QAV AU 903 art optimised-1

In this episode of QAV Aus­tralia, Cameron and Tony nav­i­gate a par­tic­u­lar­ly tur­bu­lent peri­od for the ASX, not­ing a buy list that recent­ly shrank to just three stocks amidst a broad­er mar­ket cor­rec­tion. The duo dis­cuss­es the fall­out for soft­ware com­pa­nies like **Reck­on (RKN)** and **Xero (XRO)** as the “AI pen­ny drops,” the impact of the RBA’s unex­pect­ed rate hike, and the dra­mat­ic 24% jump for **Pep­per Mon­ey (PPM)** fol­low­ing a takeover bid from Chal­lenger. The club episode fea­tures a deep dive into **Atlas Pearls (ATP)**, exam­in­ing the unique (and labor-inten­sive) world of Indone­sian pearl farm­ing, before wrap­ping up with a “grit­ty” after-hours seg­ment cov­er­ing every­thing from *Game of Thrones* pre­quels to Baz Luhrmann’s new Elvis doc­u­men­tary.

This week’s full episode is for QAV Club mem­bers only. The free episode is avail­able below. Also check out our pod­cast archives link and our pages on Apple Pod­casts or Spo­ti­fy or watch clips on Tik­Tok. Or vis­it our home­page to learn more about QAV and how it works as a val­ue invest­ing sys­tem that you can learn and apply to beat the mar­ket.

Transcription

 

[00:00:00]

Cameron: Wel­come back to QAV Aus­tralia. Tony,

Tony: Uh, well behind the scenes cam just went from a con­cerned look to a big beam­ing smile. In a blink of an eye. Uh,

Cameron: tech­nol­o­gy. Tony, I don’t want to put my foot through my com­put­er at all. it is episode 9 0 6, Tony, this is the 10th of Feb­ru­ary, 2026.

Tony: ready.

Cameron: How’s your week been?

Tony: Good. Yeah. Played a lot of golf. Um, yeah, played a lot of golf, uh, being up and down to Mel­bourne. Uh, unfor­tu­nate­ly Jen­ny’s father’s in hos­pi­tal, so we’re going up to see him, uh, which is no good.

Cameron: hmm.

Tony: and, uh, yeah, talk about a few things in the after hours, what that would be, watch­ing what had been good, but yeah,

Cameron: how’s your hot water?

Tony: fixed.

Cameron: Yeah, still it’s

Tony: Yeah, no, it has

Cameron: but it’s still good.

Tony: still good. Uh, like it’s, [00:01:00] um, The new sys­tem’s fine. So they put new hot water sys­tem in and it’s got a large, a loud fan on it. So if you turn the hot water on, you can hear this sort of vibrat­ing out­side, um, which was­n’t there with the old one. And they fixed it because of the gas fig­ure came back and changed the reg­u­la­tor between the gas bot­tles and the house, and, which made me sort of think that might have been the prob­lem in the first place.

And we spent 3000 bucks on the hot water sys­tem we don’t need, and which is loud­er than the old one. So, but any­way,

Cameron: And what

Tony: short of throw­ing out and get anoth­er one,

Cameron: You were telling me last week that there was beep­ing going on in the mid­dle of the night or the week before that it’s wak­ing you

Tony: that was, that was the boil­er for the, for the heater that’s been ser­viced and fixed and parts have been replaced, so yeah. Yeah, major handy­man work here over the last month.

Cameron: Well, some­thing else that was­n’t work­ing last week was the stock mar­ket, Tony.

Tony: Worked per­fect­ly. What are you talk­ing about? B Bit­coin’s down to its low­est. [00:02:00] The, uh, all the tech bros are lick­ing their wounds. I think it’s great.

Cameron: I don’t know if that’s true. I think that they’ve all rebound­ed in the last day or so. Um, there was a mar­ket cor­rec­tion on the ASX. I ran a buy list on Fri­day night and there were three com­pa­nies on it. Well, that’s not true. There were five com­pa­nies on it. Two of them were com­mod­i­ty stocks where the com­mod­i­ty was a Josephine. Of the three that were left, one was Atlas Pearls, which is just a no go in my book, but I know you’re doing your pulled pork on ’em today. that should be fun.

Tony: There’s only three stocks to pick from on the buy list.

Cameron: And the oth­er two were okay. One was Qan­tas, but they had­n’t report­ed, so it was like

Tony: Hmm.

Cameron: to buy. So then I ran anoth­er one Mon­day night last night, and there was about 10 stocks, but again, none of them had report­ed. So noth­ing to do. But, uh, that, that three com­pa­nies on it last week, or five, if I take the two [00:03:00] with Josephine’s and by the, and when I did the com­mod­i­ty checks, every­thing except Man­ganese was a

Tony: Mm.

Cameron: or a sell.

It was crazy. I have nev­er, in the years we’ve been

Tony: Mm

Cameron: this, seen a buy list with three stocks on it. Uh, even in the mid­dle of COVID, we had more things. I think to buy, well, no, we did­n’t buy any­thing, so maybe not. Maybe they were all josephine’s. but it was, it was shock­ing. I was shocked. But then the mar­ket bounced back yes­ter­day.

A lot of, lot of, lot of things are still josephine’s though, on the buy list I did

Tony: mm.

Cameron: a lot of things had recov­ered yes­ter­day, but not well enough to get back over a sec­ond byline. So, um, a minute I thought, woo, gone wrong with my script. And I start­ed man­u­al­ly check­ing the sen­ti­ment on 10 or 15 stocks and the bread lat­er.

And so, no, they’re all, So, um, yeah, you, you came up with a sim­i­lar sort of result, I assume, over the week­end.

Tony: I did, [00:04:00] um, I did actu­al­ly did mine again on yes­ter­day as well, but, um, my buy list has all the josephines in it still, so it’s a bit longer than yours. But, um, yeah, when I dug into it, there was­n’t much to, uh, to buy.

Cameron: that yours is a bit longer than mine. That’s, that’s not nice. No brag­ging. It’s what you do with the bile is the counts, Tony. Not how long it is. Don’t

Tony: Hmm.

Cameron: that? Well, it’s an episode title. It’s what you do with it.

Tony: Yeah. Well I like keep­ing the Joseph in because, uh, they can turn around quick­ly. Some­thing that was­n’t a buy yes­ter­day can be a buy today, so

Cameron: Yeah,

Tony: I keep it all in.

Cameron: fair enough. Um, well, I’ll do some quick updates. Um, I did the light update on Mon­day and it, it’s worth not­ing the most impres­sive return for the pre­vi­ous 30 days. And this is, I did this before the mar­ket had opened yes­ter­day was KOV, which was up 14% for the month. [00:05:00] We’ve owned Corevest in the light port­fo­lio since Novem­ber, 2023.

When we bought it at $7 99. As of Mon­day morn­ing it was $16. Which is over a hun­dred per­cent return in that peri­od. But we’ve owned it in the dum­my port­fo­lio since April, 2020. Must have been the first thing that we bought, um, in COVID, right? April,

Tony: Yeah, it would’ve been, yeah.

Cameron: we bought it at $3 49 in April, 2020. it’s up 358% in near­ly six years, which, what’s that sort of return like, um, six divid­ed by 360, 60 a year on aver­age.

Is that right?

Tony: I dun­no.

Cameron: Yeah.

Tony: Straight line. Yeah. Not kaga.

Cameron: it’s anoth­er exam­ple of why we don’t rebal­ance and we don’t [00:06:00] take

Tony: Ooh.

Cameron: I had a phone call from a mem­ber yes­ter­day say­ing. uh, you know, my stocks are doing real­ly well, but when I look at the three point trend line, the sell line for them, it’s way, way, way low­er than where the share prices are.

Should I take prof­its? should I sell some, I’m wor­ried that I’m gonna lose every­thing, and I gave them the usu­al spiel, which is, this is not finan­cial advice, but if it were me, what Tony always says is, do what­ev­er you have to do. If you to sleep, sleep well at

Tony: Oh

Cameron: if that’s what you wan­na do, do it.

But we don’t do that because, um, and talked about some exam­ples, things go down, they go back up. We’ve talked about a few

Tony: cor­rect. Yeah. And look, Corevest is a, a great exam­ple, isn’t it? We’ve held it the, almost the whole way through since the start. We’ve been, I think we did this pod­cast not much ear­li­er than COVID, so it’s a six year hold­ing and it could go on for a life to be a life­time hold­ing, which is per­fect, isn’t it?

Cameron: [00:07:00] I guess, yeah, I mean it’s 360% in six years. Good.

Tony: Yeah. Dou­bling it. My, my rule of thumb is dou­bling in five. Um, you wan­na, do you wan­na do bet­ter than that? I think 15% is dou­bling in five. So any­thing greater than That’s good. So this is three times in six, so it’s prob­a­bly bet­ter than dou­bling in five. Yeah. It’s good

Cameron: Prob­a­bly bet­ter than I did have some recent cells though. Uh, reck­on. GRR and NWS reck­on. Yeah. Um, count­ing soft­ware stock and

Tony: Hmm.

Cameron: got, I mean, they’ve been fool­ing for a while, but there was a, some news last week, before, um, anthrop­ic, the AI that has one of the state of the art mod­els.

Claude released a new sort. Fea­ture of Claude Cowork. And it was a legal plu­g­in basi­cal­ly that would do a lot of legal [00:08:00] work and legal soft­ware com­pa­nies in the US took a mas­sive hit. I was actu­al­ly look­ing at some of them over the week­end, pub­licly list­ed legal. There’s a bunch of them over there, they’re all in the last year or so, down like 70, 80%, tak­ing a mas­sive hit. They all took anoth­er hit. Um, a big­ger hit last, uh, last week when Claude came out with this. And I think gen­er­al­ly across the board soft­ware, there’s lots of talks about Atlass­ian was down. Peo­ple that aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly in the, uh, legal space took a hit because, uh, the, I think the Fin said the AI pen­ny is final­ly drop­ping for soft­ware man­u­fac­tur­ers. Um, the mar­keters final­ly work­ing out that, know. AI could come for these soft­ware ven­dors a lot soon­er than we may have thought. It’s not five years away. It’s maybe a year, two years away they’ll come for you.

