Big River, Big Comeback (BRI): QAV AU #921

QAV 921

[00:00:00] Wel­come to QAV Aus­tralia. It’s episode 921. No Tony today. I’m fly­ing solo. Tony is not far from me, down the Gold Coast, buy­ing and sell­ing, I don’t know, hors­es, I think. Um, so I’m gonna do one. It’ll be a quick show today. I am gonna do a Pulled Pork in his absence. Few lit­tle sto­ries to cov­er. We’ll do a look at the port­fo­lios, but, uh, I’ll make it brief.

I won’t keep you too long today. Of course, uh, it’s the 26th of May, Tues­day the 26th of May when I’m record­ing this. After sev­er­al days of being told by Trump that we were very close to a peace deal and the Straits of Hor­muz open­ing, et cetera, et cetera, out of nowhere, uh, he start­ed bomb­ing Iran again today. So, ah, you know, I guess that’s what [00:01:00] we should have expect­ed.

The mar­ket in Aus­tralia has, uh, col­lapsed. Well, not col­lapsed, but it’s come back again today after a lit­tle bit of a recov­ery. Uh, the oil price had start­ed to fall. I think it’s spiked back up again today. At the moment I’m record­ing, about 12:00 PM Bris­bane time, the mar­ket’s at 8871. Was as high as 9,091 on the 7th of May.

That’s come down and has­n’t real­ly recov­ered. So there you go. What, uh, what can you say? Um, as a con­se­quence, the stock that I’m gonna do a Pulled Pork on today actu­al­ly was a buy yes­ter­day. It’s become a sell today ’cause it’s fall­en below its sell line, which was pret­ty close to its price yes­ter­day. But I’m gonna do it any­way because I’ve done my prep on it.

And we’re well and tru­ly into con­fes­sion sea­son now, uh, this being sort of the end [00:02:00] of May, so I’m prob­a­bly not gonna buy any­thing, I think, for a while. I’m gonna wait until results come out. As long-term lis­ten­ers will know, uh, con­fes­sion sea­son is the unof­fi­cial sea­son as you’re get­ting up to a report­ing peri­od where tra­di­tion­al­ly Aus­tralian busi­ness­es have con­fessed that they might not be hit­ting their, um, you know, the, the sort of results that they had fore­cast and they’re sup­posed to give us warn­ing, con­tin­u­ous dis­clo­sure and all that kind of good stuff.

But as we have noticed over the last year or two, Aus­tralian busi­ness­es by and large seem to be just skip­ping that. Eh, they’re just not both­er­ing with it any­more and then all of a sud­den the results come out and they take a hit. So Tony made a deci­sion in the last year or so to stop buy­ing dur­ing con­fes­sion sea­son.

Just hold our pow­der [00:03:00] and wait to see what hap­pens. So I’m gonna start doing that. I’m going to, uh, do that in the lite mar­ket. The stock that I am gonna talk about today, BRI, I did add that to the lite port­fo­lio yes­ter­day, but I think that’ll be the end of it for a while. I’m just going to, uh, wait until we get through con­fes­sion sea­son.

Up to you whether or not you do it. Uh, not finan­cial advice. I’m just let­ting you know what I’m gonna be doing with our port­fo­lios and my own port­fo­lio for the next month or two. Uh, I have one arti­cle from the Finan­cial Review I want­ed to cov­er today. “Val­ue’s vic­to­ry lap: Why hav­ing zero expo­sure is now a risky bet.”

This was, uh, in the opin­ion columns, uh, May 24th by Ari­on Nairon, who I believe, accord­ing to his byline, is the man­ag­ing direc­tor and head of [00:04:00] Asia Pacif­ic at VanEck. There’s some good stuff in this about val­ue and some stuff I dis­agree with, so I’m just gonna rush through it and give you my thoughts on it for what they’re worth.

