Hi folks,

I’ve had a weird week, how about you? With Tony away, I had to cov­er both QAV shows by myself (with Phil Mus­catel­lo help­ing me out on the Amer­i­can show, a cross-pro­mo­tion on his Shares For Begin­ners pod­cast). On top of that, I’ve been doing research on why Chris­tians in the Mid­dle Ages were addict­ed to burn­ing peo­ple at the stake and start­ed writ­ing a new book about Aus­trali­a’s robot­ic future. Fox had anoth­er kung fu grad­ing last week­end, and I start­ed watch­ing the new Nico­las Cage SPIDER NOIR series (not sure about it yet, first episode was bor­ing, but Hunter tells me to stick with it, it’s a slow burn). Tomor­row night we’re going to see SPARKS again! Excit­ed about that.

The All Ordi­nar­ies had it’s usu­al up-one-day, down-the-next, back-up-again-the-next week, as the news ran with Trump’s idea of the day… Iran deal is as-good-as-signed, no, wait, “self-defen­sive strikes” (what­ev­er the hell that means), Iran’s retal­i­a­tion strikes, no, wait, there’s still a deal to be made, no, wait, he’s threat­en­ing to bomb Oman now.… ugh.

US mar­kets seem to care less, maybe because AI con­tin­ues to boom regard­less of glob­al eco­nom­ic pain and anx­i­ety. Don’t ask me to make any sense out of it (just read my myth killer arti­cle this week for con­text).

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

The Macro Myth

The Myth: You need to understand interest rates, GDP, inflation, central bank policy, and geopolitical trends to invest well.

The Reality: Macroeconomic events have little effect on investing strategy — or returns.

Every week some­one asks us a ver­sion of the same ques­tion. What does Tony think inter­est rates are going? What does the tar­iff sit­u­a­tion mean for our port­fo­lio? What about the war’s impact on oil prices? Is now a good time to buy giv­en the eco­nom­ic uncer­tain­ty?

His hon­est answer: he has absolute­ly no idea. And more impor­tant­ly… he does­n’t care.

Open any finan­cial news­pa­per / blog / pod­cast on any giv­en morn­ing and you’ll find the same thing. Ana­lysts pre­dict­ing what inter­est rates will do next. Econ­o­mists fore­cast­ing reces­sion or no reces­sion. Fund man­agers explain­ing how they’re “posi­tion­ing” for the macro envi­ron­ment.

It’s an impres­sive amount of con­fi­dent noise about things nobody can actu­al­ly pre­dict.

In 2005, Berke­ley pro­fes­sor Philip Tet­lock pub­lished a study of 82,361 expert polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic fore­casts made over twen­ty years. The experts, includ­ing econ­o­mists, ana­lysts, pol­i­cy wonks, all per­formed about the same as ran­dom chance. The aver­age expert was rough­ly as accu­rate as a dart-throw­ing chim­panzee.

As he wrote in his fol­low-up book, “Super­fore­cast­ing: The Art and Sci­ence of Pre­dic­tion” in 2015:

“Open any news­pa­per, watch any TV news show, and you find experts who fore­cast what’s com­ing. Some are cau­tious. More are bold and con­fi­dent. A hand­ful claim to be Olympian vision­ar­ies able to see decades into the future. With few excep­tions, they are not in front of the cam­eras because they pos­sess any proven skill at fore­cast­ing. Accu­ra­cy is sel­dom even men­tioned. Old fore­casts are like old news—soon forgotten—and pun­dits are almost nev­er asked to rec­on­cile what they said with what actu­al­ly hap­pened. The one unde­ni­able tal­ent that talk­ing heads have is their skill at telling a com­pelling sto­ry with con­vic­tion, and that is enough. Many have become wealthy ped­dling fore­cast­ing of untest­ed val­ue to cor­po­rate exec­u­tives, gov­ern­ment offi­cials, and ordi­nary peo­ple who would nev­er think of swal­low­ing med­i­cine of unknown effi­ca­cy and safe­ty but who rou­tine­ly pay for fore­casts that are as dubi­ous as elixirs sold from the back of a wag­on. These people—and their customers—deserve a nudge in the ribs.”

Writ­ing his first book in the ear­ly years of the Iraq inva­sion, he starts off talk­ing about the “intel­li­gence fail­ures” pre­ced­ing the Amer­i­can inva­sion and how the experts’ bold­est pre­dic­tions of weapons of mass destruc­tion and of min­i­mal resis­tance had not been borne out. “What experts think”, he writes, “mat­ters far less than how they think.”

And I think the same is true when it comes to invest­ing. What Tony teach­es us, is not what to think about invest­ing, but a way to think about invest­ing. And one of his prin­ci­ples is that nobody — repeat, nobody — can pre­dict the future. So all of this expert opin­ion about macro eco­nom­ic issues is, large­ly, a waste of time lis­ten­ing to.

