QAV AU 904 — Humm-ing a Different Tune

 

[00:00:00]

Cameron: Wel­come back to QAV Aus­tralia, tk. It’s the 27th of Jan­u­ary. It’s 2026 and it’s bloody hot around Aus­tralia. I saw her.

Tony Kynas­ton: and

Cameron: Hmm.

Tony Kynas­ton: is the tem­per­a­ture the for­ties

Cameron: Yeah,

Tony Kynas­ton: today again.

Cameron: it was 37 here in Bris­bane. Yes­ter­day I saw a, a thing, I, I don’t know if it’s true, I saw it on Red­dit or some­thing, how, like a heat map of the world and how Aus­tralia was the hottest place on earth right now and kind of feels that way. Right,

Tony Kynas­ton: It’s like Ade­laide, I think, or No, some­where. Some­where south of URA is the hottest place today.

Cameron: right. Well that is what I’d expect. Mild Jira. You know, it’s, no, I’m kid­ding. I haven’t been to mild Jira in 30 years. I dun­no what’s going on in mild Jira. Well, Tony, let’s get into the show. Before we do, I wan­na give a shout out to a new QAV [00:01:00] club mem­ber. Marie from Carl­ton, who I spoke to this morn­ing, had a love­ly chat to Marie.

Um, so great to speak to peo­ple who need it. Get it. She was like, oh my God, I’ve, I need a sys­tem. I’ve just been wing­ing it and I’ve been lucky a cou­ple of times, but as we said, luck is not a strat­e­gy. So, hi Marie. Thanks for the chat. It was love­ly. Oh, not so love­ly news. Rob Hirsch passed away. Ray Ray, Tony Ray would know who Rob Hirsch is.

Uh

Tony Kynas­ton: who Rob Hirsh is. Do you mean Rob Hurst?

Cameron: uh, Rob Hirsch. It’s not Hirsch. It was Hurst. Yes. In my notes it has, uh, Rob Hurst. Yeah. That was, uh, very sad. Yeah. You saw the oils not so long ago, did­n’t you?

Tony Kynas­ton: yeah. Well, we, I think, well we saw, def­i­nite­ly saw ’em in Toron­to when they did their world tour. That would’ve been about six years ago. Um, that

Cameron: [00:02:00] Right.

Tony Kynas­ton: last time we yeah, been to dozens of mid­night laws con­certs over the years. Love them. Love Rob Hurst. and I think every night in my feed I must get half a dozen clips from shows fea­tur­ing Rob Hurst and just play them right out. It’s been great Lis­ten­ing to Mid­night

Cameron: Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: at night.

Cameron: He was like, it’s unusu­al to have a drum­mer with that amount of. Star pow­er, right? Like, I don’t know the names of many drum­mers of Aus­tralian bands, uh, over the last 40 years, but you know, Rob, I got his last name wrong. But, uh, you know, Rob Burst, like, he was just, he was sort of, it was weird. Like he was

Tony Kynas­ton: I must have been when

Cameron: Yeah,

Tony Kynas­ton: Um. There was that great doc­u­men­tary, goat Island Oil when Triple J had a birth­day and they did a con­cert on Goat Island in Syd­ney Har­bor. think that’s going back to about the [00:03:00] mid to late eight­ies. uh, it was when Peter Gar was think­ing of going, he may have just been elect­ed to the Sen­ate, his polit­i­cal career. And a lot of the singing trans­ferred to Rob Hurst for the first time. Ozzy Oscar was prob­a­bly their biggest hit that he sang,

Cameron: Right,

Tony Kynas­ton: I you know, just pro­tect­ing them­selves for the future Gar­rett. Um,

Cameron: Mm.

Tony Kynas­ton: they they kind of made it through with him, with­out him in places.

But yeah, that time on, Rob Hurst took sort of front stage when he start­ed singing. Always dynam­ic behind the scenes, the, the water tank that he played and the big drum kit, that kind of had like a per­cus­sion kit. Either side of it as well. So I was lucky as play­ing at a big desk, um, always ener­getic and from all the arti­cles and tes­ti­mo­ni­als and things, just an all round nice guy. Always. I saw some­thing from De Debra Con­way that when Girl [00:04:00] Over­board moved to Syd­ney to try and estab­lish them­selves. He put them up for as long as they need it in his house and you know, just of oth­er sto­ries like that along the way as well.

Cameron: Yeah, well, sad to see him go and, um. It’s fun­ny ’cause I was, Chris­sy knows some oils tracks, but not that many. So I played her some in the car. I said, you just got­ta lis­ten to the drums. Like it’s just stand­out. Real­ly. Sort of icon­ic drum­ming. And she said that when we were in Bund­aberg, see­ing a gig that my mate was doing over Christ­mas, she was sit­ting next to my old mate, Nick.

Uh, and Nick was sort of giv­ing her a, a, a, an overview of Aus­tralian rock, the his­to­ry of Aus­tralian rock. He’s a big music fan and he said Aus­tralian rock in the eight­ies and nineties was, uh, had a unique sound because it was very drum based. It was very drum led, [00:05:00] drum dri­ven music. And I said, I was­n’t aware of that.

I’d nev­er thought of it in that way before. But any­way, cer­tain­ly the oils had a very dis­tinc­tive sound. Big pig in those sorts of groups did too.

Tony Kynas­ton: many like just icon­ic mile­stones along the way. I remem­ber played in New York on the back of a flatbed truck. And when the Exxon Valdez hap­pened then parked in front of the Exxon build­ing and did a, a quick con­cert, even the New York cops were dri­ving away in the back­ground to them and instead of clear­ing them on, I remem­ber being in Paris, France when, uh, blue Sky Min­ing came on the radio after like all this hours of nice pop music, but did­n’t under­stand the lyrics ’cause they were in French.

And then mid­night all came on. was great. Yeah, just so many good mem­o­ries. They, um, the con­certs I went to Noosa Ozzy Hop is a stand­out back in the eight­ies again when they head­lined sky­hooks, when they reformed. [00:06:00] many great con­certs. Real­ly good. I, I met Peter Gar­rett once, although he would­n’t remem­ber it back in, um, the mid eight­ies when he came to our, our Uni­ver­si­ty of Queens­land cam­pus.

And I just said, hel­lo. Um, he did a speech there. He was head of Green­peace in Aus­tralia or p and d or one of those things at that time. Um, tow­er­ing, physic, phys­i­cal­ly impos­ing per­son and men­tal­ly impos­ing per­son too. Just incred­i­ble.

Cameron: I met him twice. Once was at a Vince Jones gig at, uh, the lit­tle jazz club in the city I used to do all the time when I went there for work. Can’t remem­ber what it was called now. Um, yeah, stand­ing next to him, like, like sev­en feet tall and. The oth­er time was when he was a labor mem­ber and I think the edu­ca­tion min­is­ter and he was at my son’s school here in Evan Park and he must’ve [00:07:00] been doing some sort sort of press thing there.

And he must’ve been ear­ly, he was by him­self maybe prac­tic­ing his notes and did­n’t have min­ders or any­thing around him. And I walked up to him and said, I remem­ber when you used to have cred­i­bil­i­ty. And he said, thanks very much mate. And that was it. So.

Tony Kynas­ton: harsh.

Cameron: I was dis­gust­ed when he joined the Labor Par­ty.

Absolute­ly appalled. I mean, I can kind of under­stand his think­ing behind get, get with the par­ty in pow­er, but it just seemed like a sell­out to me. So, um, yeah, any­way, I was, I was filthy because he was my idol in the eight­ies. Like, uh, you know, with the, well one of them, you know, in terms of tak­ing a stance and his anti-nuclear thing, I mean, I don’t agree with anti-nuclear any­more, but I did in the eight­ies and it was a dif­fer­ent time in the eight­ies.

So, but, you know, his, his polit­i­cal stance fi push­ing back against our rela­tion­ship with the Unit­ed States, you know, his Green­peace stance, all that kin­da stuff, he was sort of an icon [00:08:00] for me as a, my polit­i­cal awak­en­ing as a teenag­er in the eight­ies, and then to join Rud­d’s Labor Par­ty. It was just a huge fall from Grace in my opin­ion, as I got old­er.

Tony Kynas­ton: saw the Ords doc­u­men­tary that came out last year and they, they broke up about three years ago. They, they nev­er real­ly said it was because of Rob, but, um, he had, that’s when he had pan­cre­at­ic can­cer and it start­ed. So I guess that that must’ve played a

Cameron: Yeah. Right. Hmm

Tony Kynas­ton: to can­cer as well, I think before that as their bass play­er. Um, and last year I also read, it’s called some­thing like the Sil­ver Riv­er, but it’s Jim Mo Moy Gin­ni, the gui­tarist, uh, mem­oirs. he, he recounts the har­row­ing sto­ry of when Gar­rett, um, Gar­ret­t’s house burnt down in his mum died, and, um. Uh, just said that change Gar­rett for­ev­er, because before

Cameron: Wow.

Tony Kynas­ton: he turned up hair and he was a bit of a surfer and a, in a boil­er suit and was a [00:09:00] trae or an appren­tice tradie or some­thing, and went from that to just full on take no pris­on­ers almost overnight.

Cameron: I did not, I did­n’t know that sto­ry. Any­way, we should move on to invest­ing stuff. Um, ah, peo­ple can deal with it. It’s big. Um, we had to sell Amer­i­ca trades last week, Tony, which was fun.

Tony Kynas­ton: Is

Cameron: I had to sell a cou­ple of stocks. Well, he’s been sell­ing Amer­i­ca for a while, I think. Or buy­ing it, sell­ing it, buy­ing it, yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: you’re bridge.

