Hi QAVVERS,

It’s been anoth­er week of war-relat­ed gnash­ing of teeth, but from a port­fo­lio per­spec­tive we haven’t had to do any­thing. Despite every­thing, I haven’t actu­al­ly sold any­thing in weeks and only a few things are cur­rent­ly even close to a sell.

This week on the shows, Tony pulled apart NWH and I had a crack at PBR, so there’s plen­ty to chew through (although only one of them is a buy — see my myth killer for more about NWH). On the com­modi­ties front it is a mixed bag, Crude and Steel are a buy, but Gold, Cop­per and Zinc are all sit­ting in Josephine ter­ri­to­ry for now.

On the per­son­al front, Chris­sy & I caught up with my old friend, Aus­tralian futur­ist Peter Ell­yard and his part­ner Robyn last week­end for lunch. They were up from Mel­bourne. Peter is 89 and still going strong — con­sult­ing to UQ and devel­op­ing a new form of yoga for the elder­ly. He’s been prac­tis­ing yoga on a dai­ly basis for 50 years and it’s paid off. Over lunch he told me about the time he spent a few hours with a young Paul Keat­ing in the mid 1970s when they were both work­ing for the Whit­lam gov­ern­ment. And Chris­sy and I also just cel­e­brat­ed our 15th wed­ding anniver­sary. I’m a lucky man!

AUSTRALIAN MARKET UPDATE

The All Ordi­nar­ies bare­ly moved over the week clos­ing Thurs­day:

• Aus­trali­a’s June jobs report smashed expec­ta­tions, with employ­ment ris­ing 76,300 against a fore­cast of just 15,000 (although more than half of those jobs are part time), though the unem­ploy­ment rate held steady at 4.4%.

• Inter­est rate mar­kets moved swift­ly on the data, pric­ing around a 36% chance of an RBA hike at the 11 August board meet­ing and a full 25 basis points of tight­en­ing before year-end, imply­ing a cash rate of 4.60%.

• The jobs sur­prise cut short an ear­ly ral­ly, with the ASX 200 crum­bling from a more than 100-point lead after the fig­ures land­ed, as rate mar­kets tipped anoth­er hike before year-end.

• Ener­gy stocks held up amid ongo­ing Mid­dle East ten­sions, with Houthi bomb­ing Sau­di tankers in the Red Sea and US-Iran fric­tion keep­ing oil ele­vat­ed; cop­per also hit a six-week high dur­ing the peri­od.

US MARKET UPDATE

The S&P 500 fell for the week, clos­ing Thurs­day at approx­i­mate­ly 7,408, dragged low­er by earn­ings-dri­ven AI spend­ing con­cerns and esca­lat­ing Mid­dle East con­flict:

• On Thurs­day alone the S&P 500 dropped 1.21% to close at 7,408.30, with the Nas­daq Com­pos­ite declin­ing 2.15%, weighed down by a 7% drop in Alpha­bet and a 14% loss in Tes­la fol­low­ing their earn­ings reports.

• Brent crude topped $100 a bar­rel, stok­ing infla­tion fears and dri­ving Trea­sury yields to their high­est lev­els of the year.

• Long-term yields surged as naval block­ades for tankers in the Mid­dle East grew tighter and ini­tial job­less claims fell to a 57-year low, pres­sur­ing tra­di­tion­al eco­nom­ic sec­tors.

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

“No One Ever Went Broke Taking A Profit”

You’ve heard it a hun­dred times. A stock you own has had a good run, you’re sit­ting on a fat gain, and some­one (your bro­ker, your broth­er-in-law, the voice in your own head) tells you to take some off the table. Lock it in. Bank the win. Nobody ever went broke tak­ing a prof­it.

And maybe you won’t go broke tak­ing a prof­it. You just won’t bank as much mon­ey as you might have if you’d con­tin­ued hold­ing. Prof­its you nev­er see don’t end up on a bro­ker­age state­ment. They are invis­i­ble. It’s the four-bag­ger you sold when it had dou­bled. It’s twen­ty years of com­pound­ing you swapped for one good year.

Let me show you what I mean, using a stock Tony pulled apart on the show this week.

NRW Hold­ings. Tick­er NWH (which always con­fus­es me). An engi­neer­ing and con­tract min­ing out­fit out of Perth. I bought it in my super port­fo­lio in May last year and it’s up about 150%. I also hold it in one of the Light port­fo­lios from a few weeks ear­li­er, where it’s up 158%. Its neigh­bour in the sec­tor, MacMa­hon Hold­ings (MAH), is up 101% in the Light port­fo­lio since Novem­ber. Over the last twelve months NRW has run 123% and McMa­hon 201%. Mate­ri­als was the best-per­form­ing sec­tor on the ASX, up 41%.

NRW’s QAV score today is 0.04, well below our 0.10 cut-off, so it isn’t on our buy list today. Not because it isn’t a great com­pa­ny but because it is no longer a great BUY. It was when a great buy when we bought it. The score fell BECAUSE it worked.

QAV is qual­i­ty at val­ue. The qual­i­ty half of NWH has­n’t gone any­where. The busi­ness is run­ning hot, rev­enue up 19.5%, EBITDA up 36.5%, under­ly­ing prof­it up 42%, an order book north of sev­en and a half bil­lion dol­lars. What changed is the price. We bought it cheap. It isn’t cheap any­more. As the price climbed the val­ue half of the equa­tion col­lapsed, and the score came down with it. A falling score on a stock you already own does­n’t mean sell. It means the stock did exact­ly what you bought it to do.

