QAV 737 — FEAR & GREED

737 Club

[00:00:00] TK: 3, 2, 1.

[00:00:11] CR: Wel­come back to QAV, episode 7 3 7. This is the 10th of Sep­tem­ber, 2024 TK.

[00:00:23] TK: it’s not a 737 Max, is it? We’re gonna,

[00:00:27] TK: We’re gonna,

[00:00:27] TK: go into a stall we can’t get out of.

[00:00:32] CR: Uh, well, we’ll see. It remains to be seen how the show goes. How are you?

[00:00:37] TK: good. Very good, thank you.

[00:00:40] TK: I had, uh, I had some friends down over the week­end, so that was nice.

[00:00:45] CR: Yeah.

[00:00:45] TK: they went back yes­ter­day, played some golf, and four sea­sons in one after­noon, it felt

[00:00:50] TK: like.

[00:00:53] CR: Love­ly.

[00:00:54] TK: and I’ll be down here for the rest of the week. It’s, um, Alex’s birth­day, Mon­day, I

[00:00:59] TK: think. But any­way, we’ll have a din­ner on Fri­day night before I head back.

[00:01:03] CR: wow. Next week, Mon­day, next week.

[00:01:06] TK: I think so. Yeah. Yeah. It’s the

[00:01:09] TK: 16th. Well, it’s the 16th. Look, I don’t fol­low what day this date is down here at Cape Shangri

[00:01:14] TK: La. It’s one of the beau­ties of being down here. Yeah. Hmm.

[00:01:20] CR: Well, hap­py birth­day to Alex for next week. Um, well, I, I hurt my back pret­ty bad­ly last week.

[00:01:29] TK: Kung Fu?

[00:01:30] CR: in the scheme

[00:01:30] CR: of things. Yeah. It was already play­ing up on Wednes­day. It’d been play­ing up for a cou­ple of days low­er back. We were there dur­ing the kids class and wait­ing for our class and Chris­sy, uh, Said, you want me to work on your back a bit?

[00:01:43] CR: And I said, yeah. So I laid down and she got in with her elbows and gave me a good mas­sage. Felt a bit bet­ter. I got up and start­ed doing our high inten­si­ty fit­ness class that we have first on Wednes­day night and every, about half an hour into it, every­thing just went,

[00:02:00] TK: Hmm. I know the

[00:02:01] CR: my low­er back, I end­ed up on my hands and knees in the back of the room and, uh, yeah, just was in a crazy amount of pain.

[00:02:13] CR: So, did­n’t train for the next few days, did some light train­ing yes­ter­day, did some light train­ing today, got an appoint­ment with our Kung Fu physio in the morn­ing to have a look at it, but um, and it’s still, I mean it’s still pret­ty sore, it’s kind of back to where it was before fit­ness class on Wednes­day, sore, hurts to get up.

[00:02:35] CR: and sit down and move. So yeah, the lum­bar, what­ev­er it is on that low­er left side. But yeah, it’s a back pain that I’ve haven’t had for many, many years. So, uh, yeah, it’s not fun.

[00:02:50] TK: Well, I feel

[00:02:51] CR: of those things that you, oh yeah. Are

[00:02:53] CR: you, you, hav­ing it at the moment

[00:02:55] CR: or I know you’ve had it in the past.

[00:02:57] TK: No, I’ve actu­al­ly come good. I’ve, um,

[00:02:59] CR: Yeah.

[00:03:00] TK: changed my golf swing a bit and play­ing much bet­ter golf and the back pain’s reced­ing as well. So I must be doing some­thing right. Um, but yeah, physio is the key for me. Like, um, not, not imme­di­ate­ly, but hav­ing a good physio and he’s giv­en me

[00:03:17] TK: lots of exer­cise rou­tines to strength­en my core, which helps a

[00:03:20] TK: lot.

[00:03:21] CR: Hmm. Well, my, I mean, that’s the crazy thing. Like my core is stronger now than it’s ever been.

[00:03:27] TK: Yeah, right.

[00:03:28] CR: I know, you know, and, um, I’m at my low­est weight that I’ve been in 20 years. I haven’t been this low since I was in my ear­ly thir­ties. So, you know, I’m doing all the right things, but yeah, just, you know.

[00:03:43] CR: Let’s always say with Kung Fu, there’s always an injury. It’s like the injury of the week that I have there. And it’s, I was say­ing to the Sifu when I was, uh, sit­ting on the side­lines the oth­er night, it’s either going to be an injury from work­ing or it’s going to be atro­phy, you know, just the body atro­phy­ing as you get old.

[00:04:01] CR: So I’ll take the injuries from strain­ing some­thing than injuries from, you know, just get­ting old and sit­ting in front of a com­put­er all day. Any­way.

[00:04:10] TK: says when I say to my physio, it sucks get­ting old. He says it’s

[00:04:12] TK: bet­ter than the

[00:04:13] TK: alter­na­tive. So he’s right.

[00:04:14] CR: That’s right.

[00:04:16] TK: Yeah.

[00:04:17] CR: yeah, you know, it’s, it’s one of those things with backs

[00:04:21] CR: that, you know, I remem­ber watch­ing Chris­sy go through this for years when she had a bad back. Um, I could­n’t stand up and I could­n’t like even just get­ting out of bed or off a seat. And part of my brain is like say­ing, well, just get up.

[00:04:36] CR: It’s just pain. And there’s anoth­er part of my brain that’s like, fuck you, I’m not mov­ing, you can’t make me. And it’s fas­ci­nat­ing to watch these two dis­tinct and dis­parate thought process­es in my brain hav­ing an argu­ment about

[00:04:54] TK: yeah,

[00:04:55] CR: mov­ing ver­sus not

[00:04:56] CR: mov­ing.

[00:04:57] TK: pain is, kind of a warn­ing sig­nal real­ly, isn’t it? I mean, what is pain? Unless you, unless your arm’s being chopped off. It’s real­ly your body, your brain say­ing

[00:05:06] TK: don’t move because if you get, if you’re gonna move, you’re gonna do more

[00:05:09] TK: dam­age to what­ev­er’s, what­ev­er’s hap­pen­ing.

[00:05:11] CR: but there’s the oth­er part of my brain going, it’s just

[00:05:13] CR: pain, just push through it, you’ll be fine.

[00:05:16] TK: I know I’ve been

[00:05:17] TK: there. Stop

[00:05:18] CR: But it’s crazy,

[00:05:19] CR: like, yeah, exact­ly, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I’m, and I’m all bent over and I’m think­ing, why am I bent over? Like, I can straight­en,

[00:05:26] CR: but I just need to push myself through that fear of straight­en­ing up, you know, and

[00:05:32] CR: it’s, Any­way, it’s, it was fun­ny for me just to watch my brain have this dia­logue with itself over those few days.

[00:05:39] CR: It’s, it’s hilar­i­ous. I’m like a bystander watch­ing my brain have a, have a cage

[00:05:44] TK: you mean.

[00:05:45] CR: I knew you would. Thought about you

[00:05:49] TK: The oth­er one, the oth­er thing that helps me is, like, I did some Pilates once and they talk about length­en­ing. So if I, like, I can just sort of, top of my head as high as I can, straight­ens the back and that helps to move when I’ve got a bad back too, because often times slump­ing is worse

[00:06:07] TK: for it. And Voltaren, do you take Voltaren

[00:06:12] TK: over the counter?

[00:06:12] CR: Take it. It’s like the cream.

[00:06:15] TK: Well it’s cream but you can get a pill and it comes in I think 12. 5 maybe even 50s mil­ligrams.

[00:06:24] CR: it’s a pain relief or some­thing.

[00:06:26] TK: It’s a mus­cle relax­ant and pain relief. Yeah, works

[00:06:28] TK: for me. Can’t take it for a long time because appar­ent­ly it’s bad for your kid­neys or your liv­er or

[00:06:33] TK: some­thing, but in short spurts, it’s good.

[00:06:37] CR: Hmm. No, I did­n’t. Uh, I did­n’t

[00:06:40] CR: know about that. Did­n’t try that. Any­way, I’m

[00:06:41] TK: Tell me more about the Kung Fu physio though. Does he

[00:06:44] TK: like come out with hands up in a row?

[00:06:48] TK: Yeah.

[00:06:49] CR: Well, it’s a, a guy and a lady

[00:06:51] CR: just ran the cor­ner from us and they’re both, um, you know, life­long Kung Fu prac­ti­tion­ers in a dif­fer­ent style to ours. Pray­ing Man­tis style, but he’s, he’s an Aussie guy who lived in Chi­na for 20 years, stud­ied Kung Fu med­i­cine or Chi­nese med­i­cine with a Kung Fu focus over there.

[00:07:10] CR: And so they’re sort of, they’re, they’re Kung Fu experts as well as phys­ios. So they know, yeah, we go in and we go, I’ve got this pain. They’re like, Oh yeah, yeah, just sit down. Yeah. We know what that is. Yeah. We’ll fix it up.

[00:07:25] TK: Yeah,

[00:07:26] CR: at our Kung Fu school ends up going there because they just know. All of the injuries that you get from Kung Fu and how to fix it and a lot of Chi­nese med­i­cine.

[00:07:35] CR: Like it’s not, it’s um, manip­u­la­tion and, oh yeah, well that mus­cle­’s con­nect­ed to this thing and when you’re in that stance you’re doing it wrong so you’re pulling this instead of doing that and they’re cool. They hurt. They get in and they real­ly, real­ly hurt you

[00:07:51] TK: I know, isn’t that bad? My physio is the same. Like,

[00:07:54] CR: Hmm.

[00:07:55] TK: you know, I come, I guess, I say it again, I’m going to the physio. She’ll go, Oh, that’s great. It’s going to help you back. And I’m like, you don’t under­stand how much it’s going to hurt. I had a female physio in Toron­to and I just used to say to her, Are you wear­ing the black leather today?

[00:08:09] TK: You’ve got the

[00:08:10] TK: cat­suit on. You’re going to real­ly work me over.

[00:08:15] CR: Uh, well, let’s get on to oth­er issues, um, uh, let me talk about the Bret­ta­la­tor first for club mem­bers. Uh, a few peo­ple, myself, Alex, um, and oth­ers have report­ed issues with the Bret­ta­la­tor over the last few days. I think it’s, it’s a Google, it’s either a Google Sheets or a Google Finance issue, although I have had issues with Yahoo Finance because I have a ver­sion of the Bret­ta­la­tor now that also uses Yahoo Finance that was built by Matthew Walk­er that I’ve been test­ing out.

[00:08:48] CR: Thank you Matt. I did use that a lit­tle bit over the week­end in par­tic­u­lar. Um, So, I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s just giv­ing me lots of NA results. It’s

[00:08:57] TK: Oh, okay.

[00:08:59] CR: it took for­ev­er. When my scripts ran over Fri­day,

[00:09:02] CR: Sat­ur­day, half of it was NA results, and I had to keep try­ing and keep try­ing and keep try­ing to get results.