Cameron: But, uh, that passed what he tar cod­ed on the new Euro­pean tar­iffs. Um, and the whole used it to get some sort of deal on tak­ing over Green­land, buy­ing Green­land, what­ev­er he is doing to Green­land.

Tony Kynas­ton: dear,

Cameron: [00:10:00] I think that was sort of the big mar­ket news for the week, but it sort of passed

any oth­er mar­ket news, uh, across your desk that’s worth men­tion­ing? Tony, before I get into oth­er stuff?

Tony Kynas­ton: of news. There was an arti­cle about, uh, a guy called Chris Hohn. Did you see that in the Fin Review?

Cameron: No,

Tony Kynas­ton: he is a hedge fund man­ag­er recent­ly set the record for the most amount made in a year. So this is an arti­cle last week, um, head­line in the Fin Review Old school Approach Nets Chris Hone, HOHN, $28 bil­lion in a year. hedge fund man­ag­er in his­to­ry has made more mon­ey in the year than Sir Christo­pher Hohn. would also wager the British bil­lion­aire as the only hedge fund man­ag­er who speaks open­ly and fre­quent­ly about whether stock pick­ers have souls and why it mat­ters. fund, TCI fund man­age­ment made a gain of just under 19 US bil­lion dol­lars or 28.2 Aus­tralian bil­lion dol­lars last year. [00:11:00] And accord­ing to firm Ebon de Roth­schild, set­ting a record in the high­ly com­pet­i­tive hedge fund world, sheer size of homes. is obvi­ous­ly impres­sive, but what’s real­ly remark­able is the way they were gen­er­at­ed sec­tor increas­ing­ly dom­i­nat­ed by com­pli­cat­ed mon­ey mak­ing strate­gies, momen­tum trad­ing, algo­rith­mic trad­ing, quant trad­ing, var­i­ous pas­sive strate­gies and pod shops to bring many of these approach­es togeth­er under one roof home looks like a ver­i­ta­ble cave­man. old school val­ue investor focused entire­ly on high qual­i­ty com­pa­nies, holds ’em for a very long time, and runs a high­ly con­cen­trat­ed port­fo­lio made up of about 15 hold­ings. Remark­ably, there are only sev­en or eight peo­ple in the invest­ment team at TCI, which honed start­ed in 2004 as the chil­dren’s invest­ment fund man­age­ment, and is tied to a foun­da­tion that has donat­ed bil­lions to phil­an­thropic caus­es. But the two com­pa­nies that. Pow­ered Hones incred­i­ble year. [00:12:00] Were as old school as his invest­ing approach. The air­craft, engine mak­ers, gen­er­al Elec­tric and Saf­fron, which last year deliv­ered total returns includ­ing div­i­dends of 86% and 42% respec­tive­ly. Hones. Oth­er hold­ings include pay­ments, giant Visa, Span­ish, air­port own­er, AE rat­ings, agen­cies, mood’s, and s and P Glob­al and North Amer­i­can Rail­way Giants, Cana­di­an Pacif­ic, Kansas City, and Cana­di­an Nation­al Rail­way Co. Uh. He gave an inter­view recent­ly and he very rarely gives inter­views, but he, he’s quot­ed as say­ing, mas­ter once said, very few things mat­ter, and most things don’t mat­ter at all, and that could also apply to invest­ing. Says home. mat­ters, he argues is that great com­pa­nies have extreme­ly high, very sus­tain­able bar­ri­ers to entry and prefer­ably sev­er­al of them. I hate com­pe­ti­tion. He says, the fact of the mat­ter is that most investors under­es­ti­mate the forces of com­pe­ti­tion and dis­rup­tion because they en under­es­ti­mate [00:13:00] com­plex­i­ty. Uh, he goes on to talk more about find­ing moats for com­pa­nies and how he, uh, reck­ons there’s only about 200 com­pa­nies in the world that have, um, the kind of moat he’s look­ing for. And he said he’s made a lot of mon­ey own­ing a cou­ple of hand­fuls of both of those. And in the arti­cle fin­ish­es. Um, where Buf­fet has built his per­son­al brand on folksy wis­dom and end­less­ly quotable quotes, there’s some­thing almost mys­tic about home who says that intu­ition, been defined as think­ing with­out think­ing, which is what the Bud­dhist would call a cone, plays a key role in his invest­ment process. And the link he’s cre­at­ed between TCI and his phil­an­thropic endeav­ors is vital. The most impor­tant thing, uh, back to what mat­ters is con­scious­ness and love, he says, and if we con­nect to that, then we’ll find pur­pose. And so I think for me, in a nut­shell, phi­lan Phil Phil­an­thropy has giv­en me pur­pose.

Cameron: Wow,[00:14:00]

Tony Kynas­ton: uh, it was a real­ly inter­est­ing arti­cle.

Great read. And who the thunk that a val­ue investor would’ve made the most mon­ey in his­to­ry in any one year.

Cameron: who would’ve thunk it? Con­scious­ness and love. I love it. Well, uh, I want peo­ple to be con­scious of the fact that crude and LNG are buys again this week, which is, um, not sur­pris­ing, but, um, it’s been a long time com­ing for those things to become a buy­er again.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Espe­cial­ly with changes in, to what’s hap­pen­ing with Venezue­lan oil as well. I had a thought, I reck­on, uh, Trump’s going to, wants to take over Green­land so he can take those Russ­ian old tankers. He, took over and, uh, tow Green­land down to Venezuela so he can have a resort where he can ski one day and surf the next. be the best resort in his­to­ry. And it’s an island so it floats. We can just take [00:15:00] it down there.

Cameron: Oh dear. Uh,

Tony Kynas­ton: Uh, that’s my idea along with putting n in front of ice as a way of solv­ing the ice team prob­lems.

Cameron: it was a very nice exe­cu­tion in the street, Min­neapo­lis. Very nice. Um, well quick port­fo­lio update. This is from my end of the week report last week for what it’s worth, cou­ple of days old, but it’ll do dum­my port­fo­lio over the last five years is up 17% per annum ver­sus the bench­mark up 9% per annum. The dum­my port­fo­lio was up 1.3900000000000001% per annum for the last 30 days ver­sus the bench­mark up 0.92% and for.

FY 2025. Is it cur­rent­ly? No. 20 what? 25, 26. It’s FY [00:16:00] 26, isn’t it?

Tony Kynas­ton: It should be.

Cameron: My, my email, my blog post says 25. No one picked me up on it. So no one’s pay­ing atten­tion. Uh, up 23% ver­sus 6% for the index. So, um, we’re doing quadru­ple mar­ket for the, uh, finan­cial year to date.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. And you know, it’s always when you start to get out­per­for­mance, you won­der how long it will go on for and whether it will regress to the mean and all that kind of thing. And I think, the first test will be the RBA meet­ing, which I think is next month com­ing up any­way. Uh, I think the Aus­tralian dol­lars back up to where it was two years ago, 69 cents now, which is large­ly being dri­ven by the US dol­lar going down because of all the things that are going on there.

But it’s also part­ly due to the fact that peo­ple expect there to be an inter­est rate rise in Feb­ru­ary. Um, and as we know, that can often be a turn­ing point for, uh, port­fo­lios, but can’t do any­thing about it. We’ll just wait and [00:17:00] see.

Cameron: Stop hit­ting me with those neg­a­tive waves, Tony. Yeah, the neg­a­tive waves. Uh, yeah. Look, one thing I’ve learned, uh, over the years we’ve been doing this is it comes in waves. You know, we have mas­sive­ly out­per­form­ing sec­tion peri­ods, under­per­form­ing peri­ods, and then track­ing along the rest of the time, but it all bal­ances out in the end.

The light port­fo­lio for the last 30 days was up 4% ver­sus the index, which was about 3.7. So it was about the same. Most impres­sive return for the last 30 days in the light port­fo­lios was DUR infra­struc­ture, con­tract­ed DUR, which was up 18% for the month. We’ve owned DUR and the light port­fo­lio in port­fo­lio since Novem­ber 22.

When we bought them at 50 cents, they’re now $2 12. So that’s been a nice [00:18:00] lit­tle triple bag­ger

Tony Kynas­ton: run.

Cameron: for the last 12 months. The light port­fo­lio is up 42% ver­sus the index up 11%. So again, quadru­ple mar­ket for the lip port­fo­lio since incep­tion, Feb­ru­ary 22, lip port­fo­lio is up 22% ver­sus the index up 11%. So dou­ble mar­ket since incep­tion.

Spot on the dum­my, the Amer­i­can dum­my port­fo­lio by the end of last week was up 92% since incep­tion, Sep­tem­ber, 2023 ver­sus the s and p 500, up 55%, so not quite dou­ble. Um, and for the last.

Tony Kynas­ton: have, they must have turned around quick­ly because it was­n’t more than a month ago when it was neck and

Cameron: Uh, Novem­ber. It was neck and neck, um, Novem­ber, ear­ly Decem­ber. And yeah, in the last month and a half, six weeks, it’s just gone bonkers [00:19:00] again or there you go. For the last 30 days, the US port­fo­lio has up 17% ver­sus the s and p 500, up 0.6%. I dun­no what that is, but it’s, it’s good. The QAV light port­fo­lio in the US not doing so well.

It’s had a bit of a rocky start thanks to Trump’s sell Amer­i­ca. So it’s cur­rent­ly neg­a­tive 3% ver­sus the s and p 500 neg­a­tive 0.04 in the same peri­od of time. I’ve had to sell a cou­ple of things, but there you go. So any­way, um, you know, most­ly every­thing across the board is look­ing great as you said. How long will it last?

We dun­no. But as I was say­ing to Marie on the phone this morn­ing, I stopped car­ing a long time ago ’cause. I know it goes in cycles, right?

