QAV 606 CLUB

Cameron  00:06

Wel­come back to QAV, TK. This is episode 606. We’re record­ing on Tues­day the sev­enth of Feb­ru­ary 2023. You still have COVID, Tony.

Tony  00:22

I do, hope­ful­ly get­ting over it soon.

Cameron  00:24

That’s no good. But you sound­ed all bet­ter last week, but then not so good lat­er on, huh?

Tony  00:30

Yeah. Went back down­hill again. So, yeah, hope­ful­ly clear­ing up this week and I can get on with life. But I’m still test­ing pos­i­tive. Appar­ent­ly, that could hap­pen for the rest of my life. I mean, I don’t think they put too much empha­sis on test­ing pos­i­tive these days, but I am. So, just keep­ing a low pro­file, try­ing to get bet­ter.

Cameron  00:50

So, you’re not going out? Stay­ing home most­ly?

Tony  00:52

Oh, god yeah. I’m just stay­ing home. You know, I’m just stay­ing in my office and my room and the bal­cony.

Cameron  01:00

You men­tioned to me last week that Jen­ny was wait­ing on you hand and foot. You’re not just fak­ing this, so she keeps wait­ing on you, are you?

Tony  01:06

It’s cer­tain­ly been good. I have the shout out to Jen; she’s done a great job of look­ing after me. Real­ly has. It’s been great. But no, I’m not fak­ing it. I’d glad­ly give it up and go out­side again.

Cameron  01:19

Okay.

Tony  01:20

And get away. My suit­case has been packed since Sun­day wait­ing to leave for a hol­i­day.

Cameron  01:25

Hmm. Well, I hope you feel bet­ter soon.

Tony  01:28

That’s all right. Thank you. Yeah, I always get chest things worse than most peo­ple, unfor­tu­nate­ly.

Cameron  01:35

Yeah. Sort of an asthma‑y thing.

Tony  01:38

Yeah, I had asth­ma as a kid.

Cameron  01:41

Well, let’s talk about the mar­ket. Been a bit of a fun­ny old week on the All Ords. If you look at the chart, the week­ly chart, it looks fun­ny. Like, last week it would go up every morn­ing and then crash in the after­noon. Go up in the morn­ing, crash in the after­noon, go up in the morn­ing, crash­es in the after­noon. Did the oppo­site today; sort of crashed this morn­ing and then seems to have recov­ered last time I checked. It was up a cou­ple of points, I think, by the last time I looked around about lunchtime. Our port­fo­lio went up a lit­tle bit, the dum­my port­fo­lio, last week. NHC sta­bilised but we’re now run­ning at 17.7% CAGR per annum since incep­tion ver­sus our bench­mark, the STW, which is run­ning at about 8.2% per annum over the same time peri­od. So, we’re doing a lit­tle bit bet­ter than dou­ble the STW since incep­tion, which for new peo­ple was the begin­ning of Sep­tem­ber 2019 when we filled up our first port­fo­lio. Still way behind for the finan­cial year, but I know you’re gonna talk about this lat­er: it’s been a real­ly, sort of, record begin­ning of the cal­en­dar year for the ASX, and I think the US mar­ket’s hav­ing a bumper year as well. Talk a lit­tle bit about that lat­er on in news. Com­mod­i­ty updates. A lot of com­modi­ties became Josephine’s this week; iron ore, gold, cop­per, zinc and tin all became Josephine’s. I got a feel­ing iron ore was already a Josephine, but Alex said it had just become one. Do you remem­ber what it was last week?

Tony  03:19

I don’t sor­ry. I think it was a Josephine, but I can’t. And just want­ed to draw atten­tion to coal, to ther­mal coal. I checked it this morn­ing, it’s very close to a sell. Tech­ni­cal­ly it’s a Josephine, but it I think in a mat­ter of days if it keeps going it’s going to be a sell.

Cameron  03:35

Right? Well, that’s gonna have a big impact on our port­fo­lio. We got a lot of coal stocks.

