final­ly [00:57:00] attained it, you want to give it up and you know you should make it work for you. Use it and use Frank’s Sina­tra par­lance, make it your rock­et to the moon, what­ev­er moon you want.

And you know, use it for good and all this. And I thought, yeah, that’s prob­a­bly the bet­ter approach to it than giv­ing it up.

Cameron: He just died young instead.

Tony Kynas­ton: Hmm.

Cameron: Hmm.

Tony Kynas­ton: I mean, I’m not talk­ing from expe­ri­ence, I.

Cameron: Come on. You’re famous in a very small cir­cle.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, and that’s, be hon­est, that’s been enough for me.

Cameron: Not enough for me. I want you to be, I want you to be world famous. The next War­ren Buf­fet. That’s what I want.

Tony Kynas­ton: Oh.

Cameron: go do the US show. Thanks Tony. Um, thank you for a good year. Tony. Thanks to all the lis­ten­ers and the mem­bers for stick­ing in for this year and, and con­grat­u­la­tions to every­one who stuck around this year.

I hope your port­fo­lios have [00:58:00] all had a great six months, and hope­ful­ly it con­tin­ues for a lit­tle while longer, but you know, a lot of, lot of respect for the peo­ple that stuck in there and just kept. Fol­low­ing the sys­tem, and hope­ful­ly you’re now see­ing the results and the returns of that,

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, well said. Yeah. It’s kind of strange that we’re at the end of 2025 already. It’s been a quick year as well.

Cameron: they get quick­er.

Tony Kynas­ton: Hmm.

Cameron: will fix that. Don’t you wor­ry.

Tony Kynas­ton: How?

Cameron: it’ll make, it’ll make, it’ll, it’ll make time. Go slow­ly again.

 All right. Thank you, tk. Have a good week every­one. Hap­py New Year.

Bernard: Q A V is a check­list-based sys­tem of val­ue invest­ing devel­oped by Tony  Khyne­ston. over 25 years. To learn more about how it works and how you can learn the sys­tem, vis­it our web­site, Q A V Pod­cast dot com dot A U.

This pod­cast is an infor­ma­tion provider and in giv­ing you prod­uct [00:59:00] infor­ma­tion we are not mak­ing any sug­ges­tion or rec­om­men­da­tion about a par­tic­u­lar prod­uct. The infor­ma­tion has been pre­pared with­out tak­ing into account your indi­vid­ual invest­ment objec­tives, finan­cial cir­cum­stances or needs. Before you decide whether or not to acquire a par­tic­u­lar finan­cial prod­uct you should assess whether it is appro­pri­ate for you in the light of your own per­son­al cir­cum­stances, hav­ing regard to your own objec­tives, finan­cial sit­u­a­tion and needs. You may wish to obtain finan­cial advice from a suit­ably qual­i­fied advis­er before mak­ing any deci­sion to acquire a finan­cial prod­uct. Please note that all infor­ma­tion about per­for­mance returns is his­tor­i­cal. Past per­for­mance should not be relied upon as an indi­ca­tor of future per­for­mance; unit prices and the val­ue of your invest­ment may fall as well as rise. The results are gen­er­al advice only and not per­son­al prod­uct advice.

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Quote of the day:

You behold in me, Stephen said with grim dis­plea­sure, a hor­ri­ble exam­ple of free thought. Ulysses, James Joyce