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: Hmm.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, it’s like going to the race­track, right? If you win three in a row, hap­py days. You don’t ques­tion it, you don’t, know, don’t go home. You [00:20:00] keep, you keep going. And if you lose the next sev­en, come out hap­py. Sim­i­lar sort of thing,

Cameron: I dun­no if that’s true at all, but, okay. I have no idea what that’s like. I, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t think you should be com­par­ing QAV to going to the race­track and bet­ting on hors­es. I think that’s the total­ly wrong anal­o­gy, because that’s luck. Well, appar­ent­ly you have a, you have a sys­tem.

 Most peo­ple would think bet­ting on the hors­es is luck. QAV is the oppo­site of luck.

Tony Kynas­ton: Okay.

Cameron: Hey, do you have a loud fan on in the back­ground or is it some­thing else?

Tony Kynas­ton: I do.

Cameron: fine. Yeah, we can live with that. Yeah. Yeah, right. Just check­ing. Uh, Toby, Toby sent me some results. Uh, hap­py Cameron attor­ney. Hap­py near to you both. Just let­ting you know where I’m at. Got that quin­tet feel­ing with WAFA four times by price.

Bit of a [00:21:00] stand­out retail­ers hold­ing back at the moment. Any­way, very sat­is­fy­ing. Appre­ci­ate both your knowl­edge and efforts. Have a great day. So here’s one year per annum return, accord­ing to this is 50.2% ver­sus the s and p 200, up 8.37%. His three year per annum return is 19.44 ver­sus 9.71 for the s and p.

So.

Tony Kynas­ton: Rob and Toby,

Cameron: Yeah, good job to Toby. his, since incep­tion per annum is only 12% though, which is sort of Feb­ru­ary 22, about the same time as the light port­fo­lio, which is 22%. So I did send him an email reply going, what hap­pened ear­ly on, because I’m sur­prised that it’s, uh, you know, does­n’t look as good as it should.

But the last few years it’s, uh, been doing well. Well, hold on. [00:22:00] 23 years is 19.4. Feb­ru­ary 22. Oh, it’s four years. Okay. We’re in 2026 now. That first year was a shock­er.

Tony Kynas­ton: And look, I, I’m not sur not sur­prised. I mean, we’ve seen that before with the light port­fo­lios. I’ve seen it with, my, uh, port­fo­lio. Some­times when they start, they go back­wards. It’s, it’s, you know, when it’s a 60 40 that we’re gonna find a stock that

Cameron: Hmm.

Tony Kynas­ton: and we’re start­ing can go back­wards at the start.

Cameron: par­tic­u­lar­ly 2022 was a shock­er year, as we know for us.

Tony Kynas­ton: Hey, the oth­er thing that you, you haven’t men­tioned is that. Uh, gold, at least. I think gold futures tipped over $5,000 a US an ounce, over the week­end. So, um, you know, again, we have gold min­ers in my port­fo­lio, in the QAV port­fo­lios, the dum­mies and what­ev­er, but, um, who would’ve picked it again, we, we did­n’t set [00:23:00] out to buy gold com­pa­nies.

We just look back and say, gee, I’m glad we found those gold com­pa­nies when they were

Cameron: Yeah. Yeah, exact­ly. Uh, I got a cou­ple of, I’ve writ­ten a new news script, Tony, that’s pulling up sto­ries. So my new news script is going through all of the ASX announce­ments for all of the stocks that I have either in my buy list, uh, sor­ry, my. Port­fo­lios or on the buy list it goes through and just is look­ing for all of the announce­ments, includ­ing finan­cial updates, con­fes­sions, sea­son, and updates, all those sorts of things.

Get­ting, you know, the one that I, the new script I’ve been run­ning for the last few months has been going through, um, news like Yahoo Finance News, but a lot of these things don’t hit Yahoo Finance News, but they have to be ASX announce­ments. So, you know, I’m pulling ’em out. Any­way, just, I thought I’d run through a cou­ple of these.

For what it’s worth, a, a real­ly, a medals, [00:24:00] a MI, I think you did a pulled pork on them just recent­ly. They came out with an announce­ment a few days ago, 21st of Jan­u­ary. Quar­ter­ly activ­i­ties report for the peri­od end­ed 31st of Decem­ber. Sig­nif­i­cant cash flow gen­er­at­ed from strong pro­duc­tion group. Quar­ter met­al pro­duc­tion of 11.7 K ounces of gold, 0.6 kilo­tons of cop­per.

7.2 kilo­tons of zinc, and 4.3 kilo­tons of lead. Cobar region oper­at­ing cash flow of 42.9 mil­lion after all sus­tain­ing cap­i­tal cash bal­ance of 85.6 mil­lion after invest­ment of 10.5 mil­lion in growth projects. Tax pay­ment of 12.2 mil­lion relat­ed to the FY 25 tax year and a fur­ther 7.9 mil­lion to restrict­ed cash for per­for­mance bond­ing.

FY 26 pro­duc­tion cost and cap­i­tal guid­ance reaf­firmed gold pro­duc­tion track­ing the upper end of guid­ance [00:25:00] range dur­ing a peri­od of strong prices. Um, man­ag­ing direc­tor Bri­an Quinn said, or real­ly had deliv­ered a strong met­al pro­duc­tion in the sec­ond quar­ter of FY 26 and remains on track to deliv­er full year guid­ance high­light­ed by a pro­duc­tion of 11.7 K ounces of gold.

The per­for­mance gen­er­at­ed robust cash flows sup­port­ing our growth jour­ney towards 40 kt of cop­per equiv­a­lent pro­duc­tion and FY 28. The strength of the oper­a­tional result this quar­ter enabled us to once again fund all growth cap­i­tal tax and reha­bil­i­ta­tion bond cash back­ing require­ments. So, uh, yeah, pos­i­tive stuff from them.

Tony Kynas­ton: And of course that just high­lights too, that we’re only three days away from report, from actu­al­ly hav­ing com­pa­nies report their annu­al num­bers. So, uh, peo­ple should get ready for that.

Cameron: By the way, I, when I did the light, uh, newslet­ter last week, I, uh, yes­ter­day, sor­ry, I did find a stock. [00:26:00] To buy because it’s on a dif­fer­ent report­ing cycle. And it was select har­vests, our almond, almond almond busi­ness that you did as a Paul pork a few weeks ago. So yeah, they, they report Sep­tem­ber and what would that be?

May march.

Tony Kynas­ton: well, sor­ry. finan­cial year ends in Sep­tem­ber and the half ends in March and they get two months before they

Cameron: Right,

Tony Kynas­ton: so it’ll May and, uh, what’s that?

Cameron: right.

Tony Kynas­ton: num­bers. Yeah.

Cameron: So they, they’re on the buy list. They’re down the bot­tom of the buy list this week. But it’s the only thing on the buy list that, um, isn’t in sort of pre report­ing. Uh, I’ve got anoth­er, uh, quar­ter­ly activ­i­ties report. This one is from our old friends, beach Ener­gy, BPT. I’ll just skip to the man­ag­ing direc­tor, Mr.

Brett Woods with growth activ­i­ties under­way across all of our core assets. It was an [00:27:00] active quar­ter for beach with deliv­ery of key mile­stones on our major projects whilst main­tain­ing out­stand­ing safe­ty and envi­ron­men­tal per­for­mance across all oper­a­tions. Pleas­ing­ly, our beach oper­at­ed assets received 12 months injury free in late Decem­ber.

Com­ple­tion of the Wat sea gas plant and deliv­ery of first sales gas into the pipeline net­work is a great achieve­ment. I’m very proud of our team’s effort to sup­port and dri­ve the project to com­ple­tion. Unlock­ing a crit­i­cal piece of infra­struc­ture for the West­ern Aus­tralian gas mar­ket. Blahdy, blahdy, blah beach.

End­ed the quar­ter with 925 mil­lion in avail­able liq­uid­i­ty dri­ven by pos­i­tive quar­ter­ly cash­flow Gen­er­a­tion and a new $300 mil­lion term facil­i­ty, which received strong sup­port from new and exist­ing lenders. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Any­way, num­bers look good. No warn­ings there. And the oth­er one that I’ve got is from our, I would say old friends, but I’m, I’m not feel­ing very friend­ly towards them at the moment.

Is Fen­di, [00:28:00] FND. You know, I think we’ve had a bit of a rough trot with Fen­di. They were the gold­en child for a while there, and then they fell off the perch.

Tony Kynas­ton: Well, because the CEO did­n’t even reply to your, uh, in invi­ta­tion to

Cameron: Well, he

Tony Kynas­ton: the time they

Cameron: was­n’t my invi­ta­tion. He offered him­self up and then ghost­ed me when I said, all right, let’s set up a date. Yeah. Uh, so, you know, it’s, uh, kar­ma. Um, where’s now I’ve lost the, oh, here we go. No, I’ve lost their bloody announce­ment. Where did that go?

Oh, here we go. So Fen­di is pleased to announce Nova Glob­al Oppor­tu­ni­ties Fund. A proven pre IPO invest­ment part­ner is a cor­ner­stone investor to its Indi­an sub­sidiary trans­ac­tion Solu­tions inter­na­tion­al TSI, Nova Glob­al’s, IPO expec­ta­tion sup­port of findy share price of 5.58 to [00:29:00] 6.69. So this is relat­ed to them float­ing off the Indi­an or one of their Indi­an sub­sidiaries any­way, is uh, one of the rea­sons they’ve been sort of hot and I think cold over there for a while.

I dun­no how the share price is doing at the moment. ’cause we had to dump ’em, I think, I think they became a three point sell at one point.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, they can. They, they’ve come right back, I think last time I saw

Cameron: Uh, came right back as in right back down or right back up.

Tony Kynas­ton: right back

Cameron: They were trad­ing at $6 45 Octo­ber, 2024. They’re now a dol­lar 17, so there you go. But they’re sort of pump­ing up this Indi­an IPO. So we’ll see how that goes and what that does for their, for their share price local­ly. [00:30:00] Uh, that’s all I got. Tk.

