FAQ
Our answers to some common questions.
What is QAV Light?
QAV Light is a stock recommendation service for people who don’t have the time to learn how to invest themselves using QAV Club.
We manage four portfolios in real-time and our QAV Light subscribers get weekly email updates advising what we are buying and selling. They can invest along with us.
How do you decide what to buy and sell?
We follow the QAV process developed by Tony Kynaston over the last 30 years.
QAV is a data-analysis driven process where we try to use financial data to weed out the bad companies and invest in the good ones.
Think of it like this: the ASX is made up of a few thousand companies. Some of those companies are consistently profitable (good). Most are not consistently profitable (bad). Of those that are good, a few are undervalued. Most are overvalued. When all of the returns of all of those companies are tallied up each year, that is the performance of the ASX index.
By only investing in good companies that are undervalued, we believe we can consistently out-perform the index. That’s what Tony has been able to achieve over the last 25+ years. His average return is around double the market.
And that’s what we’ve been able to achieve in the last few years with the QAV Dummy Portfolio.
What is your model portfolio construction?
The QAV process doesn’t pay any attention to ‘weightings’ and portfolio construction apart from buying profitable companies that are undervalued and then holding on to them until they breach one of our selling conditions.
Why is it called QAV?
QAV stands for QUALITY AT VALUE. Tony’s approach is to use a checklist to find companies that are performing well (quality) but which can also be bought at a discount (value). It’s basically what is usually called “value investing”.
If Tony’s so rich, why is he doing this?
Hah! Tony would rather be playing golf. But after ten years being friends with Tony, I eventually smartened up enough to realise I needed to learn more about the basis of Tony’s investing success. As a professional podcaster, I of course decided a podcast was the best way to learn his system. Tony agreed to it because he felt sorry for me and he’s a nice guy. Subscription fees go to cover production costs. These days we have a small team of people helping us produce checklists, transcripts, run the IT, editing, etc.
Do you have an AFSL?
Yes we do, thanks for asking.
Spacecraft Publishing Pty Ltd trading as QAV (“QAV”) (ABN 41 163 119 300) is a Corporate Authorised Representative (CAR 001292718) of MF & Co. Asset Management Pty Ltd (AFSL 520442).
How much capital do you need to make QAV Light worthwhile?
The only costs associated with QAV Light are our monthly fee ($29 + GST = $31.90) and your brokerage fees. The fee per transaction using online brokers starts around $10. If you don’t already have one, here’s a list to get you started.
To work out if you have enough capital to start using QAV Light, just do some simple maths based on how much you have to invest.
EXAMPLES:
1. If you have $500 per month to invest, and you use it to buy one stock per month, you will spend roughly $500 on fees over the course of 12 months (eg $31.90 + $10 brokerage x 12), which will be 10% of your capital ($500 x 12 = $6000).
2. If you have $1000 per month to invest, and you use it to buy one stock, you still spend roughly $500 on fees over the course of 12 months, which will be 4% of your capital.
3. If you have $5000 per month to invest, and you use it to buy one stock, you still spend roughly $500 on fees over the course of 12 months, which will be 1% of your capital.
If your portfolio returns, on average, double the market, eg 18–20% pa, then you need to factor in the cost of the fees.
Keep in mind that a QAV will not return double market every year or necessarily your first year. The double market returns Tony has achieved over 25+ years is an average. There will always be great years, good years and bad years. Successful investor take a long-term view.
I bought some stocks you recommended and they didn’t perform well.
Like any investment strategy, QAV doesn’t have a 100% success rate when it comes to individual stocks. It’s a system, not a magic ball.
The way QAV works, most stocks will be an average success (20–50% return), a good success (50–100% return) or a dud, which we get out of either at, or slightly below, our buy price. Every now and then, we find a rocket that delivers amazing returns and make all the difference.
This is how Warren Buffett invests, too. As he wrote in his 2022 Annual Letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders:
“In 58 years of Berkshire management, most of my capital-allocation decisions have been no better than so-so. In some cases, also, bad moves by me have been rescued by very large doses of luck. Our satisfactory results have been the product of about a dozen truly good decisions – that would be about one every five years – and a sometimes-forgotten advantage that favors long-term investors such as Berkshire. The lesson for investors: The weeds wither away in significance as the flowers bloom. Over time, it takes just a few winners to work wonders.”
We’ve found that, over time, QAV has about a 60% success rate when it comes to individual stocks (meaning we sell about 60% of the stocks for a profit). Every now and then we strike gold. And we normally get year when, for a variety of reasons, we seriously out-perform the index. This gives our portfolio a lot of headwind. Most years, however, we will do only slightly better, or even slightly worse, than the index. One out of every five years will (on average) make all of the difference to long-term results.