Tony  03:39

Yeah, I was just look­ing at the chart. I think last month it dropped some­thing like 30–35%, the coal price, so it’s down a lot.

Cameron  03:46

Coal price that is?

Tony  03:48

Yeah, ther­mal coal price.

Cameron  03:49

Yeah, I think we got a ques­tion lat­er on, a late ques­tion that came in just about coal and fudg­ing sell lines and that kind of thing, but might be too late, any­way.

Tony  04:01

You don’t need to bud­get it, I don’t think; it’s gonna cross pret­ty soon if it keeps going.

Cameron  04:05

Yeah. NCM takeover bid, Tony. Did you read about this, has it crossed all the medi­a’s this morn­ing?

Tony  04:15

Oh, yeah. It’s been the Fin Review front page for a cou­ple of days now.

Cameron  04:18

Right. New­mont, the $24 bil­lion bought dol­lar bid for New­crest. I think we’ve owned New­crest maybe at some point, but it’s not in our port­fo­lio at the moment.

Tony  04:29

No, it’s the biggest gold com­pa­ny in Aus­tralia. And it’s been a chron­ic under­per­former; prob­a­bly because of its size. I mean, there were issues around man­age­ment a lit­tle while ago and they’ve got an act­ing CEO now, so they’ve been mak­ing attempts to clean it up, I guess. But I guess it’s a bit like big min­ing com­pa­nies every­where, but if you’re a small gold com­pa­ny and you acquire a mine, it makes a big dif­fer­ence to your share price. But if you’re a com­pa­ny as big as New­crest and you open a new mine or acquire anoth­er one, it does­n’t real­ly move the nee­dle, so to speak. So, they tend to just trade with the com­mod­i­ty cycle and under­ly­ing earn­ings. But no, it has­n’t been much. I think actu­al­ly over time the share price has gone down in the last ten years.

Cameron  05:17

Well, I’m look­ing at about a year ago, it was trad­ing at $22.99. Went up to $28.8 Feb­ru­ary last year, then fell down to $16.80 and is back up at $23. So, if you had man­aged to buy it when it turned around, it was has­n’t been a bad invest­ment over the last six months.

Tony  05:37

No, and I don’t recall it being on the buy list. It’s just been too big, too lum­ber­ing, I guess. And, you know, biggest gold min­er in Aus­tralia, so it’s picked over a lot by the ana­lysts. So, it tends to trade at, you know, at least fair val­ue, if not a pre­mi­um, which is some­thing that just does­n’t get onto our buy list.

Cameron  05:55

Okay, well, we miss out on that, then.

Tony  06:00

Well, it has­n’t been except­ed yet. This is like, this is the toe in the door, this is a knock on the door from New­mont. And New­mont and New­crest used to be the same com­pa­ny. They’ve had this habit­u­al split, acquire, divest. They’ve cer­tain­ly been an invest­ment bankers’ friend over the last ten-twen­ty years or so. So, noth­ing may come of this. The cur­rent pre­mi­um is, I think, about 23% or some­thing like that, it said in the paper today. So, it’s not an excit­ing sort of takeover offer. I sus­pect it’s just the first sal­vo.

Cameron  06:34

Right, but it has had a good six months share price wise. Would have been nice to have held it.

Tony  06:40

Yeah. And the gold price has gone up in the last six months, so that’s prob­a­bly why.

Cameron  06:44

Mov­ing on to a dif­fer­ent min­ing com­pa­ny, WHC. Annette asked a ques­tion on our Slack chan­nel about their coal break­down. I had them down in my spread­sheet as cok­ing, but she picked up in their annu­al report they’re actu­al­ly report­ing 82% ther­mal and 18% metallurgical/coking in their FY 22. Report. So, I just want­ed to point that out for any­one out there that’s got or think­ing about WHC or owns WHC. They’re real­ly tied to the ther­mal price, which as you said is about to become a sell. So, update your notes on that if you’re hold­ing them. The RBA’s sup­posed to lift rates in about ten min­utes, Tony. An announce­ment com­ing?