Tony Kynas­ton: Okay. Well I’ve got a pulled pork to do if you want me

Cameron: Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Good. Uh. I got a, uh, pulled pork to do on a com­pa­ny we’ve

Cameron: I.

Tony Kynas­ton: about and I’m pret­ty sure I did it as a pulled pork ago. The, even though it wa it’s not on the list, um, hum. HUMM was called Flexi group until the buy now pay lat­er com­pa­ny start­ed to mus­cle in on it.

And at a new CEO who was a mar­keter and they piv­ot­ed towards the buy now pay lat­er space to try and fend off their com­pe­ti­tion and change their name to hum. God knows why. but in the last, uh, six or sev­en months, there’s been a numer­ous takeover or two takeover offers and numer­ous events going on, and we [00:31:00] have allud­ed to it.

I did speak about the gov­er­nance issues back in Novem­ber or Decem­ber when, um, chair, uh, Mr. Aber­crom­bie was, um. shares, uh, when the com­pa­ny was in receipt of a takeover offer. And that was, though I think the offer had been announced before he bought the shares, it was seen as still not being, uh, the right thing to do under a cor­po­rate gov­er­nance per­spec­tive.

From a cor­po­rate gov­er­nance per­spec­tive, um, I’m not gonna offer an opin­ion, opin­ion on that. Peo­ple can Google it and, and look into it, but, um, it’s, it’s on the buy list. Uh, the num­bers are good, although it does trade around the lat­est offer. So we know in takeover sit­u­a­tions to be care­ful with that. If there’s not anoth­er bet­ter offer com­ing, then we are gonna sell it around the same price if the offer pro­ceeds.

Um, and if they, the, the cur­rent, uh, bid bid­der walks, then the share price might decline. So I’ll just say all that in advance. Um. [00:32:00] of pot­ted his­to­ry for the com­pa­ny and any­one who does­n’t know it, it was called Flex­i­Group back when we first looked at it, when the QAV first start­ed. then, uh, its core busi­ness was around pro­vid­ing uh, retail­ers and their cus­tomers offers to, uh, offer to finance appli­ance pur­chas­es like fridges and oth­er elec­tri­cal items on a, on an inter­est free basis.

And so you would go in store, wan­na buy a fridge, call up Flex­i­Group and arrange a line of cred­it. They prob­a­bly, they even­tu­al­ly start­ed issu­ing you with a cred­it card, which had no inter­est pay­ments, but a, a month­ly prin­ci­ple that was required. And that would. That, that sort of deal got longer and longer as it became more com­pet­i­tive.

And even­tu­al­ly it became, start­ed off with being six months inter­est free, and then it became like five years inter­est free. All you had to do is make the appro­pri­ate repay­ments in time. then the after pays came along and [00:33:00] they kind of start­ed to cut the lunch of Flex­i­Group. And so Flex­i­Group piv­ot­ed and it’s had a bit of a rough time since then.

They bought a cou­ple of buy now, pay lat­er busi­ness­es, one in New Zealand and one in Aus­tralia called CER and bolt­ed those in. And they also invest­ed and expand­ed, um, buy now pay lat­er around the world to, uh, I think the UK at least, um, as well as New Zealand. Uh, and the, those busi­ness­es have been a lit­tle bit rock­i­er, uh, than, um, hum would’ve liked.

And the share price has been up and down and large­ly down I think since we last looked at it. and that’s. Not only, uh, meant that there’s been some activ­i­ty in terms of, uh, uh, an offer being lobbed by Aber­crom­bie and his fam­i­ly office, um, to, uh, to take the com­pa­ny pri­vate, um, at 58 cents per share back in June, uh, 23rd of June, 2025, in fact. [00:34:00] and then that was, um, that, uh, offer would kind of fell over, um, and, uh, it was­n’t sup­port­ed by some of the oth­er major share­hold­ers. and so it was with­drawn. And then in, uh, Novem­ber, Decem­ber cred­it court, anoth­er com­pa­ny which has been on the buy list and a and a long time, favorite of mine, in Novem­ber, 19th and Novem­ber, they offered, um, To buy the com­pa­ny under a scheme of arrange­ment at 77 cents per share in cash. And if the scheme was­n’t suc­cess­ful, ’cause it, it did require, um, a major­i­ty of accep­tances of share­hold­ers, then they’d do an off mar­ket takeover offer at 72 cents per share. And I should say the shares now trade at 76 cents per share. So that’s 1 cent below the scheme of arrange­ment price. so yeah, so Andrew Aber­crom­bie is the founder of the com­pa­ny back in the mid­dle of last year. He thought it [00:35:00] was, um, uh, a scream­ing buy and offered to take it over and turn it pri­vate 58 cents. And then the, uh, share prices climbed all the way up to 76. On the part of that strength was the cred­it core bid. So they believe it’s worth a lot more than what he was pre­pared to offer for it uh, their under­tak­ing due dili­gence at the moment. so that’s kind of. No, that’s, that’s a, that’s the back­ground of the two offers that have hap­pened to the com­pa­ny recent­ly, but also in the mix was our old friends at Col­in Street Val­ue Fund teamed up with anoth­er, um, activist investor head­ed by Jere­my Rap­er. And they’ve issued a notice and called an annu­al gen­er­al meet­ing, uh, for the 19th of Feb­ru­ary. And they, um, they want to spill the board and, uh, that they have cit­ed a cou­ple of rea­sons for that. They don’t think that the com­pa­ny has been as man­aged as good as it could have been. Um, uh, it’s gone from being a real­ly good, [00:36:00] steady, prof­itable com­pa­ny, uh, under the old offer­ing of, um, issue a cred­it card for five years, zero inter­est. Um, some of that’s fund­ed by the mer­chant, obvi­ous­ly. And then let the cus­tomer pay it off and do your col­lec­tions, uh, to being that plus part­ly a buy now pay lat­er com­pa­ny. um. That has­n’t gone all that well or as well as it could have gone. and then there’s the cor­po­rate gov­er­nance issues that they don’t like with when the, the chair, um, tried to buy the com­pa­ny at a low val­ue and then bought shares in the com­pa­ny when their takeover off, when their takeover offer was, um, announced. So lots going on there. Um, I’ve got­ta say in the back­ground, the com­pa­ny’s still, I think, real­ly good. And, and to give a, a, a his­to­ry of it and an out­line of it, the com­pa­ny list­ed as Flexi group, and I should say as well, it not only has the inter­est free point of sale finance, but it has leas­ing prod­ucts and, uh, equip­ment, [00:37:00] financ­ing prod­ucts.

And in fact, they make up the major­i­ty of the busi­ness now, even though a lot of the atten­tion is focused on the con­sumer cred­it prod­ucts, it’s real­ly that, uh. leas­ing and asset financ­ing part of the busi­ness, which is dri­ving the prof­it. And we’ve had a cou­ple of those com­pa­nies on our buy list.

I’ve done some pulled porks on some oth­er, uh, com­pa­nies which offer equip­ment leas­ing. and they’re on, they’ve been on our buy list as well. Uh, but, and Flexi, flexi Group or Hum is real­ly that kind of busi­ness now with the oth­er things, uh, cer­tain­ly con­tribut­ing to rev­enue but not as much to prof­it as the, uh, equip­ment leas­ing side of it is. Any­way, going back to, um, to its his­to­ry, uh, list­ed as flexi group in 2019, 2020, they bought Cer­ta, Easy­Pay and Oxy Pay, which was the New Zealand com­pa­ny. And then they changed their name to Hum in Novem­ber, 2020. uh, and their [00:38:00] tick­et code changed from FXL to HUM at the same time. And they did a strate­gic piv­ot towards BMPL. And kind of sim­i­lar relat­ed con­sumer financ­ing offer­ings. Uh, they also had added some more prod­ucts like Hum, BMPL bun­dle with two Ls and hum 90, a long term inter­est free prod­uct. They expand­ed into New Zealand, Ire­land, the UK and Cana­da, and also devel­oped sev­er­al prod­ucts aimed at the small to medi­um enter­prise mar­ket. that did­n’t, I said, that was kind of a bit of a risky piv­ot and in ear­ly 2022 agreed on terms for lat­i­tude. Lat­i­tude group. Um, anoth­er ASX list­ed lender to buy its con­sumer finance busi­ness, includ­ing the BNPL, install­ment and cred­it card oper­a­tions in a deal, which orig­i­nal­ly val­ued that at around $335 mil­lion. How­ev­er, that sale col­lapsed in [00:39:00] mid 2022, um, when they both mutu­al­ly agreed to ter­mi­nate the trans­ac­tion. And I think the back­ground to that, if I remem­ber prop­er­ly, was that inter­est rates were ris­ing and that does have a, a, a prob­lem of com­press­ing mar­gins in these kinds of kinds of busi­ness­es. So they both agreed to walk away from that. it does real­ly say that harm isn’t weed to the buy now, pay lat­er busi­ness, and does­n’t real­ly see it as core if it’s was pre­pared to it off. I’ve been through the, uh, the offers year and last year. Um, I want­ed to talk a lit­tle bit about, uh. Yeah. Want­ed to talk a, well, lemme just, lemme just do a bit more deep dive into Flexi Group itself.

