QAV Weekly Update 2026-01-09

Hi folks,

I hope 2026 has start­ed well for you. It’s pret­ty crazy around the world right now, but, as always, we just try to stick to doing what we do — fol­low­ing the rules. Let’s see where things are at the end of the week!

All the Best,
Cam

QAV MYTH KILLERS

Tony once told me, in the ear­ly days of the show: “If I want­ed to hear a sto­ry, I’d buy a book.”

We don’t lis­ten to com­pa­ny sto­ries. And before you think that’s some kind of anti-intel­lec­tu­al stance or wil­ful igno­rance, let me explain why.

Every com­pa­ny has a sto­ry. Every sin­gle one. And it always sounds ter­rif­ic.

The CEO is vision­ary. The team is world-class. The mar­ket oppor­tu­ni­ty is mas­sive. The exe­cu­tion is flaw­less. The com­pet­i­tive advan­tage is insur­mount­able. The growth tra­jec­to­ry is expo­nen­tial.

That’s the job.

A CEO’s job isn’t just to run the com­pa­ny. It’s to sell the com­pa­ny. To investors. To the media. To employ­ees. To cus­tomers. The sto­ry is the prod­uct, and they’ve got PR teams on six-fig­ure retain­ers mak­ing sure that sto­ry sounds absolute­ly bul­let­proof.

And most of them are good at it. They should be. They’re pro­fes­sion­als.

The Media’s Role

The busi­ness media exists to write sto­ries about busi­ness­es. The Aus­tralian Finan­cial Review, the Wall Street Jour­nal, the New York Times busi­ness section—they’re in the sto­ry busi­ness.

Why? So they can sell sub­scrip­tions and adver­tis­ing to fill the gaps around those sto­ries.

That’s their busi­ness mod­el.

Do they real­ly care where you invest or how well your port­fo­lio per­forms? Of course not. That’s not their job. Their job is to keep you read­ing. Engaged read­ers become sub­scribers. Sub­scribers become rev­enue.

There’s noth­ing sin­is­ter about this. It’s just incen­tives doing what incen­tives do.

But it means the sto­ries they pub­lish are opti­mised for engage­ment, not out­comes. Dra­ma sells. Com­plex­i­ty sells. “The next big thing” sells. “Com­pa­ny qui­et­ly com­pounds at 12% for a decade” does­n’t.

What We Actually Do

Don’t get me wrong—we read the AFR. We read the busi­ness press most days. We lis­ten to the sto­ries.

But our job is to make sure we don’t accept those sto­ries as gospel when we’re decid­ing what to invest in.

We let the num­bers tell the sto­ry. Not the CEO. Not the PR team. And cer­tain­ly not the busi­ness media.

It’s not that the num­bers nev­er lie. They do. They’re com­piled and report­ed by humans, after all. And those humans some­times have incen­tives to make the num­bers look bet­ter than they real­ly are.

But here’s the dif­fer­ence: there are seri­ous legal con­se­quences for pub­lish­ing incor­rect num­bers. There aren’t real­ly legal con­se­quences for “sell­ing a vision.”

You can promise the moon. You can talk about dis­rup­tion and trans­for­ma­tion and par­a­digm shifts until every­one in the room is nod­ding along. None of that is action­able if it does­n’t mate­ri­alise.

But if you mis­re­port rev­enue? If you hide lia­bil­i­ties? If you cook the books? That’s fraud. That’s jail time.

So we focus on the num­bers that are hard­er to fake and have con­se­quences attached.

The Numbers That Matter

The price-to-oper­at­ing cash flow ratio tells a sto­ry. The growth-over-PE ratio tells a sto­ry. The amount of equi­ty the own­ers hold tells a sto­ry. How many con­sec­u­tive quar­ters of equi­ty growth the com­pa­ny has tells a sto­ry.

These aren’t excit­ing sto­ries. They don’t involve dis­rup­tion or moon­shots or rev­o­lu­tion­ary tech­nol­o­gy that’s going to change every­thing.

They’re bor­ing sto­ries. Sto­ries about prof­itabil­i­ty. About cash gen­er­a­tion. About bal­ance sheets that don’t require you to squint and believe in the future.

From time to time, these num­bers tell us the sto­ry we want to hear.

It’s always the same sto­ry: a com­pa­ny that is mak­ing mon­ey but can be picked up momen­tar­i­ly at a dis­count to its true val­u­a­tion.