Tony  07:31

Yeah, they are. It’s first Tues­day of the month, so RBA day. They did­n’t meet in Jan­u­ary because it was a month off for them, their hol­i­day. But yeah, you know, most econ­o­mists expect them to lift rates either by 0.25 or half of 1% today.

Cameron  07:47

And this is because the econ­o­my’s just doing too well.

Tony  07:50

Well, CPI is up. I don’t know that the econ­o­my is doing that well. It’s not doing too bad­ly, but it’s CPI. And I don’t know if rais­ing inter­est rates is going to have the effect the RBA wants, real­ly, because I sus­pect that infla­tion isn’t being dri­ven by spend­ing. I mean, there has been a lot of spend­ing out there because the RBA dropped rates dur­ing COVID and there was a big cash splash, so we’re at the tail end of that. And cer­tain­ly, rais­ing inter­est rates will damp­en the econ­o­my, for sure, but I sus­pect it’s a sup­ply chain issue. Like, you know, the war in Ukraine is going to have a big­ger impact, I think, on whether we have infla­tion than peo­ple’s spend­ing habits in the main. They obvi­ous­ly both con­tribute to it, but I don’t see how rais­ing inter­est rates is going to solve high oil prices, high gas prices, pay­ing more for build­ing mate­ri­als, etc., etc.

Cameron  08:39

So, what can the RBA do about the sup­ply side squeeze forc­ing prices up?

Tony  08:46

Well, noth­ing. It’s not in their remit. It’s as War­ren Buf­fet­t’s always said: “if your only tool is a ham­mer, every­thing’s a nail.” So, they see infla­tion going up and they raise inter­est rates. I’m not say­ing it’s the wrong thing to do, right? Because inter­est rates were arti­fi­cial­ly low and there was an asset bub­ble, so I’m not say­ing it’s the wrong thing to do. And we’re prob­a­bly only going to get back to, you know, what I would call a neu­tral set­ting. So, over my life­time, 3%-4% RBA rates is about what they nor­mal­ly are. So, we’ve been through a peri­od of very low rates which has led to house price bub­bles, asset bub­bles, stock mar­ket bub­bles for growth stocks, that kind of thing. So, it’s not a bad thing to lift inter­est rates. But cen­tral banks do have a, they’re a bit like a, you know, heli­copter pilot try­ing to work the joy­stick and bring it in for a smooth land­ing. I mean, if you’ve watched a heli­copter land, it does­n’t come down smooth­ly. It jerks, it gets hit by the wind, it buf­fets, it goes up, it comes down. That’s what we’re in for, unfor­tu­nate­ly.

Cameron  09:42

And if you’re on the Gold Coast, you just might end up hit­ting anoth­er heli­copter. Okay, well, we’ll obvi­ous­ly keep an eye on that, and we’ll have to adjust our spread­sheets if the rates go up again. AFR had an arti­cle in Chan­ti­cleer, I think it’s still Tony Boyd writ­ing. I don’t know if the han­dover has hap­pened yet, but it’s enti­tled “Ray Dalio, Cathie Wood, and the fate of the FOMO ral­ly.” Any­thing with Ray Dalio in the head­line, I’m gonna read it. “The stun­ning ral­ly on the ASX and Wall Street is start­ing to have some echoes of bull­ish fren­zy in 2021, but the back­drop is very dif­fer­ent.” And it goes on to talk about how a lot of stocks have been boom­ing recent­ly over there. Face­book’s own­er Meta rock­et­ed 23% high­er. Who else did we have here they were talk­ing about? Cathie Wood’s Ark invest fund. Well, first of all, Meta plat­for­m’s year to date gain now stands at 50%. Ark invest fund, Cathie Wood’s fund, is up 28% in Jan­u­ary, it’s best month­ly gain on record. Elon Musk’s Tes­la was up a stag­ger­ing 74% this year. And on the ASX, they were say­ing that James Hardie was down 46% last year, is up more than 30% in 2023. That’s crazy. Kogan plunged 55% in 2022, up 26% this year. Zip, the BNPL firm down 83% last year is up 21%. So, are we going into anoth­er sort of crazy bub­ble fren­zy, Tony? We just got out of a bub­ble. We had a bub­ble then we had a crash, and now we’re back in a bub­ble again already. What’s going on?

