Transcript #603

QAV 603 CLUB

Thu, Jan 19, 2023 5:47PM • 1:07:25

Cameron  00:06

Wel­come back to QAV every­body. This is QAV 603. We’re record­ing Tues­day the 17th of Jan­u­ary. How are you, TK?

Tony  00:18

Very well. You stuffed up my intro — I was gonna say “hel­lo moth­er­fuck­ers!”

Cameron  00:26

We try and keep this show clean, Tony, we’ve got a clean rat­ing on the net­work. So, yeah. Moth­er, moth­er, moth­er flip­pers, try that.

Tony  00:36

I was ref­er­enc­ing Der­ry Girls that we were talk­ing about before.

Cameron  00:39

I know, it’s a great show. Well, it’s been a good week in the mar­kets, Tony.

Cameron  00:45

The mar­ket was on a bit of Via­gra last week. It was going up every day. It dipped a lit­tle bit this morn­ing, but then last I looked it sort of had recov­ered from that. I’m not sure if it’s recov­ered all the way, but… No, it’s still down, I think, still down today by 0.21%. Not too bad. But one of the good things about that is, well, not good, one of the bad things is the STW — our bench­mark — has shot up in the last week and it’s mak­ing us look bad still. It’s doing real­ly well. But any­way…

Tony  00:45

It has.

Tony  01:17

In the short term.

Cameron  01:19

In the short term.

Tony  01:20

It’s just tak­en a slight lead; we’re still com­ing around the turn. Got plen­ty of time to catch up.

Cameron  01:27

More than a slight lead for this finan­cial year, it’s got a huge lead. But yeah, we’ll catch up. Before we get into the port­fo­lio updates, let’s talk about com­mod­i­ty updates, because I had some issues with that this morn­ing. Some­body, one of our astute lis­ten­ers, point­ed out to me that I had cok­ing coal down as a Josephine, but that it might actu­al­ly be a buy. I shot you some emails, I think the chart I’ve been using was out of date. It was a Sep­tem­ber ’22 chart that I had for­got­ten was not stay­ing cur­rent. I’m using Bar Charts there. When I looked at the Jan­u­ary ’23 cok­ing coal chart, it actu­al­ly looks like it’s a by again. You’re using a dif­fer­ent chart, I think, you were using Trad­ing?

Tony  02:18

Yeah, I’m using the one that’s in the score­card, which is Trad­ing Eco­nom­ics.

Cameron  02:23

Not in my copy of the score­card.

Tony  02:26

Oh, hang on, sor­ry, let me just open up the score­card. I’m using Bar Chart as well. I’m just click­ing on the link that’s in the score­card.

Cameron  02:37

Okay. So, when you click on that, if you look at the title it says Sep­tem­ber ’22 and that’s where the price fin­ish­es.

Tony  02:43

Right.

Cameron  02:44

But it’s now Jan­u­ary ’23.

Tony  02:47

Ah, okay. Sor­ry. Gotcha. Sor­ry, just for clar­i­ty, I was think­ing of the nor­mal coal chart, the ther­mal coal chart.

Cameron  02:53

Year, right. So, if you look at the cok­ing cul­ture in Bar Chart for Jan­u­ary ’23, its code is U7F23. Def­i­nite­ly looks like it’s above the sec­ond buy line, and it’s picked up in the last cou­ple of months, actu­al­ly. Novem­ber ’22 it was down at 273, now it’s trad­ing at around about $309. This is the Aus­tralian cok­ing coal price. So, I think cok­ing coal is actu­al­ly a buy.

Tony  03:19

Yeah, I think you’re right.

Cameron  03:21

So, thank you to who­ev­er point­ed that out. Good work. Thank you for check­ing our work, as always.

Tony  03:29

So, that means we’re going to have to update this each month with a dif­fer­ent link, aren’t we?

Cameron  03:33

Yes. And I’ve actu­al­ly made a note of that now beside the chart in my thing, so I remem­ber to do it. Most of our charts update, you don’t have to pull up a new one all the time, but this one, unfor­tu­nate­ly, you have to do that. So, cok­ing coal, I can’t exact­ly remem­ber the cok­ing coal com­pa­nies, but I think…

Tony  03:53

Stan­more and Coro­n­a­do from mem­o­ry.

