Hi QAVVERS,

Well the Aus­tralian finan­cial year is done and dust­ed and it was a great year for QAV. I hope you all did as well, if not bet­ter, than we did. I’ve already heard from a few mem­bers who had even bet­ter per­for­mance than we did, which isn’t uncom­mon, and is what QAV is all about. Sys­tem­at­ic out­per­for­mance. Feel free to share your num­bers with me so we can use it as tes­ti­mo­ni­als.

AUSTRALIAN MARKET UPDATE

• The ASX 200 dropped ~56 pts (0.6%) to 8,723 Wednes­day (first day of the new finan­cial year), a 20-day low, rough­ly flat YTD.
• Weak­ness fol­lowed Wall Street’s soft open and prof­it-tak­ing in chip/tech names; all four big banks fell, drag­ging finan­cials down 1.7%.
• Coles slid ~4.2% on news it’s weigh­ing a pur­chase of Pet­barn own­er Green­cross from TPG.
• South32 jumped ~9.7% after agree­ing to sell most of its alu­mini­um assets to Alcoa.
• The RBA is on hold at 4.35% (June deci­sion), no July meet­ing; next call is Aug 11.

US MARKET UPDATE

• June jobs report (released Thu Jul 2) came in soft: +57,000 pay­rolls vs. ~113–115k expect­ed, break­ing a three-month hot streak.
• Unem­ploy­ment ticked down to 4.2%, but large­ly because labour-force par­tic­i­pa­tion fell to ~61.5% (low­est since 2021), not from strength.
• The weak jobs print rein­forced expec­ta­tions the Fed holds rates steady at 3.50–3.75% (it last held on June 17, its fourth straight hold).
• The Dow hit a fresh record, up ~1.1% (~600 pts) Thurs­day, led by finan­cials and comms.
• Chip stocks had their worst two-day skid in weeks, the PHLX Semi­con­duc­tor Index fell ~6% Thurs­day, after reports Anthrop­ic is explor­ing its own AI chip with Sam­sung.
• Tes­la fell as much as ~8.3% intra­day despite beat­ing Q2 deliv­ery esti­mates (480,126 vehi­cles), a “sell the news” reac­tion.
• Con­text: US indices closed out their best quar­ter since 2020; S&P 500 up ~9.4% and Nas­daq ~12.5% for the first half of 2026.

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

Misery Loves Company

“Mis­ery loves com­pa­ny, so in light of the lat­est Bit­coin dump and our return to the 50% draw­down mark, I thought I’d reach out to the oth­er suf­fer­ers.” That’s from a post this week by Andrew Page, CEO of Straw­man (who was our guest on QAV #355). He want­ed to “pour one out for the poor fools among us hold­ing stuff well below recent lev­els.”

His list: WiseTech down 75%. Pro Medicus down 45%. ARB down 54%. CSL down 58%. Xero down 63%. Cochlear down 60%. Cat­a­pult down 50%. Even gold is down 25% from its peak.

Andrew’s point, fair enough, is that these aren’t meme stocks or joke coins. They’re good com­pa­nies. Real earn­ings, real prod­ucts, real mar­ket lead­ers. And he’s not wrong about that.

What makes the list sting more is the tim­ing. This isn’t a crash. The index as a whole is still up for the year and only around 5% off record highs. So while the mar­ket par­ties on, a grave­yard of blue-chip growth dar­lings is qui­et­ly get­ting car­ried out the back door.

Mean­while, over on our side of the fence, it’s been the best finan­cial year in QAV’s his­to­ry. The mod­el port­fo­lio fin­ished FY26 up 28.95%, against 6.61% for the SPDR 200 accu­mu­la­tion index. Bet­ter than quadru­ple the mar­ket. Every sin­gle one of our four Light port­fo­lios beat the mar­ket too, one of them by almost ten times. The stocks doing the dam­age have names most pun­ters have prob­a­bly nev­er heard of: South­ern Cross Elec­tri­cal up 508%, Genus­Plus up 330%, Duratec up 267%, SHAPE Aus­tralia up 134%, and Kor­vest up 460% since we bought it years ago. Bor­ing, for­get­table, cash-gen­er­at­ing busi­ness­es that most of our own lis­ten­ers could­n’t tell you what they actu­al­ly do.

Two port­fo­lios of ASX-list­ed com­pa­nies. One full of house­hold names hyped up on every invest­ing forum over the last few years. One full of names even we for­get. Guess which one just had its worst year and which one just had its best.

This isn’t real­ly a sto­ry about bad com­pa­nies. It’s the same old sto­ry about price.

When Tony talked through the WiseTech-and-friends list on the show this week, he made the dis­tinc­tion plain­ly: “I don’t dis­agree with his the­sis that they’re good com­pa­nies… but be a lit­tle bit more self-reflec­tive and realise you’re pay­ing way too much for them.” Then the line that’s real­ly the whole arti­cle in a sen­tence: “As it always does, always, every sin­gle time, if you over­pay for some­thing, it comes back to bite you in the end.”