That’s the only sto­ry we real­ly care about. The sto­ry about qual­i­ty and val­ue.

The Growth Trap

Growth sto­ries are seduc­tive. They have to be. That’s how they work.

“We’re not prof­itable yet, but once we reach scale…”

“We’re invest­ing heav­i­ly in R&D because the mar­ket oppor­tu­ni­ty is…”

“Tra­di­tion­al met­rics don’t apply to us because we’re…”

Maybe it works out. Some­times it does. Occa­sion­al­ly, spec­tac­u­lar­ly.

But most of the time? Most of the time, the growth sto­ry is just an expen­sive way to lose mon­ey while feel­ing smart about it.

The mar­ket is full of com­pa­nies that had incred­i­ble sto­ries. Vision­ary CEOs. Enthu­si­as­tic media cov­er­age. Excit­ed investors.

And then the num­bers did­n’t show up.

Because here’s the thing about sto­ries: they’re for­ward-look­ing. They’re about what could hap­pen. What might hap­pen. What the CEO real­ly, real­ly believes will hap­pen.

Num­bers are back­ward-look­ing. They’re about what did hap­pen. What actu­al­ly occurred. What the com­pa­ny proved it could do.

We pre­fer proof to promis­es.

Once Upon a Time

“Once upon a time, in a land not that far away, there lived a com­pa­ny that was unloved by the mar­ket…”

That’s the begin­ning of our favourite sto­ry.

Not “Once upon a time, there was a vision­ary founder with a rev­o­lu­tion­ary idea that would change the world.”

We want the com­pa­ny that’s already doing the work. Gen­er­at­ing cash. Grow­ing equi­ty. Trad­ing at a dis­count because it’s bor­ing, or out of favour, or in an unsexy indus­try, or just tem­porar­i­ly for­got­ten.

The mar­ket will tell you a thou­sand sto­ries about the future.

We’d rather invest in the com­pa­nies with a track record in the present.

Because when it comes to your mon­ey, the only sto­ry that mat­ters is the one the num­bers tell.

And num­bers don’t need a PR team.

STOCK ANALYSIS OF THE WEEK

For edi­tion 204 of my week­ly Aus­tralian Light mem­ber email this Mon­day, I did an analy­sis of Har­money Corp Lim­it­ed (HMY). Aus­tralian Light and Club mem­bers can read it here.

For edi­tion 3 of the U.S. Light mem­ber email, I did an analy­sis of XPLR Infra­struc­ture LP (XIFR). U.S. Light and Club mem­bers can read it here. We’re also talk­ing about it in more detail on the U.S. episode this week.

On the full week­ly pod­cast, Tony did a deep dive on Fenix Resources (FEX). See the pod­cast link down below if you want to lis­ten to his analy­sis.

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 Aus­tralian Val­ue Invest­ing Buy Lists 2026-01-04

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

QAV Amer­i­can Val­ue Invest­ing Buy List 2026-01-03

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.

AUSTRALIAN

QAV DUMMY

Five Year Report: Over the last five years, our port­fo­lio is +16% p.a. vs the bench­mark +9% p.a.

Month­ly Report: The AU Dum­my Port­fo­lio was +2% 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

In the last 30 days, the Light port­fo­lio was +4% vs the index which was +0.9%.

Our most impres­sive return for the last 30 days is CVL (+25%).

For the last 12 months, the Light port­fo­lio is +37% vs the index +9%. In oth­er words — TRIPLE MARKET.

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

QAV DUMMY

Since incep­tion (Sep 2023), our port­fo­lio is +74% vs the S&P 500 +55%.

Our U.S. port­fo­lio for the last 30 days was +8% vs +0.7% for the S&P 500.

No trades this week.

QAV LIGHT

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

THIS WEEK’S EPISODES

QAV AU 901 — Broc­coli Invest­ing

The Walk­ing Dead Invest­ment: AMC Net­works – QAV AMERICA 33

STOCK NEWS AND UPDATES

• Trump’s Venezuela plan risks inten­si­fy­ing an oil price col­lapse
• Every Wall Street ana­lyst now pre­dicts a stock ral­ly in 2026
• Equi­ty investors could not be more opti­mistic, and it is ter­ri­fy­ing
• Insid­er Stock Buy­ing Reach­es AU$7.45m On Bhag­wan Marine
• The Holy Grail of invest­ing: How to spot ASX Ten Bag­gers before the mass­es pile in
• COMMODITIES

This week we report­ed that Steel has become a Buy.

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]