Cameron  03:56

Good ol’ SMR: the one that I bought when I should­n’t have bought it but has done very well any­way despite the fact that it was a Josephine at the time. So, any­way, that’s that. A few oth­er changes on the com­mod­i­ty list this week; I think cop­per was a buy again, isn’t that excit­ing? So, is that C6C? Is that our big cop­per stock?

Tony  04:18

C6C, it is, and Sand­fire from mem­o­ry, too.

Cameron  04:21

I’ve got my lit­tle list of comm stocks here. Let’s see who else. 29 Met­als, I don’t think that ever comes up on our buy list. Eris Resources, Aure­lia Met­als are in cop­per. C6C is the big one. What else looks famil­iar down here? Helix Resources: I think they’ve been on the buy list before. Oz Min­er­als. Appar­ent­ly Zim­plats has some expo­sure to cop­per accord­ing to this list. We real­ly don’t treat them as a cop­per com­pa­ny.

Tony  04:53

No, it would­n’t be.

Cameron  04:55

Any­way. So, there you go, that’s excit­ing. What else do we have in the comm stats changes this week? Platinum’s a Josephine, alu­mini­um is a buy, and zinc is a buy.

Tony  05:04

Oh, well zinc I think was also South 32. It’s one of their big met­als, so that’s good for them.

Cameron  05:11

Right. Let’s see, what have I got in terms of zinc? What looks famil­iar here? Aure­lia Met­als.

Tony  05:21

Again, I think it real­ly is more gold than zinc, I would have thought.

Cameron  05:24

Right, okay. Helix comes up in this list as well.

Tony  05:25

Aure­lia could be gold/copper from mem­o­ry.

Cameron  05:26

Okay. Met­als Aus­tralia, MLS, has some expo­sure to zinc, maybe. Oz Min­er­als again, obvi­ous­ly Rio Tin­to. Yeah, S32, Sand­fire resources has some zinc expo­sure, appar­ent­ly. Supe­ri­or Lake Resources, which I thought was SLR. It says it’s SUP here, so I don’t know about that. Maybe SLR is some­thing else. Any­way, that’s the only ones that real­ly jumped out at me as some­thing we’ve seen before. And what else did I say? Alu­mini­um?

Tony  06:01

Mh-hmm. CAA.

Cameron  06:03

Yeah, Capral, CAA, and South 32 have some alu­mini­um expo­sure — 50% I’ve got not­ed here. I’ve got it down as 50% alu­mini­um.

Tony  06:13

Yeah, from mem­o­ry it’s got both baux­ite and what they call alu­mi­na, which we call alu­mini­um. So, that should be good for them.

Cameron  06:21

So, if any­one’s look­ing at any of those stocks, you can check those out. Port­fo­lio updates. Well, I did my week­ly report this morn­ing. The dum­my port­fo­lio since incep­tion, which for new lis­ten­ers is the sec­ond of Sep­tem­ber 2019, is up about 17.5% per annum CAGR ver­sus STW, the bench­mark, which is up about 7.8% per annum over that peri­od. So, we’re doing two- and a‑bit times still.

Tony  06:49

Sor­ry to inter­rupt, but that’s why I don’t get fussed about under­per­form­ing the STW for the finan­cial year.

Cameron  06:54

I know. It’s fine. We’re all cool.

Tony  06:58

But for new lis­ten­ers.

Cameron  07:00

Yes. Peo­ple do ask me to report on the finan­cial year num­bers, though, so they can see how they com­pare and how their port­fo­lio com­pares to how we’re doing. We’re up about 8% for the finan­cial year ver­sus the STW, which is up about 20%. So, it’s hav­ing a cork­er year. Of course, it usu­al­ly won’t always stay that way, but that’s how it’s doing right now. Last thir­ty days SMR is up 30%, CVL is up near­ly 17%, LAU is up 14.5%, BFG’s up 10.5%, NCK is up 10%, and then there’s a bunch of oth­ers. So, good month for SMR, up 30%.

Cameron  07:01

Well, and that makes sense if, as you point­ed out, cok­ing coals just become a buy again.

Cameron  07:18

Yeah, thank you SMR. The Light port­fo­lios, well, I think last week when I men­tioned the light port­fo­lios, we were almost dou­ble the STW. Well, the STW caught up this.

Tony  07:56

Oh real­ly?