[00:09:08] CR: So, just, uh, don’t know what’s going on, but if you’re hav­ing Bret­ta­la­tor issues, you’re not alone. Hope­ful­ly, it’ll resolve itself, and if it does­n’t, uh, we’ll have to fig­ure some­thing else out. Um,

[00:09:21] TK: for me, but I did­n’t use it much on the week­end. I used it today. Um, but I did have to update Google, what­ev­er it is, Google, prob­a­bly Google Sheets, I guess. There was a, you know, I get a, let me have a look at it, I get a but­ton in the top right hand cor­ner, which says, um, Occa­sion­al­ly Update, and I guess it’s,

[00:09:39] TK: uh, Google

[00:09:40] CR: Prob­a­bly Chrome,

[00:09:41] CR: I’m think­ing. I’m think­ing.

[00:09:42] TK: Could be Chrome, yeah, could be Chrome.

[00:09:43] CR: just soft­ware. I don’t think you have to

[00:09:45] TK: Yeah, no, you’re right, it’d be Chrome. It’s not there at the moment, so I can’t tell you, hell yeah, but yeah, so, and it, so I, when­ev­er I see that, I do it, and it’s, I haven’t

[00:09:54] TK: had a prob­lem, so maybe that might be the solu­tion.

[00:09:57] CR: Hmm. Yeah. I’m look­ing at mine. I

[00:09:59] TK: would­n’t know if it needs an

[00:10:01] TK: update.

[00:10:02] CR: Well, Chrome would know. It says Chrome is

[00:10:04] CR: up to date, so it’s not a Chrome issue for me any­way. But any­way, just let­ting peo­ple know if you’re hav­ing issues, that’s why. Um, Port­fo­lio Updates. I did my, uh, week­ly report this morn­ing. And, uh, the U. S.

[00:10:22] CR: Port­fo­lio, uh, It’s still doing real­ly well. The Stock­o­pe­dia one come back a lit­tle bit over the last week, as did the S& P 500 over there. But it’s still per­form­ing, I think 39 per­cent since incep­tion ver­sus the S& P at 23 per­cent now. But the Aus­tralian port­fo­lio is out­per­form­ing too, the Stock­o­pe­dia one.

[00:10:42] CR: It’s up 13. 6 per­cent since incep­tion, which is about a year ver­sus the index about 11. 6. So it real­ly kicked ahead. In the last week or so got a nice lit­tle bump and some of the stocks that are real­ly out­per­form­ing well in that I thought were worth a men­tion. We’ve talked about them on and off but, uh, we don’t talk about them much on the show.

[00:11:08] CR: Vysarn is the big one. Have you ever done a pulled pork on Vysarn, Tony, that you can recall?

[00:11:17] TK: was that the first one we

[00:11:18] TK: did? Let me have a look.

[00:11:21] CR: I’ve got

[00:11:21] TK: How do I spell

[00:11:22] TK: that?

[00:11:22] CR: sheet. V Y S A R N.

[00:11:28] CR: I’m just going to look through the, uh, list of pulled porks

[00:11:32] TK: Sor­ry, is this Vysarn, the Aus­tralian com­pa­ny or the

[00:11:34] TK: US com­pa­ny?

[00:11:36] CR: No, it’s an Aus­tralian com­pa­ny?

[00:11:37] CR: Yeah,

[00:11:38] TK: I haven’t done it. No,

[00:11:39] TK: sor­ry.

[00:11:40] CR: I did­n’t think so. They’re, um, no, they’re not on the list.

[00:11:43] CR: Accord­ing to Stock­o­pe­dia, they are a inte­grat­ed Water Ser­vices Com­pa­ny, um, provider, the com­pa­ny through its sub­sidiaries is engaged in hydro­log­i­cal drilling, dewa­ter­ing, and test pump­ing ser­vices and water con­sul­tan­cy busi­ness­es.

[00:12:06] CR: Its ser­vices are locat­ed at a num­ber of mine sites across West­ern Aus­tralia. Its seg­ment con­sists of Pen­tium Hydro, Project Engi­neer­ing, Pen­tium Test Pump­ing, Pen­tium Water, and Vysarn. Any­way. So, this turned up on the buy list, the Stock­o­pe­dia buy list a while ago, um, let’s see, when did I buy it? Duh,

[00:12:27] CR: duh, duh, duh, duh, view trans­ac­tions. I bought it back in July last year. So the port­fo­lio is a lit­tle bit old­er than Sep­tem­ber. At, um, 0. 17 and today it’s trad­ing at 0. 45,

[00:12:49] TK: Well done. What’s the ADT on that stock?

[00:12:52] CR: oh, good ques­tion, how do I tell that

[00:12:55] CR: in, you know, that’s a tricky one, because I’m in Stock­o­pe­dia, but I can just get a Stock Doc­tor, hold on, Stock­o­pe­dia don’t show me ADT, I have to man­u­al­ly cal­cu­late it, um, um, 92, 000.

[00:13:12] CR: So too small for you, but rea­son­able size for most of us. Any­way, it’s had a cork­er, it’s had a cork­er run, Vysarn, and it’s not one that I see turn up on our port­fo­lio much. Up 176 per­cent since July last year. Some of the oth­ers that have done real­ly well on the Aus­tralian Stock­o­pe­dia list. Ser­vice Stream, up 55%.

[00:13:37] CR: Shape Aus­tralia, famil­iar with them. S H A, anoth­er one I don’t see turn up very often, um, what do they do? Shape Aus­tralia, an Aus­tralian based nation­al fit out and con­struc­tion ser­vices spe­cial­ist. So they do fit outs. So, um,

[00:14:00] TK: I did do a pulled pork on ser­vice string.

[00:14:04] CR: Ser­vice Stream, yeah,

[00:14:05] TK: Yeah,

[00:14:06] CR: I remem­ber that. Well, Shape Aus­tralia are up 52%, any­way, since I bought them, which was, when? Um, Decem­ber, last year, 1. 75. Uh, up 50 per­cent in, well, less than a year. It’s cur­rent­ly trad­ing at, uh, what’s that? 2. 67. So any­way, it’s, um, it’s got some good stocks that are doing quite well. And, uh, the dum­my port­fo­lio, the nor­mal dum­my port­fo­lio is up since incep­tion.

[00:14:42] CR: 15. 5%. Per annum ver­sus the mar­ket up 8. 8 per­cent per annum. So we’re doing about 1. 76 times bet­ter in the mar­ket over the his­to­ry. And for the last 30 days, the Stock Doc­tor W port­fo­lio is up about 3. 5%, which is exact­ly the same as the STW more or less. So it’s sort of track­ing the, track­ing the, uh, bench­mark at the moment.

[00:15:05] CR: In the last month, declines have been FPR down 7 per­cent and BOL down three, SUL is up 21% in the last month and McMa­hon up 14% SUL. That’s a good, uh, good month for it. It must have had good results. Have you No. SU L’s sort of one of those stocks that you’re in and out of, aren’t you?

[00:15:28] TK: now I’ve been, well I’m in it at the moment, I’ve been hold­ing it for a year or so

[00:15:32] TK: now. It’s up about, I looked at it this morn­ing, it’s up about 30 per­cent and paid a good div­i­dend yield, so that’s good. Um, I think the results came out and they were bet­ter than was thought, uh, from mem­o­ry. The, um, sales were up, but prof­it was down from mem­o­ry.

[00:15:50] CR: Hmm.

[00:15:51] TK: Yeah, but bet­ter than expect­ed.

[00:15:54] CR: The

[00:15:55] TK: But I guess the com­ment to make about a lot of those stocks you’re men­tion­ing is, and Supercheap is one of them, it went ex div­i­dend recent­ly. So I think Supercheap went ex div­i­dend. Um, or Super Retail Group as it’s called now, went ex div­i­dend yes, uh, Mon­day or Fri­day and the share price came off 7 per­cent and it’s start­ing to go back up again today, so just be care­ful of that.

[00:16:17] TK: If you’re think­ing of buy­ing some­thing or sell­ing it because it’s dropped through a sell line, um, just make sure it has­n’t gone ex div­i­dend for the next month or

[00:16:26] TK: so.

[00:16:27] CR: Well, it has gone Ex-div­i­dend, did­n’t you say? And it had a spe­cial cash too. 9th of Sep­tem­ber when Exxon had a spe­cial cash pay­ment.

[00:16:34] TK: Yeah.

[00:16:35] CR: Wow. 50 cents

[00:16:38] TK: Bid­dy.

[00:16:38] CR: and 37 cents for the div­i­dend. That’s a beau­ty. It’s trad­ing at 17 bucks, I guess. Yeah. It’s come back a lit­tle bit, but still it’s had a good, very good

[00:16:48] TK: Mmm, it has,

[00:16:49] CR: Uh, so what else?

[00:16:51] CR: We haven’t trad­ed any­thing in the dum­my port­fo­lio recent­ly. Uh, I also, I’ve been look­ing for some­body to come on and talk about F scores and Z scores. I reached out Elio D’Am­a­to from Stock­o­pe­dia. He said, uh, your best bet would be to find a an aca­d­e­m­ic, um, and get them on. So had a look around, could­n’t find any­one in Aus­tralia to talk about F scores or Z scores.

[00:17:20] CR: I was think­ing about reach­ing out to Joseph Petro­vsky him­self.

[00:17:23] TK: uh huh.

[00:17:24] CR: like in

[00:17:25] TK: Is he still

[00:17:25] TK: around?

[00:17:26] CR: in the UK. He’s actu­al­ly quite young.

[00:17:29] TK: Oh wow,

[00:17:29] TK: okay,

[00:17:30] CR: he, he looks like he’s My age,

[00:17:35] CR: um,

[00:17:36] TK: so not that young, Ha ha

[00:17:39] CR: sh shut up, younger than you,

[00:17:42] TK: ha ha!

[00:17:42] CR: hehe­he­he,

[00:17:44] TK: That’s, that’s, you’re just get­ting into

[00:17:46] TK: the bad back­stage of old age, Cam. Ha ha ha ha ha!

[00:17:50] CR: Uh, yeah, like, I don’t know how old he is, but he looks quite young. I was on his, um, uni­ver­si­ty site. Um, yeah, I think he must’ve been quite young when he came up with it. let me look him up again. No date of birth, but he got his BS in account­ing in 1989. So, you know, there you go.

[00:18:10] CR: So he’s can’t be much, he’d be a cou­ple of years old­er than me. I’m guess­ing so mid fifties. Hmm. So any­way, I’m not sure if he’ll come on, but I got to reach out. I’m going to try and find some­body. A cou­ple

[00:18:22] TK: Yeah. Well maybe if you reach out to him he can put you in con­tact with

[00:18:25] TK: some­body else soon.

[00:18:27] CR: Yeah, an expert.

[00:18:28] TK: Yeah.