Tony  11:32

Oh, well, clas­sic fear and greed. I think you post­ed some­thing on Face­book dur­ing the week say­ing that the econ­o­my would work bet­ter if we had arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence allo­cat­ing the resources. I’m not sure the share mar­ket would work because it needs human emo­tion to swing like a pen­du­lum. But all those stocks you talked about are up this year, but they’re still a falling knife. They’re all much low­er than what they were twelve months or even more ago, and Tes­la is a clas­sic exam­ple of that. It’s up a lot this year, but it’s below what it was twelve months ago, and that was below what it was twelve months before that. So, if you look at the graph, it’s a falling knife. They all are. And this is just clas­sic. So, at some point some­thing gets sold off and gets over­sold, and the pen­du­lum swings back the oth­er way. Peo­ple say, “ooh, Tes­la looks cheap. I’ll buy some,” and then they come back in. Although, I mean, what’s the back­drop to this, and what Ray Dalio, I think, is allud­ing to, is the fact that peo­ple are try­ing to sec­ond guess the Fed. There’re now signs in the longer term dat­ed bond mar­ket that bond traders don’t think that we’re going to go into a reces­sion, or if we do, it’s going to be shal­low and not too dif­fi­cult. And so, peo­ple like Cathie Woods, who are, you know, rely­ing on low­er inter­est rates are say­ing, “well, this could mean the Feds going to actu­al­ly drop inter­est rates in the future, and that’s good for all these growth stocks.” So, that’s what she’s pin­ning her hopes on. And she’s a cheer­leader for that, so rah rah rah and her stocks are up. First­ly, I like the head­line: it’s FOMO, it’s Fear Of Miss­ing Out. It’s com­plete­ly dri­ven by human emo­tion, fear and greed, and it’s noise in the mar­ket, as far as I’m con­cerned. Cou­ple of things I noticed in that arti­cle; it was actu­al­ly a real­ly inter­est­ing arti­cle, because it talked about a num­ber of oth­er met­rics going on in the mar­ket. And I should, I was going to point out that we’ve had the best Jan­u­ary start to the share mar­ket in ASX his­to­ry, it was up some­thing like 6.25%. So, that’s quite a lot for a month. And again, it’s dri­ven by peo­ple think­ing that the RBA is going to at least slow down its rate of inter­est rates and per­haps even start to drop them in the sec­ond half of the year, because the share mar­ket casts a nine-month shad­ow usu­al­ly. Peo­ple are look­ing at what’s going to hap­pen in nine months when they make their deci­sions on what to invest. I’m not sure about that, and I don’t pre­dict, so I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing. But I mean, that’s a big bet to make, try­ing to guess what the RBA is gonna do or the Feds gonna do, and then to see that start to take off and to join in because it’s tak­ing off, there’s a lot of human psy­chol­o­gy in that which is all dri­ven by fear and greed and hope. So, I’m not sure it’s going to end well. But any­way, the arti­cle was good because it talked about some oth­er things, and I think in the first bit of the arti­cle it talks about how stock mar­ket strate­gists only six weeks ago were say­ing that the mar­ket was going to tank this year because there’s a reces­sion com­ing. And then six weeks lat­er, they’re say­ing, “no, the Feds done with rais­ing inter­est rates, it’s gonna be great,” and so the stock mar­kets had its best Jan­u­ary on record. So, you know, fair dinkum putting your faith in Stock Mar­ket Strate­gist. What a waste of time that is. In six weeks, they’ve gone from black to white, so that’s just crazy. The oth­er inter­est­ing thing I saw was what’s called the “weight of mon­ey” argu­ment, which I’ve always put a lot of stock in. So, the author of the arti­cle talks about the fact that there’s bil­lions of dol­lars of cash sit­ting wait­ing to be deployed, and they were spec­u­lat­ing whether or not this kind of ral­ly would drag that cash back into the mar­ket. It’s pos­si­bly start­ing to, but when­ev­er I’ve seen cash build­ing up on the on the side­lines, it could take a long time before it gets deployed. But it gen­er­al­ly is the first sig­nal at some stage, in the next six months or so, there’s going to be a stock mar­ket ral­ly. Which may be hap­pen­ing now. But that gets called “the weight of mon­ey” argu­ment. When cash sits on the side­lines, it can’t sit there for­ev­er; it will get deployed at some stage, and that’s when the mar­ket will start to take off again. So, that was inter­est­ing. And the last point I want­ed to make, there was a line in the arti­cle say­ing that retail investors were get­ting back into the mar­ket this Jan­u­ary, which makes sense giv­en the share mar­kets up, but it had a stat there say­ing that retail share­hold­ers had a record month and they made up 23% of stock and ETF trades in the US. I sort of scratched my head and said, that means there’s 67% of insti­tu­tions buy­ing ETFs, and I just don’t get that. If you’re an insti­tu­tion­al investor and you’re charg­ing some­one to man­age their mon­ey, and all you’re doing is going and buy­ing an ETF, well, I mean…

