Hi folks,

Hap­py New Year! Here’s my week­ly port­fo­lio and pod­cast updates and some thoughts on why we don’t engage in re-bal­anc­ing our port­fo­lio or set price tar­gets for our stocks.

As it’s the start of a new invest­ing year, I urge every­one to re-com­mit to a year of fol­low­ing rules and ignor­ing emo­tions (at least when it comes to invest­ing). Whether the mar­ket is up, down, or some­where in between — just fol­low your rules, for­get about the noise and hype, and take a long-term view.

All the Best,
Cam

QAV MYTH KILLERS

Myth Killer: Why We Don’t Care About Price Targets

One of the most per­sis­tent habits in retail invest­ing is the obses­sion with price tar­gets.

“This stock is worth $X.”
“I’ll sell when it hits $Y.”
“I need to rebal­ance because this one’s run too far.”

We don’t do any of that. Delib­er­ate­ly.

We don’t rebalance because we don’t want to sell our winners

Rebal­anc­ing assumes you know when a stock has “had its run”.

You don’t.

Nobody does.

If a busi­ness con­tin­ues to exe­cute, com­pound cash flows, and improve its eco­nom­ics, the share price can keep sur­pris­ing you for years. Sell­ing just because it’s gone up is how you ampu­tate your best per­form­ers.

Tony always comes back to Buf­fett on this:

Why would you bench Michael Jor­dan?

If a stock hasn’t hit one of our sell trig­gers, we let it run. Price action alone is not a trig­ger.

Our job isn’t trading. It’s ownership.

Our actu­al job as investors is hard enough already.

We’re try­ing to find:
• well-run busi­ness­es
• with strong eco­nom­ics
• led by capa­ble man­age­ment
• tem­porar­i­ly mis­priced for under­stand­able rea­sons

That com­bi­na­tion is rare.

And man­age­ment qual­i­ty is one of the hard­est parts.

Gen­uine­ly good man­age­ment teams are scarce. When you find one that allo­cates cap­i­tal sen­si­bly, com­mu­ni­cates clear­ly, and actu­al­ly behaves like own­ers, the last thing you want to do is casu­al­ly hand them back to the mar­ket because the share price hit an arbi­trary num­ber.

If you find a com­pa­ny with good man­age­ment, you don’t want to sell them unless you have to.

Trad­ing has costs. Hold­ing has advan­tages.

Every unnec­es­sary trade intro­duces fric­tion:
• bro­ker­age
• cap­i­tal gains tax
• rein­vest­ment risk

You’re not just sell­ing a stock. You’re swap­ping it for some­thing else. And there’s no guar­an­tee the replace­ment will be bet­ter than the one you just sold.

In fact, the odds are against you.

Most long-term returns come from a small num­ber of big win­ners held for a long time. Price tar­gets and rou­tine rebal­anc­ing are excel­lent ways to ensure you don’t hold them long enough.

Price targets create false precision

Price tar­gets look sci­en­tif­ic. They feel dis­ci­plined. They give investors a com­fort­ing sense of con­trol.

They’re most­ly the­atre.

Busi­ness­es change. Val­u­a­tions move. New infor­ma­tion arrives. A fixed price tar­get assumes the future stops evolv­ing the moment you buy the stock.

It doesn’t.

We sell on triggers, not feelings

This mat­ters.

We don’t sell because a stock “feels expen­sive”.
We don’t sell because it’s gone up a lot.
We don’t sell because a spread­sheet says it hit a tar­get.

We only sell when pre­de­fined trig­gers — eg three-point trend line sell, Rule #1, com­mod­i­ty sell, gov­er­nance red flag — are breached.

That’s it.

Trig­gers remove emo­tion, reduce sec­ond-guess­ing, and stop us from sab­o­tag­ing our own best ideas.

Rebal­anc­ing is usu­al­ly a con­fi­dence prob­lem

Our view is blunt.

Rebal­anc­ing, like exces­sive diver­si­fi­ca­tion, is often a sign the investor doesn’t ful­ly trust their frame­work.

If you’ve done the work:
• you know why you own the busi­ness
• you know what would make you sell
• and you trust your process

You don’t need price tar­gets to tell you what to do.

You need patience.