He says, “In Decem­ber, I wrote in this mast­head that val­ue invest­ing did­n’t die dur­ing the growth decade. It was sim­ply under-owned. Last year, val­ue was vin­di­cat­ed, and this year it’s done a vic­to­ry lap while the cost of admis­sion has gone up. The trade is crowd­ing, the late arrivals are pay­ing up, and the stagfla­tion regime that most strate­gists now treat as Aus­trali­a’s eco­nom­ic base­line favors exact­ly the kind of cash gen­er­a­tive bal­ance sheet resilient busi­ness­es that val­ue investors should have always owned.

From the glob­al finan­cial cri­sis through to the pan­dem­ic, zero inter­est rates and plat­form eco­nom­ics hand­ed growth its longest stretch of dom­i­nance in mar­ket his­to­ry, a regime in which ter­mi­nal [00:05:00] val­ue assump­tions did the heavy lift­ing and the cost of being ear­ly on val­ue com­pound­ed into being wrong.” Well, obvi­ous­ly we’re gonna take issue with that.

Any­way, I’ll keep go- keep going. The 2022 revival was treat­ed as a head fake. Cap­i­tal rushed back to the mega caps as soon as the dis­in­fla­tion trade resumed. A gen­er­a­tion of investors learnt implic­it­ly that val­u­a­tion did not mat­ter. Last year began the cor­rec­tion. Val­ue out­per­formed across Japan, Europe, the UK, and Aus­tralia, with inter­na­tion­al enhanced val­ue beat­ing its growth coun­ter­part by a mean­ing­ful mar­gin.

What does this mean for investors? There are two things held simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. First, humil­i­ty. Tim­ing fac­tor rota­tions is a near impos­si­ble feat, and any­one to know– claim­ing to know pre­cise­ly when val­ue’s run ends is sell­ing some­thing. Sec­ond, humil­i­ty is not a license for inac­tion. Every style has its sea­son.

While growth invest­ing [00:06:00] dom­i­nat­ed for the bet­ter part of a decade and a half, val­ue’s pedi­gree is the longest and most rig­or­ous­ly doc­u­ment­ed in the lit­er­a­ture. No sin­gle approach wins per­ma­nent­ly, but when a fac­tor that has sur­vived a decade of being ear­ly, wrong, or ignored begins to reassert itself, the appro­pri­ate response is not to call the top, it is to ensure you have mean­ing­ful expo­sure.

The most durable insight in this dis­ci­pline still belongs to Klar­man, who wrote in Mar­gin of Safe­ty, “Val­ue invest­ing is at its core the mar­riage of a con­trar­i­an streak and a cal­cu­la­tor.” So, uh, I mean, I’m pick­ing the eyes out of his arti­cle. There’s, there’s quite a bit more to it, but obvi­ous­ly my push­back is gonna be that val­ue has always worked for TK over the long term.

There, there is no bad time to be in val- to be a val­ue investor unless you’re look­ing at very short time­frames, which you should nev­er do as an investor. Like, 2022 to 2024 were, by com­par­i­son for us, [00:07:00] lean years, bad years, but they were a blip. 2019 to 2021 were great years. 2025 to 2026 have been great years.

We had a cou­ple of lean years, but we don’t rotate. We don’t try and rotate in and out. And in fact, that’s what, um, what works on Wall Street specif­i­cal­ly says is the biggest mis­take that pro­fes­sion­al investors make, is try­ing to rotate in and out of styles of invest­ing. You should pick one that you’re com­fort­able with and stick with it. In and out, you know, if I look at, which I will do, I’ll bring up our port­fo­lios. I was doing this yes­ter­day because I was putting togeth­er a report. If you look at, um, our lite port­fo­lio, the first one that I start­ed in ear­ly 2022, the 221 port­fo­lio. Let me just see. The [00:08:00] first trans­ac­tion for that was the 16th of Feb­ru­ary 2022, which was the worst pos­si­ble time in the last few years to start a port­fo­lio because it’s exact­ly when the Ukraine inva­sion start­ed, and then inter­est rate ris­es start­ed.