Tony: Yeah. Well,

Cameron: Tay­lor built a task man­age­ment app for his busi­ness for all of, he need­ed some­thing sort of cus­tomized for cam­paign [00:09:00] man­age­ment and task man­age­ment for all of his cre­ators. And he just built some­thing and it looks at, you know, it looks like a pro­fes­sion­al Mac app. It’s instal­lable on a Mac, and he’s just about to do an iPhone ver­sion. Just built it all in Claude Code. Just said, build me this app. Cus­tom built, looks pro­fes­sion­al. It’s tak­en him a bit of time. He’s put in over a cou­ple of weeks, but he built his own app that would’ve cost him, you know,

Tony: Yeah, right.

Cameron: or thou­sands of dol­lars if he want­ed to buy it or rent it or lease it or what­ev­er.

Pay for a licens­es for all of his team.

Tony: now I should go and see Black­bird Ven­tures get a series A fund­ing round going for the app, and then. List­ed on the ASX and then watch it dis­ap­pear after court comes along. But, uh, but reck­on was a good exam­ple of what’s hap­pened because, um, it’s, it’s kind of like, it’s always been a bit of the poor rel­a­tive of the oth­er account­ing stocks.

The two big ones in a, in a, in Aus­tralia are may zero zero in par­tic­u­lar, is one I wan­na talk about. Have a look at their share price. Um, [00:10:00] it’s now back to COVID lev­els. Speak­ing of, um, COVID, well actu­al­ly no, it’s not true. Yeah, back to 2023. It’s last low. It’s kind of like halved. Um, and it was only, I can’t remem­ber how long ago it was now, a cou­ple of years ago, that peo­ple were telling me, um, you got­ta invest in zero.

It’s, you know, it’s the biggest thing. It’s a soft­ware as a ser­vice, it’s cap­i­tal light. Um, it’s not mak­ing any mon­ey, but it’s grow­ing fast. And there was some analy­sis that had come out by a big research house that had said. Zero was going to be able to, once it dom­i­nat­ed the space around the world, uh, start mon­e­tiz­ing it and trad­ing at a prof­it, and now look at it, it’s half the price.

It was.

Cameron: The crazy thing is, if you go back over the last few years, it was sort of bot­tomed out in Decem­ber, 2022 at $70, which is when Chat­G­PT came out, and then it, [00:11:00] it just grew like a rock­et

Tony: Hmm.

Cameron: to June of last year when it hit $193.

Tony: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: So, you know, it it, it grew because of ai. I think the last cou­ple of years peo­ple have been going, oh, all these soft­ware com­pa­nies. ’cause they all say, oh yeah, now we’re gonna AI in our tool and it’s gonna be great. It’s

Tony: Yeah. I’m not sure if that’s the rea­son why zero grew.

Cameron: Oh, okay. Why

Tony: Yeah. Uh, it expand­ed into the US main­ly. It, um, it’s always had a big fol­low­ing, uh, ’cause it’s been a growth stock, one of those unprof­itable growth stocks, putting all this mon­ey back into, um, all its rev­enues back into, uh, improv­ing its soft­ware plat­form and growth.

Um, expand­ed to the US changed CEOs. Um, Daniel Petri was involved for a while. He might still be. Um, but now then he hand­ed over to some­body else. Yeah. Uh, some­one, [00:12:00] I for­got the name. Some­one sing and then, yeah. And, uh, she was, um, she was liked by the mar­ket and, and like I said, this research was going around say­ing, Xero’s gonna over, you’re gonna take over the world.

And once it does, it’ll be like Uber and can start putting its prices up and mar­gins will come back and it’ll make mon­ey. But I mean, it just has­n’t hap­pened. I use Xero, you know, it’s a great pack­age. I use Xero. I use Share site Fan­tas­tics. Pack­ages. But, um, you know, if they, if they need­ed to make mon­ey, they prob­a­bly cost me twice as much than they are.

Cameron: Yeah, well, it’s down to 83, 80 $4 at the moment, from June last year. So as you said, back down to where it was, begin­ning of 2023.

Tony: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: Uh, so that, uh, bit of a blah, GRR, we know we’ve talked on and off about the issues that they’ve got,

Tony: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: et cetera, et cetera. That final­ly became a sell. And News­Corp, and I’ve [00:13:00] got­ta be hon­est, I’m always kind of hap­py to sell News­Corp.

I always, I always feel bad when I have to buy it.

Tony: Yeah, I just, I agree, but just be aware. Remem­ber, we’ve had this prob­lem before and I haven’t looked at News­Corp this half, but it did pop up on my bio list too, and I, straight away, I went, stock doc­tors still haven’t fixed that prob­lem with a num­ber of shares, so. Remem­ber it, so it’s, yeah. In fact, I even bought it a cou­ple of years ago when it popped up on the buy list and had to sell it.

Um, so there’s, there’s been a prob­lem. What­ev­er data feed Stock Doc­tor have used has report­ed the wrong num­ber of shares, and then a week or so lat­er they work it out and fix it. Yeah.

Cameron: God. So yeah, ful­ly paid ordi­nary shares, 566 mil­lion June, 2025, and it’s just dropped down to 42.8 mil­lion

Tony: Hmm. Has­n’t dropped.

Cameron: Decem­ber 25. So, you know, the num­bers are wrong on that. Again. Do we

Tony: Hmm.

Cameron: to tell them again that it’s [00:14:00] wrong?

Tony: Yeah. Well, I haven’t looked into it, but pos­si­bly, yeah. It’s hap­pened the last two years run­ning at least.

Cameron: Uh, well I sold it, but it was

Tony: Good.

Cameron: trend­line sell. I mean, so, you know. It’s got noth­ing to do with the share prices. The, the num­ber of ordi­nary shares, right.

Tony: No, but it, it, it gets onto our buy list ’cause there’s an incor­rect cal­cu­la­tion.

Cameron: Oh, in the first place

Tony: Yeah, I ca so either, I think it might inflate the prop calf or some­thing like that, ’cause of the wrong num­ber of shares.

Cameron: It’s no longer a, uh, three point trend­line sell, either. It’s recov­ered since it was yes­ter­day. Just try­ing to fig­ure out when I bought it.

Tony: But lis­ten­ers should, lis­ten­ers should be aware, they should real­ly dou­ble check the num­ber of shares if they’re gonna, before they buy it. Uh, check it with the annu­al report.

Cameron: I bought it in April last year. So, um, yeah. Any­way, [00:15:00] end­ed up, no, it was a rule one sell for me. It was­n’t a three point trend line sell this time it was a rule one sell down 23% from where I bought it. Just goes to show can’t trust Um

Tony: well, I’m not sure where it’s at, but they have a big hold­ing in rre realestate.com au, which was sold off last week as well as part of the AI sell. Well, AI caused sell down. Yeah.

Cameron: Hmm. It did go up as high as 54 at one point, now it’s come back any­way. So, uh, what else? RBA Tony, last week on the show, you pre­dict­ed that they would hold their rates, um, and like any good econ­o­mist,

Tony: yep.

Cameron: You were wrong.

Tony: Uh, well, you’re not sup­posed to do that. Can, you’re sup­posed to wait until I’m right before you high­light it.

Cameron: Ah, right.

Tony: Yeah. We always, always assume I’m wrong.

Cameron: So, uh, time to update your spread­sheets, kids, if you

Tony: Yeah. Yep. So we need to update it for our IV cal­cu­la­tions [00:16:00] and even­tu­al­ly the mort­gage rate will change as well. It’ll go up, prob­a­bly won’t flow through straight away. It’ll take a month to, to to come through.

Cameron: A ISS resources, I think,

Tony: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: their quar­ter­ly activ­i­ties report last week, maybe a week before they were down 10% as a result of that. Um,

Tony: Had a look this morn­ing and they were up sev­en. So

Cameron: Oh, good for them.

Tony: lot of lot of volatil­i­ty in the mar­ket camp.

Cameron: Yeah. Yeah. They took a hit last week. I think I do. Hold them in some­thing. Yeah. No. Uh, they were a pos­si­ble buy for QAV light back in Decem­ber of last year. They’re down about 4% since then. Some­thing’s going on there. I think, uh, Toby or some­body post­ed in our Face­book group that there was some­thing messy going on, but I. Hm. get details. of the big wins for us [00:17:00] though this week has been pep­per mon­ey, good old pep­per pig. Uh, it’s been, it was at the top of our buy list for God knows how long

Tony: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: I think, more or less. And I bought it, uh, I was in the dum­my port­fo­lio since May and also in a light port­fo­lio since May of last year.

We bought it at a dol­lar 64, dol­lar 65. Did­n’t real­ly do much until this week when it was announced that chal­lenger, uh, try­ing to acquire them. And I think it jumped up like 24% Mon­day in, uh, trad­ing.

Tony: Yeah, so tech­ni­cal­ly I think Chal­lenger and KKR or a sub­sidiary of KKR acquir­ing them. So KKR orig­i­nal­ly acquired Pep­per float­ed it and now engi­neer­ing a buy­back work chal­lenger will have 25% and the oth­er KKR sub­sidiary will have the rest, but it’ll be [00:18:00] unlist­ed. Um, from mem­o­ry, the, the offer was at $2 60, um, and it’s got all the usu­al caveats and the shares are trad­ing below that at the moment.

And I sus­pect that’s because, uh, when Chal­lenger announced they were bid­ding, their share price dropped. And so there might be some back­lash from Chal­lenger share­hold­ers around whether they should be acquir­ing a com­pa­ny like Pep­per. Um, to put some con­text around that, chal­lenger have a long his­to­ry of, uh, offer­ing annu­ities to retirees.

So peo­ple who want a steady income when they retire will buy a prod­uct off Chal­lenger. And their busi­ness mod­el is basi­cal­ly to find income streams that have low volatil­i­ty and then put a mar­gin on them and then pack­age them up as annu­ities to retirees. Um, they’ve done that for a long time with com­mer­cial prop­er­ty, and then as they got big­ger and start­ed to diver­si­fy away, they did.

They even, I think, even may have had some index like ETFs. Uh, or some [00:19:00] prod­ucts like that where they use stocks to back ’em. Um, and now the, the, their plan is to use the, the loans that pep­per are mak­ing to peo­ple as that sort of fixed income pool of, uh, mon­ey that they can then put a mar­gin on and sell as annu­ities.

But, uh, the, some of the share­hold­ers are ques­tion­ing this because it’s a new line of busi­ness for them and prob­a­bly haven’t got­ten their minds around what it means. Um, but also too, I think, uh, chal­lenger may have talked about buy­backs or return­ing some mon­ey to share­hold­ers as well. So, um, there may be some more to play out in this, this one for us.

Cameron: All right. Well I want­ed to give a shout out to Trent for pick­ing up the news, ensur­ing that with this yes­ter­day, uh, I just got an alert to say that Mabb has just become a three point cell as usu­al.

