QAV Weekly Update 2026-02-19

Hi folks,

I hope you’re all hav­ing a great week and your port­fo­lios are doing well.

All the Best,
Cam

QUIZ OF THE WEEK!

Tony sug­gest­ed we start a week­ly quiz to spice things up.

Each week we’ll ask you to choose from two stocks from our buy list this week. Which do you think will be the best per­former over the next 12 months?

Click the image and take your chances!

May the Force be with you.

QAV MYTH KILLERS

Last week I wrote about mass ver­sus gas when it comes to val­ue invest­ing. Some­one sug­gest­ed that this week I should talk about val­ue invest­ing in terms of quan­tum mechan­ics.

Chal­lenge accept­ed!

If you’ve ever spent time read­ing about quan­tum physics, you’ll have come across one of my all-time favourite exper­i­ments — the dou­ble slit . I read up on it at least once a year, just to refresh my mem­o­ry, and it always gives me a thrill (not unlike when I play through the Don­ald Byrne vs Bob­by Fis­ch­er ”The Game of the Cen­tu­ry” from 1956, some­thing I also do once a year).

It was first per­formed by the British poly­math Thomas Young in 1801. At the time, he was­n’t try­ing to prove quan­tum weird­ness, he was try­ing to set­tle a debate about whether light was a par­ti­cle (as Isaac New­ton had believed) or a wave. By shin­ing light through two thin slits and see­ing the “inter­fer­ence pat­tern” on the wall, he proved light behaved like a wave.

A cen­tu­ry-and-a-half lat­er, in 1959, the first “true” dou­ble-slit exper­i­ment using elec­trons was per­formed by Ger­man applied physi­cist Claus Jöns­son (who, I just found out, only passed away in 2024… I feel like that should have been big­ger news). He con­firmed that mat­ter (not just pho­tons) has a “wave-par­ti­cle dual­i­ty” and that observ­ing it changes its behav­iour.

Jöns­son fired par­ti­cles (like elec­trons) at a bar­ri­er with two slits. When no one was watch­ing, the par­ti­cles act­ed like waves, pass­ing through both slits simul­ta­ne­ous­ly and cre­at­ing an “inter­fer­ence pat­tern” on the back wall, which means they exist­ed in a state of mul­ti­ple pos­si­bil­i­ties at once. How­ev­er, the moment a sen­sor was placed at the slits to “observe” which path the par­ti­cle takes, the behav­iour instant­ly changed. The par­ti­cles stopped act­ing like waves and start­ed act­ing like lit­tle sol­id mar­bles, hit­ting the wall in two straight lines. As it turns out, the act of mea­sure­ment col­laps­es the wave of pos­si­bil­i­ty into a sin­gle, fixed real­i­ty.

By observ­ing some­thing, you change its real­i­ty. Think about that for a minute and I guar­an­tee it’ll blow your mind.

Why is it so?

It’s because in every bar of Cad­bury dairy milk choco­late… no, wait, wrong exper­i­ment.

We don’t know why waves become par­ti­cles. We don’t even know what “observ­ing” real­ly means in this con­text. Read five books on quan­tum physics and you’ll get five dif­fer­ent inter­pre­ta­tions.

BUT WHAT (I hear you ask) does this have to do with invest­ing?

In invest­ing we also have “the observ­er effect”. How often have I heard TK say that he likes it when we don’t have any ana­lyst fore­casts for a stock on our buy list because it means it isn’t get­ting any atten­tion yet and we might be pick­ing it up first?

Think of a hot AI stock, gold or cryp­to. Mil­lions of eyes are on it. This “obser­va­tion ener­gy” cre­ates a mas­sive Hype Cycle, pump­ing the stock full of “Gas.” The tra­jec­to­ry is no longer based just on the busi­ness fun­da­men­tals, but on the heat of the crowd, the heat of expec­ta­tions. It seems like every­one is talk­ing about it, every­one thinks it’s a great idea, and you’d be an idiot not to invest in it.

Strange­ly enough, I also see this all the time on the val­ue invest­ing sub-red­dit, where I post my week­ly Amer­i­can pulled pork. Have a look through that and see how many peo­ple are post­ing about tech stocks. It’s unbe­liev­able.

When a stock is “unob­served”, ie no ana­lysts, no AFR / CNBC cov­er­age, no Red­dit cov­er­age, no Tik­Toks, it exists in a state of undis­cov­ered poten­tial. But the moment the “Observers” (the herd or a poten­tial acquir­er) turn their flash­lights on it, the val­ue “col­laps­es” because the price adjusts to reflect all that new atten­tion.

We might say that QAV lives in the Low-Obser­va­tion Zone (LOZ). And does­n’t it feel that way at times? We are often talk­ing about com­pa­nies and stocks that seem com­plete­ly incog­ni­to. Select Har­vests? Almonds?? Real­ly? How sexy. Serv­corp? Office rentals? Not going to be great con­ver­sa­tion at a din­ner par­ty.

“So, Bar­ry, what are you invest­ing in these days? Bit­coin? Gold”

“Let me tell you about almond har­vest­ing.…”

Yawn.