And, uh, you know, if I look at, uh, let me go to the five-year chart here, look at the AORD. Um, the All Ordi­nar­ies, um, what did I say? The 16th of Feb­ru­ary. All Ords was at, uh, 7502 on the 14th of Feb­ru­ary, and by July it was down 6877, 6720 by the end of June. So every­thing just sort of col­lapsed and then stayed pret­ty low for a cou­ple of years and start­ed to, you know, sort of grow [00:09:00] again in the end of 2023.

So that port­fo­lio, if I look at it over the last, what­ev­er it is, six years, uh, four years now, it’s up 5.67% per annum ver­sus the, uh, SPDR 200, which is up 8.54. So we’re under­per­form­ing by near­ly three points on that. Even after four years, it’s recov­ered a lot. At one point, June 2023, we were down. We were under­per­form­ing by near­ly 15%, and we were deeply in the red on that.

We were down near­ly 10% while the, um, ASX 200 was up about 5%. But, uh, so we’ve recov­ered a lot, and I have full con­fi­dence that we will con­tin­ue to recov­er. Uh, we did get just above it as of Jan­u­ary, but we’ve dropped back below again in the last, uh, cou­ple of months. But over the [00:10:00] long haul, it will recov­er and it’ll get back on top.

All of our oth­er lite port­fo­lios have done much bet­ter than that, even though they were s- they start­ed just a lit­tle bit lat­er. The, uh, sec­ond lite port­fo­lio, which I start­ed at the end of April 2022, is up 12.87% ver­sus the SPDR up 7.79, so it’s out­per­form­ing by 5%. Not quite dou­ble mar­ket, but not far off it.

The 223 port­fo­lio that I start­ed in the mid­dle of August 2022 is up 23% ver­sus 10% for the bench­mark, so that’s over dou­ble mar­ket. And the fourth and final one that I start­ed in Novem­ber 2022 is up 23% per annum ver­sus the index up, uh, just under 10. So out­per­formed by 13%, also well over dou­ble mar­ket. So even in [00:11:00] 2022, which was the worst pos­si­ble year, uh, I’ve seen in val­ue invest­ing in the six or sev­en years we’ve been doing the show, three out of the four port­fo­lios that I start­ed this year have done very well. Well, are doing very well.

The first one, which was start­ed a cou­ple of months ear­li­er than the rest, um, is not doing as well, but, you know, that’s, uh, just unfor­tu­nate tim­ing. My point is that there is real­ly no bad time to do val­ue invest­ing as far as I can tell, and any­one who tells you there is, is, uh, you know, I don’t know, on a dif­fer­ent pro­gram, I guess. Well, the stock that I’m gonna do the deep dive on today is.

Oh, by the way, I should also give you an update on, I guess, while I’m here. I’ll do the dum­my port­fo­lio just in case you’re inter­est­ed. Dum­my port­fo­lio, uh, what time­frame will I do? Last five years, for new lis­ten­ers, is up [00:12:00] 14.77%, uh, per annum on aver­age ver­sus the index up about 8.4%, 8.3% over the same time­frame.

And that start­ed back in, uh, 2019. Last five years, that was obvi­ous­ly 2021. Uh, the last– Well, we’ll do this finan­cial year, I guess. Um, this finan­cial year, our port­fo­lio is up rough­ly 18% ver­sus the bench­mark up five and a half per­cent. So it’s absolute­ly killing it for this finan­cial year. If I look at a short­er time– um, sor­ry, a longer time­frame, last three years it’s up 18% ver­sus 11. So yeah, it’s been good times in that port­fo­lio.

So, um, the, the stock I’m gonna do the deep dive on today is Big Riv­er Indus­tries, BRI. Now, as I said ear­li­er, it’s actu­al­ly a [00:13:00] sell today. It dropped a few cents between when I first start­ed look­ing at it yes­ter­day morn­ing and right now. It’s, uh, down about a $1.33. But there, there was­n’t a lot to buy on the buy list yes­ter­day, and I sus­pect it’s, it’s prob­a­bly even less today after the mar­ket’s, uh, declined today.