Cameron  07:57

Yeah, it’s ahead of us now in terms of Light as a group, the STW had a blitzer week. So, it trumped us again, not by much, but it’s ahead of us again. What else have I got in my things to talk about? Collins Street, our friends at Collins Street val­ue fund down in Mel­bourne. We’ve had them on the show a cou­ple of times, I think. Michael Gold­berg runs Collins Street Val­ue Fund. Love­ly guy, pret­ty much a val­ue investor with his own…

Cameron  08:25

… Twist of lemon on there. Like all val­ue investors, they do it their own way. But I got their quar­ter­ly report in an email the oth­er day, had a look. For com­par­i­son, our DP Decem­ber quar­ter for the end of 2022 was 7.26% per annum using CAGR. They’re report­ing for the Decem­ber quar­ter 8.37%, but that’s net returns, and I assume that just means you take your start­ing point, you take your end­point, and you cal­cu­late the dif­fer­ence. Is that what net returns means as a cal­cu­la­tion?

Tony  08:25

Very much.

Cameron  08:26

Usu­al­ly for funds man­agers, net returns mean they’ve tak­en their fees out and any costs they’ve had as well.

Cameron  08:37

Oh, right. But it does­n’t tell me how they cal­cu­late it. Is this a CAGR cal­cu­la­tion?

Tony  09:06

It should be, but as we know, it could be weight­ed by time or weight­ed by funds invest­ed, or what­ev­er.

Cameron  09:20

Yeah. Well, for CAGR we’re 7.26, but when I looked at our start­ing bal­ance and our end­ing bal­ance, it’s up about 8% over that Decem­ber quar­ter. Their twelve months return they’re report­ing as ‑7.63% while ours was +1%. So, we’re doing okay com­pared to the Collins Street folks, but not tak­ing any­thing away from them. By the way, the rest of their num­bers: two years annu­alised 7.7%, three years annu­alised 15.36% — which I think, you know, three years is rough­ly the amount of time that the dum­my port­fo­lio’s been run­ning. As I said before, it’s about 17%. So, a lit­tle bit bet­ter than that. Their annu­alised return since incep­tion is 14.46%. They don’t real­ly say when that was, but their five-year annu­alised is 14.09%. So, they do good. We do a bit bet­ter, but they do okay. That’s all my list of things to talk about, TK, what’s on your list?

Tony  10:28

Quite a few things, actu­al­ly. So, we have anoth­er ques­tion I saw come in late about a CEO tran­si­tion, and this always seems to be an issue for peo­ple: when do we raise a red flag when the CEO leaves? I want­ed to come back to a ques­tion raised last week, I think it was last week, about Fortes­cue Met­als Group and the fact that their CFO had just resigned unex­pect­ed­ly and before their finan­cial results come out next month. I noticed in the Finan­cial Review that that’s not the first senior finance per­son to leave Fortes­cue. Guy Debelle, who resigned as 2IC from the RBA, went across to work for Fortes­cue, has only last­ed a num­ber of months and he’s left as well. So, there’s some­thing fun­ny going on, I think, in the finance depart­ment or Fortes­cue Met­als Group. Could be coin­ci­dence, could be that, you know, the com­pa­ny’s piv­ot­ing towards all its green, new invest­ments, and that’s not work­ing out for some of the finance staff. I don’t know. But it’s pret­ty close to a red flag, I think, when you see that hap­pen­ing. And as I said last week, I would­n’t sell the shares. I don’t own them, but I would­n’t sell them straight­away, I’d watch what the mar­ket does. But, you know, I’d be get­ting out at the first sign of a down­turn.

Cameron  11:39

Well, it has had a bit of a down­turn. On the 13th of Jan­u­ary, so late last week, it was trad­ing at $22.93. It actu­al­ly got over $23 briefly. It’s now trad­ing at $21.91, so it’s dropped by 10% in the last few days.

Tony  12:00

Yeah, well, I mean, every­one’s sit­u­a­tion is gonna be dif­fer­ent tax wise, etc., but I’d be inclined to sit this one out and bench Fortes­cue until some more clar­i­ty or until a bit of time goes past and the new CFO comes in and every­thing’s hunky dory again. But yeah, it’s look­ing pret­ty strange when senior finance peo­ple leave quick­ly.

Cameron  12:19

So, you would sell it if you held it?