So it start­ed in 88, 19 88 as a spe­cial­ist con­sumer finance and leas­ing busi­ness and an equip­ment leas­ing busi­ness. Um, the that the busi­ness mod­el worked [00:40:00] was that, um, uh, retail­ers believed they could sell more if cus­tomers could spread their pay­ments, and retail­ers don’t want to car­ry the cred­it risk, nor want to be in the posi­tion of ask­ing their cus­tomers for repay­ments if they fall behind. Flex­i­Group, did that, so did GE Finance and a cou­ple of oth­er com­pa­nies, and GE Finance sold that busi­ness to lasu, which I just spoke about. Um, but Flex­i­Group paid the mer­chant up front and then offered the cred­it to the cus­tomer and took the cred­it risk and it earned its returns through fees that charge mer­chants for, for that process. And. Um, cus­tomer inter­ests were applic­a­ble because obvi­ous­ly if a cus­tomer falls behind and then, uh, they’ll, they’ll start incur­ring inter­est, um, as well as late fees and penal­ties. Um, so it’s real­ly an old school con­sumer finance busi­ness and not any­thing like a Sil­i­con Val­ley Fin­Tech, like After­pay or any of those kinds of busi­ness­es. its growth through, [00:41:00] through B2B part­ner­ships. So part­ner­ships with Coles, Mey­er, and oth­er busi­ness­es. Um, I think Har­vey Nor­man might have been a part­ner, but although I’m not, like not a hun­dred per­cent sure of that, it’s large­ly invis­i­ble to con­sumers. So when some­one goes in to buy a fridge, they’re not think­ing, they’re deal­ing with flexi group, they’re deal­ing with Har­vey Nor­man or Mey­er or who­ev­er. they embed­ded their process­es inside the retail­er’s check­out, so. You could you’re sign­ing up to, uh, to pay for the fridge, sign up anoth­er piece of pa uh, paper to sign up for the, um, cred­it con­tract with, uh, with Hum. the com­pa­ny had a lot of expe­ri­ence at, uh, under­writ­ing, um, was a heavy user and had a lot of expe­ri­ence at what’s called secu­ri­ti­za­tion fund­ing, which is to, pool up loans and then offer them to the mar­ket, either for sale or as the back­ing asset, back­ing for a bond, um, which they could then use to fund expan­sion. so basi­cal­ly they’re a bit like a bank. So the returns are dri­ven by the cred­it qual­i­ty of [00:42:00] the cus­tomer, abil­i­ty of flexi group or hum, to assess the cred­it qual­i­ty of the cus­tomer and to scale it on a large enough basis so that, uh, if one cus­tomer falls behind, it does­n’t impact on prof­it as much as, uh, if the base was small. Um, so they list­ed in 2011, um, as flexi group, uh, they con­tin­ued to expand. The mar­ket per­cep­tion of Flexi group was, um, pret­ty much as a bor­ing but reli­able lender. low growth because you’re real­ly, um, only grow­ing at the same rate as the retail­ers you’re ser­vic­ing. and as we know from talk­ing about retail­ers before, they tend to get sort of GDP growth num­bers.

Um, unless they’re grow­ing a, unless they’re small and they’re grow­ing a retail net­work quick­ly, they gen­er­al­ly only open new stores in line with, um, pop­u­la­tion move­ments. Um, or, or per­haps, uh, C‑P-I-G-D‑P, that kind of thing. So they’re low growth usu­al­ly for the estab­lished net­work. but back in the late, uh, [00:43:00] 2000 and sort of sec­ond half of 2000 and, 16 to 19, say After­pay was on the rise, um, flexi group was kind of already doing BMPL just was­n’t in four equal install­ments.

They had the paper­work, they had the cred­it checks, they were, uh, abid­ing by the. Code, which the BMPL peo­ple nev­er did. and per­haps until recent­ly when there was a bit of a hybrid, uh, adopt­ed for them, they had strong brand­ing, um, they had a good user expe­ri­ence for the cus­tomer. Um, so I guess the, the feel­ing was that the prod­uct was­n’t obso­lete, but the pre­sen­ta­tion was. And so they rein­vent­ed them­selves a, a acquired those two, um, bus, uh, BNPL busi­ness­es, Oxy Pay and ser­gy, and rebrand­ed as hum. but there was always a bit of a ten­sion in the com­pa­ny because their DNA flexi group’s, DNA, was risk con­trol, fund­ing, dis­ci­pline and mer­chant rela­tion­ships. BMP’s, [00:44:00] DNA is to grow at all costs and gain mar­ket share, to have min­i­mal trans­ac­tion fric­tion and to expand at a greater rate than the retail­ers were build­ing new stores.

So you, you have to put a fair bit of mon­ey into mar­ket­ing to the end con­sumer direct­ly to get them to take your prod­uct over After­pay or what­ev­er else. So, um. That led to deal, which fell over with lat­i­tude to buy the BMPL deci­sion. And since then it’s been, it’s been try­ing to run two sep­a­rate divi­sions real­ly, that do dif­fer­ent things. so it was found­ed by Andrew a Aber­crom­bie in 1988, and he still is a large share­hold­er and still, um, on the board. He is, um, very much old school in his approach to, the com­pa­ny. Um, his kind of core mantras are that cred­it, cred­it dis­ci­pline is the num­ber one, impor­tant thing in this kind of. So growth is only good if loss rates stay con­trolled. Um, [00:45:00] cred­it mod­els, arrears man­age­ment fund­ing struc­tures mat­ter more than cus­tomer acqui­si­tion veloc­i­ty. sur­viv­ing through down­turns is a badge of hon­or. So of course they’ve been through the GFC, the reces­sion we had to had and mul­ti­ple retail cycles, cycles. And flexi group nev­er blew itself up on cred­it, which some of its com­peti­tors did along the way. Um, Aber­crom­bie always saw the retail­ers or the mer­chants as is the real, as the real cus­tomers for flexi group, not the con­sumers. So, uh, they were mer­chant con­sent, they were mer­chant, mer­chant cen­tric. They had long-term retail part­ner­ships, they had embed­ded finance at the check­out. They had, uh, high switch­ing costs once inte­grat­ed. Um, and that’s dif­fer­ent to the BMPL play­ers who were. rush­ing around, sign­ing up retail­ers, charg­ing them a large fee, and then mar­ket­ing their prod­uct to the con­sumers, um, above the line mar­ket­ing, uh, and, and in store I guess. But, but, um, spend­ing a lot [00:46:00] on mar­ket­ing to, um, the end con­sumer, which Flexi group nev­er did.

Most peo­ple would­n’t know they had a con­tract with Lega­cy Group. They think it was with Har­vey Nor­man or Coles, Mabb or who­ev­er. so. Aber­crom­bie cared a lot about and, and had a lot of expe­ri­ence in the fund­ing mar­kets. So the secu­ri­ti­za­tion mar­kets focused a lot on the cost of funds match­ing dura­tion for his loan book to the fund­ing. Um, so he was very, uh, bank-like in the fund­ing side, but because they were a small, nim­ble com­pa­ny with­out all of the lega­cy issues of a bank, he was much, much more flex­i­ble and that made them resilient and, and prof­itable over time, albeit at low­er growth options. so that’s kind of, uh, the core of the flexi group. Um, DNA, but it did­n’t real­ly gel with the BNPL, DNA, so there’s a bit of a mish­mash there. The oth­er side of things, which is, which has grown. To be the, prob­a­bly the core busi­ness, um, rather than the con­sumer busi­ness is the leas­ing and [00:47:00] com­mer­cial finance busi­ness. Um, which you’d say is a rea­son­ably bor­ing but excel­lent busi­ness.

And again, it, it relies on cred­it qual­i­ty. Um, all the things I spoke about in terms of, uh, match­ing financ­ing to loan pools, et cetera. Um, keep­ing the cost down ’cause it’s a low mar­gin busi­ness, keep­ing the cred­it. Qual­i­ty in check because, um, arrears late pay­ments and, and, uh, peo­ple who don’t pay can affect prof­itabil­i­ty. So the leas­ing and com­mer­cial finance busi­ness focus­es on equip­ment financ­ing, like it med­ical and office equip­ment type leas­ing. and that’s a, that’s a, a good busi­ness and it’s been under­served a bit by the banks who tend to look after the big com­pa­nies and not the small­er ones. Um, it’s a good busi­ness because their secured is an asset.

Secu­ri­ty may be hard to get the pho­to­copi­er back if the per­son does­n’t pay for it, but it is there and it’s the effort of tak­ing if, if, um, so desired. Um, there is tax dri­ven rea­sons for busi­ness­es to take out equip­ment financ­ing rather than to buy the item [00:48:00] them­selves. So that cre­ates a demand. Um, there’s lots of repeat cus­tomers. like the fact that they can con­tin­u­al­ly upgrade to the lat­est or, or pho­to­copi­er or what­ev­er with­out hav­ing to, um, incur any more costs. ’cause they’re on the lease already. and they just roll over the cur­rent lease and, um, and the pric­ing’s rea­son­able. So it, it’s, it’s, that’s worked for them.

It’s been a good, it’s been a good busi­ness. Um, so two things that work­ing have worked for Flexi Group in the long term. Their, their inter­est, uh, free loans for the retail­ers, the leas­ing and SM SME, the BMPL side has­n’t. So there has always been a focus a bit on this busi­ness about, um, why the, why the, uh, breakup of, uh, of the com­pa­ny would un unlock val­ue and it’s kind of com­ing to a head at the moment.

So, I want­ed to spend a cou­ple of min­utes on Cred­it Corp and why Flex­i­Group might be a [00:49:00] good fit for them. and they prob­a­bly. think about it, cred­it Corp is a log­i­cal buy­er for this busi­ness. Um, more so say than the bank. per­haps some of the com­peti­tors like Lude might want to buy some of the busi­ness.