This is where the take-a-prof­it brigade get to work. The score’s gone. The PE looks ter­ri­fy­ing (53 times, though that’s warped by a one-off write-down I’ll spare you). It’s had a mon­ster run. Sure­ly you sell and give your­self a pat on the back?

The aca­d­e­m­ic data is unkind to that instinct. Ter­rance Odean went through 10,000 bro­ker­age accounts from 1987 to 1993 and found the win­ners peo­ple sold went on to beat the losers they held onto, by 3.4% over the fol­low­ing year. Investors are bril­liant at water­ing their weeds and cut­ting their flow­ers. Peter Lynch said it best: “Sell­ing your win­ners and hold­ing your losers is like cut­ting the flow­ers and water­ing the weeds.” War­ren Buf­fett liked that line so much he rang Lynch up to ask if he could bor­row it. Tony nev­er asked, but he bor­rows it con­stant­ly.

Jesse Liv­er­more worked it out the hard way a cen­tu­ry ago. “It nev­er was my think­ing that made the big mon­ey for me. It always was my sit­ting.”

So do we just hold every­thing for­ev­er and hope for the best? No. This is the part that sep­a­rates QAV from a hunch.

We sell. We sell all the time. We just don’t sell because a num­ber got big, or a chart looks top­py, or our palms are sweaty. We sell when the rules tell us to. NWH has a three-point sell trend line, and right now the stock is sit­ting a long way above it. As Tony said on the show, it would have to fall a long way from here before that line breaks. Until it does, we hold. If it does, we’re out. No debate, no attach­ment. Just rules.

That is the whole trick. The deci­sion to sell is made by the method, not by me, and def­i­nite­ly not by some­one on Tik­Tok telling me you can’t go broke tak­ing a prof­it.

And if you’re wor­ried about how much you’d lose while the price drops down through that sell line, I get it. But we’ve done back­test­ing of our rules and found that, more often than not, they make us mon­ey. Sure — some­times things would have worked out bet­ter if we’d sold ear­li­er, or not sold at all. But sta­tis­ti­cal­ly, it goes well for us more often than it does­n’t. They only need to work for us 51% of the time to pay off.

One thing worth being clear about, because it mat­ters. Hold­ing NRW and buy­ing NRW are two com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent deci­sions. At these lev­els it’s a Josephine, it’s well above our val­u­a­tion, and it is absolute­ly not a buy today. If you don’t own it, this is not me telling you to go and get some. Tony’s pulled pork was a look at a stock that has already done its job. But if you got in ear­ly, back when it was bor­ing and cheap and nobody was writ­ing it up, then the ques­tion was nev­er “how much prof­it should I grab.” The ques­tion is “has my sell rule trig­gered.” It has­n’t.

The finan­cial press now run­ning glow­ing pro­files of NRW and MacMa­hon had noth­ing pos­i­tive to say about these stocks when they were cheap and we were buy­ing them. They tend to dis­cov­er a win­ner right about the time we’ve already made our mon­ey on it.

The dis­ci­pline in this game isn’t in the buy­ing. Any­one can buy. The hard part, the part that actu­al­ly com­pounds, is the sit­ting. Hold­ing a good stock through the noise, past the point where cash­ing out feels clever, until the rules and only the rules tell you the run is done. To para­phrase Jer­ry — any­one can TAKE a posi­tion, but do you know how to HOLD a posi­tion?

Okay so.… maybe no one ever went broke tak­ing a prof­it. But “not going broke” is not the goal. Max­imis­ing returns — that’s the name of the game.

STOCK ANALYSIS OF THE WEEK

Tony did a Pulled Pork on NRW Hold­ings (NWH) this week, the Perth-based engi­neer­ing and min­ing ser­vices con­trac­tor that has surged 123% in the past year but has since moved off the buy list. Find the full score­card walk­through in the pod­cast link below.

This week on the Amer­i­can show I did a deep dive on Petro­bras (PBR), the Brazil­ian oil giant that scored a per­fect 100% QAV score and got added to the Light port­fo­lio. We cov­ered every­thing from Brazil­ian dic­ta­tor­ships to Oper­a­tion Car Wash along the way, so check out the full episode at the link below.

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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) 2026-07-19

U.S. BUY LIST

QAV Val­ue Invest­ing Buy List 2026-07-20

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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: He already knows where they are.

(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

From Val­ue to Growth: NWH — QAV AU #929

The Oil Is Ours: Petro­bras (PBR): QAV Amer­i­ca #62

STOCK NEWS AND UPDATES

COMMODITIES

This week the big changes to com­modi­ties were the fol­low­ing:

Com­mod­i­ty	Sta­tus
Gold (USD)	JOSEPHINE
Crude Oil	BUY
Cop­per	JOSEPHINE
Zinc	JOSEPHINE
Mag­ne­sium	SELL
Steel	BUY
LNG	SELL

DISCLOSURE

Please review our trad­ing and dis­clo­sure pol­i­cy.

SIGNING OFF

That’s the week done. I’ll be doing more kung fu. What about you?
Have a good week­end.

SSDD!

• Cam

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That’s it for the week!

QAV A GOOD SHAREMARKET!

Got a ques­tion? [email protected]