Tony: Yep.

Cameron: I dun­no why I

Tony: Uh, yeah, I know what you mean. I went, I went out to Chad­stone the oth­er [00:20:00] week, um, and went to Mabb and was yet again dis­ap­point­ed by my vis­it and just, you know, walk through Chad­stone think­ing how does Mabb even exist with all these oth­er re spe­cial­ist retail­ers, which are inside Mey­er and often out­side Mey­er in their own stores, but then left Chad’s and emp­ty hand­ed and went, how does Chads even exist these days?

’cause you can buy stuff, went home and bought some­thing online. So it just, you know, just biggest belief real­ly.

Cameron: mm. It does. Well. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to buy and sell Myer over the years, but there you go. This will be anoth­er one. Uh, speak­ing of things that aren’t around any­more, uh, I noticed that SWM sev­en West

Tony: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: delist after the merg­er late last year. I’m not sure if we talked about that.

I know that we had bug­ger lugs on

Tony: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: Street and

Tony: Yep.

Cameron: fight­ing it. Um, but it, it went through by the looks of it, and S sev­en West Media did [00:21:00] delist, so that won’t be on our buy list again. South­ern Cross Media merged with it may be, but I don’t think they’re at the moment. Uh, what

Tony: Well, giv­en there’s five stocks on the buy list, it’s a good bet. They’re not

Cameron: Prob­a­bly not. Yeah. Wan Marine or in my news yes­ter­day, they put out an announce­ment say­ing that they’re in the process of. Adding a com­pa­ny called River­side Marine that they’ve acquired. Uh,

Tony: bug ones are sell, by the way. So yeah, I dun­no if you still hold it in port­fo­lios, but it’s, yeah.

Cameron: dun­no if I ever did. Actu­al­ly. I think I did at some point. B‑W-N-B‑W. NBWN No. see them in my archive.

Oh yeah, I did. There you go. I did. It was a three point trend­line sell back in Novem­ber at 52 cents. What are [00:22:00] they today? Should I look or is that just gonna

Tony: Oh no. They’ll be low­er.

Cameron: Oh, they are 44 and a half cents. Okay, good. Good work rules.

Tony: Yeah.

Cameron: Uh, any­way, they, they, they might be back on now that they’ve bought this com­pa­ny, River­side Marine. Uh, apart from mak­ing fun of Bit­coin, which I get in trou­ble for on Face­book, peo­ple say I’m obsessed with Bit­coin. Did you watch that Tik­Tok? I Did you watch the Tik­Tok that I had linked in my notes?

Tony: Uh, yes I did actu­al­ly, the

Cameron: uh, analy­sis?

Tony: sell­ing.

Cameron: Yeah, cas­cad­ing,

Tony: Cas­cade. Thank you. Yeah.

Cameron: the guy said. Basi­cal­ly. He’s, he is a, I think he’s an econ­o­mist. Um, he, his, his stuff is pret­ty good. He, he sim­pli­fies a lot of these things. He was basi­cal­ly say­ing that a lot of the mon­ey that’s gone into Bit­coin over the last cou­ple of years was lever­aged.

Tony: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: And as the share price has been drop­ping, peo­ple are get­ting hit by mar­gin calls, which means they need to sell, which dri­ves [00:23:00] the price low­er, and it becomes this cas­cad­ing liq­ui­da­tion event where calls kick in, peo­ple have to sell, and that dri­ves the price down. And then the new round of mar­gin calls get. Hit, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, the price, yeah, is back down. It’s gone up a lit­tle bit in the last cou­ple of days, but when I checked over the week­end, it was back down to Novem­ber, 2021 So and a bit years of, uh, val­ue for Bit­coin investors and if they did­n’t sell, wiped out. Um, but it’s a store of long-term val­ue and it’s gonna hit a mil­lion dol­lars, Tony.

So just keep that in mind. I

Tony: Dig­i­tal gold.

Cameron: saw a friend of mine, uh, on Face­book over the week­end say­ing, I think it’s time to buy more Bit­coin. It’s just like, of course it is.

Tony: Yeah. Stan­dard response. Yeah. Uh

Cameron: that you, you did­n’t, you did­n’t sell and you know, you’ve seen the share price [00:24:00] halve and you’re like, quick, every­one go in and pump it back up again.

Tony: oh. Who knows? It may, may turn back up again. Peo­ple may be awake to it now. Um, that Tik­Tok you sent me also men­tioned, I think it’s now called strat­e­gy, but it was called MicroS­trat­e­gy, uh, back when I met the CEO many years ago when they were pro­vid­ing ana­lyt­i­cal soft­ware. And, uh, they piv­ot­ed to buy Bit­coin and I think they’re report­ing this week in the US and that’ll be anoth­er water­shed moment for Bit­coin because they hold a large amount of Bit­coin on their bal­ance sheet.

And I don’t think they’ve been a sell­er so far, but they have lever­age via place­ments they’ve con­tin­ued to make to their, uh, share­hold­ers. And when they raise more cap­i­tal, they buy Bit­coin. And I think they’ve been doing it in term. The way they’ve been doing it is to issue con­vert­ible notes. And so as those start to con­vert, the share­hold­ers might pres­sure them to sell down their [00:25:00] Bit­coin, which will be part of this cas­cad­ing liq­ui­da­tion event.

Grand Sale. Grand Sale, grand Sale.

 Yeah, but I, I actu­al­ly think one of the big issues with Bit­coin is when the Wall Street ETFs, um, raised a lot of mon­ey and bought a lot of Bit­coin, um, or deriv­a­tive Bit­coin prod­ucts or what­ev­er. I thought that was the, the trig­ger moment. I thought, you know, buy Bit­coin just before that hap­pens. ’cause there’ll be a huge amount of buy­ing going on.

This was when the a when the, um, when the US allowed for the first time, uh, banks and invest­ment hous­es to buy Bit­coin on the whole­sale, um, basis and offer it to retail. Retail cus­tomers buy their var­i­ous prod­ucts. Um, but I always thought it was a sell after that because if every­one’s crowd­ed into the ETFs.

You know, it’s, that’s a large chunk of Bit­coin tied up and, um, who’s gonna top that [00:26:00] buy­ing? And then peo­ple will get sick of wait­ing and they’ll start sell­ing in. The ETFs will be required to sell, to redeem, um, and that’s just gonna be a prob­lem.

Cameron: Well, I thought that’s what the guy was sug­gest­ing that peo­ple lever­aged to buy into those ETFs or

Tony: now they’ve got mar­gin calls. Yep.

Cameron: Yeah, I dun­no. Uh, Phil, uh, sent me an email sug­gest­ing a cou­ple of future pulled porks, MSV Mitchell ser­vices, which I feel you have

Tony: I did that 20 March, 2024. I looked it up.

Cameron: You did. I just

Tony: Yeah.

Cameron: So check that out, Phil. Uh, unless you think it’s due for anoth­er one, but that was episode 7 1 2 titled Chi­na Beats Expec­ta­tions. Again, my annu­al, oh, look, Chi­na’s not falling over like every­one’s pre­dict­ed sto­ry. He’s also sug­gest­ed GVF, which he says is a list­ed invest­ment com­pa­ny.

You famil­iar [00:27:00] with GVF?

Tony: I’m not, um, but it might be worth doing. It’s Chris cuf­f’s. I think it’s a glob­al val­ue fund. So I’ll have a look at it and if it’s worth talk­ing about, I can do it next week ’cause I am run­ning out­ta things to do. Our buy list either has stocks that have been there for a long time, like pep­per mon­ey or it’s got noth­ing.

So

Cameron: yeah.

Tony: yeah, I’ll have a look at GVF next week.

Cameron: As opposed to our Amer­i­can buy list. Did you look into the com­pa­ny I’m doing today? Tusk.

Tony: No, just a brief look.

Cameron: Oh my God. I was telling Chris­sy like, it’s anoth­er one of these ones with a like a. Major bribery scan­dal involv­ing this com­pa­ny. Um, peo­ple, CEO went to jail,

Tony: I.

Cameron: et cetera, et cetera. I was like, we don’t get those sto­ries in the Aus­tralia.

Like I’m sure there are sto­ries of cor­rup­tion and bribery and scan­dals in Aus­tralia, although prob­a­bly not because asic are too at the wheel. But the, it’s like, it seems to me like 50% of the com­pa­nies that I [00:28:00] do in the Amer­i­can pulled Porks have some major scan­dal, you know, um, bank­rupt­cies or bribery or fraud or death by mis­ad­ven­ture or some­thing going on, dirty oil, dirty this, dirty that. And I’ve been won­der­ing like, why is that so preva­lent in the com­pa­nies that are at the top of the US buy list? Obvi­ous­ly they’re dis­count­ed

Tony: Yeah. No one wants to buy them.

Cameron: this tar­nish,

Tony: Hmm.

Cameron: at the top of the Aus­tralian buy list, we don’t come across.

Tony: No.

Cameron: Those sorts of

Tony: Good point.

Cameron: Is it because our reg­u­la­to­ry frame­work is bet­ter?

Or Aus­tralians just less cor­rupt? Or, I I Is it the, the cul­ture at Aus­tralia is dif­fer­ent. I, I’ve been try­ing to, I thought you’d know being a

Tony: Oh, no, I don’t.

Cameron: mar­ried to senior

Tony: It’s, it’s hard to believe the reg­u­la­to­ry infra­struc­ture in Aus­tralia is bet­ter. [00:29:00] Yeah, it could be us, could be worse, but, uh,

Cameron: of these pulled porks, I get into them for the Amer­i­can cup­board, like, oh my God, what, what? That’s crazy. And yet we don’t, we like, Aus­trali­a’s so bor­ing. Our Paul Porks, they’re just, yeah, they’re run­ning a busi­ness. They’re min­ing stuff. They’re run­ning a bank, they’re run­ning a retail­er.

They’ve got a cred­it card. where’s the death? Where’s the blood­shed? Where’s the mur­der? Where’s the Shake­speare­an epic tragedy in Aus­tralian busi­ness Tony.

Tony: well, there has been some over the years, you know, the HIHs and the uh, um, oth­er col­laps­es, Opus, prime, et cetera. Christo­pher S. Case. Yeah. I saw in today’s paper that uh, Mr. Brey is going to release his auto­bi­og­ra­phy. Ron Brey. Yeah.

Cameron: he dead? Did­n’t we

Tony: No, I don’t. Oh,

Cameron: we said he was dead.

