QAV Weekly Update 2026-03-27

Hi folks,

Aus­tralian mar­kets deliv­ered a mixed week with the All Ordi­nar­ies clos­ing down 0.69% or 60.40 points in the lat­est ses­sion.

US equi­ty mar­kets suf­fered their steep­est decline since geopo­lit­i­cal ten­sions esca­lat­ed, with the S&P 500 drop­ping 1.74% to close at 6,477.16 on Thurs­day. The mar­ket appar­ent­ly does­n’t put much stock in Trump’s sug­ges­tions that a deal is close at hand. And, even if it is, the dam­age done to the glob­al econ­o­my is going to last for months… or longer.

So, let’s get into my week­ly updates and see where we are at.

All the Best,
Cam

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QAV MYTH KILLERS

If you’ve ever spent much time read­ing the Investos­phere, you’ll have come across some form of this bon mot of dodgy wis­dom: “Index funds always beat active stock pick­ing”.

To whit:

“Why index funds beat stock pick­ers”

“Why Index Invest­ing Beats Active Stock Pick­ing (Most of the Time)”

“Do index funds per­form bet­ter dur­ing a bear mar­ket? (5 for­mi­da­ble facts that prove pas­sive investors will always win)”

Even the GOAT him­self says it:

“Why War­ren Buf­fett Says Index Funds Beat Stock Pick­ing for Most Investors”

My mate Steve Sam­marti­no told me the same thing when I first inter­viewed him back in 2008 about his “Sam­marti­no Method” of invest­ing (which is just buy­ing index funds) long before I had heard the name “Kynas­ton”.

War­ren’s actu­al quote is “A very low-cost index is going to beat a major­i­ty of the ama­teur-man­aged mon­ey or pro­fes­sion­al­ly man­aged mon­ey.”

And he’s cor­rect (of course). But the key words are ‘a major­i­ty’.

The way to be in the minor­i­ty, and to beat an index fund, isn’t hard — it’s called hav­ing a sys­tem.

Most investors, ama­teur and pro­fes­sion­al, don’t stick to a proven invest­ing sys­tem.

Let me quote again from WWOWS (the source of last week’s arti­cle):

Struc­tured invest­ing is a hybrid of active and pas­sive man­age­ment that auto­mates buy and sell deci­sions. If a stock meets the cri­te­ria, it’s bought. If not, not. No per­son­al, emo­tion­al judg­ments enter the process. Dis­ci­plined imple­men­ta­tion of active strate­gies is the key to per­for­mance. Tra­di­tion­al man­agers usu­al­ly fol­low a hit-and-miss approach to invest­ing. Their lack of dis­ci­pline accounts for their inabil­i­ty to beat sim­ple approach­es that nev­er vary from their meth­ods. Don’t sec­ond-guess. Don’t change your mind. Don’t reject an indi­vid­ual stock — if it meets the cri­te­ria of your strat­e­gy — because you think it will do poor­ly. Don’t try to out­smart.

• What Works On Wall St by James O’Shaugh­nessy

If you have a dis­ci­plined strat­e­gy, and you fol­low it day-in-day-out, you can beat an index fund — and most pro­fes­sion­al investors.

Let’s look at the num­bers.

What does the mar­ket actu­al­ly return over time?

Here are the STW (SPDR S&P/ASX 200 Fund) total return fig­ures, includ­ing div­i­dends, net of fees — as of 28 Feb 2026:

• 1 year: 16.20%
• 3 years p.a.: 12.15%
• 5 years p.a.: 10.73%
• 10 years p.a.: 10.64%

→ Source: ssga.com/au — STW fund page

Five-to-ten years is a rea­son­able time­frame for com­par­i­son. So the SPDR200 returns rough­ly 10–11% a year on aver­age.

Now let’s look at the per­for­mance of the funds and we’ll start with active fund man­agers.

In Aus­tralia 74% of active fund man­agers under­per­formed the ASX 200 last year, and over 15 years that blows out to 87%.

SPIVA Aus­tralia (S&P Glob­al, Year-End 2025 — pub­lished March 2026)

What a great gig that must be. Get paid a for­tune to under­per­form the index. I bet they all have real­ly impres­sive busi­ness cards.

But what about index funds?

Here are the ver­i­fied fig­ures as of Feb­ru­ary 2026:

VAS (Van­guard Aus­tralian Shares Index ETF) — after fees, total return

• 1 year: 16.38%
• 3 years p.a.: 12.12%
• 5 years p.a.: 10.62%
• 10 years p.a.: 10.69% → vanguard.com.au (as of 28 Feb 2026)

A200 (BetaShares Aus­tralia 200 ETF) — after fees

• 1 year: 16.46%
• 3 years p.a.: 12.28%
• 5 years p.a.: 10.97% → betashares.com.au (as of 27 Feb 2026)

Over 5–10 years the return 10–11%, the same as the SPDR200 (which is what you’d expect).

On the oth­er hand.…

And we do this part-time. I’ve prob­a­bly spent less than an hour a week man­ag­ing the QAV port­fo­lio in the last year. Dur­ing the last 12 months, in this port­fo­lio, I’ve only done 21 trades (10 sells, 11 buys). That’s an aver­age of less than one trade per month. Despite all of the chaos and volatil­i­ty, I’ve had to trade less than once a month.

Beat­ing the sys­tem isn’t hard if you have a sys­tem. It takes a sys­tem to beat the sys­tem.

STOCK ANALYSIS OF THE WEEK

Despite the chaos in the mar­kets, I’ve found a few things to buy this week and you can see my Light posts here.