Cameron  11:49

You can go for a long lunch.

Tony  14:47

Mon­ey for jam, isn’t it? But again, I point to the fact that we’re in a strange indus­try where peo­ple put their fee income objec­tives ahead of what’s right for their clients. But if you check your funds, if they’re hold­ing lots of ETFs, do it your­self and save the fees.

Cameron  16:24

Well, on one hand, we crit­i­cise funds for not being able to match the index let alone beat the index. So, they lis­ten, and they go, “okay, well, we’ll just buy the ETFs we can’t be crit­i­cised for not match­ing the index per­for­mance at least.”

Tony  16:38

Yeah, look, I get it in some cas­es. Like, if I was run­ning a super fund and I thought we should have some expo­sure to inter­na­tion­al shares and I thought it was cheap­er to buy an inter­na­tion­al ETF rather than to high­er an inter­na­tion­al team of stock­bro­kers, maybe it makes sense. But when you start to ques­tion whether you super fund needs expo­sure to inter­na­tion­al shares if it does­n’t have it. Like, what’s wrong with local shares, or what­ev­er else. It gets back to this whole allo­ca­tion fal­la­cy that the stock mar­ket goes on with about how much you have to have in each asset class as diver­si­fi­ca­tion to pro­tect you from a down­turn. But when the shit hits the fan, every­thing turns brown. It does­n’t, it does­n’t dis­crim­i­nate.

Cameron  17:16

When­ev­er I do our port­fo­lio reports each week and I look at the ASX this finan­cial year, the STW is up about 22% for this finan­cial year, ver­sus, I think we’re run­ning at about 7%, you know, that’s crazy. That’s a big dif­fer­ence. There’s a lot of mon­ey going into the mar­ket out there in this finan­cial year. It’s been crazy in a mar­ket where we’ve got war, COVID in Chi­na, sup­ply chain issues, you know, coun­tries pay­ing more for ener­gy prices all around the world, et cetera, et cetera, inter­est rates going up con­stant­ly, you know, every month or six weeks inter­est rates are going up here and, in the US, and around the world. And yet the mar­ket is still boom­ing.

Tony  18:09

Yeah, well, I mean, think about what the mar­ket is; we’re talk­ing about the top twen­ty stocks, that’s going to be most of the per­for­mance of the STW or the ASX. So, four major banks, two super­mar­ket retail­ers, Wood­side Ener­gy, BHP, RIO, there’s half of it. All of those are ben­e­fit­ing from either high­er inter­est rates or high­er com­mod­i­ty prices. So, that’s why the mar­ket is boom­ing. When those stocks boom, they tend not to be on our buy list. I have Wood­side and I have Mac­quar­ie, so I’ve got two of the top twen­ty stocks, but that’s prob­a­bly about it.