Um, some of the com­pa­nies who are also in equip­ment leas­ing might wan­na buy some of the busi­ness, but they’re, they’re a bit small­er. So, um, uh, this flexi group is a bit big­ger than some of the oth­er, um, Fin­Tech style SMEs com­pa­nies that we’ve spo­ken about. Uh, cred­it Corp though is big enough to buy them. And at the heart of Cred­it Corp is that same DNA that is at the heart of Flexi group. They are obsessed with, um, col­lect­ing and man­ag­ing large of debt. They often buy what’s called PD PDSs, which are the, the, um, debt rolls of equip­ment, finances off util­i­ty com­pa­nies and off banks for, for say, cred­it card debts. because it’s cheap­er. [00:50:00] uh, a com­pa­ny like Cred­it Corp, which focus­es on the busi­ness of debt recov­ery to, to run that process than say a bank, which is doing a lot of oth­er things as well. Um, so Cred­it Corp has a lot of expe­ri­ence in the pric­ing of risk, on col­lect­ing mon­ey, on being able to raise funds to be able to buy debt and, and back the debt. Um, you know, so that there’s no mis­match between the end date of the debt and the end date of the, the, the bond that they’ve used to secu­ri­tize the debt, for exam­ple. All that kind of thing. Um, can be a, a real damp­en the wrong val­ue. But Cred­it Corp has expe­ri­ence in that too. so I think that they are a legit­i­mate, Uh, acquire of this com­pa­ny. And I can see how it would be attrac­tive to them because Flexi Group would have a num­ber of large pools of debt, both in the asset leas­ing space, but also in the con­sumer space. And Cred­it Corp would be able to, uh, run and col­lect those, uh, at least as well as Flexi [00:51:00] Group could, does beg the ques­tion of what hap­pens to the BNPL side of things, which, um, cred­it Corp don’t have expe­ri­ence at. And I, I would­n’t mind bet­ting that if, um, the deal does go through and Cred­it Corp buys this com­pa­ny, that they may cut out some of the assets like the BNPL busi­ness and put them up for sale and it would also. Not sur­prise me if, if Andrew Aber­crom­bie and his fam­i­ly office some­how join the cred­it core bid or do a deal with Cred­it Corp.

So they take sec­tions of the com­pa­ny that Cred­it Corp don’t want, um, as part of the deal too. But that has­n’t hap­pened yet, but I think it, uh, is very like­ly. cred­it Corp does have suc­cess with this kind, these kinds of acqui­si­tions, not nec­es­sar­i­ly of a flexi Corp nature, but they’ve, they’ve had some big acqui­si­tions in their life.

So for exam­ple, in Bay they bought a com­pa­ny called Bay Corp, was a sim­i­lar debt pur­chas­ing and col­lec­tion busi­ness. That was in [00:52:00] 2019. Um. They had a busi­ness in New Zealand, which expand­ed, uh, cred­it Corp, uh, over there as well. They bought Nation­al Cred­it Man­age­ment in 2016. Again, a sim­i­lar sort of book which, uh, bought these PDLs from, um, from banks and util­i­ties. they bought Col­lec­tion House, which was a com­peti­tor, but it was, um, under a lot of stress at the time. so, uh, that expand­ed Cred­it Corp in 2022, and then they bought, um, Group, which was on the, our buy list, uh, prob­a­bly five or six years ago. that was the old radio rentals busi­ness. So they have a big con­sumer base there, some­thing like 5,000 con­sumer loans, um, for peo­ple who had gone on to the rent before you buy, pro­grams that the Thorn Group and before that radio rentals offered. So they, they have, they do have a lot of expe­ri­ence in deal­ing with end con­sumers, which is a nice fit for the flexi [00:53:00] group type. Um. Uh, cus­tomers. Um, so they’ve got expe­ri­ence of doing that. I think they’ll, um, they’re a nat­ur­al buy­er for it. Uh, I, I dun­no if the deal will go ahead. ’cause there’s a cou­ple of things, cou­ple of mov­ing parts, but, um, it, it cer­tain­ly looks like a good fit, all of that aside because that’s the, that’s the kind of m and a side of what’s going on.

Um, and even though that’s get­ting all the head­lines, the lat­est results from harm were pret­ty good. their FY 25 annu­al report, which was the year end of June, 2025, ver­sus the same peri­od 2024, saw net prof­it rise from, uh, 7.1 mil­lion in 24 to 39.6 mil­lion in FY 25. So a huge increase. Rev­enue also went up 8% and assets under man­age­ment went up 10%.

So a pret­ty suc­cess­ful year for them. Finan­cial year 2025. And, uh, they have also now released their half year results for, for the. For [00:54:00] this, uh, half end­ing Decem­ber. Um, I should, I’m not sure if this is a half year results or it’s an, uh, an update, but any­way, um, they’ve announced that cash prof­it was up as well. net prof­it was up. Um, earn­ings per share was up, and assets under man­age­ment were up as well. So they are hav­ing a much bet­ter year, um, this finan­cial year than they were hav­ing in the past finan­cial year. And per­haps that’s what, uh, trig­gered some, um, some activ­i­ty, uh, in terms of, uh, peo­ple mak­ing offers for the com­pa­ny.

I can see it’s kind of rebound­ing at the moment. and, and of the com­men­tary on those results, uh, the com­mer­cial finance side of the busi­ness drove, drove most of the prof­it. 26.5 mil­lion out of 29.8 mil­lion in total prof­it came from the com­mer­cial finance side of the busi­ness. So that leaves about 10% for the retail con­sumer finance side of the. But if I flip the coin to rev­enues, then [00:55:00] $1.2 bil­lion in rev­enues out of 2 bil­lion came from the con­sumer side of the busi­ness. So con­sumer is, um, me, is a large rev­enue, low mar­gin. And, uh, it’s the, uh, SME side of things, which is dri­ving all the prof­it for them. Um, the oth­er oth­er thing to look at too is the cred­it loss­es in com­mer­cial finance are under 1%, and retail they were 3.3%. And 3.3% by the way, is a good num­ber. you think less than four, in sort of the cred­it card mar­ket or per­son­al loan mar­ket is a good num­ber. So they’re doing, they’re doing well there. It is just that they have high­er loss­es com­pared to SMEs. Um, I’ve been through the cur­rent state of play. Uh, what else can I say about them? Um, oh yes, the, the Street Asset Man­age­ment. Um. Uh, requests for a, a gen­er­al meet­ing will occur on the 19th of Feb­ru­ary, and that’s prob­a­bly about [00:56:00] the time that they’ll report their num­bers. So, if any­one is think­ing about buy­ing this com­pa­ny, and I’m not say­ing they should because it’s trad­ing around the cur­rent offer, they may want wait till the num­bers or the GM in 19th of Feb­ru­ary, but my guess is some­thing’s gonna hap­pen on the cor­po­rate side, the cor­po­rate takeover side before then any­way.

But the g the gen­er­al meet­ing on 19th of Feb­ru­ary is there as a back­stop. Um, and as I said, co uh, Collin Street Asset, Mabb Val­ue Man­age­ment, and Jere­my, uh, rap­er Cap­i­tal or Rap­er Cap­i­tal, head­ed by Jere­my Rap­er, um, want to spill the board. Um, based on the fact that, the, there’s been per­sis­tent under per­for­mance over the last five years. there’s been, they see that there’s been poor strate­gic deci­sions about BMPL. They don’t like the fact that Aber­crom­bie put for­ward a, um, a low ball offer halfway through the year to buy the com­pa­ny out. Um, and then he’s, he’s [00:57:00] chair­ing the com­pa­ny, so they have gov­er­nance con­cerns. Uh, their plan is to, um, an inde­pen­dent board.

They, they have some­thing like about 9% of the com­pa­ny between them, so uh, they can’t spill the board and, uh, them­selves. And it looks like from the arti­cles I’ve read, they prob­a­bly don’t have enough fire­pow­er to take the com­pa­ny over or to make an offer them­selves. So gonna rely on some­one like Cred­it Corp to do that heavy lift­ing for them, I would think. Um, they have 9.5% of the com­pa­ny. Andrew Aber­crom­bie still has near­ly 30% of the com­pa­ny, so what he wants to do still mat­ters a large amount. and, uh, yeah, like I said, I would­n’t be sur­prised if, um. Aber­crom­bie’s Fam­i­ly Office and Cred­it Corp. Put the com­pa­ny up. or Cred­it Corp buys the whole com­pa­ny and sells parts to Aber­crom­bie and or oth­ers. But of course, if Cred­it Corp Walk and they’re still in the due dili­gence phase, then uh, there’s [00:58:00] no offer. and you’d prob­a­bly have to, giv­en the track record of the Aber­crom­bie offer, expect him to come back if the price dropped a long way from where it is now back in the 50 sort of cent range from 76 cents.

So, just be aware of that. Um, it’s up to you whether you take the risk of buy­ing now, uh, but um, it’s prob­a­bly get­ting close to the end gate, but they are com­pelling num­bers and this com­pa­ny is on our buy list near the top. The a DT for the com­pa­ny is 740 mil­lion, so it’s strong. And the stock price for my analy­sis is 76 cents, which is 9% less than con­sen­sus tar­get, and it’s also less than IV two, which is 98 cents, but above IV one at 50 cents. per share is a dol­lar five, so we can buy it for less than NPPs. Um, NTA is a lit­tle bit less than that at 79 cents, but we’re still above the cur­rent price. Uh, if so, we can buy it for both. Um, less than NTA and less than book is 2.63%. So it’s pay­ing a [00:59:00] div­i­dend, but it’s not enough to score for us.