[00:18:28] CR: I know there’s some­body else

[00:18:30] CR: Cou­ple of things, uh, uh, just about the buy list. The buy list we put out yes­ter­day, uh, you and some­body else, I think Trent picked up that the ADTs were wrong. I think when Alex or I sort­ed the list, the ADTs got out of whack, so I fixed that. So if you down­loaded it, Yes­ter­day, uh, down­load anoth­er ver­sion today, same link, if you want to use our ADTs as a guide, uh, I fixed that up.

[00:18:56] CR: Cou­ple of oth­er things is Alex picked up that MLG appar­ent­ly no longer has a qual­i­fied audit. It did last week and does­n’t this week, and IGN also no longer has a qual­i­fied audit, so if you were look­ing at either of those, they’re on the buy list this week with no audits, keep­ing them in the, uh, black­list.

[00:19:21] CR: That’s all on that. Got any­thing else on the buy list?

[00:19:24] TK: Nope?

[00:19:24] TK: All good.

[00:19:26] CR: I want­ed to talk about, I’ll talk about, um,

[00:19:29] CR: com­modi­ties first, maybe. Read an inter­est­ing arti­cle in the ABC, uh, over the last cou­ple of days. Why gold is surg­ing and what it tells us about glob­al sta­bil­i­ty. This is by Ian Ver­ren­der, their chief busi­ness cor­re­spon­dent.

[00:19:50] CR: Some things nev­er go out of fash­ion. For thou­sands of years, gold was the glob­al medi­um of exchange, and until 1971 it was the stan­dard upon which the U. S. dol­lar val­ued itself, until it was final­ly dis­card­ed. In more recent years, its rep­u­ta­tion took a hit from talk dig­i­tal cur­ren­cies would assert its hal­lowed sta­tus as a store of wealth.

[00:20:10] CR: Not any longer. A few weeks back, the cost of a sin­gle bar of gold pushed through the US 1 mil­lion mark as the pre­cious met­als surged to new records. Gold prices have dou­bled since 2019, and in the past two years have head­ed into orbit as infla­tion­ary clouds gath­ered over the glob­al econ­o­my. But despite most major devel­oped nations sig­nalling vic­to­ry over infla­tion, with inter­est rate cuts in the UK, Europe, Cana­da, and the first expect­ed this week in the US, the upswing has­n’t abat­ed.

[00:20:46] CR: Already this year, the prices jumped 21%, con­sis­tent­ly punch­ing through new records. As this graph mea­sured in US dol­lars illus­trates. You can’t see the graph obvi­ous­ly, but it’s going up. That’s the point.

[00:21:02] TK: It’s a

[00:21:02] TK: record, you

[00:21:03] CR: with fur­ther gains expect­ed this year, that’s left some experts baf­fled, giv­en gold tra­di­tion­al­ly was pri­mar­i­ly seen as a safe haven for investors dur­ing times of recent, of finan­cial tur­moil.

[00:21:14] CR: Who are the buy­ers? Rather than investors seek­ing a safe har­bour, the renewed inter­est instead comes from cen­tral banks. Fear­ful of the recent increase in geopo­lit­i­cal ten­sions, the ongo­ing con­flict in Ukraine after Vladimir Putin’s inva­sion two years ago, the poten­tial for the war in Gaza to spread across the region, and the prospect of an esca­la­tion in trade hos­til­i­ties between the US and Chi­na have brought the era of glob­al­iza­tion to an end.

[00:21:42] CR: On top of that, Amer­i­ca’s huge lift in fed­er­al gov­ern­ment debt, the That’s seen its annu­al inter­est bill top its defense spend­ing. And the ongo­ing prospect of end­less deficits has under­mined its posi­tion as the world’s reserve cur­ren­cy, prompt­ing oth­er nations to look for alter­na­tive sources for for­eign reserves they’ve revert­ed to gold.

[00:22:04] CR: In the past two years, cen­tral banks, pri­mar­i­ly from Asia, East­ern Europe and the Mid­dle East, have been des­per­ate­ly scour­ing glob­al mar­kets to add to their gold reserves, a trend which has con­tin­ued this year as they added record amounts to their reserves. The Peo­ple’s Bank of Chi­na last year was the world’s biggest buy­er, snap­ping up 7.

[00:22:23] CR: 23 mil­lion ounces, the most by the coun­try for at least four years. 46 years. The move could be inter­pret­ed as a wor­ry­ing mea­sure of the break­down in rela­tions between the world’s two biggest economies, with Chi­na now active­ly replac­ing its US dol­lar hold­ings with gold. So it goes on and on, but I thought that was an inter­est­ing insight that gold has become the reserve cur­ren­cy now for coun­tries because of geopo­lit­i­cal ten­sions around the world.

[00:22:58] CR: What are your thoughts on that, Tony?

[00:23:00] TK: know, there’s lots to unpack. I think, um, again, this is one of these arti­cles full of spec­u­la­tion, but, um, some­where else towards the end, they talk about how much of the gold price is dri­ven by peo­ple who actu­al­ly use the met­al for jew­ellery in the main and how that’s the major­i­ty of the buy­ing. So, um, yes, there’s, peo­ple like to divine the tea leaves on what’s hap­pen­ing with gold from a geopo­lit­i­cal stand­point, but under­pin­ning it, as always, is peo­ple who use the stuff to make things.

[00:23:32] TK: Um, so that’s impor­tant. Cou­ple of points. Uh, it must have been about 10 years ago, maybe 20 years ago, that there was a whole flur­ry of arti­cles around Chi­na hold­ing lots of the US debt, um, so they were buy­ing up US bonds, and how, you know, was there a secret? Old war com­ing where the Chi­nese would manip­u­late the US econ­o­my by buy­ing and sell­ing debt.

[00:23:58] TK: The US bond debt, would it sell it all at once and cause a calami­ty, blah, blah, blah. And of course, you know, like Chi­nese could do that, but they’re real­ly just try­ing to max­i­mize their posi­tion as, as good as good gov­ern­ments do. I mean, they weren’t the only one to see the rid­ing on the wall for bonds.

[00:24:15] TK: Um, as inter­est rates start­ed to rise, because they usu­al­ly invert the div­i­dend paid by a bond. If it goes up in the open mar­ket, that means that the face val­ue of the bond goes down. So it makes total sense if you’re a big hold­er of U. S. bonds to sell them and buy some­thing else. And the Chi­nese, I would have thought, I mean, a lot of peo­ple got oth­er bonds back into shares.

[00:24:39] TK: That’s the clas­sic arbi­trage between bonds that goes on in the mar­ket between bonds and shares has always been so. But I don’t think the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment would have been allowed to buy lots of U. S. stock or any U. S. com­pa­nies poten­tial­ly. I mean, they cer­tain­ly pro­hib­it­ed So, I guess the US would be even more sen­si­tive than we are.

[00:25:03] TK: So, the next best thing to buy would be gold as an alter­na­tive to bonds. So, that makes per­fect sense to me. Is it a hedge against uncer­tain­ty in the world? Yeah, pos­si­bly. Is it replac­ing the US? Is it? Reserve cur­ren­cy. Well, again, I’ve heard that debate for a long time, prob­a­bly ever since the US dol­lar float­ed.

[00:25:25] TK: And, um, it, I have read oth­er arti­cles which say that Chi­na is demand­ing a lot of con­tracts in Chi­nese cur­ren­cy. So it may come to pass that, um, I don’t think the Chi­nese cur­ren­cy would become a default world cur­ren­cy, but it cer­tain­ly is chal­leng­ing the U. S. for a big­ger share of inter­na­tion­al trade. Um, so, yep, that could be a thing, but I real­ly think it’s two things.

[00:25:51] TK: I think it’s peo­ple get­ting out of bonds, and if they can’t buy stock for what­ev­er rea­son, shares for what­ev­er rea­son, they’re buy­ing gold, but it’s also a heck of a lot more. of buy­ing has been for peo­ple who want to make some­thing with it. Jew­ellers, um, I know gold’s used a lit­tle bit more in EVs and that kind of thing now than it has been in the past.

[00:26:11] TK: So it could be that. Um, but yeah, this whole arti­cle about the gold price being, uh, an index on inter, you know, inter­na­tion­al wor­ried­ness is, is a bit over­done, I think.

[00:26:26] TK: Could be. Yeah, I don’t know if any gov­ern­ment around the world’s going, oh, what’s Putin gonna do? I bet­ter buy some gold.

[00:26:35] CR: No, but it’s Putin buy­ing the gold.

[00:26:38] TK: Well, he’s one of the biggest exporters.

[00:26:41] TK: Well, why is he, why is he buy­ing gold if he thinks that there’s going to be insta­bil­i­ty in the world

[00:26:46] TK: affairs? I just don’t fol­low the log­ic.

[00:26:49] CR: Mm. ’cause he can buy stuff with gold. I love gold, Mr.

[00:26:56] TK: Well, he’d be doing that if he thought. I guess it’s a nat­ur­al thing to do if your cur­ren­cy is being deval­ued. You buy gold.

[00:27:06] CR: Right,

[00:27:07] TK: because if your cur­ren­cy goes down, you can sell the gold and buy the cur­ren­cy back at a low­er price. So that, that helps. So there’s a cer­tain amount of that that goes on around world cur­ren­cies.

[00:27:18] TK: So in effect, they’re arbi­trag­ing their own, their own cur­ren­cy or by world gov­ern­ment, sor­ry, or reserve banks. Um, yeah, but look, I could be wrong. I just heard this. Argu­ment time and time and time again, um, about how gold is, goes up in times of uncer­tain­ty. My stan­dard approach to all this is I can’t think of a time when we haven’t had uncer­tain­ty or some­thing going on in the world.

[00:27:44] TK: And it just gets used as an excuse when the gold price goes up. I don’t, I don’t. You know, it’s prob­a­bly, there’s been a lot of cor­re­la­tion going on there rather than cau­sa­tion, I think.

[00:27:54] CR: right. Well, I

[00:27:55] CR: just obvi­ous­ly took it as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to look through our, the gold stocks on our buy list and see how they’re doing. RRL. Is on our buy list this week. It’s a buy, but it’s, it’s a Josephine real­ly. It’s, uh, a lit­tle bit below its sec­ond byline. Um, PRU is one of the ones that’s N/A‑ing for me, actu­al­ly.

[00:28:23] TK: Um, PRU’s done real­ly well with the ris­ing gold price, and I’m a bit upset with myself for sell­ing it. It crossed the rule one, or it crossed the

[00:28:32] TK: sell line for me about a year ago and I got rid of it, but ever since then it’s done well.

[00:28:37] CR: Yeah, it seems to have done well. It’s, uh, Josephine though, at the moment it’s dropped from $2 66 down to $2 34. But, uh, let’s see, a year ago it was, uh, 2. 19, has­n’t had a great, it dropped a bit towards the mid­dle of this year and has been rebuild­ing since then. Uh, what else is on our buy list, it’s gold, Evo­lu­tion Min­ing, a com­bi­na­tion of cop­per and gold.