Tony: don’t think so. Well, he’s some­one pos­ing as Ron’s gonna release an auto­bi­og­ra­phy there, [00:30:00] uh,

Cameron: yeah. No, he is still around 88 years old.

Tony: am Maria Win­dow was, um, using that. It’s gonna be hard because he’s gonna self-pub­lish it. It’s gonna be hard to release it

Cameron: I,

Tony: and self-pub­lish it because his inter­net activ­i­ties mon­i­tored because of his, um, pre­vi­ous charge charges.

Cameron: uh, but was he on the Epstein, is he in the Epstein files? Tony, that’s the impor­tant thing.

Tony: I dun­no.

Cameron: not. Nobody’s in the Epstein files. I mean, uh, just, you know, side load. Um, I’ve, the, the, the Bill Gates Asso­ci­a­tion

Tony: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: Epstein sur­prised me and shocked me, as did the affair stuff that came out about Bill a year or two ago, been a, you know, a fol­low­er of Bill since the eight­ies.

Tony: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: there for near­ly 10 years, met him a cou­ple of times. Like in my mind, bill was above all of that, [00:31:00] prob­a­bly one of the smartest guys on the plan­et. Um, very, very, very, very much a, a nerd rich nerd, but a nerd nonethe­less. He’s inter­est­ed in sci­ence and tech and maths, and read­ing books and study­ing stuff. So when the affair stuff came out, it was shock­ing to me a lit­tle bit and, and also how bad­ly man­aged it was, um, by the sounds of it. Uh, it was­n’t even, you know, he was­n’t even try­ing to not get caught. But the Epstein stuff, I could, I can’t join the dots with that. I just can’t imag­ine him being involved, like, okay.

We know that Epstein was, know, liked to sur­round him­self with rich peo­ple and pow­er­ful peo­ple and phil­an­thropists and sci­en­tists and, and you know, norm Chom­sky spent time with him and that’s shock­ing. And there’s been a whole bunch of that. And, and I can imag­ine, okay, gates, as Gates is posi­tion­ing it, uh, like I was just talk­ing to him about phil­an­thropic stuff, et cetera, et cetera. But then I saw Melin­da, his ex-wife, [00:32:00] inter­viewed last week okay, so she’s got her issues with him. But if she had come out in that inter­view, ’cause they asked about it and said. I got, I, you know, bill and I have had our prob­lems and you know, we’re divorced and all of that kin­da stuff. But I have to say, hav­ing, you know, lived with him for 20 years and know­ing him, well, the, you know, was, he could­n’t have pos­si­bly been involved in any of the hor­ri­ble, hor­ri­ble stuff.

It was all sur­face lev­el phil­an­thropic stuff. You know, they’ve got kids, they’ve got grand­kids. His rep­u­ta­tion is here, and she did­n’t do that. She basi­cal­ly, she did­n’t dou­ble down, but she also did­n’t give him an out, a, a, an out. She just said, this is a time of reck­on­ing for soci­ety, and basi­cal­ly threw him under the bus.

And I was like, holy hell. Like if she’s not, at least back­ing him up and com­ing to his defense with that. Aspect of it. [00:33:00] That’s not a good look. That’s a real­ly bad look. Like I’ve got ex-wives, but I’m sure if I was in the Epstein files, even my ex-wives, even the ones that haven’t spo­ken to me in 30 years, would have to come out and go, lis­ten, you know, Cameron, there’s no way Cameron is involved with

Tony: real­ly?

Cameron: Well, I would like to think so. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tony: Yeah. I, I can’t tell. I, I saw the inter­view with Melin­da as well, but did­n’t defend him. But it did­n’t defend him. No. But she’s divorced from him as well.

Cameron: So what.

Tony: Well, he is, had affairs and all the rest, so there’s a bit of bit bit­ter­ness there.

Cameron: Sure, but I mean, they have kids and grand­kids and his rep­u­ta­tion now is like, I mean, it’s already suf­fered, but this is a whole new lev­el of bad rep­u­ta­tion. Any­way. All right. Enough of that. What else you got?

Tony: [00:34:00] Uh, well, speak­ing of takeovers, one of the. Com­pa­nies that did a pulled pork on last year. So it would’ve been on the buy list last year as Appi­um, which was a vet chain. Uh, yeah. Yeah. So they’ve been, um, they’ve been tak­en over as well by a com­pa­ny called Adam Man­am, a pri­vate equi­ty group, which I always chuck­le when I see it.

’cause it was­n’t at the Man­ti Young, the thing that they inject­ed into Hugh Jack­man to turn his bone into steel. The wolver­ine? Yeah.

Cameron: Adam anum in, sci­ence fic­tion, gen­er­al­ly, it’s not just in Wolver­ine, but in sci­ence fic­tion, Adam Anum like, um, you know, fic­tion­al super­pow­ered,

Tony: Oh, okay.

Cameron: or some­thing like that. Yeah. Strongest, strongest met­al to hu human­i­ty. Uh

Tony: Well, this com­pa­ny’s called Adam Man­am Cap­i­tal, and they’ve, um, launched a bid at 87 cents, and the [00:35:00] price when I did the pulled pork was 54 cents in August. So, um, good luck to any­one who still holds Appi­um Health.

Cameron: Not us. I don’t hold them.

Tony: Okay.

Cameron: Dun­no

Tony: Uh, let me have a look. Yes, A XH. Okay. Um, cou­ple of arti­cles, three arti­cles in the AFR this week.

The first one talks about the volatil­i­ty of Aus­tralian report­ing sea­sons get­ting worse, and it says that, uh, August was the most volatile ever record­ed, and the sec­ond, uh, most volatile was Feb­ru­ary before that last year. So they’re get­ting worse. There’s a few, few things in the arti­cle which they try and point to, to talk about why that might be.

Um, every­thing from quant. Funds flood­ing the mar­ket with buy and sell orders and for small parcels through to ai, check­ing the announce­ments as they’re made and, and buy­ing or sell­ing quick­ly. Um, and pas­sive [00:36:00] funds. And I think prob­a­bly pas­sive funds is the one to be the most wary of, though. ’cause uh, um, you know, if some­thing starts to move, they, they tend to, what’s the word I’m look­ing for?

Make that move big­ger or small­er. Uh, mag­ni­fy the move. Um, yeah. And, uh.

Cameron: us about that for a long time.

Tony: I have, and it’s the rea­son why I’m not pre­pared to buy now either dur­ing report­ing sea­son until we get the num­bers so we can make our own mind up. Um, but yeah, expect, expect volatil­i­ty in the port­fo­lio. This, uh, this month, um, noth­ing I’m hold­ing is report­ed yet.

Uh, so we’ll see what hap­pens. We’ve still got a cou­ple of weeks to go, but it will be volatile going for­ward.

Cameron: Hmm.

Tony: So there was that, um, arti­cle, which was inter­est­ing. Pep­per mon­ey, I think we spoke about, uh, was one of the ones I had to talk about. And last thing on, um, on Gold Min­ers and tech com­pa­nies was a, an arti­cle say­ing that, uh, some funds [00:37:00] who had been writ­ing the, the, uh, what do they call it, SA as the, the cap­i­tal light busi­ness, um, busi­ness mod­el for invest­ing.

Sor­ry, I’m just try­ing to find the arti­cle. Here we go. Uh, a com­pa­ny called QVG. Cap­i­tal’s Oppor­tu­ni­ties Fund is one of the many small cap funds that invest main­ly in tech­nol­o­gy and indus­tri­al stocks, and has been grap­pling with the grow­ing pres­ence of gold min­ers on its bench­mark. So this is from the AFR.

Last week, the fund lagged the small ordi­nary index by 6.7% last month as its port­fo­lio of com­pa­nies from fam­i­ly track­ing plat­form life 360, and by now pay­load oper­a­tor zip code to ath­let­ics and analy­sis. Devel­op­er Cat­a­pult Sports were pun­ished by the shift of mon­ey into the boom­ing gold sec­tor. Um, one of their founders says in the last week of Jan­u­ary, the queues out­side Mar­tin Places Gold Bul­lion Depos­i­to­ry start­ed to reach Cas­tle Ray Street.

We are Jel­ly. No one is lin­ing up for our stocks. [00:38:00] QVG port­fo­lio man­agers, Tony Waters and Chris Ti said, the rota­tion to resources have left the share prices of plen­ty of QVG style busi­ness­es floun­der­ing. So, uh, we’ve been in gold stocks all the way through, which has been good for us and it’s catch­ing some peo­ple, um, nap­ping.

Uh, but the oth­er part about this arti­cle, which was inter­est­ing, was that the. ASX will rebal­ance, um, their index­es on March the sixth, and there are some gold stocks which are, um, set to move into the ASX 100. Some of those have been on our bio list, so West Gold Resources, Reg­is Resources and Vault Min­er­als.

Uh, join­ing me ASX 100, or you join the ASX 100 on March 6th, and then that will prob­a­bly pro­mote some pas­sive invest­ing, buy­ing of them, but will also, you know, dis­rupt, um, ASX 100 investors as they try and grap­ple with the idea of buy­ing gold min­ers. Um, and whether it’s late in the [00:39:00] cycle or not. So, uh, inter­est­ing arti­cle about how peo­ple, um, have been caught short by the gold min­ing boom, but not us.

Cameron: Hmm. Good for us.

Tony: So that was, uh, that was my three arti­cles to go through. Um, and the last thing I’ve got is a pulled pork, and as you said, Atlas Pearls. You don’t like them, do you?

Cameron: Well, they’re just. Speak­ing of volatile.

Tony: Yeah.

Cameron: volatile. We, we’ve seen this before where they have these auc­tions and the auc­tion can be a dis­as­ter. I’ve owned them before and they’ll have an auc­tion and it’s a dis­as­ter and I have to sell it ’cause the share

Tony: Yeah.

Cameron: col­laps­es like by 30% or some­thing. Like, um, I’m just pulling up my, uh, trad­ing his­to­ry with them. Doo

Tony: So hav­ing said that, I’m just look­ing at their share price graph, and it has, it is of course, volatile, but, um, five years ago the share price was 1 cent [00:40:00] and today it’s 19 cents. So even though it’s been volatile, it’s been, it’s been gen­er­al­ly going up.

Cameron: I bought them in Decem­ber 23 at 13 cents. Sold them April 24 at 11 cents a rule one sell. And now they’re 19 cents. So would’ve done okay if I’d held it for anoth­er cou­ple of years and had­n’t sold it, but,

Tony: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: okay. shut up and let you talk about them. Then I’ll stop bitch­ing and moan­ing.