Tony  12:22

Yeah, I think so.

Tony  12:23

I’m red flag­ging it. And that’s just-I’m being ultra con­ser­v­a­tive. It could­n’t be all good, but it’s just… I mean, look­ing at it objec­tive­ly, and I know they’ve come out and tried to paint a rosy pic­ture on why peo­ple are leav­ing, but two senior peo­ple, one from out­side in a senior role with the RBA last­ed six months. And again, you know, he’s say­ing per­son­al rea­sons for the rea­son why he’s leav­ing, the cur­rent CFO’s say­ing per­son­al rea­sons for the rea­sons why he’s leav­ing. But it’s an incon­ve­nient time to say the least for Fortes­cue, and that to me rais­es ques­tions.

Cameron  12:23

Okay.

Cameron  12:54

And every­one always has per­son­al rea­sons.

Tony  12:56

Yeah, and I could be wrong; I’m being con­ser­v­a­tive, they could all be kosher and hunky dory and it could go on and on. And also, too, the lat­est down­turn in the price could also be for just iron ore under­ly­ing rea­sons. I know that the Chi­nese are try­ing to put togeth­er a car­tel across all of their buy­ers to get bet­ter prices out of Aus­tralian iron ore pro­duc­ers, so that could also be depress­ing the share price at the moment,

Cameron  13:19

When the New South Wales pre­mier has to resign because of the pho­tos of him wear­ing a Nazi uni­form come out, no doubt it will be per­son­al rea­sons as to why he has to leave. Noth­ing to do with the Nazi uni­form.

Tony  13:31

Well, he bet­ter watch out for Al Paci­no and the hunters com­ing after him.

Cameron  13:38

Yeah, I just want­ed to know if he was at the same par­ty that Prince Har­ry was at when he wore a Nazi uni­form. Was it just, like, you know, priv­i­leged white men wear Nazi uni­form day? I’m not priv­i­leged, so I don’t get those invites.

Tony  13:54

They claim it’s fun­ny, and that’s the sad part, isn’t it?

Cameron  13:56

I’ve got a pret­ty dark twist­ed sense of humour, but even I can’t real­ly find humour in that.

Tony  14:02

Well, and I also for­give twen­ty-one-year-olds for muck­ing up. I mean, that’s, you know, I would­n’t want my twen­ty-one-year-old self dragged out into the press at the moment, because I would have made mis­takes for sure. And every­one does. But it goes kind of one of two ways: he’s twen­ty-one, he’s excit­ed about his twen­ty first par­ty and he makes a mis­take. Okay, that’s entire­ly plau­si­ble. Or giv­en his polit­i­cal per­sua­sion, he’s twen­ty-one and things “I’m gonna stick it up those woke bas­tards, I’m going to be real­ly out there and edgy and provoca­tive.” And he puts a Nazi uni­form on.

Cameron  14:33

I don’t think “woke” was the thing when he turned twen­ty-one, was it?

Tony  14:39

Anti-lib­er­al­ism cer­tain­ly was, so, yeah, he was just try­ing to be provoca­tive. And we’ll nev­er know which one the answer is. If it’s the sec­ond one, it’s a prob­lem, but if it’s the first one, I’d gloss over it.

Cameron  14:49

I like the fact that some senior rank­ing Lib­er­al Par­ty mem­ber down there start­ed attack­ing the per­son that appar­ent­ly was going to leak this sto­ry as a cow­ard. It’s like, blame the leak­er, not the per­son who did the thing that’s being leaked. Attack the leak­er. I think in the Psy­chopath Epi­dem­ic I wrote about one of the symp­toms of a psy­cho­path­ic cul­ture is when you attack the peo­ple that reveal the dirty things that are going on or the bad news. You attack the lis­ten­ers — shoot the mes­sen­ger? You shoot the mes­sen­ger.

Tony  15:22

Play the man, not the ball, to use rug­by terms, yeah.

Cameron  15:25

So, when you see them attack­ing those peo­ple, I’m like, okay, well, that says a lot about the cul­ture of New South Wales Lib­er­al Par­ty. Well, any­way.

Tony  15:34

And it was leaked by a New South Wales Lib­er­al mem­ber any­way.

Cameron  15:37

Sup­pos­ed­ly. I don’t think they know who it was yet, right, but that’s the sug­ges­tion.