[00:29:09] CR: Let’s see how

[00:29:09] TK: Well, the cop­per price, I think, is equal­ly as inter­est­ing, if not more inter­est­ing, because cop­per’s been declin­ing heav­i­ly this year. And tra­di­tion­al­ly, that’s the lead­ing indi­ca­tor for eco­nom­ic growth around the world. So if peo­ple aren’t buy­ing cop­per, it gen­er­al­ly means that

[00:29:27] TK: the world’s slow­ing down.

[00:29:29] TK: Eco­nom­i­cal­ly, the growth in the world is slow­ing down.

[00:29:32] CR: Well, that leads me. It’s like you knew, it’s like you have

[00:29:35] CR: my notes in front of you, Tony, because the next sto­ry is from The Fin this morn­ing. Iron ore dropped below 90 a ton on Mon­day for the first time since Novem­ber 2022, while Brent oil plunged 10 per­cent last week to its low­est close since 2021.

[00:29:53] CR: Even cop­per once hailed as this year’s break­out com­mod­i­ty suc­cess. Is now in a bear mar­ket after div­ing 20 per­cent from its May record. This is an arti­cle by Alex Gluyas again. Iron ore drops below 90 as Chi­na con­ta­gion bat­ters com­modi­ties. It’s a con­ta­gion. Glad he did­n’t use the word pan­dem­ic. That would­n’t have been appro­pri­ate.

[00:30:18] CR: Fears of a slow­down in the world’s largest economies has inject­ed fresh tur­bu­lence into com­mod­i­ty mar­kets as traders ques­tion whether Chi­na can achieve its growth tar­get while U. S. reces­sion risks inten­si­fy.

[00:30:31] TK: We re watched the Borat sequel on the

[00:30:34] TK: week­end.

[00:30:35] CR: hmm?

[00:30:36] TK: it was fun­ny. But um, it must have been released dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, and appar­ent­ly Borat was respon­si­ble for the pan­dem­ic.

[00:30:47] CR: I haven’t seen any, either of the Borat films, I think.

[00:30:50] TK: Oh, real­ly? They are help­less. They’re hilar­i­ous, but par­tic­u­lar­ly the sec­ond one. It real­ly held up well. It’s got that great scene at the end when Rudy Giu­lian­i’s in a hotel room being inter­viewed by Borat’s daugh­ter, who’s now work­ing as a jour­nal­ist, and he invites her into the bed­room and asks for a phone num­ber.

[00:31:09] TK: And then Borat has to, you know, burst

[00:31:12] TK: in and save her.

[00:31:14] CR: Res­cuer, wow, clas­sic. My old friend Rudy Giu­liani,

[00:31:20] TK: Yes.

[00:31:20] CR: far he has fall­en since our, the good times he and I spent togeth­er.

[00:31:26] CR: And if peo­ple don’t believe it, look it up. It’s a pho­to of me and Rudy hav­ing a cig­ar togeth­er. Um, so yes, iron ore, cop­per, Brent oil going in the oppo­site direc­tion of gold. Um,

[00:31:41] TK: And if you look at, I mean, you know, peo­ple talk about whether we should be using these graphs as cor­re­la­tions for the stocks, the min­ing stocks that use them, but look at Fortes­cue, it’s down to 16, 16 bucks a share now, or there­abouts, um, and I spoke a month or so ago about the iron ore price crash­ing below a hun­dred dol­lars and, and Fortes­cue’s, you know, share price is in

[00:32:05] TK: fair­ly much lock­step with the iron ore price.

[00:32:07] CR: Hmm. Yeah. So that’s why

[00:32:09] CR: we use com­mod­i­ty prices to help us make deci­sions on when to get in and when to get out of these things. Right.

[00:32:17] TK: I think Shine is real­ly inter­est­ing at the moment because I don’t have the arti­cle in front of me, but I read anoth­er one over the week­end, uh, about how. I mean, the arti­cle was slant­ed to almost crit­i­cize Xi Jin­ping for not doing enough to sup­port the Chi­nese econ­o­my, par­tic­u­lar­ly the prop­er­ty mar­ket and infra­struc­ture spend.

[00:32:36] TK: Um, but it did go on to say that, you know, Xi Jin­ping’s, um, strat­e­gy or Xi Jin­ping’s objec­tives are to get Chi­na heav­i­ly into AI, to get Chi­na heav­i­ly into The met­als for, um, the new, like, for EVs and the new econ­o­my to become a dom­i­nant, the dom­i­nant car mak­er in the world, et cetera, et cetera, and I thought, you know, that is just so smart.

[00:33:01] TK: He’s piv­ot­ed on a dime. He’s, um, you could make a case to say that, If he does become self suf­fi­cient and cor­ner the mar­ket in super­con­duc­tors and AI and the hard­ware that sup­ports AI, if he did hap­pen to then reach out and co opt Tai­wan, which would shut off super, like a lot of semi­con­duc­tors, to the rest of the world, he’s basi­cal­ly got AI to him­self, locks, lock and bar­rel.

[00:33:33] TK: So I think that’s a very inter­est­ing strat­e­gy. That’s the one that, that’s inter­est me a lot more than peo­ple say­ing, Oh, Chi­na’s, Chi­na’s a cat­a­stro­phe and it’s going to, it’s, there’s going to be anoth­er con­ta­gion of eco­nom­ic woe around the world because of

[00:33:47] TK: it. That’s bull­shit.

[00:33:50] CR: I like the way you say that he’s doing this and he’s doing that, like he’s run­ning a coun­try of two bil­lion peo­ple by him­self.

[00:33:59] TK: He’s the pup­pet mas­ter.

[00:34:00] TK: Right.

[00:34:05] CR: of bureau­crats that are pro­fes­sion­al bureau­crats. Think about things deeply, I think, and make strate­gic deci­sions that have a long term vision. I could quote you all my books on Xi Jin­ping and Chi­nese gov­er­nance, but let’s not go down that rab­bit hole. Any­way, look­ing through our com­mod­i­ty list, uh, we’ve got very lit­tle that’s in a buy state.

[00:34:30] CR: Uh, gold has become a buy, uh, this week. It was a Josephine last week. LNG is a buy. And that’s it. Every­thing else is either a sell or a Josephine. So, you know, we talk about, we often talk about how QAV cycles us in and out of things. I know we were very com­mod­i­ty heavy for a while there. And, um, now we are not com­mod­i­ty heavy.

[00:35:01] CR: I don’t know what we are heavy in, in the buy list, actu­al­ly. Let’s

[00:35:05] TK: Well, it’s real­ly inter­est­ing cause I, I found anoth­er arti­cle just talk­ing about how QAV works like that. It was in the Fin as well, um, either in the last few days or over the week­end, but it was talk­ing about a sim­i­lar sort of thing, how peo­ple had bought into, par­tic­u­lar­ly the iron ore min­ers, 12 months ago, because they were the best div­i­dend pay­ers.

[00:35:28] TK: on the ASX and how now because the iron ore price was declin­ing, how they were all cut­ting their div­i­dends and that peo­ple were now get­ting into, peo­ple who chased div­i­dends, were now get­ting into insur­ance com­pa­nies. And, um, lo and behold, I sold my min­ing stocks about 12 months ago and bought QBE, an insur­ance com­pa­ny.

[00:35:48] TK: So it’s, it’s done real­ly well for me since then. Um, But again, it’s a, it’s, my point here is that QAV’s got me out of one cycle into anoth­er one before it becomes a known cycle. But it’s because I found it attrac­tive, even­tu­al­ly the mar­ket finds it attrac­tive. So it’s just an inter­est­ing way QAV

[00:36:07] TK: works,

[00:36:08] CR: Yeah. So I just threw this week’s buy list into GPT and asked it to do an analy­sis on the, uh, indus­try groups to see what the breakup is. Um, it says. 18 per­cent of it as mate­ri­als. What’s an exam­ple of mate­ri­als? Pact Group Hold­ings, MLG, uh, what else have we got? Capral, which is alu­mini­um and goods and ser­vices.

[00:36:43] CR: Um, what else? PRG, PRL Glob­al, Mid­way, Lim­it­ed, Reg­is Resources. So we’ve still got a few. Com­mod­i­ty based resources, min­er­al sands in there. Um, we don’t track min­er­al sands. There might be one why we don’t have a com­mod­i­ty price for it. 10 per­cent of cap­i­tal goods, 7, 8 per­cent of con­sumer ser­vices, 7, 8 per­cent of finan­cial ser­vices, 6 per­cent media and enter­tain­ment, and 5 per­cent health­care equip­ment and ser­vices.

[00:37:17] CR: So that’s the basic, Oh, here we go. It goes down to banks, 5%, Com­mer­cial and Pro­fes­sion­al Ser­vices 5%, Con­sumer Dis­cre­tionary 5%, Util­i­ties 4%, Ener­gy 4%, Trans­porta­tion 4%, goes down from there.

[00:37:31] TK: real­ly diver­si­fied then, isn’t it Real­ly?

[00:37:34] CR: it is, yeah, it’s quite a, quite a long list.

[00:37:37] TK: Yeah.

[00:37:38] CR: Uh, well, that’s all I got on my notes for that, for today. Tony, what are you, you got a quote for us, Tony?

[00:37:46] TK: I do, I’ve got a quote from what works on Wall Street, um, and this, this quote comes from a time when O’Shaugh­nessy was writ­ing about the dot com boom, and it’s again about booms, and um, every time I read about the dot com boom, it reminds me of the cur­rent US mar­ket with the Mag7, um, And I know there’s been plen­ty writ­ten about whether it’s a boom, whether it’s a jus­ti­fi­able boom, etc.

[00:38:11] TK: But my basic rule of thumbs, if you think it’s, if peo­ple are ask­ing if it’s a boom, it’s a boom!

[00:38:18] CR: Don’t they do that with every boom though? You’ve got one camp jus­ti­fy­ing it. You’ve got one camp, you know, doing

[00:38:24] TK: This time it’s dif­fer­ent. Yeah. Any­way, so this is the, this is the quote from O’Shaughnessy, I see he approach­es it from a, prob­a­bly a more sci­en­tif­ic point of view. He’s talk­ing about the dot com boom. This mania is a cre­ation of fan­ta­sy and ludi­crous expec­ta­tion and of the child­like notion that hope can pre­vail over expe­ri­ence.

[00:38:44] TK: Legions of inex­pe­ri­enced peo­ple, many of whom can’t even begin to under­stand the bal­ance sheet, believe that all they need to do to secure their for­tune is to plunk down their mon­ey on any­thing. com and watch the prof­its roll in. For the patient, edu­cat­ed, long term investor who knows that over time the mar­ket is bound by the rules of eco­nom­ics, The last year and a half have been pret­ty sick­en­ing.

[00:39:08] TK: Near the top of any mania, you’ll often see out­right stu­pid­i­ty reward­ed. The cur­rent myopia can­not and will not last. After every stock mar­ket mania, from tulip bulbs in 17th cen­tu­ry Hol­land, radio stocks in the 1920s, alu­mini­um stocks in the 1950s, to com­put­er stocks in the mid 80s, and the biotech craze of the ear­ly 90s, those bor­ing laws of eco­nom­ics, Always rear their very sane heads.