Tony: That’s all right. You can bit your man. All you like cost noth­ing.

Cameron: All

Tony: Uh, well we’ve spo­ken about them before, um, but I haven’t done pulled pork on them and apolo­gies to lis­ten­ers for me doing anoth­er small a DT stock. And this is a small one, but there was­n’t much choice this week on the bio. Um, they are Perth based, and I spoke last week about, um, my lik­ing of WA com­pa­nies.

So that gets a tick. Um, although [00:41:00] it’s, they’re not real­ly Perth oper­at­ing, they, their oper­a­tions are in Indone­sia, so I’m not sure whether the Perth econ­o­my ben­e­fits them or not. Uh, they’re best known for pro­duc­ing and sell­ing in South Sea pearls, and in par­tic­u­lar the sought after white and sil­ver pearls from the Indone­sian islands.

They oper­ate eight farm­ing loca­tions. Um, through­out that, that Indone­sian chain of islands, uh, they employ a thou­sand peo­ple or more than a thou­sand peo­ple, and they har­vest­ed, uh, last year between 500 and 600,000. Pearls and they’ve been doing that for a while now. So, uh, quite a pro­lif­ic pearling com­pa­ny as far as, uh, I know.

And, and they claim they’re the only list­ed pearling com­pa­ny in the world. They com­menced farm­ing back in 1993 with their first farm locat­ed in Kupang East. No, at East Noosa. K. And, uh, they’ve then [00:42:00] expand­ed into oth­er areas, includ­ing, uh, off the coast of Bali. So when I talk about Pearl Farms, these, these are of course in the ocean, in the seas, um, to the north of Indone­sia.

And if you have an map of Indone­sia, uh, in front of you, they kind of stretch­es along the arch­i­pel­ago from. Almost touch­ing Pap­py New Guinea, the west­ern side of Pap­py, new Guinea or West Papi­er, um, through to Malaysia and even fur­ther to the west of that. Uh, and all of these farms are spread out across those islands and they’re all on the north­ern end of those islands.

And that sort of, um, in the small seas, the jar­vey, I guess is the biggest one, uh, which links into the South Chi­na Sea, but, um, stretched across the north­ern coast of the Indone­sian Islands. Um, they have done a lot of work on what they call their struc­tured breed­ing pro­grams. And because of that, they’re able to main­tain a sup­ply of healthy, man­aged oys­ter stocks and they can [00:43:00] trans­port those between dif­fer­ent farm sites, uh, which is impor­tant because oys­ters are incred­i­bly sen­si­tive to.

What’s going on in their envi­ron­ment to small changes in tem­per­a­ture, but also changes in nutri­ents or pol­lu­tants in the water. So the fact that they can move oys­ters between the farms, um, is, is good for them because, um, you know, hur­ri­canes and cyclones blow through and flood­ing hap­pens, which puts more nutri­ents in the water.

Um, so the fact that they have eight sites, uh, even though they’re all in Indone­sia, they are quite wide apart and they can move from site to site. Um, to your point about the sell­ing of the pearls through the auc­tions, and there’s been one. Recent­ly in Kobe in Japan, or been a cou­ple actu­al­ly in Kobe in Japan.

Um, Atlas Pearls have been aware of the volatil­i­ty of that mar­ket and they’re doing a fair bit to try and diver­si­fy away from that. Um, and work with cus­tomers, uh, both, uh, retail [00:44:00] and whole­sale, um, and online and, uh, not place as much empha­sis on those auc­tions going for­ward. The auc­tions will still play a big part in clear­ing their stock ’cause they’ve got, you know, half a mil­lion pearls to push each year.

Uh, but they are doing more and more, um, deals with, uh, jew­el­ers and peo­ple, um, who like buy­ing pearls, uh, some­times for jew­el­ry, some­times for their own col­lec­tions, um, behind the scenes. Um, unfor­tu­nate­ly that means that, uh. South Sea pearls is one thing we can’t get a com­mod­i­ty graph for. Uh, there’s, it’s not a big enough mar­ket.

There’s no futures trad­ing for it. Um, and it’s often an opaque mar­ket. It real­ly only gets vis­i­bil­i­ty when they hold these, uh, um, uh, pub­lic auc­tions for the sale of pearls. But a lot of the, the bot­tom and sell­ing goes on behind the scenes with traders as well. Uh, the oth­er thing that, that I should men­tion is that, um, they do have [00:45:00] a quite a strong ESG focus and, uh, they do a lot of work, um, in the local com­mu­ni­ties of the, of the, uh, pearl farm­ing areas, uh, which are often very remote.

Um, and they also, uh, point out that they’re the, this type of farm­ing, it’s called farm­ing, it’s not real­ly on land. Um, and it does­n’t involve all the chem­i­cals and fer­til­iz­ers that land farm­ing does use. So it’s, it’s a very car­bon light type, um, uh, oper­a­tion as well. Uh, what else can I say about them? Um, I want­ed to, to com­pare them to some oth­er pearling com­pa­nies that peo­ple might have heard of.

Prob­a­bly the most high, high pro­file one in Aus­tralia is past Par­ley Pearls, and this all served to, I guess, um, high­light some of the um, uh, ben­e­fits of Atlas Pearls to its com­peti­tors. Been two main com­peti­tors in Aus­tralia over the [00:46:00] years, um, Paal and, uh, one called Car­los and Paal is, is prob­a­bly the most high pro­file one, uh, because from time to time they’re on mar­ket­ing around, um, PA Pearls.

But they also have, um, high end retail out­lets. One of them is, um, in Mar­tin Place in Syd­ney, right on the cor­ner of, of, uh, one of the main streets there. George Street, I think. So, um, peo­ple may have want­ed past it and seen it. Um, the dif­fer­ence between Pasal Pearls and Atlas Pearls is pasley, uh, cul­ti­vates from, um, the Wildes.

So they col­lect their pearls from the wild oys­ters, and we’re always talk­ing about a group of oys­ters called the pink tar­tar, Max­i­ma oys­ters, just to, to be clear. So there are oth­er, many oth­er, um, pro­duc­ers of pearls, but the, the, the south sea pearls that come from that one par­tic­u­lar type of oys­ter, uh.

That the Paley Pearl from that wild­ly col­lect­ed oys­ter, um, uh, which tends to hap­pen, [00:47:00] uh, off the coast of Broome in, uh, in wa and um, maybe, uh, clos­er to Dar­win in some places, but main­ly Broome. Um, it’s those pearls are prized for their excep­tion­al n ray thick­ness, um, sur­face qual­i­ty and lus­ter. So they tend to sell for some­times tens of thou­sands of dol­lars, if not more.

Um, and they’re at the, the ultra pre­mi­um into the mar­ket, where­as Atlas Pearls, um, even those, they still get, um, good prices for South Sea pearls, um, uh, have a, a large amount of vol­ume which keeps the cap on the price. And they have, um. A oper­a­tion which involves cul­tur­ing and farm­ing the, um, the pearls. So they con­trol that rather than have to go and find them in, in, um, the nat­ur­al areas.

Uh, and con­se­quent­ly they’re in the vol­ume game, where­as pa Pal­lia in the, the high end price game. Um, there is a, [00:48:00] a anoth­er cou­ple of things to note between the, the Aus­tralian source pool pearls and the Indone­sian pearls. Um, one is obvi­ous­ly the cost infra­struc­ture. So Aus­tralian wages are much high­er than Indone­sian wages, espe­cial­ly in remote areas.

And the Aus­tralian gov­ern­ment caps, the num­ber of oys­ters that can be opened or, or pearls that can be tak­en from the nat­ur­al waters off broom to a cer­tain num­ber each year. So it restricts for eco­log­i­cal rea­sons, the, um, the sup­ply of those pearls, where­as that kind of, um, pol­i­cy does­n’t hap­pen in Indone­sia.

And, uh, because. Uh, Atlas Pearls are farm­ing their own oys­ters. Uh, they can, um, expand as much as they like in terms of, um, reg­u­la­tion any­way. Uh, but Atlas Pearls does still face a num­ber of, um, obsta­cles, um, in its indus­try. And I’m gonna high­light that by talk­ing about an arti­cle I read, uh, by Lau­ra Moore on a site [00:49:00] called J jew­el­ry world net au.

And it was about her trip to Atlas Pearls in Indone­sia. She says The jour­ney begins in Atlas’s own hatch­ery, where micro­scop­ic oys­ter lava called spat a nur­tured in a spe­cial­ized algae based diet for­mu­lat­ed. In the lab at four months old, the young oys­ters that are trans­ferred to the ocean placed into hold­ing nets sus­pend­ed above lit­tle black boys.

The B‑U-I-Y‑S kind, um, which can be seen from the shore Atlas team works tire­less­ly div­ing dai­ly to clean and check each oys­ter, ensur­ing its health as it grows. It takes two years before the oys­ters are ready to be seed­ed. A del­i­cate pro­ce­dure or a small piece of man­tle tis­sue from a donor oys­ter along with a round nucle­us is insert­ed into the gonad.

Kind of sat up straight when I read that.

Cameron: yeah.

Tony: The, the oys­ter then forms a pearl sack around the nucle­us, slow­ly coat­ing it in lay­ers of NRA over the next two years. By [00:50:00] the time, the time the pearls are ready to be har­vest­ed in around four years of age. Only 50 to 60% will be con­sid­ered jew­el­ry grade. Watch­ing this process unfold from the clean­ing of young oys­ters to see­ing larg­er shells pre­pared for seed­ing was a Mabb remark­able insight into the patients and skill required to pro­duce pearls of this cal­iber.

And that arti­cle was from August last year. So it’s a fair­ly labor inten­sive and time con­sum­ing, uh, busi­ness. And they don’t see a result for four years, which is not unusu­al in farm­ing terms. But, um, it’s not a sort of quick oper­a­tion to go from start­ing to pro­duc­ing pearls. Uh, a bit of a his­to­ry of the com­pa­ny.

Um, they’ve had a num­ber of dif­fer­ent name changes over the years. They pub­licly list­ed back in 1987, um, one of their orig­i­nal cor­po­ra­tions was called Atlas Pacif­ic Gold nl. And they start­ed a life to pur­sue min­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties. But in the ear­ly 1990s. They piv­ot­ed into pearling when it acquired [00:51:00] inter­est in the Indone­sian pearling farm in 1992.

The com­pa­ny was renamed sev­er­al times as the strat­e­gy shift­ed. It’s been called in the past, Atlas Pacif­ic at the South Sea, Pearl Atlas, pearls and Per­fumes. And final­ly, Atlas Pearls Lim­it­ed in Decem­ber, 2017. Um, so that’s, that’s its time­line was inter­est­ing read­ing about the ear­ly peo­ple involved, none of which are still direc­tors.