And patience, incon­ve­nient­ly, is where most of the mon­ey is made.

STOCK ANALYSIS

For edi­tion #203 of my week­ly Light mem­ber email this Mon­day, I did an analy­sis of Stock Invest­ment Report: Mon­eyMe Lim­it­ed (ASX: MME). Light and Club mem­bers can read it here.

On the full week­ly pod­cast, Tony did a deep dive on Per­en­ti (PRN) and talked about his lat­est thoughts on Growth / PE. See the pod­cast link down below if you want to lis­ten to his analy­sis. This week’s full episode is also avail­able to free lis­ten­ers.

BUY LIST

Each week, we pro­duce a buy list based on our val­ue invest­ing sys­tem that we share with our QAV Club mem­bers. The intend­ed pri­ma­ry pur­pose of this buy list is for club mem­bers to use as a ref­er­ence for com­par­ing their own buy list. In the­o­ry, all of our buy lists should look pret­ty sim­i­lar each week.

Below is a link to the AU list for this week:

QAV Val­ue Invest­ing Buy Lists 2025-12-28

Below is a link to the US list for this week:

QAV Val­ue Invest­ing Buy List 2025-12-28

PORTFOLIOS

We com­pare our per­for­mance to what we think is the most rel­e­vant bench­mark (SPDR 200 in Aus­tralia, S&P500 in the USA), but if you’re new to invest­ing, these com­par­isons might not mean much. Instead, you can com­pare our per­for­mance to the top-per­form­ing Super Funds in Aus­tralia.

Over­all, 2025 was a pret­ty great year for the QAV port­fo­lios. It was one of those years we hold out for. I hope you did­n’t miss out on it and were ful­ly invest­ed!

AUSTRALIAN

QAV DUMMY

Incep­tion Report: Since incep­tion (Sept 2019) our port­fo­lio is +17% p.a. vs the bench­mark +8% p.a.

Month­ly Report: The AU Dum­my Port­fo­lio was ‑0.8% p.a. for the last 30 days vs the bench­mark +0.9% p.a.

No trad­ing in that port­fo­lio this week.

For the 2025 CY, our port­fo­lio was +27% vs +10% for the index — near­ly TRIPLE MARKET.

QAV LIGHT

Our most impres­sive return for the last 30 days is still EDU (+36%).

For the CY the Light port­fo­lio is +37% vs the index +11%. In oth­er words —  over TRIPLE MARKET.

And the graph for this FY shows what a great six months it’s been for our port­fo­lio. 27% vs 4%. This should give our port­fo­lio a lot of wind in its sails.

Become a QAV Light Member today and start your investing on the right track

If you want to find out what we’re trad­ing in QAV Light each week, sign up to become a mem­ber. You’ll get an email from me every Mon­day let­ting you know what we’re buy­ing and sell­ing in that port­fo­lio. You can choose to copy our trades or not. It’s the eas­i­est way to start your rules-based invest­ing career… and you don’t even need to know the rules. I’ll fol­low the rules for you. It’s a good first step to even­tu­al­ly becom­ing a QAV Club mem­ber and learn­ing how to run the sys­tem by your­self.

AMERICAN

Since incep­tion (Sep 2023), our port­fo­lio is +64% vs the S&P 500 +55%.

Our U.S. port­fo­lio for the last 30 days was +7% vs +0.5% for the S&P 500.

No trades this week.

I’ve recent­ly start­ed our U.S. Light port­fo­lio, too, but it’s too ear­ly to both­er report­ing.

THIS WEEK’S EPISODES

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

QAV AU 851 — From Zero to Sys­tem: A First-Year QAV Jour­ney

The Walk­ing Dead Invest­ment: AMC Net­works – QAV AMERICA #33

STOCK NEWS AND UPDATES

• WOODSIDE CEO LEAVES FOR BP

• ‘HIGHLY UNUSUAL’: HUMM CHAIR BOUGHT $11M WORTH OF SHARES DAYS AFTER TAKEOVER APPROACH

• COMMODITIES

No changes to our com­modi­ties this week.

DISCLOSURE

Please review our trad­ing and dis­clo­sure pol­i­cy.

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That’s it for the week!

QAV A GOOD SHAREMARKET!

Got a ques­tion? [email protected]