Cameron  18:44

Well, I just bought some NAB myself last week and bought NAB and West­pac for the light port­fo­lios. They were on our buy list, so they haven’t been boom­ing, or at least they’re still a buy for us.

Tony  18:59

Well, I sold NAB a month or so ago because it went below its 3PTL line. But the banks have been doing well as they do in a ris­ing inter­est rate envi­ron­ment, because they’re slow to put up sav­ings deposit rates, and they’re quick to put up mort­gage rates, of course. And the same thing with super­mar­kets: they cry food infla­tion and they put their prices up more than their sup­pli­ers put their prices up, and their mar­gins increase. That’s all hap­pen­ing. Now, you know, does that mean we’re sil­ly not to buy those? Maybe, but we stick to our knit­ting and even­tu­al­ly they’ll slow down and val­ue stocks that we hold will increase more. And just on that, there’s been some fan­tas­tic results in the last week or so. I mean, Mac­quar­ie came out today with a good result. Their share price is up which is great, because I think I’ve owned them since they were about $1.60, and now they’re get­ting up clos­er to $2 again, so that’s been fan­tas­tic. Janus Hen­der­son Group came out with good results last week and their stock price went up at least 10%. 10% in the first day. So, this is how QAV is meant to work dur­ing report­ing sea­son; we hold stocks and they’re good com­pa­nies, and they pro­duce bet­ter results when their share price goes up. Cred­it Corp put out good num­bers; they went down because they were call­ing a flat fore­cast, but they’ve recov­ered again as peo­ple realise that Cred­it Corp peren­ni­al­ly under promise and over deliv­er. And that’s prob­a­bly going to be the theme of this report­ing sea­son, if there is one, that com­pa­ny CEOs tend to have a bit of a herd men­tal­i­ty. So, inter­est rates are ris­ing, they’re all gonna say, “oh, we can’t give any guid­ance, we don’t know what’s going to hap­pen; whether peo­ple will slam their wal­let shut, whether they’ll keep spend­ing. So, best we can do is to say, we’ll prob­a­bly do as good as we did last year.” And that’s sound con­ser­v­a­tive guid­ance giv­ing, but the mar­ket will sort that out over the next com­ing cou­ple of months and there’ll be some win­ners in there which are going to keep on doing as well as they’ve been doing. Typ­i­cal­ly, the qual­i­ty com­pa­nies. As Buf­fett says, a qual­i­ty com­pa­ny is one that can put its prices up in a ris­ing inter­est rate envi­ron­ment.

Cameron  21:00

It’s fun­ny. If I go back and look at the three-year chart for the dum­my port­fo­lio, and I look at where our major peaks lie, the major spikes in the val­ue of the port­fo­lio, they tend to hap­pen end of Feb­ru­ary and end of July. There’re some oth­ers; Octo­ber, sort of March, April, and sort of July, August. So, report­ing peri­ods.

Tony  21:33

Exact­ly, when the new num­bers come out.

Cameron  21:35

Right. I’d nev­er realised that before. So, that’s where we get most of our growth, is around report­ing peri­ods.

Tony  21:43

Yeah, right. That’s typ­i­cal­ly what hap­pens; we jump 10 or 20%, and we hang on. Next report­ing peri­od comes out, we jump 10 or 20%, and we hang on.

Cameron  21:52

Oh, that’s inter­est­ing. We’ll see if it holds true this time. Speak­ing of report­ing, I know Nick Scali came out with some num­bers, and some­body asked if you’d do a pulled pork. We’ve got some ques­tions about Nick Scali this week, I think you’re going to talk about them.

Tony  22:08

I am, yeah. Just in the news, last cou­ple of things. So, I spoke about the stocks improv­ing, which is good; Mac­quar­ie, Janus Hen­der­son, CCP. But I did want to point out on the flip side, Open­pay, one of the BNPL stocks, is now in admin­is­tra­tion. That was announced today. Their high was around $4.28 dur­ing the BNPL craze a year or two ago, and their last trade was 20 cents, and now they’re zero. So, I only men­tion that because we keep see­ing this bub­ble burst cycle in the mar­ket, and peo­ple keep falling for it. So, I think this is going to hap­pen to some of the lithi­um min­ers. Some of them will do okay, some of them will go up, come back and keep trad­ing, but some of them are going to go to zero. So, just be aware of that if you get car­ried away with tips or FOMO or any­thing like that with the lat­est bub­ble. Just be care­ful.