But it, it, you know, it’s prob­a­bly gonna be close to a buy again, uh, depend­ing on what hap­pens over the next cou­ple of weeks, so worth cov­er­ing any­way. BRI, Big Riv­er Indus­tries. Big wheel keep on turn­ing. Uh, I think that’s what, uh, Tina Turn­er said. Nev­er heard of these guys before, did­n’t know any­thing about them.

Inter­est­ing sto­ry, and kind of a good val­ue invest­ing sto­ry, I guess. Sort of a clas­sic val­ue invest­ing stock in many ways. Been around for 120 years in one way, shape, or form. [00:14:00] They’re a tim­ber com­pa­ny. They make build­ing mate­ri­als. Born on the Clarence Riv­er in North­ern New South Wales, which was referred to– It was actu­al­ly called Big Riv­er at one point, but I think there was anoth­er riv­er called Big Riv­er, so they had to change the name of the riv­er b- um, to the Clarence Riv­er.

394 kilo­me­ters long, the biggest riv­er by vol­ume in New South Wales, big scrub coun­try, cedar for­est, hard­wood. Remained unknown to British author­i­ties until the mid-1830s when escaped con­vict Richard Craig, who had been liv­ing with the Abo­rig­i­nal peo­ple in the area, report­ed its exis­tence. If I was an escaped con­vict, I’d prob­a­bly just keep my mouth shut.

But any­way, it was ini­tial­ly called the Big Riv­er, um, but then the gov­er­nor of New South Wales, George Gipps, in 1839, changed the name to the Clarence Riv­er in [00:15:00] hon­or of the pre­vi­ous King of the British Empire, William IV, the first Duke of Clarence and St. Andrews. Was­n’t actu­al­ly the first Duke of Clarence, but that’s anoth­er sto­ry.

Peo­ple who know King Richard III will know that Clarence is a main char­ac­ter in that. Don’t, don’t make me recite the open­ing solil­o­quy of King Richard III. Uh, and Big Riv­er Group has been oper­at­ing from Grafton, which is sort of at the heart of the Clarence Riv­er, for over 120 years. Appar­ent­ly, the orig­i­nal Grafton mill is still there today and run­ning. So Aus­trali­a’s hous­ing boom real­ly got going in the 1900s, the Fed­er­a­tion era.

The sub­urbs of Syd­ney and Bris­bane were being built. There was a huge demand for tim­ber, and a guy called Thomas Pid­cock, who start­ed his career as a sawmiller in 1894 in North­ern New South Wales, start­ed open­ing his own sawmills [00:16:00] in the 1920s. And in 1928, he con­struct­ed the first sawmill in the state of New South Wales using hydro­elec­tric pow­er to mill hoop pine and euca­lyp­tus.

And that was sort of the start of what became Pid­cock and Sons a decade lat­er. They opened fac­to­ries in Grafton and Coffs Har­bour. And when Tom­my P. died in 1948, the busi­ness was car­ried on by his four sons. And then in 1960, they sold their sawmilling oper­a­tions and con­struct­ed a mod­ern rotary veneer fac­to­ry in Grafton.

I have no idea what that is, so I had to look it up. A rotary veneer fac­to­ry is where logs get turned into thin sheets of wood used to make ply­wood. Basi­cal­ly, as I under­stand it, a log is mount­ed on a giant lathe, like a spin­ning machine, uh, like you’re gonna [00:17:00] peel an apple, and a long blade is pressed against it as it rotates, pro­duces a con­tin­u­ous rib­bon of thin wood sheet called a veneer, and that is then cut into pan­els, dried, glued togeth­er in cross-grain lay­ers to make struc­tur­al ply­wood.

Called rotary obvi­ous­ly because it turns as opposed to a sliced veneer where the blade moves in a straight line or sawn veneer. Rotary cut­ting is appar­ent­ly the most effi­cient method for struc­tur­al ply­wood because it max­i­mizes the usable area from each log and pro­duces large, con­sis­tent sheets. So there you go.