Tony  15:42

They haven’t named the per­son who was threat­en­ing to release it, but it was actu­al­ly released by a cab­i­net min­is­ter in the Lib­er­al Par­ty.

Cameron  15:49

Oh, wow. So, things are afoot?

Tony  15:53

Yeah, absolute­ly. He’s com­ing into an elec­tion, there’s a bit of jock­ey­ing going on. But yeah, it’s a bad sit­u­a­tion.

Cameron  15:59

Yeah. Mov­ing right along.

Tony  16:01

Yeah. So, that was Fortes­cue Met­als Group. I did the mort­gage rate sur­vey last week fol­low­ing on from the Reserve Bank cash rate rise, and I gave it a week or two, a) because it was Christ­mas, and b) because some­times the banks don’t pass on the rate ris­es straight­away and the bank’s mort­gage rates have risen. I get an aver­age of 6.82, which I’m plug­ging into our spread­sheets now as our test to see whether the yield is above the mort­gage rate. I say 6.82 with­out any sort of sense of con­fi­dence, because the banks delib­er­ate­ly make it hard to com­pare their rates. So, unless you sub­mit an appli­ca­tion and they per­son­alise the rate for you, it’s pret­ty hard to com­pare. So, I tried to take the stan­dard vari­able home loan rate with a few stan­dard fea­tures, and use their com­par­i­son rate because they’ve got all sorts of dis­counts and rate changes for whether you have 80% equi­ty or sor­ry, 20% equi­ty, or 30, or 10, or what­ev­er, and what kind of oth­er fea­tures you want, whether you want a cred­it card with it, blah, blah, blah, and there’s hon­ey­moon rates going on there, too. So, look, it could be 6.5, it could be 6.8, it’s in that sort of ball­park, so I’ve land­ed on 6.82 as the aver­age.

Cameron  17:12

And for new lis­ten­ers, Tony, can you just explain again why it mat­ters, what the mort­gage rate is and why we use that in the check­list?

Tony  17:20

Yeah, we do it as a test to see whether the yield on a com­pa­ny is strong enough to pay off our mort­gage if we hap­pen to be bor­row­ing funds to invest.

Cameron  17:29

And why do we do that?

Tony  17:30

It’s just a pos­i­tive. So, for my per­son­al way of invest­ing, I’ve always had a mort­gage against my house which I’ve then drawn down to invest in the share mar­ket, and it’s a bonus if the com­pa­ny yield can pay off the mort­gage for me. I mean, ide­al­ly, and we’ll talk about this when we get into ques­tions lat­er on, the ide­al sit­u­a­tion — which we’ve been in before — is you buy a house, you mort­gage it as much as you can, you draw that mon­ey down, you put it in the share mar­ket, you tar­get QAV com­pa­nies with a strong yield, and then their div­i­dends pay for your house mort­gage, so you’ve got a free house. It’s cost­ing you noth­ing to live there. Plus, you’ve also got a lot of expo­sure to the share mar­ket. And even if you’re just get­ting index-like returns, the div­i­dends are cov­er­ing the fees. It’s a free hit. So, yeah, that’s a ben­e­fit, which is why it scores an extra point on our check­list.

Cameron  18:22

Thank you. Hors­es, this is some­thing close to your heart.

Tony  18:25

It is, and I’m rais­ing it for two rea­sons. One, we sold a horse for a good price last week. We had a colt out of a mare we own called Furyk, and it sold for 450,000 against the reserve of 250,000. So, it was a very, very bull­ish horse sale at the Mag­ic Mil­lions, so we were hap­py. But I want to raise it now and put it in the cat­e­go­ry of pre­dic­tions, but the last time… So, the Mag­ic Mil­lions set new records for the high­est priced horse sales this time round. Last time it hap­pened was Jan­u­ary 2008, when things were bull­ish and there was free mon­ey float­ing around and peo­ple were pay­ing up for hors­es, and it did­n’t end well after that. So, I’m hop­ing his­to­ry won’t repeat, but just to let peo­ple know, it’s a frothy econ­o­my out there still even though under­ly­ing it’s not great.

Cameron  19:15

Is that one of the legs of your stool that you always talk about.

Tony  19:18

It’s not, and again, like, I hate to make pre­dic­tions, but it cer­tain­ly caught my atten­tion.