Even­tu­al­ly, after the Observers find out about it, a QAV stock might hit The Mea­sure­ment Zone (TMZ), not the celebri­ty rumour site, but that time when a major ana­lyst or influ­encer “observes” the stock, which caus­es the wave­func­tion to col­lapse, mak­ing the price jump, or “revert to the mean”, as Tony says. It stops being under­val­ued and starts to become fair­ly val­ued, or, some­times, over­val­ued. The TMZ itself becomes the thing dri­ving the price. This is where the Mass (Val­ue) can be replaced by Gas (Sen­ti­ment). That’s fine with us, as long as we bought it when it was still in the LOZ.

Even­tu­al­ly it will enter the Decay Zone: once there are no new observers left to join, the ener­gy dis­si­pates. The “Gas” evap­o­rates, and the stock crash­es back to its orig­i­nal “Mass.” This might take months or even years, and we hold on to it as long as our rules allow us to.

Even­tu­al­ly, as it decays, our sell trig­gers acti­vate and we get out at a prof­it (.… most of the time). No tree grows to the sky, as TK says.

So stay in the LOZ, friends. It’s going to make for bor­ing din­ner par­ty con­ver­sa­tion… UNLESS YOU START COMPARING INVESTING TO QUANTUM MECHANICS.

Nope, Chris­sy says. STILL bor­ing. Ah well.

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STOCK ANALYSIS OF THE WEEK

We are still in “Report­ing Sea­son” in Aus­tralia, and there’s still been noth­ing on my buy list for most of the week, but I found some­thing this morn­ing.

For edi­tion 9 of the U.S. Light mem­ber email, I did an analy­sis of Shin­han Finan­cial Co (SHG). U.S. Light and Club mem­bers can read it here. We’re also talk­ing about it in more detail on the U.S. episode this week. It’s anoth­er pret­ty crazy sto­ry involv­ing three cur­rent scan­dals.

On the full Aus­tralian pod­cast this week, Tony did a deep dive on Glob­al Val­ue Fund (GVF). See the pod­cast link down below if you want to lis­ten to his analy­sis.

BUY LIST

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

In the absence of any­thing to buy, I did­n’t both­er to pub­lish an Aus­tralian list this week.

Below is a link to the US list for this week (avail­able to our U.S. Club mem­bers):

QAV Amer­i­can Val­ue Invest­ing Buy List 2026-02-15

PORTFOLIOS

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

AUSTRALIAN

QAV DUMMY

Five Year Report: Over the last five years, our port­fo­lio is +17.5% p.a. vs the bench­mark +9.6% p.a.

Month­ly Report: The AU Dum­my Port­fo­lio was +2.9% p.a. for the last 30 days vs the bench­mark +3.3% p.a.

I sold PLT from the port­fo­lio this week but haven’t replaced it because we don’t have enough cash for a full posi­tion in any­thing at the moment.

For FY26, our port­fo­lio is +25.6% vs +8.8% for the index.

QAV LIGHT

As of Mon­day this week (the last time I did a report), in the last 30 days, the Light port­fo­lio the Light port­fo­lio was ‑1.79% vs the index which was +0.41%.

Our most impres­sive return for the last 30 days is SXE (South­ern Cross Elec­tri­cal Engi­neer­ing) which is +13%. But we’ve held it in two parcels since 2023.

SXE up 287%

Bought 30/8/2023 at $0.780 (+278%)

Bought 2/11/2023 at $0.820 (+260%)

Yet again, anoth­er reminder why we don’t sell stocks because they hit some arbi­trary price. If they are good busi­ness­es, we hold them for as long as we can.

A QUADRUPLE MARKET YEAR

For the last 12 months, the Light port­fo­lio is +37% vs the index +8.7%.

Since incep­tion (Feb 2022), the Light port­fo­lio is +20% vs the index +11%, dou­ble mar­ket, right on tar­get (hey that rhymes!).

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

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

AMERICAN

QAV DUMMY

Since incep­tion (Sep 2023), our port­fo­lio is +105% vs the S&P 500 +55%. Not quite dou­ble mar­ket but get­ting very close.

Our U.S. port­fo­lio for the last 30 days was +7.6% vs ‑0.8% for the S&P 500.

No trades this week.

QAV LIGHT

I recent­ly start­ed our U.S. Light port­fo­lio, and it’s had a slow start, and is cur­rent­ly ‑2% vs the S&P 500 +0.4%.

THIS WEEK’S EPISODES

QAV AU 907 — Mass vs Gas

TUSK – The Cobra’s Bite – QAV AMERICA 39

STOCK NEWS AND UPDATES

COMMODITIES

This week all of the com­modi­ties were either in a Sell or a Josephine state with the excep­tion of Gold, which remains a buy, and Coal (ther­mal) and Crude Oil which both became a Buy.

DISCLOSURE

Please review our trad­ing and dis­clo­sure pol­i­cy.

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That’s it for the week!

QAV A GOOD SHAREMARKET!

Got a ques­tion? [email protected]