Um, but there are some large share­hold­ers I’ll talk about lat­er. But, uh, it was basi­cal­ly found­ed by marine biol­o­gists. So the orig­i­nal, uh, project man­ag­er was, uh, chap by the name of Dr. Peter pur­chase and he pio­neered pearl farm­ing in Coupang and West Tim­or. And he was a marine biol­o­gist and he.

Cameron: that Peter pur­chased pio­neered pearls?

Tony: Yes, I am.

Cameron: say that 10 times fast.

Tony: I could not. Uh,

Cameron: Keep going.

Tony: um, so he, he suc­cess­ful­ly man­aged oys­ter [00:52:00] breed­ing and cul­ti­va­tion, which led to the ear­ly har­vest in, uh, into the, in, in, in Indone­sia. And he demon­strat­ed that, uh, south Sea pearl farm­ing could suc­ceed, um, over­seas. Uh, he was replaced by a per­son called Joseph Tay­lor, and he lat­er com­plet­ed the PhD, focused on the, the Max­i­ma pearl oys­ters and con­tributed a lot of tech­ni­cal knowl­edge to the oper­a­tion.

And then last­ly, uh, pro­fes­sor Alex Kerr served as chair­man of the board in the ear­ly devel­op­ment phase for the Indone­sian oper­a­tions. And, uh, the last per­son I should men­tion. Is an Indone­sian called, goes by the name of Pac poa. Um, I think his full name is Admi­ral Rad­den Pani Po NoMo. And he was an influ­en­tial Indone­sian part­ner and for­mer naval offi­cer who helped secure local gov­ern­ment sup­port and oys­ter stock, um, access in East Indone­sia.

So a lot of work went on from a marine biol­o­gy point of view to, to see the [00:53:00] indus­try before Atlas Pearls. Um, uh, took a hold of it. Uh, but that’s, its, that’s its his­to­ry. Some­thing else to say about them was tra­di­tion­al­ly Indone­sian pearls were dis­missed as infe­ri­or ver­sus the Aus­tralian South Sea pearls.

They were small­er often, um, not the white or gold col­or that, that peo­ple pre­ferred. Um, but I dug up a, an arti­cle back in 1999. From of all peo­ple. Tim tread gold in, uh, the AFR. He’s one of our min­ing go-tos when it comes to, um, the Aus­tralian min­ing scene. But back in 1999, he wrote, uh, Aus­trali­a’s Pearl Indus­try has been watch­ing Indone­sia very close­ly.

Own­ers such as the past Bai­leys, who account for 40% of the annu­al 300 mil­lion in pro­duc­tion refused to pub­licly acknowl­edge the threat. How­ev­er, an employ­ee of the Paal busi­ness came up close to explain­ing the posi­tion in the rare inter­view pub­lished in a Aus­tralian geo­graph­ic mag­a­zine in 1994. Uh, this is the skip­per of a paal boat.

He said in Indone­sia, for exam­ple, they oper­ate [00:54:00] under a total­ly dif­fer­ent tax and wages regime. One of their farms can run for a year on the annu­al wages of one of our employ­ees. And I have 26 peo­ple on this boat alone. Um, but they lack the infra­struc­ture and the tech­nol­o­gy that give us an edge. But I guess that’s, that sort of, um, that sort of wage dif­fer­en­tial’s been a big help for Atlas and they’ve put a lot of mon­ey into infra­struc­ture and tech­nol­o­gy since 1999.

And so, uh, they’re becom­ing more suc­cess­ful as time goes on. Um, the oth­er com­pa­ny to talk about in Aus­tralia was Kless, um, which were a, a, a cou­ple of Greek immi­grants in, in wa uh, who got into the pearling indus­try, main­ly to use Moth­er of Pearl to make but­tons. Um, and they were, um, exit­ed that busi­ness because, uh, plas­tic but­tons sort of over­took, uh, their busi­ness.

Um, but their daugh­ter was a, a, again, a, um, a sci­en­tist and did a lot of work. [00:55:00] In the hus­bandry, seed­ing and farm­ing of oys­ters. And so they, um, they piv­ot­ed from, uh, the oys­ter busi­ness of mak­ing but­tons from the shell to the pearling busi­ness. Um, but they exit­ed the pearling busi­ness in 2009 and um, it’s prob­a­bly worth look­ing at why they did that.

So the fourth or six year, um, life­cy­cle from oys­ter seed­ing to har­vest to sale was a long time to be invest­ed for, for a, for a fam­i­ly busi­ness any­way. Um, they faced huge risks in terms of cyclones ’cause they’re oper­at­ing in. North­west of, of Aus­tralia, uh, Broome and, and clos­er to Dar­win. Um, there, but there are also oth­er bio­log­i­cal risks, includ­ing dis­ease tem­per­a­ture shifts in the water and algae blooms.

Um, and then the high fixed costs of oper­at­ing boats and divers, divers and marine staff of com­pli­ance, which does­n’t exist in Indone­sia, um, hurt them. And, [00:56:00] uh, they were ca by reg­u­la­tion on how much they could take from the, uh, from the areas. So they got out­ta the mar­ket, left it to PAs, bar­ley, but even PAs, bar­ley’s lat­est returns and there were pri­vate com­pa­ny seemed to sug­gest that they were feel­ing the pinch in the pearl side of their busi­ness.

And we’re piv­ot­ing more towards tourism and hotels. So, uh, maybe Atlas are in the right part of the indus­try going for­ward, but, uh, I guess time will tell. Um, Kay­la has con­tin­ued, they piv­ot­ed into jew­el­ry mak­ing. You can go to their web­site now and see that. A lot of the jew­el­ry they make uses, uh, pearls, which they, um, source from oth­er places.

Uh, and they’ve made a go of being a jew­el­ry com­pa­ny. So, um, uh, as they, as they put it, they’re clos­er to the cus­tomer than what they were, and they don’t have the, the six, four to 60 year, uh, lead times involved in, uh, in pearling. Uh, and so they’re, they’re doing bet­ter out of the jew­el­ry [00:57:00] side of the busi­ness.

Um, so that’s a bit of an insight into the indus­try and into Atlas Pearls, the lat­est results. And I’m going back to June, 2025, show that sales were up 6% and prof­it was down 30%. Um, large­ly because they sold more pearls for a low­er price, which is what you allud­ed to before. Cam. Um, their NTA was up though the 16 cents per share from 12.80 cents the year before and div­i­dends were increased to 2.40 cents from 1.86 cents.

And they high­light­ed the fact that they were debt free. So, um, except for the prof­it side of things, pret­ty good results. Um, and even though prof­it was down, their NTA was up and their debt free and they increased their div­i­dends. So, um, they were still. You know, see upside in their busi­ness to con­vince them­selves to increase div­i­dends.

Um, and they had an increase in NTA. Uh, but again, I high­light the fact that there is no, um, com­mod­i­ty we can track for this com­pa­ny, for pearl pric­ing. So, and it’s a bit of [00:58:00] an OPA opaque mar­ket, which is a risk for us look­ing at the QAV num­bers, which again, are based on June, 2020 fives, and they’ll be updat­ed fair­ly soon, I guess if you’re inter­est­ed in the com­pa­ny.

I would wait until then. Um, small, a DT as I said, $27,000 a day, uh, even though they’re still a buy on the bread lat­er. Um, they’re small. A DT stock price is 18.50 cents for this analy­sis, IV one 26 cents. Uh, so they’re trad­ing below IV one. We don’t have an IV two because there’s no, no uncov­er­ing the stock.

So we have no con­sen­sus price tar­get. And like­wise, we have no con­sen­sus earn­ings per share fore­cast, so we can’t give ’em a. A growth over PE score, a grope score. Um, yield is cur­rent­ly 10.8%, which is very high Stock Doc­tor finan­cial health and trend is strong and steady, but stock edia only have it as 76 in their qual­i­ty rank­ing sys­tem and an F score of five out of nine.

So stock pedia at mar­ket down for qual­i­ty Stock [00:59:00] Doc­tor tend to like it. Um, one thing I’ll high­light, which we don’t score for, but some peo­ple like to know, is that he has an ROE of 34%. So, um, uh, very strong mar­gins in this busi­ness. Uh, stock edia, um, have a val­ue rank of 97, but an over­all rank of 78, so not high on their, on their rank­ing sys­tem.

PD ratio’s only 3.7, so, um, not the high­est or the low­est, just almost the high­est, but it scores a zero for us. Pr/OpCaf is below five at 4.94 times, so that’s good. The equi­ty per share is 16 cents, so book plus 30 is 21 cents and and above the share price. So that gets a tick from us. Uh, direc­tors hold 14% of the com­pa­ny and I, and I can’t find out, uh, much about these, um, own­ers, but there are two big hold­ings between the Mar­tin fam­i­ly and a com­pa­ny called Rain­tree Pearls and Per­fumes.

Um, nei­ther appear to be [01:00:00] founders, but they both have long-term share­hold­ings. Uh, and Kim Mar­tin, who holds 14% sits on the board. So, uh, I have score it for the founder, but, um. It, it isn’t real­ly an own­er, but they’ve been around for, sor­ry, a founder, but they’ve been around for a long time. There is con­sis­tent­ly increas­ing equi­ty, um, yields above the aver­age mort­gage rate.

So over­all I’m get­ting a qual­i­ty score of, uh, 13 out of 12. ’cause some of these items get the score of two or 108% and the QAV score of 0.22. So it’s rea­son­ably high on the buy list, even though it’s a small a DT stock. Um, a lot of risks with this com­pa­ny, but also oppor­tu­ni­ties. So, um, biggest risk obvi­ous­ly is in, is in the pearl price mar­ket itself.

It’s opaque. There’s no com­mod­i­ty com­mod­i­ty index to track, so it will get belt­ed around by, um, the auc­tion events, even though this com­pa­ny has called out the fac­ul­ty try­ing to build a lot more. Diver­si­fi­ca­tion into how they [01:01:00] sell their pearls. Um, even though they are spread across eight sites, um, if a big hur­ri­cane went through Indone­sia, I’m sure they would all still get bat­tered.

So nat­ur­al dis­as­ters, bio­haz­ard and cli­mate change, you’re all gonna be issues for oys­ters. They’re, they are very sen­si­tive to even small changes in the water tem­per­a­ture, in small changes in the amount of nutri­ents in the water. I guess the upside is that, uh, they’re also good for their local envi­ron­ments because they fil­ter a lot of the, um, the bad things out­ta the water, um, in those areas.