Cameron  19:25

So, it may indi­cate that there’s way too much mon­ey float­ing around out there, and it’s sort of peak froth­i­ness at the moment.

Tony  19:33

Yeah, it’s going into risky assets. So, you would­n’t say hors­es are any­where near as good qual­i­ty com­pa­nies on the share mar­ket.

Cameron  19:41

Well, that one you just sold for twice what you want­ed to get for it sounds like it was pret­ty good.

Tony  19:45

It was, yeah, and that’s the clas­sic sur­vivor bias.

Cameron  19:50

Let’s not talk about all the ones that end­ed up as dog food. Let’s not talk about those, but this one, yeah.

Tony  19:56

So, that’s why I raised it. Just again, for what it’s worth, I’m not gonna change what I do, but it’s anoth­er har­bin­ger of the top of the mar­ket, I think. I want­ed to just put a gen­er­al call out to QAVers for feed­back on what sort of fees they think they’re sav­ing by doing it them­selves. I know a lot of our lis­ten­ers have come across from Super funds or have had mon­ey in man­age funds or have been using peo­ple to advise them on invest­ing, through direct accounts or what­ev­er. We have had lots of good feed­back from peo­ple say­ing that their returns are real­ly good and are get­ting bet­ter returns than what they were get­ting in the past. But I’m just inter­est­ed to know, have peo­ple got expe­ri­ence in how much they’ve been sav­ing in fees? Is it noth­ing, 1%, 2%, 3%? Because there are still fees involved in doing it your­self. A lot of peo­ple will set up a Super fund, they’re pay­ing a sub­scrip­tion to us and Stock Doc­tor, or what­ev­er. I’d just be inter­est­ed in know­ing what the sav­ings are on fees, because I think that’s not as impor­tant as the returns — because good returns trump every­thing — but it gets lost, I think, the fact that some peo­ple are out there pay­ing even 4% in fees. And if you think about the clas­sic way fund man­agers charge fees, is they typ­i­cal­ly have 1–2% for their admin, and they’ll charge 10% of out­per­for­mance, or even 20% of out­per­for­mance, which can add up to a high num­ber which they then take off your return. So, I just thought it’d be good, just as a touch­stone, to high­light the fact that even if you’re, you know, maybe not get­ting the returns you thought you would, you’re per­haps sav­ing on the oth­er end from fees. So, it’d be love­ly if peo­ple could come in and tell us what they’re sav­ing on fees.

Cameron  21:36

Okay, well, if any­one wants to share that, you can shoot me an email at [email protected] and I’ll let Tony know.

Tony  21:44

Yeah, thanks.

Cameron  21:44

Let’s talk about Con­fes­sion sea­son.

Tony  21:46

Yeah, we’re into it. And I noticed today a num­ber of retail­ers have come out with their final list of results, and their sales and results are doing rough­ly 20% above the con­sen­sus fore­cast so they felt the need to come out dur­ing con­fes­sion sea­son, which as we know is the month before report­ing sea­son. Under ASX and ASIC, I guess, rules they have to come out if they have a rea­son to believe that the con­sen­sus is mis­lead­ing the mar­ket and update peo­ple. So, this could be a one off because retail has had a good half and may not be the future, in terms of the sales may come off again this half as inter­est rates have risen. And cer­tain­ly, dur­ing COVID retail­ers did well, and when peo­ple could­n’t trav­el the mon­ey was going into retail. So, they may have had all their good. But any­way, we’re in con­fes­sion sea­son, be alive to the fact that peo­ple are going to come out with inter­est­ing announce­ments, and they may affect their shares one way or the oth­er. Peo­ple should be ready and watch­ing their share port­fo­lio over the next cou­ple of weeks to see if they need to make a change.

Cameron  22:52

Appar­ent­ly, George Pell kicked off con­fes­sion sea­son just before he passed last week. He con­fessed that he thought Pope Fran­cis was a dip­shit and run­ning the Catholic Church in the wrong direc­tion. And then con­ve­nient­ly went, well, let’s not get into where he went. Wher­ev­er it is, it was­n’t good enough, or bad enough, or enough enough, but that’s my per­son­al opin­ion.