[00:39:37] TK: Ulti­mate­ly, a stock­’s price must be tied to the future cash pay­ments the com­pa­ny will make. to you as an own­er. His­to­ry shows us that the more you pay for each dol­lar of a com­pa­ny’s rev­enue, the low­er your total return. It does this because it has to. That’s why eco­nom­ics is called the dis­mal sci­ence.

[00:39:57] CR: Yeah, that’s great. And yeah, look, we’ve talked about this before. I mean, there’s a big, there’s a lot of dif­fer­ences between say the dot com, the stocks in the dot com boom and the stocks in this boom. Uh, you know, one

[00:40:14] TK: Is there?

[00:40:15] CR: yeah, well, yeah, like one of them being

[00:40:17] CR: this, yes, one of them being that most of the com­pa­nies in the mag sev­en have been around a long time and are prof­itable busi­ness­es.

[00:40:27] CR: I mean, Face­book or Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple, these aren’t star­tups. You know, they did­n’t come out of nowhere and are going to spend 20 years, uh, run­ning at a loss before they make a prof­it. But they’re prof­itable

[00:40:42] TK: they’ve already done that.

[00:40:43] CR: Yeah, they’ve, yeah, exact­ly. They’ve done that over the last 20, 30, 40

[00:40:47] CR: years, depend­ing on the com­pa­ny. Ope­nAI is dif­fer­ent, but it’s not pub­licly list­ed. It’s not part of the Mag7 direct­ly. NVIDIA has been around a long time. Uh, Tes­la, not quite as much, but, uh, you know, they’ve been around for quite a, quite a few years. But on the flip side. Even if we say that AI has def­i­nite­ly got a big future, who’s going to make mon­ey, how much mon­ey they’re going to make?

[00:41:14] CR: No one knows. That’s all just guess­work. Like, no one knows.

[00:41:21] TK: and O’Shaugh­nessy takes us through that. He talks about booms with the radio boom of the

[00:41:25] TK: 20s and alu­mini­um boom of the 50s, etc. Sure, there’s still

[00:41:30] TK: peo­ple mak­ing

[00:41:31] CR: was a real

[00:41:32] CR: busi­ness. Yeah, alu­mini­um was a real

[00:41:34] CR: busi­ness, Yeah.

[00:41:35] TK: Exact­ly.

[00:41:36] TK: Yeah.

[00:41:37] CR: And the

[00:41:37] TK: does­n’t mean that the 120 radio man­u­fac­tur­ers on the New York Stock Exchange will sur­vive.

[00:41:43] TK: Look, I agree with you. I love the stocks that are in the Mag 7 there. They’re cer­tain­ly world beat­ers, but not at this price. That’s the key, I think. You’re pay­ing for, as you say, unlim­it­ed blue sky due to, large­ly due to AI, for each of those, and, uh, that’s a big, that’s a big punt,

[00:42:00] TK: real­ly.

[00:42:01] CR: It is. Who are you call­ing a big? Oh, punt. Okay. Um, yeah, that’s a good quote. And like, again, this time it’s dif­fer­ent. Is it though? I mean, it’s because again, it’s about it, it real­ly, like the learn­ing for me over the last few years, as we’ve talked about this is, it’s real­ly got noth­ing to do with the busi­ness­es.

[00:42:23] CR: It’s got noth­ing to do with the tech­nol­o­gy. It’s got noth­ing to do with the plat­forms or any, it’s all about human behav­iour. That’s what mar­kets are about. Real­ly. human behav­iour is dri­ven by fear and greed, and hope­ful­ly, for some of us, Rea­son, log­ic, ratio­nal think­ing, sci­ence, uh, but the rest of it’s dri­ven by fear and greed, and those things don’t change.

[00:42:50] CR: That’s why their val­u­a­tions are where they’re at. It’s not because of any log­ic or ratio­nal think­ing, it’s fear and greed.

[00:42:58] TK: Well, human­i­ty is dri­ven by fear and greed. I mean, we did that, we’ve, you know, made movies about that. The his­toric­i­ty of Jesus and about reli­gion and that’s just all about fear and greed. I’m going, I, I, I fear death. So I’m going to wor­ship some­thing hang­ing on a cross in a church to try and give me a pass to the after­life.

[00:43:19] TK: And I’m going to be greedy about that. It’s, that’s just straight fear and greed. The same thing applies in the share mar­ket. It’s, it’s a mar­ket which has, which has human beings on both sides of the trade. So yeah, absolute­ly. Um, so it’s, to me, look, the, the, the, I nor­mal­ly would­n’t care. I could­n’t care less about the Mag sev­en and who wants to buy them and who does­n’t.

[00:43:39] TK: ’cause I’ve seen so many booms and busts in the mar­ket. The thing I think, which is gonna be dif­fer­ent this time and this time, it’s dif­fer­ent. I know. Um, well, the thing that, the char­ac­ter­is­tic, which I find the most wor­ry­ing about this cur­rent boom is the num­ber of peo­ple who are buy­ing it and not real­ly know­ing they’re buy­ing it via index funds and index ETFs.

[00:43:59] TK: If you buy a world ETF, you are gonna have. a much big­ger expo­sure to those sev­en stocks than you think you have. Um, it’s going to be a large part of your port­fo­lio and when they even­tu­al­ly come off for what­ev­er rea­son, um, you know, that’s going to be a bad thing for index investors, which will mean it’s a bad thing for most stock mar­kets because index­es are so ETFs are now such a large

[00:44:22] TK: part of most mar­ket index, most stock mar­kets around the world.

[00:44:27] CR: How do ETFs fare when, sort of, um, booms bust? Do they just replace those stocks with what­ev­er’s com­ing up next and trade through it and do fine? Like, how did they deal with the last cou­ple of busts? I know they weren’t as big then as they are now, but,

[00:44:47] TK: Well, that’s why I don’t like ETFs. Sor­ry, I should­n’t say I don’t like ETFs. I’m hap­py with ETFs. I don’t, I pre­fer LICs to ETFs because the LICs don’t need to sell. If they, if they are hold­ing the MAG7 and they decide that Apple is still a good com­pa­ny and they just decide to put it in the bot­tom draw­er for five years, then they can, but an ETF has to sell Apple shares.

[00:45:09] TK: on the way down, and then rebal­ance and buy some­thing else. So as, you know, as if, if it’s just the Mag 7, which is drop­ping, but I sus­pect if they drop the whole US stock mar­ket drops, if it’s a world index fund, and then they’ll have to work out around the world, what’s the next biggest thing to buy if they sell a Mag 7 stock, which who knows what that could be, it could be, you know, anoth­er big Amer­i­can com­pa­ny, Wells Far­go or GE or some­thing, or it could be Shell.

[00:45:35] TK: in Europe or BP or what­ev­er. So, um, that’s what the ETF has to do. It has to trade on the way down and trade on the way up. So the mon­ey it has to invest is the mon­ey that peo­ple have put into it when they buy a share in the ETF. And like­wise, when they redeem, they have to sell shares. So the sell­ings of the, the ETFs are going to exac­er­bate This prob­lem, I think, when­ev­er there’s going to be, when­ev­er the reck­on­ing day of reck­on­ing comes from the Mag 7, a lot of the sell­ing will be because the ETFs have a large hold­ing.

[00:46:06] TK: And I know peo­ple have point­ed out to me in the past, oh, there’s always been man­aged funds, and they’ve always been index investors, but the mag­ni­tude of what’s going on now is, um, is much larg­er, I think, than it has been in the past. And you can see that all the time, because there’s so many arti­cles being writ­ten now say­ing, It’s the death of the stock pick­er because ETFs, index ETFs are tak­ing away so much mon­ey from, from, uh, man­aged funds and because man­aged funds can’t always beat the mar­ket and only 20 or 30 per­cent of them do, so it’s not worth putting your mon­ey into.

[00:46:38] TK: And whilst I agree with all of those things, um, putting your mon­ey into an index ETF may not be as safe as peo­ple think.

[00:46:47] CR: hmm. I’m just look­ing at the Van­guard S& P 500 ETF. Back in just pre COVID, ear­ly 2020, it was trad­ing at about 300, then it dropped down to about 240. By March, yeah, 2020, rebound­ed as the mar­ket did. Then it got up to about 436 in Decem­ber 21. Inter­est rates, Ukraine, et cetera, et cetera. It start­ed to drop, drop down to 330 by Sep­tem­ber 22 and has been most­ly rebound­ing since then with a few peaks and troughs is now up around 500 bucks.

[00:47:31] CR: So it’s def­i­nite­ly had a good cou­ple of years.

[00:47:34] TK: Oh yeah. I mean, as we’re say­ing it, the US, US stock mar­ket’s in a bub­ble. So yeah, it’s had a great run. Um,

[00:47:42] TK: but go back to 2007. I don’t know if that index fund was around then, but I remem­ber

[00:47:46] TK: that,

[00:47:47] CR: goes back to

[00:47:47] TK: they were just sort of, well, 2007, I remem­ber that, um, some of the ear­ly index funds dropped off dra­mat­i­cal­ly and I stayed down for a long time, but LICs like Wil­son Asset Man­age­ment and AFIC were trad­ing as low as, um, 30 per­cent to the Net Tan­gi­ble Assets, 40 per­cent to the Net Tan­gi­ble Assets.

[00:48:08] TK: And that was a great scream­ing buy because you like, you know, that, that, um, dis­count to the stocks they were hold­ing and did­n’t feel they had to sell, uh, was, um, regressed to the main. So you made 30 or 40 per­cent for doing noth­ing but buy­ing at the right time.

[00:48:23] CR: mm. Alright, mov­ing right along. You gonna pull some pork today?

[00:48:30] TK: I am, yeah, uh, Cash Con­vert­ers is the stock I’ve picked out. So I think it’s new on the buy list this week. And, uh, I guess peo­ple in Aus­tralia are famil­iar with cash con­vert­ers. I don’t know if many of our lis­ten­ers actu­al­ly use cash con­vert­ers, but they’ve prob­a­bly seen the stores around. Accord­ing to Cash Con­vert­ers, they are the largest glob­al store net­work focused on repur­pos­ing Pre owned items, which they also call the cir­cu­lar econ­o­my.

[00:49:01] TK: Pro­vid­ing solu­tions to meet the cash needs of a grow­ing under­sur­faced mar­ket. They have 40 years in oper­a­tion and they’re a mul­ti chan­nel glob­al in store and online pres­ence. They have a reg­u­lat­ed and respon­si­ble lend­ing busi­ness and they have rough­ly 670 stores glob­al­ly and 1. 7 mil­lion Repur­posed items in Aus­tralia alone are trad­ed through their stores and they lend 780 to a 780, 000 Aus­tralian per­son­al, they have 780, 000 Aus­tralian per­son­al loan appli­ca­tions per annum.