Don’t say you don’t learn any­thing. Over 120 years, they expand­ed from one sawmill into a nation­al man­u­fac­tur­er and dis­trib­u­tor. Today, they’ve got about 26 sites across Aus­tralia and New Zealand. Fast-for­ward to ear­ly 2016, a pri­vate equi­ty firm called Anaca­cia Cap­i­tal acquired a con­trol­ling [00:18:00] inter­est in the busi­ness, and then they list­ed them on the ASX in 2017.

So rel­a­tive­ly recent as a pub­lic com­pa­ny, but a very old busi­ness under­neath. And as far as I can tell, Anaca­cia still hold a 17% strate­gic block in the com­pa­ny, so they have a long-term inter­est. They’ve been involved in the busi­ness at least for the last ten years. And the com­pa­ny’s been basi­cal­ly going through acqui­si­tions, buy and build, buy­ing region­al tim­ber mer­chants and frame and truss man­u­fac­tur­ers, and then try­ing to scale up the nation­al foot­print.

What is frame and truss, I hear you ask, unless you know way more about con­struc­tion than I do, ’cause, uh, I could have guessed, but I was­n’t sure. So imag­ine you’re a builder about to put up a house. Instead of your crew hav­ing to cut every wall stud and roof rafter on-site by hand, you phone Big Riv­er. [00:19:00] You give them the dimen­sions of what you need, and their fac­to­ry pre-cuts every com­po­nent to mil­lime­ter pre­ci­sion using the archi­tec­tur­al draw­ings.

Then they flat pack it all, whack it on a truck, deliv­er it to the site, and the crew basi­cal­ly just pops it up like a kit. That’s called frame and truss. For Big Riv­er, that’s their con­struc­tion divi­sion. It’s about, um. That’s a big chunk of their busi­ness. Their half year rev­enue for the first half of this finan­cial year– Sor­ry, for the first.

Yeah, for the first half of this finan­cial year, the Decem­ber 25 num­bers was about 138.7 mil­lion. It’s the core engine of the busi­ness. Struc­tur­al ply­wood, these are these big sheets of lay­ered wood you see around com­mer­cial con­struc­tion sites hold­ing con­crete in place while it sets or as the floor of an apart­ment build­ing before the tiles go down.

That’s [00:20:00] part of what they call their pan­els divi­sion. Their half year rev­enue was about 67.3 mil­lion. They also do inter­nal doors, floor­ing, fiber cement sheets, trade hard­ware, sort of the full builder’s pantry. So it’s basi­cal­ly what Big Riv­er does. It’s not just res­i­den­tial, it’s com­mer­cial, it’s you name it.

Every­thing to do with Aus­tralian con­struc­tion and wood, they have a hand in the sort of unglam­orous infra­struc­ture side of the con­struc­tion busi­ness. As I said, sort of a clas­sic val­ue invest­ing, uh, oper­a­tion. Not a, not a brand any­one would rec­og­nize, not sexy, but they’ve had a rough trot, and the busi­ness seems to be turn­ing around.

Um, so we’ll, time will tell, but their lat­est num­bers are a turn­around from what they had report­ed at the end of last finan­cial year. So we’ll talk a lit­tle bit about the num­bers. The [00:21:00] FY25 num­bers, rev­enue was about $405 mil­lion. EBITDA before sig­nif­i­cant items was $28.7 mil­lion, down 11.9% on the year before. But the result was pret­ty ugly. They report­ed a $14.8 mil­lion net loss.

They wrote down about $20 mil­lion of intan­gi­ble assets, good­will essen­tial­ly from acqui­si­tions that was­n’t worth what they paid for it any­more. I guess they were buy­ing stuff at the top of the cycle, inter­est rates kicked in and, uh, all the rest of the eco­nom­ic issues that we’re all aware of. And, uh, they had to write down some of those assets.

But their Decem­ber ’25 num­bers, the first half of FY26, EBITDA jumped 20.4% to $12.4 mil­lion. Mar­gin went from 7.4% to 8.9%. Net prof­it came back to $1.39 mil­lion. Oper­at­ing cash flow was [00:22:00] $13.2 mil­lion. Uh, just a note on that, if you look at Stock Doc­tor’s num­bers, they’re a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent from what the com­pa­ny report­ed.