Tony  23:18

Yeah, mine too, I’ve got to say. And, you know, he’s been through the courts. He was con­vict­ed, got off, spent time in jail. So, it’s pret­ty hard to run a court case on very, very old evi­dence. But what real­ly annoys me with Pell is the Mel­bourne solu­tion.

Cameron  23:34

Yeah.

Tony  23:34

He was the per­son that, for peo­ple we don’t know, who thought it was a great idea if some­one came and com­plained about the priests molest­ing their child, they’d just go lawyer up and Stonewall and try and starve the oth­er per­son with fees. And it was just a ter­ri­ble thing for a Chris­t­ian to do, I think.

Cameron  23:50

For any­body to do.

Tony  23:52

Well, par­tic­u­lar­ly for a Chris­t­ian. You’re right, for any­one, but par­tic­u­lar­ly for some­one pro­fess­ing those val­ues.

Cameron  23:57

Yeah, but like, you know, you know my take on the his­to­ry of Chris­tian­i­ty is replete with vio­lence, oppres­sion, racism, anti­semitism. When peo­ple go, “well, that’s not very Chris­t­ian.” I go “actu­al­ly, that’s absolute­ly Chris­t­ian because Chris­tian­i­ty has been rap­ing and pil­lag­ing its way around the world for nine­teen hun­dred years.” Well, a bit less; since Theo­do­sius in 390 CE. Yeah, and as I had to explain to a few peo­ple over the last few days, when the High Court reviewed the Pell deci­sion, they did­n’t declare he was inno­cent. They did­n’t look at the evi­dence. All they said was, and this still blows my mind, is actu­al­ly the jury should­n’t have been able to reach a con­clu­sion based on the evi­dence they were pre­sent­ed with. They should­n’t have been able to reach a con­clu­sion beyond rea­son­able doubt. They should have had some doubt, and there­fore they nul­li­fied the jury’s find­ing, and he was acquit­ted. But that’s nowhere near the same thing as declar­ing he was inno­cent of the charges, they just put a ques­tion mark over the jury’s con­clu­sion which in and of itself is quite extra­or­di­nary, I think. It does­n’t hap­pen very often that, you know, but I think it has some­thing to do with the high-pro­file nature of the per­son involved in the case and all that kind of stuff.

Tony  25:18

And poten­tial­ly of the per­sua­sion of the High Court, too, well, alleged­ly, I should­n’t say that.

Cameron  25:24

I don’t know any­thing about the per­sua­sion of the High Court. But yeah, it was a very extra­or­di­nary event.

Tony  25:29

It does blast a hole through the sys­tem. If you’re gonna be judged by a jury of your peers, and they’re swayed by emo­tion­al evi­dence as well as phys­i­cal evi­dence, and they find you guilty, and then the high court comes along and says, “well, actu­al­ly, if it had’ve been a jury of lawyers, they would’ve let you off.” It’s like, well, what do we have here? A sys­tem of review by law or review by peer?

Cameron  25:52

Any who. Let’s talk about lithi­um.

Tony  25:57

Anoth­er phan­tom liv­ing in the sky. I raised it because I spoke last week about won­der­ing what the next thing was that was going to be replace Bit­coin or After­pay, or, you know, tech stocks, what­ev­er. And I thought it was lithi­um. And then Livewire today put out their list of the most tipped small caps for 2023. So, this is an annu­al thing they do, they ask read­ers of the Livewire email to put in their tips for both large caps and small caps. The small cap one has sev­en out of ten min­ing com­pa­nies on it, and the oth­er three are tech stocks. So, I don’t think the desire to shoot for the moon has gone away from the peo­ple who’ve replied to this. And there’s a large num­ber of peo­ple reply­ing and giv­ing their tips. Whether or not they invest in those shares is anoth­er thing, but these are their tips. But a lot of the sev­en min­ers, I think most of them are involved in elec­tri­fi­ca­tion. So, they’re either lithi­um or nick­el, and some rare earth stocks. And it just bog­gles the mind, again, that a large num­ber of peo­ple can come to the share mar­ket and treat it as a casi­no. As Buf­fet­t’s been say­ing for decades, they’re just hop­ing to land on a lucky num­ber which pays them a thou­sand to one when, if they walk down the street, they’re gonna walk past fab­u­lous qual­i­ty busi­ness­es, hard­work­ing busi­ness­es that have been around for a long time pay­ing good yields and good returns and they can invest in them cheap­ly. And I just don’t under­stand why they do the for­mer and not the lat­ter. I still can’t under­stand it.