Cameron  23:03

Well, you know, before you go on. This whole thing about human behav­iour and get­ting sucked in, you know, I see that in media cov­er­age for geopol­i­tics and wars and that kind of stuff, too. There’s this, you know, Twit­ter-gate thing that Matt Taib­bi has been report­ing on. Colum­bia School of Jour­nal­ism came out with a major report a week or so ago talk­ing about how the main­stream media in the US basi­cal­ly just lied through their teeth and made-up stuff with the whole Rus­sia-gate thing from 2016 to 2020, when they were try­ing to tie Trump to Putin. There was con­stant wall to wall sto­ries about Rus­si­a’s infil­tra­tion of the Trump cam­paign, Trump admin­is­tra­tion. And it end­ed up as noth­ing; there was no evi­dence, real­ly, that could tie them. Some guys had some con­nec­tions with some busi­ness­men, but there was real­ly noth­ing there like the media was por­tray­ing. Columbi­a’s School of Jour­nal­ism came out and just tore the main­stream media to shreds. Main­stream media are doing their usu­al mea cul­pa: “oh, maybe we did get a lit­tle bit car­ried away there. We will nev­er do it again.” I was like, well, we’ve seen this before. They did that with the Iraq inva­sion. There’re always peo­ple who should know bet­ter get­ting caught up and just believ­ing these sto­ries when­ev­er the media sees an oppor­tu­ni­ty to sell news­pa­pers, or you know, increase their rat­ings for their TV shows, their radio shows. They jump on it, peo­ple fall for it, a few years lat­er we find out that there was noth­ing to it and they go, “whoops, we should­n’t have done that. Mea cul­pa. We won’t do it again.” Then it hap­pens again, and the same peo­ple fall for it every time. And the same thing is prob­a­bly true in invest­ing too, right?

Tony  24:43

Oh, yeah.

Cameron  24:43

Peo­ple just fall for the cycles, get caught up in it over and over and over.

Tony  24:49

Yeah, I mean, the first point to make is that a busi­ness’s incen­tives are always mis­aligned to the cus­tomers incen­tives, usu­al­ly because, you know, they’re try­ing to sell you some­thing and at some point, they’ll realise that they can hold their nose and sell it to you even if you don’t real­ly want to buy it. So, if it bleeds, it leads, and that’s good for news­pa­per sales and media sales. It’s good for politi­cians because they can get peo­ple worked up to sup­port an agen­da or to cas­ti­gate some­one. So yeah, it’s exact­ly the same in almost every indus­try, real­ly; not just news­pa­pers, as you say, finan­cial ser­vices. But yeah, I mean, Buf­fet­t’s been say­ing for years, “buy an index fund or do it your­self”. It’s such a sim­ple mantra, and yet there’s this whole world­wide indus­try out there which just bypass­es that thought, because it’s not in their inter­est. And that’s prob­a­bly the same in almost every indus­try, real­ly.

Cameron  25:46

And peo­ple, I don’t know, it’s just human nature. We just fall for it over and over and over again.

Tony  25:52

Yeah, well part of the fact is fresh meat. I mean, a lot of peo­ple don’t pay atten­tion to the stock mar­ket and then they come into a lit­tle bit of mon­ey, and it’s a bit like, you know, hon­ey to a fly. They attract all kinds of advice and tips and things, and with­out expe­ri­ence, they get sucked in. So, I com­plete­ly under­stand that and for­give the peo­ple for it, I just don’t for­give the big insti­tu­tions that take advan­tage of it.