They report­ed $12.4 mil­lion EBITDA before sig­nif­i­cant items. Stock Doc­tor shows $14.5 mil­lion for the same peri­od. Tried to work that out. I think it’s prob­a­bly just, uh, Stock Doc­tor has a fair­ly mechan­i­cal, uh, process, rev­enue minus oper­at­ing expens­es. And I think the $2.1 mil­lion gap has got some­thing to do with leased sites, BRI fig­ur­ing in if they strip out right of use asset depre­ci­a­tion from, uh, their sites that they lease, their 26 sites.

Could be the dif­fer­ence. Any­way, the bot­tom line is it’s a real recov­ery. Uh, at least it start­ed in the first half. We’ll have to see what their finan­cials are at the end of the finan­cial year. The trail­ing 12 months to Decem­ber 2025 [00:23:00] has EPS before abnor­mals at 4.59 cents. Fore­cast EPS for FY26 was 6.4 cents.

So mar­ket was expect­ing a, a pret­ty good year. Div­i­dend two cents per share for H1, ful­ly franked. Yield on the cur­rent price is about 2.92%. But we don’t know how it’s gonna play out. You know, they haven’t done any con­fes­sion sea­son, uh, report­ing as far as I can tell. And the, the prob­lem here is obvi­ous­ly the, what, what’s going on in the build­ing cycle and the eco­nom­ic cycle for Aus­tralia.

The share price peaked at $2.80 in Feb­ru­ary 2023. It’s now $1.37, so a 51% fall over three years. Uh, obvi­ous­ly it’s been a tough time. As we know, Reserve Bank raised rates, hous­ing starts col­lapsed. The sec­ond and third biggest mar­kets for BRI, New South Wales and Vic­to­ria, went into a deep build­ing slump.

They had acqui­si­tions on the books that they over­paid for, that 20 mil­lion good­will impair­ment that I [00:24:00]

men­tioned.

But the com­pa­ny’s been around a long time. They’ve been through cycles before. They sur­vived the 1930s, the war years, the 1990s. It sucks for share­hold­ers that bought at the peak, but that’s not us. That’s why we don’t tend to buy at peaks. So, uh, it seems to be turn­ing around, although the pan­els divi­sion is anoth­er con­cern.

Its mar­gin fell from 12.3% to 9.8% in the first half. Man­age­ment is talk­ing a lot about pric­ing dis­ci­pline, uh, but there’s import­ed ply­wood from South­east Asia which is com­pet­ing on price, and when the mar­ket is soft, it, it puts a lot of pres­sure on them. So we’ll see if they can con­tin­ue to make mon­ey. [00:25:00] Um, by the way, there’s not a lot of direc­tor skin in the game.

Com­bined direc­tor hold­ings are $572,000 on a $128 mil­lion com­pa­ny, but looks like the founders are long gone. Uh, obvi­ous­ly the orig­i­nal Pig­otts, I think, got out of it a long time ago. Um, now the one bright spot is Bris­bane 2032. Bris­bane, uh, Queens­land is BRI’s strongest and fastest grow­ing mar­ket. It has a decade of pipeline locked in up here, par­tic­u­lar­ly built around the Olympic and Par­a­lympic Games set for 2032.

All this work going up, ath­lete vil­lages, trans­port infra­struc­ture, sta­di­ums, the whole nine yards. Plus all the res­i­den­tial devel­op­ment that fol­lows, in the­o­ry. Peo­ple mov­ing to Bris­bane, hous­ing starts to go up, all of that kind of stuff. The CEO, John Lorente, has specif­i­cal­ly called out Queens­land as the dri­ver in the H1 ’26 num­bers. [00:26:00]

The ques­tion is whether or not growth in Queens­land can con­tin­ue to off­set soft mar­kets in New South Wales and Vic­to­ria. I don’t know the answer. I can’t pre­dict the future. Nei­ther can he. But, um, they’re hop­ing that this will be a good mar­ket for them. Just a lit­tle bit on the man­age­ment. John Lorente, I men­tioned the CEO, joined Big Riv­er in 2018, was appoint­ed man­ag­ing direc­tor and CEO on the 1st of March 2023, so he’s not long in the job.