Cameron  27:30

In their defence, they prob­a­bly don’t under­stand how to do the lat­ter.

Tony  27:34

Yeah. They fol­low the sto­ries.

Cameron  27:37

Yes. And it’s nat­ur­al to want to get the high­est pos­si­ble return as quick­ly as pos­si­ble for your mon­ey. But the way that you do it is just kind of bor­ing.

Tony  27:51

It is, yeah. That’s why we have to throw out ref­er­ences to the Catholic Church and Chris­tian­i­ty.

Cameron  27:58

Al Paci­no, Nazis. We have to sex it up.

Tony  28:05

We don’t actu­al­ly believe that stuff, peo­ple, we just throw it in to sex it up.

Cameron  28:08

Well, that’s exact­ly, you know, what hap­pened with Chris­tian­i­ty. You know, they start­ed off going “we had this guy, and he was, you know, walk­ing around, he was a preach­er.” “Yeah, what hap­pened?” “Well, he died.” Then they’d go “next!”  And they’d go, ” Oh, hold on. Did I men­tion that he could walk on water?” “Real­ly? Tell me more.” “Oh, yes. He could walk on water, and he brought peo­ple back from the dead!” “From the dead?” “Yeah.” “Are you sure they weren’t just sleep­ing?”

Tony  28:39

So, the first gospel sold okay, but the fourth gospel, oof.

Cameron  28:45

Speak­ing of Mon­ty Python, have you ever seen or heard of their Ger­man episodes?

Tony  28:51

You mean the joke that won the war?

Cameron  28:53

The two episodes that they did com­plete­ly in Ger­man lan­guage for Ger­man audi­ences?

Tony  28:59

No.

Cameron  29:00

It’s on Net­flix. I stum­bled across it the oth­er day, and I was like, the hell is this? I’ve nev­er heard of this before. And I thought it must be a joke and I start­ed watch­ing it. No, John Cleese, speak­ing flu­ent Ger­man. All of the sketch­es are in Ger­man, nar­ra­tions in Ger­man, every­thing’s in Ger­man. And I looked it up, and appar­ent­ly, they did make two episodes com­plete­ly in Ger­man. It was sup­posed to be a series. It was com­mis­sioned by some com­pa­ny in Ger­many in the mid ’60s. Chris­sy was watch­ing it, and Chris­sy speaks Ger­man, she’s like, “wow, this is like…” You’re watch­ing John Cleese nar­rate the thing in his, you know, his news­cast­er thing in Ger­man. She said, “he’s got zero accent, that’s amaz­ing.” And I looked it up, it was all pho­net­ic. They had scripts in pho­net­ics that they had mem­o­rised, then after two episodes they were like, “we can’t do this any­more. This is too hard.” It takes too much work to have to do the whole thing pho­net­i­cal­ly. So, none of them spoke Ger­man. And the fun­ny thing is, I’ve seen clips of them doing live shows where they lapse into Ger­man and start speak­ing Ger­man, and yet none of them can speak Ger­man. So, I think they’re either fak­ing the Ger­man and I could­n’t tell the dif­fer­ence, or they mem­o­rised these things that they did in the ’60s and they can just fall into telling jokes in Ger­man. But any­way, that’s it for some­thing com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent. It’s worth check­ing out. It’s on Net­flix, Mon­ty Python, it’s Fly­ing Cir­cus but in Ger­man.

Cameron  30:36

Got a pulled pork for us this week, Tony?

Tony  30:38

I do. I have a pulled pork on Sev­en West Media, SWM.

Cameron  30:43

Oh, yeah.

Cameron  1:06:41

The QAV Pod­cast is a pro­duc­tion of Space­craft Pub­lish­ing Pro­pri­etary Lim­it­ed, autho­rised rep­re­sen­ta­tive of AFSL 520442, AFS rep­re­sen­ta­tive num­ber 001292718. Please don’t make any invest­ment deci­sions based sole­ly on lis­ten­ing to this pod­cast. This is pre­sent­ed as gen­er­al advice only, not per­son­al finan­cial advice. We don’t know your per­son­al finan­cial cir­cum­stances. Please see a finan­cial plan­ner before mak­ing any invest­ment deci­sions.