Um, Stock Doc­tor finan­cial health and trend is mar­gin­al and recov­er­ing. So mar­gin­al isn’t great and we don’t score it for that. But recov­er­ing I like is a trend. It means things are improv­ing and the com­pa­ny’s get­ting its finances back in order, so that’s a good thing. Uh, stocked equal­i­ty rank­ing is 70, which is kind of I guess as well, but over­all they rank at 93, which is dri­ven by a val­ue rank of 92. So it’s, um, it’s high up on their over­all list. Uh, inter­est­ing­ly enough, the F score is sev­en out of nine, which is strong. and that’s edia is F score. p is just under 20 times, which is the high­est in three years. So we mar­ket down for that. is only. 2.04 times. So it’s very, very cheap on the cash flow of view. There is an own­er, founder who I spoke about before, and direc­tors hold 31% earn­ings per share. Growth is pret­ty close to zero and growth over pe. PE [01:00:00] is two, it’s about 0.04. Um, so it’s pret­ty low. Don’t quite have con­tin­u­ous­ly increas­ing equi­ty, so we can’t score it for that. So the qual­i­ty score now buy list 11 out­ta 16 or 69% and the QAV score is 0.34.

Last­ly, dri­ven by that price to oper­at­ing cash flow. Um, so inter­est­ing­ly enough, as an aside, EDIA says that HUM qual­i­fies for shaugh­nessy’s cor­ner­stone growth port­fo­lio. So Edia will tell you, um, about var­i­ous fil­ters and over­lays. And let you know if a stock is a val­ue stock or a growth stock and who it appeals to.

And of course, O’Shaugh­nessy wrote what works on Wall Street. So that’s, that’s kind of a tick for me that he likes it accord­ing to his fil­ters. I think the risks are pret­ty appar­ent now apart from down­turn risks. So if inter­est rates rise, for exam­ple, that will hurt the busi­ness. Um, it will hurt con­sumer spend­ing and retail­ers, which will hurt the busi­ness.

It’ll prob­a­bly [01:01:00] stop small busi­ness­es from, Pur­chas­ing more equip­ment, which will hurt the busi­ness and it will also com­press mar­gins, which, um, will take a while to progress through the sys­tem. Um, espe­cial­ly if fur­ther have fund­ing already in place at one rate. and they’ve got a loan that, um, a loan to ser­vice for the con­sumers now at a dif­fer­ent rate. Um, so there is risk around inter­est rate ris­es, uh, which there always is I guess, for this kind of com­pa­ny. the biggest risk now is around cor­po­rate action. If CCP walks away, um, or if they don’t get enough accep­tances, if they launch a takeover bid with­out a scheme of arrange­ment, you got­ta watch the news for this one. Aber­crom­bie may come out and, and say to rec­om­mend to accept a CCP bid. He may do a deal with them to split the com­pa­ny. I real­ly think the GE gen­er­al meet­ing in Feb­ru­ary will be the back­stop for all this, and I’ll prob­a­bly have a deal done before then. But, but who’s to say, um, if they do go to the gen­er­al meet­ing, there’s a risk that the board is built and, um. [01:02:00] will even fur­ther com­pli­cate issues in terms of an m and a, side of things. Um, but there’s a lot to like about the com­pa­ny. It’s a clas­sic val­ue com­pa­ny. Um, and I’m talk­ing about the non BPL busi­ness. So the equip­ment leas­ing and the con­sumer finance side out­side of BMPL, um, it’s a clas­sic val­ue com­pa­ny.

It’s slow growth, but it’s con­sis­tent growth. It, uh, sur­vives down­turns, which is some­thing I like. Um, but the mar­ket does­n’t real­ly, uh, val­ue com­pa­nies like that much. and uh, we’re see­ing a few equip­ment leas­ing com­pa­nies appear on the buy list. I dun­no why they’re not val­ued bet­ter by the com­pa­ny, for exam­ple. Um, this com­pa­ny trades on the. A prop calf ratio of about two times oper­at­ing cash flow ver­sus a NZ bank at four times. So it’s, you know, it’s basi­cal­ly a bank, in terms of how it oper­ates. It rais­es cap­i­tal and then lends it out. Um, but it’s trad­ing at half the val­u­a­tion of a, of one of the big banks.

So part of that could be, I guess, a [01:03:00] NZ seen as being, um, uh, uh, a larg­er busi­ness that’ll be around for a longer time. But flex group’s been around for a long time as well. so with, I buy it now, uh, I’m not see­ing much upside in the stock price above the CCP offer, prob­a­bly not. Um, but it, you know, things might change.

I mean. CCP might walk away, Aber­crom­bie might walk away, the board may get spilled, um, but the com­pa­ny still chugs along giv­ing the num­bers like we’ve seen at the moment. If that’s the case, then yeah, it would, um, very def­i­nite­ly be a buy­er. Or if anoth­er big comes along, peo­ple who are buy­ing in, um, have, who have bought in already will be, um, even fur­ther reward­ed. I, I think that’s less like­ly. I, I can’t nom­i­nate some­one who might, make a bid for this com­pa­ny, but you nev­er know because it, it could hap­pen. And again, you nev­er know that, uh, Aber­crom­bie won’t do some kind of deal with CCP, which might revise the offer as well. So, that’s, that’s, uh, an update on hum, um, kind of com­pli­cat­ed with what’s going on in the [01:04:00] news, but under, uh, under­neath a, a real­ly strong, good val­ue, uh, invest­ing busi­ness.

Cameron: I remem­ber once upon a time I said Hum was dumb. You don’t think Hum was dumb, Tony?

Tony Kynas­ton: No, the BMPL side I don’t like, but

Cameron: I think I was refer­ring just to the brand. Change the name, change the hum.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, I thought it was dumb.

Cameron: Hey

Tony Kynas­ton: Bar­ry

Cameron: Bar­ry and Stan would’ve done a much bet­ter job. Bar­ry and Stan are the for gold stan­dard for brand changes. Tony, don’t you be Dis­en Bar­ry and Stan. Um,

Tony Kynas­ton: But if you think back to 2020 what, 2020 20 some­thing like that. After­pay was just the, every­body was talk­ing about

Cameron: yeah, it was the dar­ling.

Tony Kynas­ton: over,

Cameron: I’ve got hum down. They’re not on my buy list this week. Um, I’ve got them as a slight­ly below their buy price on the bread ora­tor too. I think my script had them slight­ly [01:05:00] below it as well.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah,

yeah, I think I, to be fair, I

Cameron: Yeah,

Tony Kynas­ton: too there, about a

Cameron: cur­rent price is about 76 cents. Buy price is 77. So just in case peo­ple are won­der­ing pret­ty close. So we’ll see what hap­pens with the takeover. Split up, what­ev­er hap­pens. Thank you. Tk, after hours.

Tony Kynas­ton: After I, I’ve got two after hours things. Um, ba boole was

Cameron: What’s the weath­er like in Tassie? Oh good.

Tony Kynas­ton: sort of low twen­ties, days. Um, yeah, shorts, weath­er, t‑shirt, weath­er real­ly good. Golf was good. We, we played ear­ly in the morn­ing before the wind get up. Lot of fun. was good. I, I did­n’t drink, but the guys enjoyed the local wines and things, so it was, um, great trip, well orga­nized, had a lot of fun. Next year we’re going to New Zealand, [01:06:00] which will be great as well this time. Um. Of the year. for­ward to that. I haven’t played golf on the south island of New Zealand, so that would be good fun too.

So yeah, I had a great time. Loved, loved Tas­ma­nia. Loved the, that area north, north­east coast, right on the coast. We were right on the beach near a small town called Bridge­port, which is just fan­tas­tic. You could just, I could eas­i­ly spend the rest of my life in Bridge­port, um, look­ing over the, the Bas Strait and yeah, it’s fan­tas­tic.

Except I’m doing it here in, in Cape

Cameron: haven’t been to Tas­ma­nia since 1990 prob­a­bly, and I’ve always want­ed to take Chris­sy down there. I want to go to Mona and uh, just show Chris­sy Tas­ma­nia. Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: Even the oth­er muse­um down there, I think it’s called Mt. A, the nor­mal Tas­man­ian or the

Cameron: Hmm.

Tony Kynas­ton: his­tor­i­cal muse­um’s. Fan­tas­tic. ’cause it high­lights the, um, the his­to­ry

Cameron: Mm-hmm.

Tony Kynas­ton: [01:07:00] and their erad­i­ca­tion the, you know, kind of stark poli­cies that were in place for, you know, boun­ties, for

Cameron: It was the ear­ly iter­a­tion of ICE or Nice down there. Yeah. Nice. Tas­ma­nia edi­tion. Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: yeah, and of course, um, the muse­um also has the high­light for me was this fan­tas­tic fur­ni­ture made by the local car­pen­ters who use the tim­bers. Um, was real­ly world class. It was just, they had a few, um, you know, parts of the gallery devot­ed to to that, and I

Cameron: I dun­no if we’ve got any, uh, QOV club mem­bers in Tas­ma­nia, but if we do reach out and we’ll set up a Tas­man­ian meet and greet, gimme an excuse busi­ness rea­son to trav­el down. Well, that’s love­ly. How’s your uh, uh, elec­tri­cals going at Cape Schanck?

Tony Kynas­ton: Uh, elec­tri­cals are going bet­ter. Um, that seems to have been sort­ed out [01:08:00] except for our hot water, which was still giv­ing us cold show­ers in the morn­ing. So wait­ing for a part that, that will hope­ful­ly fix that. But yeah, it’s

Cameron: been a week and you still haven’t got it fixed. Hmm

Tony Kynas­ton: No, days of

Cameron: Oh, and Jen­ny went away too, right? She did­n’t wan­na stay there by her­self.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, she went up to Mel­bourne. Yeah, stayed with her sis­ter. Um, I have just received a book. Have you heard of the author, John fan? F‑A-N-T‑E. But I was read­ing, uh, that Ed Sweet book about, um, his time in Hol­ly­wood as a direc­tor and pro­duc­er. you know, I, I like books where they give you a rec­om­men­da­tion to read some­one else’s books. And, um, Fante is, uh, well, the book I’m hold­ing now that came today is the 80th 80th anniver­sary edi­tion a book called Ask the Dusk. what real­ly sealed the deal for me to buy it was, um, it has an intro­duc­tion by an [01:09:00] author.