Pri­or to join­ing Big Riv­er, he worked for the GWA Group who are a sup­pli­er of build­ing fix­tures and fit­tings. He was there for 12 years, had var­i­ous senior man­age­ment roles. The CFO is a guy called John O’Con­nor. He joined Big Riv­er in August 2022. Also has­n’t been there very long. Before that, he had a lot of dif­fer­ent roles in man­u­fac­tur­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion busi­ness­es, includ­ing CFO and [00:27:00] com­pa­ny sec­re­tary at YouFoodz Hold­ings.

He was there when they pub­licly list­ed in 2020, and then they sold to the HelloFresh Group in 2021. And the chair­man is Mar­tin Mon­roe, the for­mer CEO of Wat­pac, major Aus­tralian con­struc­tion group. He’s been a non-exec­u­tive direc­tor of the com­pa­ny since Sep­tem­ber 2021, became chair in, in Octo­ber 2023. So, uh, he has a lot of expe­ri­ence.

He was at Wat­pac from 2012 as the CEO until he retired in 2019. So yeah, good addi­tion to the board, you would think. That’s about all I have to tell you about these guys. Let me run through the score­card. Uh, the QAV score when I ran my buy list on the week­end was 0.103, so it bare­ly gets over the cut­off.

Uh, but as I said, there was­n’t much [00:28:00] to buy this week after I took every­thing out, uh, all the things that weren’t Josephines and that were above their sec­ond buy lines, et cetera. Had a qual­i­ty score of 56.2%. Not great, not above our 75% that we’d like to see. Um, the Stock­o­pe­dia scores for it are rea­son­able.

Qual­i­ty score of 88, val­ue score of 77, momen­tum 90, stock rank 96, and a health trend of six. Stock Doc­tor’s finan­cial health is sta­ble or increas­ing. The health rat­ing is sat­is­fac­to­ry. It actu­al­ly passed for book price, um, plus 30. Book val­ue per share was about $1.19. The price was about $1.36 when I did it, 37, some­thing around that. Price was less than the con­sen­sus [00:29:00] intrin­sic val­ue. There was, uh, obvi­ous­ly a three-point uptrend. There was a new three-point uptrend, so I could score it for that. The PROPCAF was 5.02.

Obvi­ous­ly, that’s, uh, the big num­ber that we’re look­ing for. So that’s, uh, pret­ty good. Basi­cal­ly get­ting your mon­ey back in five years based on the cur­rent num­bers. Could­n’t score it for yield being above the cash rate. No own­er founder, as I said before. Uh, not the low­est PE, and, uh, that’s it. So that’s basi­cal­ly my scor­ing, uh, for it this week.

It’s, you know, as I said, it’s become a sell today, so too late. But, uh, it’s an inter­est­ing lit­tle busi­ness. Been around a long time. Seems to be turn­ing around, but time will tell. But as I said, I [00:30:00] am putting a hold on buys from this point for­ward any­way as we move clos­er to report­ing sea­son, uh, to see what hap­pens.

There are obvi­ous­ly some stocks that don’t report at the end of June, so we make an excep­tion for those, the ones that are on a dif­fer­ent report­ing cycle. So some of those may turn up. We may be able to buy those. But out­side of that, that is my Pulled Pork for this week with no Tony to pro­vide com­men­tary.

He might pro­vide com­men­tary next week, give me feed­back. Uh, I will do a lit­tle bit of an after hours, though. I’ve only real­ly got one thing. Bugo­nia, the Yor­gos Lan­thi­mos film that I think came out last year, Emma Stone and Jesse Ple­mons. If you’re not famil­iar with, uh, Lan­thi­mos, uh, Greek direc­tor, made The Lob­ster, uh, a cou­ple of oth­er films he’s done with Emma Stone.