Cameron  26:16

I caught up with an old mate of mine from Microsoft for cof­fee a week or so ago. He was there before me; he was there dur­ing the boom times in the share price in the late 90s when the Microsoft share price was going gang­busters. And I said to him, “are you still liv­ing on those Microsoft mil­lions?” And he laughed. He said, “dude, I got caught up with every­one else.” There was a firm, who’ll remain name­less, who did the rounds at Microsoft. I remem­ber meet­ing them at some point. They would go to the Microsoft employ­ees and say, “look, your shares are boom­ing, they’re great. You should take out mar­gin loans against your share port­fo­lios, your options, because it’s always gonna go up. Look, they’ve been going up, they’ve been dou­bling every year for twen­ty years. They’re always going to dou­ble every year.” Of course, the dot­com crash hap­pened, and the DOJ case hap­pened, and Microsoft shares halved, I think, and then did­n’t move for quite a long time. And appar­ent­ly, lots of Microsoft employ­ees got burned and end­ed up hav­ing to sell hous­es and hol­i­day hous­es and boats and lux­u­ry vehi­cles. They were fresh meat, I guess, for this firm that was just going around sell­ing them on this idea of mar­gin loans against their options port­fo­lios.

Tony  27:42

Yeah, wow. One of the prob­lems if you’re a Microsoft employ­ee is you’re rich on paper when your share price goes up like that. But until you sell some­thing, you don’t get the mon­ey. So, if some­one comes along and says, “hey, I can use that for col­lat­er­al,” and sud­den­ly you can go and buy a beach house with it, I can see the attrac­tion to it. But yeah, it’s a dumb thing to do.

Cameron  28:00

But I would­n’t have known it was a dumb thing to do back then.

Tony  28:03

No.

Cameron  28:03

I’m sure most peo­ple did­n’t know. If you have a finan­cial advi­sor, come and tell you that this is what you should be doing and every­one you know is doing it, all of your col­leagues and your boss­es are doing it, you just go, “okay. That’s the thing to do, right? Easy mon­ey.”

Tony  28:18

That came across my desk one day. I mean, I won’t name names either, but some­one close to me and very much smarter than me, came to me and said, “hey, I’m doing this agri­cul­tur­al invest­ment that my accoun­tants put me on to, and you should have a look at it because it’s all tax deductible. It’s this tea tree plan­ta­tion, which, you know, is going to be the next big thing in mul­ti­vi­t­a­mins and oils and what­not. In sev­en years, I got this con­tract in place, blah, blah, blah.” So, I took it to my accoun­tant who was a pret­ty safe pair of hands that I trust­ed for a while and he just went, “mate, part 4A of the Tax Act, it does­n’t mat­ter how you struc­ture this, the tax office can just say ‘no, that’s an attempt to avoid pay­ing tax’.” The whole indus­try even­tu­al­ly got closed down. The gov­ern­ment rewrote the tax laws to specif­i­cal­ly cater for it. This per­son who was close to me lost all their mon­ey, plus they were then a recip­i­ent of a class action of peo­ple who were suing these tea tree own­ers for dam­ages. And any­way, it was a real night­mare for them. And the basic rule is if it looks too good to be true, it prob­a­bly is. And, you know, if you’re not sure, get it checked out by a tax advi­sor that you pay by the hour to give you impar­tial advice. The tax advi­sor to this per­son close to me who gave them advice was receiv­ing com­mis­sions; it was free advice, right, to this per­son close to me. How­ev­er, they were mak­ing a lot of mon­ey out of putting peo­ple into the plan­ta­tion schemes.

Cameron  29:54

I think that’s our prob­lem with QAV. Peo­ple look at it and think it’s too good to be true. It’s prob­a­bly a con.

Tony  29:59

Yeah. Look, pos­si­bly. We should dou­ble our prices. Did­n’t we have a busi­ness advi­sor ear­ly on who said we’re not charg­ing enough.

Cameron  30:06

Yeah. Any­how, you want to do NCK?

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Cameron  1:15:58

The QAV Pod­cast is a pro­duc­tion of Space­craft Pub­lish­ing Pro­pri­etary Lim­it­ed, autho­rised rep­re­sen­ta­tive of AFS sell 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 invest­ing deci­sions.

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