[00:49:36] TK: So that comes from their lat­est results. So it’s basi­cal­ly a, it’s a chain of what we would have called pawn shops in the past, P A W N shops. I remem­ber when they first sort of got up and going, I used to have a look at them in the, some of the, um, Super­mar­ket, uh, or some of the shop­ping malls they were in when I worked in retail and you sort of look at new, new store for­mats, uh, and they kind of took the, uh, high street or the main street pawn shop and, and turned it into a fran­chise mod­el and made it look a bit, um, a bit bet­ter and a bit eas­i­er to approach as a, as a cus­tomer.

[00:50:12] TK: Um, They, long sto­ry short, I was quite sur­prised at how big they are now. So they’re, they, they do oper­ate in 17 coun­tries. And as I said before, near­ly 700, 670 stores glob­al­ly. So it’s, they’re quite large at the moment, even though their mar­ket cap’s not that big. They are oper­at­ing a lot, main­ly through a fran­chise mod­el.

[00:50:36] TK: And one of their One of their strate­gies for growth is to buy back more and more of the fran­chise stores to become com­pa­ny oper­at­ed, which gives them a bet­ter mar­gin, but at this stage they’re still main­ly fran­chise com­pa­nies. The first store opened in Perth in 84 and they’re still based in Perth, WA.

[00:50:56] TK: They fran­chised sev­en stores across the state soon after open­ing in 1984. In 1990, the group expand­ed into oth­er Aus­tralian states, and then they land­ed in the UK in 1994. And now they’re across, uh, all of Europe as well. So they, they cur­rent­ly have 190 stores in the UK, which is a mix of com­pa­ny owned and fran­chise, uh, stores 72 in France and, and some of the sur­round­ing coun­tries and 78 in Spain and Por­tu­gal.

[00:51:29] TK: Um, with­in Aus­tralia they have 151 stores in 22 in New Zealand. So the mix is still pre­dom­i­nant­ly fran­chised 532 fran­chise loca­tions ver­sus 137 cor­po­rate. Um, so it’s actu­al­ly, they’re actu­al­ly quite. Quite large from the retail pres­ence. Inter­est­ing oper­at­ing mod­el, they Um, so the busi­ness is if you want a short term loan, you take your old gui­tar or radio cas­sette or what­ev­er into a shop and, um, they’ll give you a short term loan and say, well, you know, we’ll, we’ll lend you what we think the val­ue of this, what this item is for a month and, uh, you’ll pay you.

[00:52:09] TK: Rea­son­able amount of inter­est on that loan if you want to buy it back in a mon­th’s time, or you just don’t turn up and we’ll sell it. So, they claim to have devel­oped a lot of, um, they’re call­ing it AI, but I guess it’s machine learn­ing around how to val­ue things quick­ly. So they’ve real­ly, um, fine tuned over 40 years the busi­ness of valu­ing those items.

[00:52:28] TK: Uh, because a lot of peo­ple just Don’t ever come back, uh, you know, redeem the item and don’t pay the inter­est on the loan. Inter­est on, inter­est­ing­ly enough, the inter­est that they charge on their loans, and there’s a few oth­er what they call pay­day lenders in the mar­ket, came under gov­ern­ment scruti­ny.

[00:52:47] TK: And there was a change to the law, I think two years ago, about what could be charged, uh, for, uh, these, they’re called SACCs offi­cial­ly, Small Amount Cred­it Con­tracts, and, uh, they have flagged in their lat­est results that they’re try­ing to get out of that, that small amount cred­it con­tract part of the busi­ness.

[00:53:10] TK: They’re still offer­ing loans, but they tend to do it on more of a, uh, Um, a loan basis. So they have also built up a lot of intel­li­gence around lend­ing peo­ple to, who can’t get loans from banks. Um, a bit like Cred­it Corp has, and we, I did a poor talk on them. So they’re ser­vic­ing that, that sort of unse­cured.

[00:53:28] TK: part of the mar­ket. They claim that that part of the mar­ket’s worth four bil­lion dol­lars and that they only have a small share of it now and it’s grow­ing. So it’s a big oppor­tu­ni­ty for them to grow in Aus­tralia at least and I guess sim­i­lar­ly around the world. But a cou­ple of years ago the law changed and there was an arti­cle on the Fin Review back in Decem­ber 2nd 2022 by a reporter called Michael Reed and it says Pay­day lenders will be pro­hib­it­ed from extend­ing loans that eat up more than 10 per­cent of an indi­vid­u­al’s income after last minute lob­by­ing by Inde­pen­dent Sen­a­tor David Pocock forced a vote in Par­lia­ment.

[00:54:06] TK: Pay­day lenders are essen­tial­ly lenders of last resort for small amounts and with lim­it­ed approval require­ments. The loans known as Small Amount Cred­it Con­tracts, SACCs, are gen­er­al­ly accessed by peo­ple on low incomes who can­not access main­stream, cheap­er forms of cred­it. Pre­cise pay­day lend­ing data is not cap­tured by the reg­u­la­tors, but lenders such as Cash Con­vert­ers, Wal­let Wiz­ard and Cash Train are esti­mat­ed to have lent out 3 bil­lion across 4.

[00:54:35] TK: 7 mil­lion loans in the three years fol­low­ing the Turn­bull gov­ern­men­t’s review into pay­day lend­ing in 2016. The new laws will require pay­day loans and oth­er forms of SACCs to be paid. To have equal repay­ment inter­vals, as well as pro­hibit­ing lenders from charg­ing month­ly fees for the resid­ual of the loan term if the bor­row­er pays off the bal­ance ear­ly.

[00:54:58] TK: Lenders will also be banned from mak­ing unso­licit­ed com­mu­ni­ca­tions to con­sumers. To enter into a pay­day loan in cer­tain cir­cum­stances. The new rules were rec­om­men­da­tions from the Turn­bull era review of small amount cred­it con­tracts con­duct­ed by Trea­sury in 2016. The Coali­tion made efforts to enact the changes, but they were nev­er pro­gressed through Par­lia­ment.

[00:55:17] TK: They were in 2022. So, the gov­ern­men­t’s tried to tidy up this This area of pay­day lend­ing and there cer­tain­ly was a lot of bad anec­do­tal sto­ries around this part of the mar­ket. I can remem­ber that, you know, back a cou­ple of years ago that peo­ple were being charged 40 per­cent inter­est and things like that and were falling on even hard­er times and it was seen as being preda­to­ry.

[00:55:42] TK: If you go to the cred­it con­vert, uh, cash con­vert­er store web­site now, you’ll see that very much por­tray­ing them­selves as respon­si­ble. Um, Oper­a­tors. They’re try­ing to get out of the SACC mar­ket. They push them­selves as being, um, big in the cir­cu­lar econ­o­my. Uh, and they say on their web­site, oh sor­ry, from their results.

[00:56:05] TK: Our retail trade is dri­ven by pre owned items which direct­ly con­tribute to the cir­cu­lar econ­o­my. This extends the use­ful life of prod­ucts, reduc­ing waste and less­en­ing demand for new man­u­fac­tur­ing and min­ing. We run a neigh­bour­hood ori­ent­ed busi­ness, reduc­ing the need for cus­tomer trav­el and deliv­ery ser­vices.

[00:56:23] TK: Each store serves of its own sup­ply chain. We do not rely on mass sup­ply, dis­tri­b­u­tion or ware­hous­ing facil­i­ties. We pro­mote envi­ron­men­tal stew­ard­ship by reduc­ing con­sump­tion, recy­cling paper prod­ucts and respon­si­bly dis­pos­ing of com­put­ers, elec­tron­ics and relat­ed acces­sories. So that’s all well and good.

[00:56:43] TK: So they’re mov­ing out of pay­day lend­ing. They’re push­ing out their cir­cu­lar econ­o­my cre­den­tials. So they seem to be at least chas­tened by the spot­light that was shined on them a few years ago. And, you know, you can say the results are actu­al­ly show­ing that Work­ing for them. So they had strong results this year, rev­enue was up 26% and NPA was up 4%.

[00:57:09] TK: The loan book was up 6% and the loss­es were down 11 to from 11% to 8%. And the impair­ment charge for loss­es going for­ward on the cur­rent loans or new loans being writ­ten was down to three point, was down 3.6%. So, um. All of that’s good for them. Of course, this time in the econ­o­my and the eco­nom­ic cycle is actu­al­ly good for them as well.

[00:57:32] TK: I’ve got to be care­ful it does­n’t get too much worse and peo­ple start default­ing on their lines. But cash con­vert­ers tends to do well dur­ing cost of liv­ing or times when cost of liv­ing is being pres­sured. So Sam Budicel­ic, the, uh, The Man­ag­ing Direc­tor attrib­uted much of the increas­es I just spoke of to con­sumers expe­ri­enc­ing increased cost of liv­ing pres­sures at a time when main­stream finance con­tin­ues to become more dif­fi­cult to access.

[00:58:00] TK: While a small lender, the com­pa­ny has a mar­ket cap of 120 mil­lion, cash con­vert­ers reflects pres­sure on low­er income bor­row­ers. Strug­gling with high­er inter­est rates and util­i­ty bills, costs which have pushed some con­sumers towards sell­ing house­hold goods, includ­ing com­put­er devices and jew­ellery. So that comes from anoth­er AFR arti­cle from July this year by James Ayres. One last thing to say about them before I get into the num­bers is they’re also mak­ing a push into, what they’re call­ing the grow­ing lux­u­ry goods busi­ness for sec­ond hand items. So think Guc­ci hand­bags. And, um, they claim, they’ve actu­al­ly even launched a cou­ple of web­sites to ser­vice this and they claim that their, their AI pow­ered solu­tions, and I’ll put that in invert­ed com­mas, but cer­tain­ly their, their machine learn­ing solu­tions for prod­uct ver­i­fi­ca­tion has enabled them to trade con­fi­dent­ly in the high end lux­u­ry mar­kets and not be ripped off by the mar­ket.

[00:58:58] TK: Buy fake goods and to give the right price to some­one who waltzes in want­i­ng to sell a lux­u­ry item. The lux­u­ry focus store con­cept is under­way and that’s one of the areas that they’re high­light­ing for growth. So, look, it was a bit of an eye open­er for me doing this research. Uh, the shares have been going side­ways for a cou­ple of years now, but if they’re ever going to go ahead, this is prob­a­bly the time that they will, and they are, they are up since their results, uh, pre­sen­ta­tion.

[00:59:30] TK: Now, just let me get to the num­bers. Uh, not a huge stock. ADT and One of the rea­sons for that is I found out dur­ing the research that a US pawn­broking com­pa­ny called Easy­Corp owns 43 per­cent of the stock. So there can’t be a big free float on this com­pa­ny, even though it’s, um, it’s quite large from a retail store foot­print point of view.

[00:59:54] TK: ADT is small, just over a hun­dred thou­sand K a day. Share price for the analy­sis is 23 cents, which sits above IV1 of 17 and below IV2 of 27. This is one of the stocks we don’t have a con­sen­sus tar­get for. So, um, The one to get set if you like the idea of being in ear­ly before the larg­er funds start to focus on it.