He [00:31:00] made, uh, one with Olivia Col­man as the queen as well. I can’t remem­ber what that was called. The Favourite. Yes, I can. Writ­ten by the same Aussie guy, Tony McNa­ma­ra, I think, who made the TV series The Great about Cather­ine the Great, which was fun­ny. Um, real­ly great direc­tor and, and does real­ly weird, weird films.

If you’ve seen The Lob­ster, very weird. Um, this Bugo­nia is very weird. And at the time, Chris­sy and I real­ly loved it. We watched it over the week­end. I think it’s on Net­flix. I would’ve said high­ly orig­i­nal, but then after­wards when I was read­ing up on it, I found it’s actu­al­ly a remake of a 23-year-old South Kore­an film.

And the orig­i­nal direc­tor of that film was gonna direct the Eng­lish remake. But then had health issues, and so Lan­thi­mos direct­ed it instead. Real­ly weird, but great. Um, you don’t know where it’s going. High­ly, um, unique sto­ry. Well, you [00:32:00] know, except­ing the orig­i­nal ver­sion, I guess, which most of us prob­a­bly haven’t seen, and great per­for­mances from every­body.

So, uh, if you like real­ly weird films, check out that, Bugo­nia. And, uh, music-wise, noth­ing to par­tic­u­lar­ly rec­om­mend, but we are gonna see Sparks, uh, this Sat­ur­day. They’re back in Aus­tralia. They’re play­ing at QPAC. We’re gonna go see them this week. We’re very excit­ed. By we, I mean me, Chris­sy, and Fox. We all went to their last Bris­bane con­cert three, three or four years ago and real­ly, real­ly enjoyed it.

It’s a great show. They’re com­ing back. If you, if you haven’t lis­tened to Sparks, I, I rec­om­mend you check out the doc­u­men­tary This Is Sparks that came out, uh, five or six years ago. It’s a great intro­duc­tion to them. Um, but they’ve been around for, I don’t know, since the ear­ly ’70s. Two broth­ers, Ron and Rus­sell.

They’ve made, I think, 28 albums. Uh, and they’re. [00:33:00] As they say in the doc­u­men­tary, they’re your favorite band’s favorite band that you’ve prob­a­bly nev­er heard of. But they’ve been on the cut­ting edge of a lot of dif­fer­ent musi­cal gen­res. They influ­enced every­one from ear­ly Queen through to Bowie. Paul McCart­ney ref­er­enced them in Com­ing Up in the ear­ly ’80s, he did a nod to them.

They’ve been around a very, very long time, and their songs are all quite, quite fun­ny. It’s not com­e­dy rock like, um, Weird Al, but there’s a lot of irony and humor in their lyrics, social com­men­tary, and they’ve had a lot of dif­fer­ent styles. Like, if you lis­ten to their cur­rent stuff, it’s very dif­fer­ent from the stuff they were doing in the ’80s, which is very dif­fer­ent from the stuff they were doing in the ’70s.

They had one big hit in the ear­ly ’70s, which was the only thing I knew of them before I saw the doc­u­men­tary, which is This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us. Check that out. It’s a good start­ing point. It’s a banger with wacky lyrics [00:34:00] about two guys fight­ing over a girl, but using zoo analo­gies, zoo ani­mal analo­gies to talk about it.

Um, and then they had a big hit a cou­ple of years ago with a song called The Girl Is Cry­ing in Her Lat­te. I’d rec­om­mend check­ing that out. Check out the video clip for it because our own Cate Blanchett, who’s a big fan of the band, offered her ser­vices to appear in the video where she dances. Um, it’s, it’s a inter­est­ing clip.

Any­way, we’re excit­ed about that. Last Sat­ur­day night, there was a per­for­mance of Shostakovich’s Fifth Sym­pho­ny at QPAC, but I found out about it too late to get tick­ets or to orga­nize any­thing, and I was dev­as­tat­ed by miss­ing out on that ’cause I’ve nev­er seen that per­formed live, and it’s prob­a­bly my favorite Shostakovich sym­pho­ny.

But, uh, there you go. Chris­sy assures me that it will be per­formed again in my life­time, so I will get a chance to see it. Uh, with [00:35:00] that, uh, QAV, have a good week.