I also added some­thing to the U.S. Light port­fo­lio this week. U.S. Light and Club mem­bers can read about it here.

On the full Aus­tralian pod­cast this week, Tony did a deep dive on KAR. See the pod­cast link down below if you want to lis­ten to his analy­sis.

On the Amer­i­can episode, I did a deep dive on KODK. See the pod­cast link down below if you want to lis­ten to my analy­sis.

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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.

QAV Val­ue Invest­ing Buy List (AU) 2026-03-22

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

QAV Val­ue Invest­ing Buy List 2026-03-23

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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 and see why an ama­teur active investor (who has a sys­tem to fol­low) can out-per­form most of the “pro­fes­sion­als”.

AUSTRALIAN

QAV DUMMY

Five Year Report: Over the past five years, the QAV port­fo­lio has deliv­ered approx­i­mate­ly 14.7% total returns com­pared to the ASX 200’s 9.3%, rep­re­sent­ing an out­per­for­mance of rough­ly 5.4 per­cent­age points. The QAV strat­e­gy has con­sis­tent­ly tracked above the bench­mark for most of the peri­od, par­tic­u­lar­ly from mid-2022 onwards where the per­for­mance gap widened sig­nif­i­cant­ly. Both port­fo­lios expe­ri­enced sim­i­lar volatil­i­ty pat­terns, but QAV’s supe­ri­or stock selec­tion has trans­lat­ed into mean­ing­ful­ly high­er returns for investors.

Month­ly Report: Over the past 30 days, the QAV port­fo­lio declined approx­i­mate­ly 9.7% while the ASX 200 fell 6.37%. Both the port­fo­lio and bench­mark expe­ri­enced sig­nif­i­cant declines, with the QAV show­ing greater volatil­i­ty through­out the month.

No changes to our port­fo­lio this week.

For FY26: The QAV port­fo­lio has deliv­ered approx­i­mate­ly 12.8% returns for the finan­cial year to date, sig­nif­i­cant­ly out­per­form­ing the ASX 200 bench­mark which sits at around 3.0%. This rep­re­sents a per­for­mance gap of near­ly 10 per­cent­age points in QAV’s favour. While both invest­ments expe­ri­enced volatil­i­ty through­out the peri­od, the QAV strat­e­gy has main­tained its lead despite some recent decline from ear­li­er peaks.

QAV LIGHT

All Time

The QAV AU Light port­fo­lio cur­rent­ly sits at approx­i­mate­ly 16.5% total return, sig­nif­i­cant­ly out­per­form­ing the ASX 200 bench­mark which stands at around 9.5%. This rep­re­sents an out­per­for­mance of rough­ly 7 per­cent­age points over the mea­sure­ment peri­od.

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Financial Year to Date

QAV AU Light port­fo­lio cur­rent­ly sits at approx­i­mate­ly 19% for the finan­cial year to date, sig­nif­i­cant­ly out­per­form­ing the ASX 200 bench­mark which stands around 3%.

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Last 30 Days

Over the past 30 days, the QAV AU Light port­fo­lio declined approx­i­mate­ly 8.94% com­pared to the ASX 200’s fall of 6.37%.

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Last 12 Months

Over the past 12 months, the QAV AU Light port­fo­lio deliv­ered approx­i­mate­ly 25% total returns com­pared to the ASX 200’s 10% return. The QAV strat­e­gy sig­nif­i­cant­ly out­per­formed the bench­mark by rough­ly 15 per­cent­age points, demon­strat­ing strong stock selec­tion dur­ing this peri­od.

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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.

(Note: Amer­i­cans inter­est­ed in join­ing QAV Light or Club please go here instead.)

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AMERICAN

QAV DUMMY

Since incep­tion (Sep 2023), our port­fo­lio is +89% vs the S&P 500 +48%. Not quite dou­ble mar­ket but pret­ty close.

Our U.S. port­fo­lio for the last 30 days was ‑7.6% vs ‑3.7% for the S&P 500.

No trades this week.

QAV LIGHT

I recent­ly start­ed our U.S. Light port­fo­lio, and it’s off to a slow start, but it out­per­form­ing the index — it is cur­rent­ly +1.39% vs the S&P 500 ‑6%. It’s had a par­tic­u­lar­ly good month, +4% vs the index ‑6%.

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THIS WEEK’S EPISODES

QAV AU #912 — Chick­en Lit­tle

We Press the But­ton on KODK – QAV Amer­i­ca #45

STOCK NEWS AND UPDATES

COMMODITIES

This week the big changes to com­modi­ties were the fol­low­ing:

Iron Ore — BUY
Gold (USD) — JOSEPHINE
Steel— BUY
LNG — JOSEPHINE
Nick­el — SELL
Wheat — SELL
Lithi­um — JOSEPHINE

DISCLOSURE

Please review our trad­ing and dis­clo­sure pol­i­cy.

SIGNING OFF

Well leg­ends, anoth­er big week in the books! We dug deep into KAR on the Aussie side and KODK across the Pacif­ic — both show­ing us that patient val­ue hunters can still find dia­monds in the rough when the mar­ket gets emo­tion­al. The com­modi­ties are paint­ing an inter­est­ing pic­ture with iron ore and steel flash­ing green while wheat’s telling us to take prof­its — clas­sic cycli­cal rota­tion that reminds us why we stick to the process rather than chas­ing head­lines. Keep trust­ing the check­list, keep back­ing your­selves, and remem­ber that build­ing wealth is a marathon, not a sprint.

SSDD!

• Cam

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That’s it for the week!

QAV A GOOD SHAREMARKET!

Got a ques­tion? [email protected]