[01:00:17] TK: If you’re yield hun­gry, the stock yields 8. 7%, which is, you know, real­ly good, above the bank rate, so we, or the mort­gage rate, so we score it for that. But it’s also one of the, uh, Stocks which I like and which I’ve seen do well in the past where the yield is above the P. E. ratio, so the P. E. ratio for this stock is just over 7 at the moment, which isn’t the high­est or the low­est, so we can’t score it for being a low P.

[01:00:43] TK: E., but we can score it for hav­ing a yield above the P. E. ratio, which is a great sign of val­ue, I think. Stock Doc­tor finan­cial health and trend is strong and recov­er­ing. So again, anoth­er recov­er­ing stock on our buy list, which I like as well. Uh, Prop­Caf is only 3. 75 times. So it’s churn­ing out a lot of cash and we’re able to buy it at a low mul­ti­ple of that cash.

[01:01:06] TK: We’re also able to buy it less than book plus 30. So net equi­ty per share is 34 cents. Book Plus 44, so we can buy it for less than book. Um, NTA is 0. 28, which is slight­ly less than NEPS, um, but it’s still, uh, the share price is still below even the net tan­gi­ble assets. And I think the dif­fer­ence between NTA and NEPS is again going to be some good­will in there, because they have acquired some, uh, net­works of for­eign bro­kers, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the UK, along their way.

[01:01:37] TK: Uh, I thought it was inter­est­ing that, uh, Stock Doc­tor have earn­ings per share Fore­cast growth has been neg­a­tive. Noth­ing on the front page of Stock Doc­tor, but the down­load say­ing that. But if I look at the num­bers and the trends and every­thing I’ve researched, I’m kind of sur­prised by that. So hap­py to score it based on what Stock Doc­tor is telling me, but I’m a bit cyn­i­cal.

[01:01:57] TK: I think this, this com­pa­ny will grow earn­ings, um, in the next six to 12 months. Uh, any­way, um, we’ll score it. We won’t score it for that. Can’t put it over, um, our, our test of earn­ings per share growth over time. P. E. because it’ll be neg­a­tive. Com­pa­ny does­n’t have an own­er founder, but as I said, it’s 43 per­cent owned by a U.

[01:02:17] TK: S. form bro­ker com­pa­ny. So that’s a very inter­est­ing dimen­sion for me into this puz­zle. I don’t know whether that means that they will launch a takeover bid. The com­pa­ny even­tu­al­ly, or whether they’re going to act more like a, like an own­er founder, some­one who has lots of expe­ri­ence in the, in the mar­ket that sits on the board and can guide the com­pa­ny.

[01:02:36] TK: But either way, I kind of view this as a pos­i­tive, despite the fact that it impacts on the ADT that’s avail­able each day of the trade. Com­pa­ny’s also a new three point upturn. It does­n’t have con­sis­tent­ly increas­ing equi­ty. So all in all it’s got Scores 12 out of 17, or 71%, and has a QAV score of 0. 19, which is pret­ty good, pret­ty high up on the buy list.

[01:03:00] TK: And Stock­o­pe­dia give it a 99 score, which is high on their rank­ing as well. Qual­i­ty score of 83 on the Stock­o­pe­dia rank­ing. Um, it’s high on the val­ue. Score 99 on their list of out of 100 and Momen­tum 91. So it scores well on Stock­o­pe­dia as well. Strengths and weak­ness­es. I think this, I’ve out­lined a lot of the strengths there.

[01:03:25] TK: I think if it gets into the lux­u­ry item mar­ket, if the econ­o­my stays a bit rocky, but does­n’t get too much worse when peo­ple default on their loans. It’ll be good. Um, if, I think we’ve prob­a­bly seen all the gov­ern­ment focus and, and change the reg­u­la­tions in this mar­ket, we’ll see for a while. Uh, so, um, but the gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion is a, is a, a risk.

[01:03:48] TK: Um, but over­all, I think it, it, um, is

[01:03:50] TK: posi­tioned for some growth in this com­pa­ny.

[01:03:53] CR: Inter­est­ing, I had a look at their web­site and was look­ing at the fee dis­clo­sure sec­tion. They seem like extreme­ly high fees to me, but I would­n’t know. So I went into GPT and asked it what it thought about the fees. Um, it says the rates you pro­vid­ed seem typ­i­cal for small and medi­um per­son­al loans offered by alter­na­tive lend­ing insti­tu­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly ones tar­get­ing bor­row­ers with less than per­fect cred­it.

[01:04:20] CR: Here’s a break­down of how these fees com­pare to gen­er­al mar­ket prac­tices. Small per­son­al loans, 20 per­cent estab­lish­ment fee and 4 per­cent month­ly fee, says they’re both rel­a­tive­ly high but not uncom­mon in the pay­day or short term loan space. Medi­um per­son­al loans, 400 estab­lish­ment fee. B and a 48 per­cent per annum inter­est rate.

[01:04:43] CR: It says they’re again high, but not out of line for sub­prime lend­ing and the line of cred­it is a 48 per­cent per annum. It says it’s also very high, though it could be viewed as rel­a­tive­ly more flex­i­ble due to the line of cred­it. Mod­el. So over­all, these loan terms are geared towards high risk bor­row­ers, which explains the high fees and inter­est rates.

[01:05:04] CR: How­ev­er, bor­row­ers should exer­cise cau­tion as these loans could quick­ly become expen­sive and lead to a cycle of debt, uh, which is, uh, good, good, uh, advice, I guess.

[01:05:16] TK: Yeah. And that’s why the gov­ern­ment focused on it back in 2016 and again in 2022. I guess to put it in per­spec­tive, and I’m not try­ing to say that they’re nec­es­sar­i­ly things to be entered into quick­ly or, or, um, with­out thought. Uh, a pay­day loan’s meant to be only for a cou­ple of weeks. So it’s like, I’ve got­ta a bill, I have to pay this week, I get paid month­ly.

[01:05:38] TK: Um, I’ll get an advance on my pay. So 48% per annum might only work out to a cou­ple of per­cent for a cou­ple for. So that’s, that’s prob­a­bly the focus you need to look at it from, although there is the estab­lish­ment fee and also too, if you’re, I’m not sure how much they’re wrap­ping up the pawn part of that into that equa­tion.

[01:05:58] TK: So if I’ve tak­en my gui­tar down and they’ve giv­en me 200 bucks for it and they say, well, you can buy it back in two weeks. A mon­th’s time for 250 bucks. That’s going to look like a large amount of inter­est on the, on the loan if I decide to go and redeem, but a lot of peo­ple won’t. They’ll just let, you know, cash con­vert­ers will then put it up for sale

[01:06:16] TK: and sell it.

[01:06:18] CR: So they don’t pay inter­est on that, then they just lose the lien on their prod­uct. I

[01:06:25] TK: Yeah. If you don’t come back and pay the inter­est with­in a month or what­ev­er the peri­od is, two months, maybe. Yeah. You don’t, we sell it. You don’t get it

[01:06:31] TK: back.

[01:06:32] CR: won­der if they accept chil­dren. Um, the

[01:06:38] TK: Maybe they charge neg­a­tive inter­est. You have to pay them until they can sell

[01:06:41] TK: it. Yeah.

[01:06:42] CR: three. I’d sell two of my three. Um, won’t say which two, that’ll give me an out if they ever hear this. Um,

[01:06:51] TK: Did you have a good Father’s Day? Recent­ly. Yeah.

[01:06:56] CR: no, not par­tic­u­lar­ly. No. Um, the, uh, where was I going? Oh yeah, I noticed on their web­site they, they like, they have an online store now for the prod­ucts that peo­ple leave behind too, so you don’t have to go into your cash con­vert­ers and,

[01:07:13] TK: Yeah, it’s a big part of their

[01:07:15] TK: busi­ness too.

[01:07:16] CR: Not sure how com­pet­i­tive the pric­ing is. I had a look at an iPad and it seemed to be about 50 bucks cheap­er than I could get a new one at JB Hi Fi, um, of the same vin­tage, but that was just one exam­ple.

[01:07:28] CR: But yeah, they do have lux­u­ry things. An Her­mes bag for 3, 000. Uh, who’s drop­ping off an Her­mes bag? Um, it’s a divorce sit­u­a­tion. Reck­on the wife’s cleared out, left her hand­bag behind. The hus­band’s like, right, down to cash con­vert­ers. Ha

[01:07:48] TK: Or, hus­band’s gone down

[01:07:50] TK: to the pub and bought a knock off Her­mes brand and

[01:07:54] TK: swapped it in the

[01:07:54] TK: wardrobe at night and tak­en the

[01:07:56] CR: ha ha ha ha

[01:07:56] CR: ha! Yeah, yeah, good for him.

[01:07:59] TK: Yeah.

[01:08:00] CR: Oh, that was inter­est­ing. Thank you, Tony, for doing that. Alright, we’re into after hours. What do you want to talk about? You can start.

[01:08:08] TK: Oh, um, So hors­es, first of all, for me, so Caste and Poi­fect are down to run on Sat­ur­day at Flem­ing­ton. Both in the same race, which will be inter­est­ing. At this stage, any­way, the nom­i­na­tions

[01:08:23] TK: aren’t out yet, I don’t think. So I’ll be going along to see that on my way home, and then, um,

[01:08:28] CR: tak­ing your

[01:08:29] TK: Sor­ry,

[01:08:31] CR: top hat? Your mon­o­cle?

[01:08:34] TK: my suit and tie any­way. I’ll do that. Alex’s birth­day, so we’ll have a din­ner for her on Fri­day night. And I Nev­er Dreamed will also race on Sun­day, I think at either Kil­more or Sey­mour, some­where in the provin­cial race­tracks around Vic­to­ria, which will be her first start for a while. So we’ll see how she is pro­gress­ing.

[01:08:56] TK: So three hors­es run­ning on the week­end. But unfor­tu­nate­ly on the flip side, I know last week I spoke about one of our May­ors fell sick dur­ing A cou­ple of weeks before child­birth and we had the euthana­sia and the foal was born via cae­sare­an sec­tion but she’s just dete­ri­o­rat­ed so bad­ly that we had to put her down yes­ter­day as well.

[01:09:14] TK: So, and I’m say­ing we, I mean I’m an own­er and I’ve been involved in the updates from vets and deci­sion mak­ing but it’s been par­tic­u­lar­ly hard on the per­son own­ing the stud farm who’s been there watch­ing it decline. So, tough week for that. It

[01:09:29] CR: Mm. That’s sad. Very

[01:09:33] TK: was, yeah. Any­way, um, a cou­ple of things I’ve caught up on, uh, I watched the first episode which has just been released of the David Chase series called Wise Guy,

[01:09:42] TK: about the, his life and the mak­ing of the

[01:09:45] TK: Sopra­nos, which is very, very good. Very great song, Fox­tel,

[01:09:51] CR: Oh.