I’ll, I’m gonna read a bit and let’s, let’s see if you can,

Cameron: can guess already. Yeah. ’cause I told you about, I told you about this guy,

Tony Kynas­ton: on?

Cameron: I’m pret­ty sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Charles?

Tony Kynas­ton: fti.

Cameron: Charles Bukows­ki?

Tony Kynas­ton: Okay. Sor­ry.

Cameron: I told you about this guy. I read his book.

Tony Kynas­ton: Okay.

Cameron: no. Well, yes. Um, so I was read­ing notes of a dirty old man a year or two ago, and he talks about it was John Fan­ti that inspired him to become a writer. Yeah, yeah. When you said the name, I thought that name, that does sound famil­iar.

Yeah. I remem­ber talk­ing to you about it, but ask­ing you if you’d ever heard of him and you said you had­n’t. And uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. you got a copy of VA The Dust. Yeah. Yeah. It’s good. It’s grit­ty. Yeah, yeah,

Tony Kynas­ton: very good. [01:10:00] Yeah. But

Cameron: yeah. Yeah. That’s great. Oh, I’m, I’m excit­ed. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah, and he talks about, I remem­ber because he talk­ing about the fact that he was unknown, like no one had ever heard of him.

Like he was sort of, you know. Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. So, so there’s a blurb by the New York Times on the front of the book, which says either the work of John

Cameron: Yeah. Right. Yeah. If you inspire Bukows­ki, you know you got some­thing going for you.

Tony Kynas­ton: Ooh. It, it tells a great sto­ry in the intro how he was, um, know, a bum and the only place to keep warm was the pub­lic library and goes through how, uh, he loved read­ing but could­n’t find any­thing good to read.

And, just hat­ed a lot of the mod­ern writ­ers. Um, hat­ed a lot of the clas­sics. Even got into read­ing med­ical books on, and anato­my and things like that. And then found John fti and just, even it was so good, he took it [01:11:00] out from the library, went back to his cold

Cameron: Hmm.

Tony Kynas­ton: build­ing and it overnight. so yeah,

Cameron: of great writ­ers, there’s a sto­ry popped up in my feeds in this last week where there, I think a fam­i­ly mem­ber is now claim­ing that Hunter s Thomp­son did­n’t kill him­self. There’s this, uh, s Yeah, God.

Tony Kynas­ton: now?

Cameron: Not that he’s not dead, just that he did­n’t take his own life. That some­thing. Yeah. Some­one else killed him.

Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. Hunter would be hav­ing a field day if he was still around. Geez.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. It’s a shame he’s not there. Or that some­one has­n’t tak­en on the man­tle.

Cameron: Mm.

Tony Kynas­ton: and

Cameron: Tbi.

Tony Kynas­ton: prob­a­bly the, uh, not Tobi some, Hey, Eby is prob­a­bly the clos­est.

Cameron: Uh, well my whole life for the week was, uh, we got, we, we went to see this Lou Reed trib­ute, Lou Reed Vel­vet Under­ground trib­ute con­cert on Sun­day nights doing a tour around the coun­try. Uh, but it [01:12:00] was Robert Forster, Dave Grainy, Mick Har­vey, and a few oth­ers. Um, tak­ing turns with the vocals with a back­ing band and did a, just a cou­ple of hour selec­tion of Lou’s solo hits and vel­vet under­ground tracks.

So right up my alley. Um, and they did a ter­rif­ic job. It was love­ly, real­ly, real­ly great. And we had a great night. So, uh, if you get a chance to go see that, I think, um, it might’ve been, Toby actu­al­ly, uh, said he was gonna try and get tick­ets to see to Mel­bourne. I think they’ve got a, a sold out show in Mel­bourne, but they’ve got a sec­ond one that’s opened up.

So if you’re down there, try and get a tick­et to see it. If you’re fans of the Vel­vets and lose solo stuff, none of, they did­n’t do any solo stuff after about 1980, so, which is, you know, dis­ap­point­ing because he had a lot of great solo albums in the last 20 years. But it’s a lot of, lot of stuff to cov­er, so, um, yeah.[01:13:00]

Um, can, I can

Tony Kynas­ton: Ever heard that, um, chest lp that, uh, the gui­tarist from men­tal as any­thing put out? Um, I’ve for­got­ten his name now.

Cameron: don’t think so.

Tony Kynas­ton: It’s a cov­er. He did a com­plete acoustic cov­er

Cameron: Of the Trans­former album, you mean?

Tony Kynas­ton: Real­ly good.

Cameron: Oh, right.

Tony Kynas­ton: Oh,

Cameron: wow. I have to dig that up. No, I haven’t heard that. Um, I watched Blade and Blade two in the last week or so. Um, have you ever seen those or have you seen ’em recent­ly? I’d only seen the first one. Oh man, he is so fuck­ing cool in these movies. Oh, the, the sec­ond one gets the first one writ­ten and direct­ed by David s Goya and it came out the year before the Matrix, but it’s very matrixy.

They’re all, it’s like mar­tial arts, black leather sun­glass­es, dark [01:14:00] fight mar­tial arts, fight scenes with tech­no music. So they kind of, you know, I dun­no if the wakows­ki were inspired by the same John Wu films or just saw this and ripped it off. But, um, very, very cool. Chris Kristof­fer­son as his off­sider real­ly cool, like an old Kris Kristof­fer­son griz­zly.

The sec­ond one was direct­ed by Guiller­mo del Toro. Real­ly over the top mon­sters and stuff in it, but, and not as good, but sort of big­ger bud­get, big­ger Don­ny Ys in it, and, um, Ron Perl­man’s in it. So some good cast. But yeah, I haven’t watched Blade three yet, but I’m gonna watch that. I think they, I think they got worse as they went along, but it was fun.

Tony Kynas­ton: Check it out.

Cameron: HBO maybe, or Dis­ney, one of the two. First one, I would­n’t watch the sec­ond one, but the first one is just, just to see Wes­ley Snipes and his hey­day, man. And the [01:15:00] thing about Wes­ley Snipes was he’s actu­al­ly did mar­tial arts from the age of 12. So he’s not one of these, like, not Keanu, where you learn some chore­og­ra­phy and then you learn how to throw a kick.

This guy, he was a real mar­tial artist, so he real­ly took the mar­tial arts part of it seri­ous­ly. Uh, and I’ve been read­ing day. The jack­al just got into day the jack­al. Nev­er read it before.

Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, fan­tas­tic book.

Cameron: I dun­no what that means, but, um, oh,

Tony Kynas­ton: when he called.

Cameron: well, I’m only into like chap­ter two, but was sur­prised to real­ize that chap­ter one is real­ly straight up jour­nal­ism. It’s talk­ing about the real assas­si­na­tion attempt that hap­pened in 1962 on Daal and the OAS that were behind it and the right wing part of the French Army that were dis­gust­ed that Daal had giv­en Alge­ria its inde­pen­dence.

And then it sort of [01:16:00] spins off from that into his­tor­i­cal fic­tion. But, um, yeah, I know I, it’s a, but it’s a weird way to start a a, you know, a his­tor­i­cal fic­tion sto­ry is to do a whole chap­ter that’s actu­al­ly his­tor­i­cal non­fic­tion. And then use that as the start­ing point. I was like, this is, this is weird.

But any­way, appar­ent­ly he was a jour­nal­ist Forsyth before he wrote it, sta­tioned in Paris.

Tony Kynas­ton: I’m sure the movie

Cameron: Well, appar­ent­ly I looked, I was read­ing about it in Wikipedia and they were say­ing that he could­n’t get a pub­lish­er for it. No one would touch it because they were like, well, UL’s still alive. Who’s gonna read a sto­ry about an assas­sin try­ing to kill De Gaul when de GA’s still alive? And then some­body picked it up and obvi­ous­ly huge hit.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Movie’s good too. The orig­i­nal,

Cameron: I nev­er seen it.

Tony Kynas­ton: the the

Cameron: Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: real­ly good.

Cameron: Yeah. Edward Fox. Yeah. Yeah,

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: So I’m [01:17:00] enjoy­ing it so far though. So, uh, yeah, that’s it. That’s all I’ve got. I thought you’d have read this. I thought it was in your up your Alley Spy nov­els. You’ll love a good spy nov­el.

Tony Kynas­ton: I

Cameron: I.

Tony Kynas­ton: Speak­ing of good spine nov­els, um, we watched the first

Cameron: Oh, I still haven’t seen that. I got­ta get into that.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. All the, all the old cast­ers reunit­ed, Steve, um, and, uh, and, uh, I’ve for­got­ten their

Cameron: Hmm

Tony Kynas­ton: greats are in there, but that’s a great book. I mean, that’s one of my favorite Lares, which was, came along late, like

Cameron: hmm.

Tony Kynas­ton: I

Cameron: I’ve sort of, you know, read a cou­ple of his and then got dis­tract­ed. I got­ta get back into that too. All righty. I’ve been read­ing books on witch. Oh, have I told you my witch­es sto­ry? Oh my God. I prob­a­bly can’t tell you on air. It’s a lit­tle bit [01:18:00] sala­cious, but, uh, it’s fas­ci­nat­ing. I’ll tell you off air what Witch­es used to do with broom­sticks.

Tony, leave it to your imag­i­na­tion lis­ten­ers. Uh,

Tony Kynas­ton: Sweep

Cameron: uh, let’s go talk about shale oil com­pa­nies on QAV Amer­i­ca. Mm. Yeah, it is inter­est­ing. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, tk. Have a good week.

Tony Kynas­ton: See you.

Cameron: So the whole thing about witch­es rid­ing on broom­sticks.

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 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 [01:19:00] 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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