Look — don’t get me wrong. Some fore­cast­ers do a bet­ter job than oth­ers. And macro events do affect mar­kets short-term — we’re not say­ing it’s com­plete­ly irrel­e­vant. Severe enough shocks (GFC, COVID, inter­est rate move­ments, war and oth­er sup­ply chain issues) gen­uine­ly do change com­pa­ny fun­da­men­tals. Inter­est rates affect dis­count rates and there­fore val­u­a­tions — this is math­e­mat­i­cal­ly true. It feels respon­si­ble and grown-up to pay atten­tion to the big pic­ture.

But Tet­lock­’s demon­strat­ed that, on aver­age, expert fore­cast­ers have no bet­ter than chance over 20 years. Even the RBA and the Fed have to revise their own fore­casts dra­mat­i­cal­ly — they don’t seem to have any bet­ter idea about what the future holds than the rest of us. As the late Amer­i­can econ­o­mist Paul Samuel­son once famous­ly said: “The stock mar­ket has pre­dict­ed nine of the last five reces­sions.” Experts have spent years warn­ing about Chi­nese debt implo­sion — Chi­na kept grow­ing. Ray Dalio’s Bridge­wa­ter macro fund has under­per­formed a basic index for years.

Macro news is the most pub­lic infor­ma­tion in the world — mil­lions of ana­lysts trade on it instant­ly. If infla­tion data drops and you think “I should sell bonds” — that trade hap­pened before you woke up.

The QAV check­list uses pub­licly avail­able com­pa­ny data for a rea­son: the edge is in the analy­sis, not the news.

Our check­list does have a field for “cur­rent inter­est rate envi­ron­ment”, but it’s used pure­ly to mea­sure whether or not the stock might be of inter­est to investors look­ing to lever­age their port­fo­lio for a div­i­dend, not as a pre­dic­tor of the future returns of the busi­ness. The check­list does­n’t ask: what’s GDP doing? Is a reces­sion like­ly? It asks: is this com­pa­ny high qual­i­ty? Is it cheap? Those ques­tions are macro-agnos­tic. If macro hits a com­pa­ny’s fun­da­men­tals, the check­list catch­es it at the next review — you don’t need to pre­dict it, you just need to mea­sure it.

Tony’s posi­tion has been con­sis­tent for the sev­en years we’ve been doing the pod­cast: he does­n’t know what inter­est rates will do, he does­n’t know when the next reces­sion is com­ing, and nei­ther does any­one else. So we don’t pre­tend oth­er­wise. We check the num­bers. We fol­low the process. We buy qual­i­ty at a dis­count and we wait.

The check­list is the answer to the macro ques­tion. Not because it pre­dicts macro — but because it does­n’t need to.

War­ren Buf­fett famous­ly ignores macro­eco­nom­ic fore­casts: “If we’re right about the busi­ness, macro­eco­nom­ic fac­tors won’t mat­ter. And if we’re wrong about the busi­ness, macro­eco­nom­ic fac­tors won’t save us.”

The econ­o­my is an enor­mous­ly com­pli­cat­ed sys­tem that no one ful­ly under­stands. The QAV check­list is a data-based process that does­n’t need to.

You don’t need to know what the Fed or the RBA will do next. You need to know whether the com­pa­ny you’re look­ing at pass­es the check­list. Those are very dif­fer­ent ques­tions — and only one of them is answer­able.

It turns out the best invest­ing strat­e­gy isn’t watch­ing Bloomberg. It’s ignor­ing it.

STOCK ANALYSIS OF THE WEEK

I added a cou­ple of stocks to the Light port­fo­lios 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, I (in Tony’s absence) did a deep dive on BRI. 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) 2026-05-22

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

QAV Val­ue Invest­ing Buy List 2026-05-24

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PORTFOLIO PERFORMANCE

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”.

We pub­lish a fresh per­for­mance snap­shot once a month. Week­ly noise does­n’t tell you much in a val­ue-invest­ing sys­tem; what mat­ters is the trend.

May 2026 per­for­mance snap­shot.

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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.

QAV LIGHT: Same des­ti­na­tion. You choose where you sit.

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

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THIS WEEK’S EPISODES

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

Straw Mat­tress to Steel Bumper (MGA): QAV Amer­i­ca #54

STOCK NEWS AND UPDATES

COMMODITIES

This week the big changes to com­modi­ties were the fol­low­ing:

Com­mod­i­ty	Sta­tus
Plat­inum	JOSEPHINE
Steel	JOSEPHINE

DISCLOSURE

Please review our trad­ing and dis­clo­sure pol­i­cy.

SIGNING OFF

Anoth­er week in the books, and while the mar­kets keep doing their usu­al dance of fear and greed, we’re stay­ing laser-focused on the fun­da­men­tals with our deep dives into BRI and MGA.
Ignore the noise and the experts. Do your own think­ing.

SSDD!
(Stay Safe, Don’t Die)

• Cam

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That’s it for the week!

QAV A GOOD SHAREMARKET!

Got a ques­tion? [email protected]