We wrote about this exact mechan­ic back in May with Microsoft. Buy the great­est soft­ware com­pa­ny on Earth in Decem­ber 1999 and you’d have wait­ed sev­en­teen years just to get your mon­ey back, while the busi­ness itself quadru­pled its rev­enue under­neath you the whole time. Same law of grav­i­ty. Dif­fer­ent decade, dif­fer­ent post­code, dif­fer­ent set of tick­ers. WiseTech, Pro Medicus, CSL, Cochlear and the rest are this cycle’s Microsoft: busi­ness­es that did­n’t need to do any­thing wrong to hand their share­hold­ers a hor­ror stretch, because the price already had years of flaw­less per­for­mance baked into it before a sin­gle thing went wrong. A stock priced for per­fec­tion does­n’t need bad news to fall. It just needs nor­mal news.

This is the whole rea­son the QAV check­list puts a hard ceil­ing on what you’re allowed to pay, regard­less of how good the sto­ry is. We don’t care how great the busi­ness is if the price to oper­at­ing cash flow is 20 times. It’s off our list well before that. It means we miss the euphor­ic run-up on the way past. It also means we’re not the ones explain­ing a 60–75% draw­down to our spous­es while the index sits near all-time highs.

Tony made the same point anoth­er way a few min­utes lat­er, talk­ing about our own good year: “I don’t want to get too hubris­tic either, because we’ll have a bad year at some stage, and we’ll be in the same boat. But it’ll be for a dif­fer­ent rea­son.” When QAV has a rough year, it’ll be because the whole mar­ket fell over… Ukraine, the Strait of Hor­muz, what­ev­er the next thing is. It won’t be because we paid 200 times earn­ings for some­thing we were con­vinced was going to take over the world.

Our 2019–2026 per­for­mance table tells the sto­ry about how QAV achieves long-term dou­ble mar­ket per­for­mance. One ter­rif­ic year, fol­lowed by a hand­ful of aver­age years (some a lit­tle above, some a lit­tle below the bench­mark)… and then anoth­er ter­rif­ic year. Rinse and repeat. Stick with the dis­ci­pline of buy­ing good busi­ness­es and obey­ing the sell trig­gers.

Good busi­ness­es can still be bad invest­ments. It has noth­ing to do with the qual­i­ty of the com­pa­ny and every­thing to do with what you hand­ed over for a piece of it. Andrew’s list isn’t a list of bad com­pa­nies hav­ing a bad run. It’s a list of good com­pa­nies that got bought at prices that assumed noth­ing would ever go wrong again.

Some­thing always does.

STOCK ANALYSIS OF THE WEEK

I only had to sell one stock from the Light port­fo­lios this week and I added a few stocks, too. Mem­bers can see my Light posts here.

I did­n’t see any­thing from the U.S. Light port­fo­lios this week but I did add a stock. U.S. mem­bers can read about them here.

Tony did a Pulled Pork on EVZ, a small engi­neer­ing fab­ri­ca­tor that has gone from 16 cents to 65 cents in the past 12 months and just land­ed on the buy list. Find the full deep dive in the pod­cast link below.

On the Amer­i­can pod­cast this week, I did a pulled pork on KSS. The pod­cast link is down below if you want the full 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.

AUSTRALIAN BUY LIST
QAV Val­ue Invest­ing Buy List (AU) 2026-06-28

U.S. BUY LIST
QAV Val­ue Invest­ing Buy List 2026-06-28

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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.

July 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: Some­one already cleared the way.

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

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Add QAV America — US stocks, the same QAV method

Already a QAV mem­ber? You can add QAV Amer­i­ca as your sec­ond mem­ber­ship at 50% off — US-list­ed stocks, the same QAV approach, billed in AUD through this site (just one pay­ment to keep an eye on). Add QAV Amer­i­ca →

Not a QAV mem­ber yet? Join QAV first, then you can add QAV Amer­i­ca at the 50% mem­ber rate.

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THIS WEEK’S EPISODES

Bor­ing Stocks, Bonkers Returns: QAV AU #926

KSS Me, Dar­ling – QAV Amer­i­ca #59

STOCK NEWS AND UPDATES

COMMODITIES

This week the big changes to com­modi­ties were the fol­low­ing:

Com­mod­i­ty	Sta­tus
Zinc	JOSEPHINE

DISCLOSURE

Please review our trad­ing and dis­clo­sure pol­i­cy.

SIGNING OFF

That’s it from me for this week. Here’s to anoth­er great year for QAV. Hap­py hunt­ing in FY27!

SSDD!

• Cam

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That’s it for the week!

QAV A GOOD SHAREMARKET!

Got a ques­tion? [email protected]