Uh, but does­n’t real­ly help the busi­ness to do that, but it does keep it clean for future growth, I guess. Um, the oth­er thing I wan­na high­light is that, uh, this com­pa­ny often ends the year hold­ing pearls in reserve. So if they can’t get the price they want. They pull a lot of the pearls from, from auc­tion and they put them in reserve, which is a good way to man­age their, um, their price points.

But if they, if that stock­pile gets too big, [01:02:00] they’re gonna have to clear it a, a sig­nif­i­cant dis­count at some stage in the future. And that’s the kind of the clas­sic, you know, retail­ing conun­drum about main­tain­ing mar­gins ver­sus clear­ing stock. So, um, they’ve got­ta do well at man­ag­ing that and it’s, it’s gonna be a risk for them going for­ward.

Pos­i­tives, they’re obvi­ous­ly a low cost pro­duc­er. The cost struc­tures in Indone­sia are much, much low­er than in Aus­tralia, which seems to be its biggest com­peti­tor, at least for South Sea Pearls. Um, and I think, you know, if any­one’s inter­est­ed in ESG invest­ing, take a look at these peo­ple because they do.

Seem to, um, I I guess from their own accounts, uh, put a lot back into the local com­mu­ni­ties. And as I said before, um, a lot of what they do is, is good for the local, um, envi­ron­ment, uh, in terms of puri­fy­ing the water and they’re not using, um, any nutri­ents or chem­i­cals, et cetera, which can be harm­ful to the envi­ron­ment.

So there’s a lot to like about Atlas Pearls, but it is risky and it is small, so have a look, espe­cial­ly when it re uh, [01:03:00] uh, releas­es its results.

Cameron: What do you think about pearls? Tony, you’re a fan of pearls.

Tony: Uh, I’m agnos­tic. I know they cost me a lot of mon­ey ’cause I buy them for Jen­ny. She loves them. So she’s got some pearl neck­laces and pearl ear­rings, which I’ve bought for her over the years.

Cameron: Does she wear them?

Tony: Yeah, she loves ’em.

Cameron: I,

Tony: Um, and they’re often, I don’t know if they’re South Sea pearls, she’s got a cou­ple of the white ones and the gold ones, but she often goes after fresh for the pearls, which are cheap­er and come in dif­fer­ent col­ors, blues and grays and pur­ples and things.

Cameron: I bought Chris­sy, I think a pearl neck­lace for our wed­ding. I think she wore it when we got mar­ried. It was a wed­ding gift. I think she’s worn it maybe once since

Tony: Oh no. Jen­ny wears hers a lot.

Cameron: I don’t know. Alright. Well Jen­ny prob­a­bly dress­es up and goes out more than we do. too poor to go out. Uh, well thank you Tony.

Tony: the go out. Lis­ten to you flew. Flew down to [01:04:00] Syd­ney to go to the pre­mier. Went to Annie. You did­n’t fly to Syd­ney. I thought you went to

Cameron: of

Tony: Epic. I thought you went to Epic with, with Tay­lor. I was on the Gold Coast, sor­ry.

Cameron: drove down. Yeah, yeah,

Tony: Oh, okay.

Cameron: Flew down. No, I was the taxi dri­ver. That’s the only rea­son I got an invite to the pre­mier is he need­ed some­one to dri­ve him down to the Gold Coast. That was, that’s my job. Uh, well thank you for that, Tony.

You’ve changed my views on Atlas Pearls. Uh, I guess I’m not as dirty on them as I have been. I’ll have to take the note out of my notes, which says volatile. Uh, I’ll give them a pass now as a result of your good work. Alright, after hours, Tony, then we can go talk about Amer­i­ca.

Tony: Yeah, watched a cou­ple of good things this week, camp. Um, yeah. Uh, night of the Sev­en King­doms, which is a Game of Thrones pre­quel, said a cou­ple hun­dred years in the past. Oh, this one’s real­ly good.

Cameron: [01:05:00] You said that about the last one

Tony: Yeah, that was good too.

Cameron: nah, it’s not good.

Tony: Okay. Well, so far this one’s only had about four episodes, but I, Jen­ny and I are both real­ly enjoy­ing it.

It’s, um. Uh, I think the book that’s based on is called the Hedge Night. So it’s about a hedge night, which is basi­cal­ly a knight who roams the land, camp­ing out, not real­ly aligned to any­one liv­ing in pas­tures and near streams and things. And, uh, this guy, uh, wants to enter a tour­na­ment to prove him­self and to make him­self a bit rich­er and gets, gets pulled into all the west­ern Austin intrigues in the var­i­ous hous­es, Tag­gar, et cetera.

That goes on even back before Game of Thrones as set, but real­ly, real­ly good fun. Real­ly enjoy­ing it.

Cameron: vio­lent and sexy?

Tony: No, there’s not as much of that in there. There’s a lot of, a lot of crude stuff, you know, ’cause it’s, the pro­duc­ers are at the pains to show it’s a, you know, uh, medieval times, all the peo­ple going to the toi­let in pub­lic, that kind of thing.

[01:06:00] But, um, but no, not as sexy at this stage. Any­way,

Cameron: Right.

Tony: more whole­some.

Cameron: Ah ha. What else?

Tony: Uh, task, which is both of those are on, um, HBO Max. Have you seen task made by the pro­duc­ers of, um, may­or of, um, what was it, may­or of East Town?

Cameron: Oh, the may­or of East? Yeah. The, um, what’s her name?

Yeah, I did see that.

Tony: Yeah.

Which is real­ly good. And this is made by the same pro­duc­ers in a sim­i­lar sort

of style. Mark Rolos in this one though, rather than,

um

Cameron: seen the trail­er 400,000 times.

Tony: Okay. Real­ly good. Worth, worth watch­ing,

Cameron: show me the same trail­er over and over and. over again. Yeah. Oh, that’s good. Yeah.

Tony: Yeah, pret­ty grit­ty.

And it cen­ters around the Dark Hearts motor­cy­cle group and the drug deal­ings and how they’ve drawn in a, some poor, a poor fam­i­ly, and Philadel­phia or on the out­skirts of Philadel­phia. and then Ruff Low plays [01:07:00] the um, FBI task Force Com­man­der, who’s tracks and track ’em all down.

He’s got his own prob­lems. It’s um, it’s a slow burn. Like it’s, it’s our an hour episode, so you real­ly get into the nit­ty grit­ty of each of the char­ac­ters And we liked it. And then, but by episode three, have one of those holy shit moments, like one of those sur­pris­es and you start to think, oh, there’s no way out here.

How are they gonna get out­ta this? And that real­ly hooks you into the rest of the series, which is good.

Cameron Reil­ly: Mark Rolo turn into the Hulk?

Is that. what hap­pened?

Tony: No,

Cameron Reil­ly: That would’ve been a twist.

Tony: well, he kind of did. ’cause like there’s, at one stage in the show he is say­ing like, I’m always 60 years of age and can’t do this and can’t do that. And in the one of the last sequences he’s fight­ing a bik­ing gang leader. Um, and throw­ing him down on the floor and wrestling and going, yeah,

Cameron Reil­ly: Hey, my,

Tony: it’s not, not

Cameron Reil­ly: seafood’s near­ly 60. He could do that.

He could take on a Bikey gang and he’d win. [01:08:00] Um, well, it’s good. I’ll check those out maybe. So, um, yes, I went to the Elvis

Doco, uh, with Baz Luman, uh, And Richard

Wilkins, who does not look good.

Tony: Oh,

Cameron Reil­ly: ooh. Does

not look good. It was weird, like, um. It’s been a while since I’ve been to, uh, any­thing like that.

Gold Coast, you know, lots of plas­ti­cy look­ing peo­ple, uh, in some inter­est­ing out­fits. Um,

the,

Tony: It’s fun­ny how that’s changed, has­n’t it? I went to, um, sor­ry to inter­rupt. I went to a gym in Morn­ing­ton, had my car, had some work done in the car, and that’s the clos­est deal­er­ship. And just the dif­fer­ence in the peo­ple like my nor­mal gyms in Rose­burg, which is one of. Poor­est post­codes in Vic­to­ria, and then going up to Morn­ing­ton.

Just the girls all had butt implants and thick lips and just going, wow.

Cameron Reil­ly: now look like this.

Tony: Mm. [01:09:00] Yeah.

Cameron Reil­ly: Um, the film itself, are you an Elvis fan?

Tony: Yeah.

Yeah.

Cameron Reil­ly: So the, the set­up Baz did a q and a after­wards that Richard Wilkins ran, and, and it was good Like Baz gives good q and a I’ll give him that. Very, very chat­ty. Um, the, the sto­ry is when he did the Elvis biopic a few years ago with Austin But­ler, he heard a rumor from like an Elvis um, expert, that there was this footage that was tak­en when he was. Behind the scenes footage of him prepar­ing for the Las Vegas is first Las Vegas shows in 69 that had nev­er been seen and it was buried in a vault some­where and they tracked it down in a vault in a salt mine in Kansas City, and it was like 68 reels of footage of Elvis get­ting ready behind the scenes.

So that’s. Pre­dom­i­nant­ly [01:10:00] what this is. It’s an edit of, that. um, but the prob­lem was they did­n’t have sound for some of it, so they had to recre­ate what it would’ve sound­ed like. They have Elvis’s vocals for bits, And they use that, but they did­n’t have great back­ing sound for the band and the choir and that kin­da stuff.

So they had to get. Peo­ple in and rere­cord it and then edit it all togeth­er and stuff. But look, if you’re an Elvis fan, as I am, it’s always great to see Elvis. He sort of, I’ll say in his prime, You know, his sec­ond prime good shape, um, just with his charm and his sense of humor. and he just comes across as a nice guy in all of this, the way he treats the band and the crew and the peo­ple in the hotel and the audi­ence. and he’s, he’s always got this thing where he is doing some­thing ridicu­lous­ly dra­mat­ic on stage, but then he’s got a lit­tle smile on his face, like he’s chuck­ling to him­self at how stu­pid it all is, but. You know, but Baz and the q and [01:11:00] a made a good point. Did you see the 68 spe­cial doc­u­men­tary that came out A cou­ple of years ago?

Tony: Yeah.

Cameron Reil­ly: They made the point in that, which I thought was real­ly inter­est­ing in that when he came back from Korea And he did like one live thing and then Colonel would­n’t let him do live any­more, And he did all the crap­py films and he made a lot of crap­py albums and he was Spent the six­ties real­ly strug­gling for rel­e­vance in rock and roll ’cause the Bea­t­les and the Stones and the Doors, and every­one was doing their thing. A lot of peo­ple writ­ing great songs, but he was­n’t get­ting any of them because they were record­ing them them­selves. Uh, or they were, you know, going to share, or Tina Turn­er or what­ev­er. and so he got sec­ond rate mate­r­i­al and then he was­n’t sure he could per­form live and it would be rel­e­vant. and he did the 68th spe­cial And that was great.

But then he was gonna do the Vegas thing. And, um, a lot of peo­ple, he said, RO Baz was say­ing Rolling Stone turned up mag­a­zine, [01:12:00] and they were expect­ing it to be just, you know, a bit like a, an oldies tour. Like rolling out the old hits and a bit pret­ty lame. And of course, Elvis came out with this mas­sive sound and mas­sive band, and the choir and he took all of these like Simon and Gar­funkel num­bers, like bridge over trou­bled water and made it this mas­sive pro­duc­tion.

And BA was say­ing, you know we look back at Elvis in Vegas in the sev­en­ties before he got. Uh, gross­ly over­weight, you know, in these late 69 through to 74, 75, and we think of it as sort of icon­ic, but he said at the time.

Tony: Hmm.

Cameron Reil­ly: peo­ple did­n’t, ex peo­ple thought it was gonna be pathet­ic and it came out And he just blew every­one away.

Um, so that’s what we’re see­ing is Elvis prepar­ing for that, not know­ing if it was gonna work, not know­ing if you know, how it would be tak­en, um, and just work­ing his ass off to real­ly shock peo­ple that he could, [01:13:00] he could deliv­er. Hav­ing said all of that. Is it worth going to the cin­e­ma to see? No, not real­ly.

No. I would’ve hap­pi­ly washed it at home. And is it the best thing on Elvis I’ve seen? No, the 69. the 68. Doc­u­men­tary is much bet­ter, much more insight­ful, I think, um, you know, watch­ing a full per­for­mance of him Alo­ha Hawaii or any­thing like that. Way bet­ter. Um, so yeah, it was okay. Then we went to the after par­ty and Baz was there and I want­ed to go talk to Baz to tell him that I love the get down. Did you ever watch the Get Down?

So it was a lim­it­ed series that he did on Net­flix 7, 8, 9 years ago. It was about the ear­ly days of hip hop, like a fic­tion­al­ized telling about a group of young guys in the Bronx or

Brook­lyn or some­where. But then it has peo­ple play­ing Grand­mas­ter Flash and you know, all of the ear­ly hip hop guys. And it’s sort of like a behind the scenes. Musi­cal [01:14:00] com­e­dy thing about the ear­ly days of hip hop, start­ing in lit­tle clubs and DJs, you know, com­ing up with the, the drum beat and then talk­ing over the top of the drum beat to keep peo­ple inter­est­ed in danc­ing. And you know how that turned into hip hop? It was real­ly good.

Um, I don’t think any­one’s seen it, Chris­sy, and I loved it any­way. Hunter would­n’t come with me to go talk

to him, so we’re allowed to go.

Tony: Oh, you need­ed Hunter.

Cameron Reil­ly: I was like come and come and talk to me with

Baz.

And

Tony: and say hel­lo.

Cameron Reil­ly: I’m not doing that.

Tony: You want, just go and talk to him

Cameron Reil­ly: Yeah, I could’ve, I

could’ve. He was talk­ing to

Tony: How did Baz look? ’cause I

saw him on TV this morn­ing as well. Yeah. He looked, I, I dun­no if it was work done, but he looked like he’d been through the make­up chair

to before he went on cam­era.

Cameron Reil­ly: Uh, I think Neil Dia­mond, uh, like yeah, ear­ly nineties. Um, big hair­piece, plas­tic

Tony: Mm-hmm.

Cameron Reil­ly: Yeah. Ter­ri­fy­ing. Uh, the, flip side of that is, uh, a film that Hunter [01:15:00] rec­om­mend­ed to me is Vive new film.

Per­fect Days.

Tony: Oh, I love inven­tors,

Cameron Reil­ly: too. Um, this is sto­ry is, um. There’s a, com­pa­ny in Tokyo called the Tokyo Toi­let, and the, basi­cal­ly they got, it’s like 20 archi­tects each to design a toi­let com­plex toi­let block, uh, in Tokyo, like Avant­garde archi­tec­ture that they run like beau­ti­ful.

Amaz­ing toi­let blocks and they want­ed Vim ven­dors to come over and do some­thing and it he just, it was start­ed off as gonna be like a doc­u­men­tary. He said, I don’t want a do doc­u­men­tary. So he did a, it’s a dra­mat­ic film about a guy old­er Japan­ese guy who lives a very sim­ple aes­thet­ic life and, he just cleans these toi­let blocks.

That’s all he does, but he’s like a per­fec­tion­ist. And he treats it, he treats it. like it’s a

spir­i­tu­al exer­cise.

Tony: That came out a while ago, did­n’t it? I remem­ber read­ing [01:16:00] a review about

Cameron Reil­ly: I think it came out last year Yeah, it just it just hit stream­ing. It’s on, um, oh, it’s on

SBS actu­al­ly is where we’re watch­ing it.

Tony: Oh, okay.

Cameron Reil­ly: Beau­ti­ful. Absolute­ly beau­ti­ful. You know, and, uh, yeah, if you like Vim ven­dors, watch it. and and the sound­track is, you know, Lou Reed and Pat­ti Smith and all these sorts of things.

Great. Sort of sev­en­ties. Bay sound­track, beau­ti­ful film. And then I told you before we went to air that I final­ly watched the IPC Crest file, read the book last year or what­ev­er, watched the Michael Kane film.

Fan­tas­tic. Michael Kane is so great in this film. And his atti­tude towards his supe­ri­ors is so

fan­tas­tic. Just a smart ass. I only one of his guys says he’s being trans­ferred and he does­n’t have my

sense of humor. He goes, I’ll miss that sir. I’ll miss your sense of humor. But the final line after he’s been tor­tured and the whole thing, and he says to his boss, the major, I caught a big killed or dri­ven mad.

And [01:17:00] his boss says, that’s what you’re paid for. and, that’s it it was such a great anti-bot sort of uh, line, you know,

Tony: Yeah. Well that was the whole thing about Har­ry Palmer, was­n’t it? That he was meant to be the work­ing class guy in all these British insti­tu­tions. And Bond was the com­man­der, um, who fol­lowed orders And, well, did­n’t fol­low orders as much, but, but stayed with­in the hier­ar­chy.

Cameron Reil­ly: lived an amaz­ing­ly lux­u­ri­ous lifestyle. This guy’s, you know, work­ing out of, you know, run­down

build­ings and, uh,

Tony: Yeah. More slow hors­es than

Cameron Reil­ly: Yes, exact­ly. Yeah. Yeah. But I I was read­ing up on it and they were say­ing that, you know, Kane, like it was one of his. First big roles and it was like the work­ing

class actor, he rep­re­sent­ed the British

work­ing class who was you know, a tough guy doing cool stuff, but had that accent and you know,

that look, et cetera.

He, his [01:18:00] work­ing, were in big

glass­es.

Tony: And, and peo­ple would say to him, you know, you’ll nev­er get far with that accent. And he said, well, sure­ly some­one wants to see a a work­ing class. Lon­don. Lon­don, they’re on the screen. And he was right.

Cameron Reil­ly: Which they said to Con­nery about his accent too, um, in the ear­ly six­ties, and they both made it work with their

accents. Mm-hmm.

Tony: I saw a great clip. See, I don’t know what’s going on, but I get lots of clips of Michael Kane inter­views on my feeds at the moment because I, I love him. And, uh, there was a clip last night about Kane uh, Michael Kane say­ing how he met Sean Con­nery. ’cause he’d known Sean Con­nery for a long time. They were mates.

And, uh, he said, well, I went to this, I went to this. Par­ty and you’re sup­posed to bring a bot­tle and a bird, but I could­n’t afford a bot­tle, so I bought two birds and then Sean came in and I was instant­ly his best friend.

Cameron Reil­ly: Yeah. Uh, and it was Chris­sy’s birth­day on Sun­day and I made her a car­rot cake [01:19:00] at

her request. I make, I make a cake once a year. It’s for Chris­sy’s birth­day, and I got­ta tell you, this was the great­est car­rot cake. It’s ever been made in the

his­to­ry of mankind. It was absolute­ly.

Tony: get Chris­sy on to, to give us a review

Cameron Reil­ly: It was epic.

Fox loved it. She loved it. I loved it. Epic. That’s the name of

the Elvis doc­u­men­tary. But the cake too was epic. so I’m think­ing that’s my new career. I’m gonna be a car­rot cake bak­er. Gonna open up a bak­ery. Just car­rot cake.

Tony: Yeah. Well, it’s fair­ly niche. It’s fair­ly niche.

Cameron Reil­ly: Sour­dough bread and car­rot cake. That’s gonna be my thing when the AI takes

Tony: the, keep the recipe secret, so yeah. Hey, I can’t

Cameron Reil­ly: Well, I got the recipe from ai, so I, I said, gimme a recipe for car­rot cake. All right, that’s all I’ve got. Thanks to Kate.

Tony: Thanks.

Bernard: Q A V is a check­list-based sys­tem of val­ue invest­ing [01:20:00] 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 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 [01:21:00] 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.

Trans­paren­cy is impor­tant to us. We will always be very open and hon­est about the stocks we own. We will also always give our audi­ence advance notice when we intend to buy or sell a stock that we are going to talk about on the pod­cast. This is so we can nev­er be accused of pump­ing a stock to our own advan­tage. If we talk about a stock we cur­rent­ly own, we will make it known that we own it.

This email is autho­rised by Antho­ny  Khyne­ston. Autho­rised Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Num­ber zero zero 1 2 9 2 7 1 8 of M F & Co. Asset Man­age­ment Pro­pri­etary Lim­it­ed (A F S L five 2 zero 4 4 2).
No part of this con­tent may be repro­duced in any form with­out the pri­or con­sent of Space­craft Pub­lish­ing.

Quote of the day: [01:22:00] “To the world: Your har­mo­ny is mine. What­ev­er time you choose is the right time. Not late, not ear­ly. To nature: What the turn of your sea­sons brings me falls like ripe fruit. All things are born from you, exist in you, return to you.” “Med­i­ta­tions.” Mar­cus Aure­lius

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