[01:09:52] TK: but the premise is that they, it’s an inter­view in the, uh,

[01:09:56] TK: Must be the set from when Tony Sopra­no goes into the shrink and he’s kind of grilled about his upbring­ing.

[01:10:03] TK: So it’s, it’s, it’s actu­al­ly real­ly good. Talks about how Sopra­no, Tony Sopra­no’s moth­er was based on his moth­er and, um, uh, has all the, a lot of the cast­ing inter­views with the var­i­ous actors who were, You’re down to play Tony Sopra­no on the cast. Inter­est­ing­ly enough, he reached out to Steve Van

[01:10:25] TK: Zandt, who actu­al­ly had nev­er act­ed before in his life,

[01:10:30] CR: Mm

[01:10:30] TK: but you see the footage of him act­ing, you know, audi­tion­ing for the role of Tony Sopra­no.

[01:10:37] TK: And then, um, Uh, and he was meant to be Tony Sopra­no, accord­ing to David Chase, but HBO balked at putting a lead actor who’d nev­er act­ed before into the role. So, David Chase went back and wrote the part of Sill for, uh, Mia­mi Steve to get him in to the role. to the show. So it’s full of inter­views with him and with Michael Impe­ri­oli, etc.

[01:11:00] TK: Um, I’ve for­got­ten the lady’s name who plays Mrs. Sopra­no. It’s

[01:11:05] TK: actu­al­ly real­ly good. Worth watch­ing.

[01:11:08] CR: Oh, I have to check that out. Yeah. The way I’ve heard him tell the sto­ry before is that Steve Van Zandt, um, like he knew Steve and Steve used to do the Al Paci­no, just when I thought I was out, they dragged me back in and yeah. And then you, you, you, you, I, you go back and you watch the pilot episode of the Sopra­nos and, um, Scyl­la’s in that, but just a small part.

[01:11:36] CR: He’s sort of at the bada bing, just as the host of the bada bing, and it almost seems like they don’t real­ly know him that well. But obvi­ous­ly, then, with­in an episode or two, when the series got picked up, he’s Tony’s con­cil­iary. Like, his, his role just esca­lat­ed. I’ve always loved the fact that he end­ed up With that role being

[01:11:56] TK: and

[01:11:57] CR: gui­tarist for the E Street Band and then, you know, inhab­it­ing this

[01:12:01] TK: own band

[01:12:01] TK: too.

[01:12:03] CR: Yeah!

[01:12:04] TK: Fan­tas­tic band.

[01:12:06] TK: Um, yeah, and David Chase talks about that. He says when he wrote the pilot and puts Van Zandt in it, The role had no pur­pose. He said it was­n’t writ­ten to be the con­cil­iary or the, or, um, the sec­ond, the under capo, as he called it, under capo, capo, um, it was just writ­ten to keep Van Zandt involved

[01:12:26] TK: in the project.

[01:12:28] CR: yeah. Good deci­sion.

[01:12:30] TK: Yeah,

[01:12:31] CR: great. Got­ta check that out. Well, uh,

[01:12:34] TK: a cou­ple of, um, a cou­ple of Oasis doc­u­men­taries and con­certs because of their, their reunion, which has been the big news in the UK this last cou­ple of weeks. So there’s a good doc­u­men­tary called

[01:12:46] TK: Super­son­ic, which I love watch­ing as

[01:12:49] TK: well. A

[01:12:50] CR: you’re an Oasis fan? I would not have picked that.

[01:12:53] TK: lit­tle bit. I prob­a­bly came in late. I did­n’t like the hype when they first start­ed and there were a cou­ple of louts and all the rest of it. But, um, I remem­ber buy­ing their last album and being real­ly impressed by it. But yeah, but yeah, great sto­ry. Go back and have a look at Super­son­ic if you’re inter­est­ed in that.

[01:13:10] CR: Well, I’ve nev­er real­ly giv­en Oasis the time of day, but I’ll, I’ll check it out on your rec­om­men­da­tion. Um, well, uh, RIP to James Earl Jones, first of all. Um, you know, 93, so not real­ly a sur­prise, but, um, what a, what an innings he had, what a lega­cy he has left behind also. Some peo­ple may not be famil­iar, but a great com­ic book artist called John Cas­sa­day Also passed away 52, I heard today.

[01:13:45] CR: For com­ic book fans, if you’re War­ren Ellis fans, you prob­a­bly know Plan­e­tary, one of the great­est graph­ic nov­el series in the last 30 years, writ­ten by War­ren Ellis. John did the art­work for that, which was icon­ic. Plan­e­tary was a, uh, an amaz­ing series. Uh, don’t know what his cause of death was. Um, I’m guess­ing he may have tak­en his own life by the fact that no one’s actu­al­ly talked about why he died.

[01:14:16] CR: Sad. Um, but yeah, I loved his work. He also did a lot of oth­er stuff as well. A lot of oth­er comics, big names, stuff. I’ve been on my Roger Cor­man deep dive. And by the way, as part of that, I found out that he passed away in May.

[01:14:33] TK: Oh, wow.

[01:14:34] CR: Why was­n’t that James Earl Jones lev­el news? Roger Cor­man passed away and I did­n’t even, did you hear about that?

[01:14:43] TK: I did­n’t.

[01:14:46] CR: Like I was, when I found out I was gob­s­macked and I was try­ing to explain to Chris­sy who he is. She’s heard me men­tion him, but. She’s heard me men­tion the name, but she’s like, I was like, Oh my God, like Cop­po­la, Lucas, Spiel­berg, Jack Nichol­son, William Shat­ner. I mean, the list goes on and Ron Howard. I remem­ber I read as part of this, he said to Ron Howard once when Ron Howard was direct­ing a film for him ear­ly in his, like his first direct­ing job, he said, Roger Cor­man said to him, if you do a good job in this film, you’ll nev­er have to work for me again.

[01:15:25] CR: That was what he used to

[01:15:26] TK: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. What a great

[01:15:30] TK: say­ing. Was Gone in 60 Sec­onds a Cor­man

[01:15:34] TK: film?

[01:15:35] CR: The orig­i­nal,

[01:15:37] TK: Yeah.

[01:15:38] CR: orig­i­nal ver­sion, uh, was, I think,

[01:15:41] TK: yeah, Because that was

[01:15:42] TK: Ron Howard’s

[01:15:42] TK: first direct­ing

[01:15:44] CR: Oh yeah, right. Um, but I, so I re watched, because I saw it 30 years ago, Lit­tle Shop of Hor­rors.

[01:15:55] TK: Right.

[01:15:56] CR: Have you ever seen that?

[01:15:57] TK: Yeah. Absolute­ly.

[01:15:59] CR: it is amaz­ing.

[01:16:01] TK: It’s out there, isn’t it?

[01:16:02] TK: It’s psy­cho. Yeah.

[01:16:03] CR: It is, but it is bril­liant.

[01:16:06] CR: Like, the very def­i­n­i­tion of a low bud­get film.

[01:16:11] CR: Like, it’s so low bud­get, it’s crazy. But,

[01:16:14] TK: how it ever got remade into a musi­cal

[01:16:17] TK: com­e­dy was just,

[01:16:18] CR: Which I’ve nev­er seen, the Rick Mora­nis ver­sion, I should check that out, but the orig­i­nal ver­sion, like every per­for­mance is amaz­ing, the char­ac­ters are hilar­i­ous, talk about black com­e­dy, it’s about as black as you can get. Real­ly, like, I was halfway through it, Chris­sy came down and watched a bit, and she was say­ing I’m enjoy­ing this more than most mod­ern films I’ve seen in the last cou­ple of years.

[01:16:42] CR: I’m like, I know, right? It is so enter­tain­ing. And then I watched The Intrud­er, 1961, William Shat­ner, pre Star Trek. It’s a small town in the deep south that’s just hav­ing their first fed­er­al­ly man­dat­ed inte­gra­tion of a school and William Shat­ner comes in and he’s this smooth talk­ing racist try­ing to work up the locals, the white peo­ple, into a racist fer­vour against them.

[01:17:20] CR: inte­gra­tion. But for the first half of the film, he’s just this charm­ing per­son who’s going around intro­duc­ing him­self to the locals, sleep­ing with a teenage girl, work­ing at a milk bar. But just, he’s very, you don’t real­ly know, but he’s just very, very charm­ing. He does­n’t have the Shat­ner affect. Yet, he

[01:17:44] TK: going to ask

[01:17:45] CR: like a nor­mal per­son. No, he’s got a bit of a south­ern

[01:17:49] CR: accent when he puts out a speech, but an astound­ing per­for­mance by Shat­ner. It has more use of the N word than any film I think I have ever seen, includ­ing Taran­ti­no and blax­ploita­tion films from the 70s that I’m a big fan of. Very, very lib­er­al use of the N word from the get go right through it.

[01:18:10] CR: Cause it’s all, it’s about, he’s basi­cal­ly going in and say­ing to the locals, so how do you feel about this inte­gra­tion? And then he gets them worked up and then he’s like, yeah, I think we can help you with that. And yeah, it’s, it’s like an absolute­ly riv­et­ing. Uh, film, direct­ed by Cor­man, again, um, so any­way, yeah, I’ve just been absolute­ly lov­ing my Cor­man deep dive on Plex, like such a cat­a­logue of, you know, I asso­ciate him more with like, you know, Death Race 2000

[01:18:43] TK: Yeah, yeah,

[01:18:44] CR: schlocky films, uh, but he made Yes,

[01:18:49] CR: but he made some absolute

[01:18:51] CR: stand­out, like these are Rot­ten Toma­to rat­ed like 90 per­cent Rot­ten Toma­toes.

[01:18:56] CR: these are

[01:18:57] TK: Wow, real­ly?

[01:18:58] CR: mas­ter­pieces. Any­way.

[01:19:00] TK: Yeah, right. Yeah. And in fact, in the David Chase doc­u­men­tary, he did­n’t work for Roger Cor­man, I don’t think, but he must have worked for some­one sim­i­lar. And he talks about one of the first things he wrote and made, per­haps as a stu­dent film, was a, that kind of era, was a, you know, sort of, um, white, racist, sex­ist, kind of movie.

[01:19:23] TK: Um, and then he worked for a com­peti­tor of, uh, must have been a com­peti­tor of Cor­man, that kind of lit­tle movie pro­duc­er com­pa­ny where they race out and shoot a movie on the week­end type thing. Yeah. And, and was, um, was Cor­man the basis for the char­ac­ter in Get Shorty, the movie pro­duc­er char­ac­ter

[01:19:44] TK: in Get Shorty?

[01:19:46] CR: Oh, I don’t

[01:19:47] CR: know.

[01:19:47] TK: I think he was, yeah. Was it called Zim? Zim Pro­duc­tions?

[01:19:52] CR: Yeah. I don’t know.

[01:19:53] TK: paid by, uh, who’s the guy? Pop­eye Doyle. Who was the

[01:19:56] TK: guy? Um, Gene Hack­man in Get Shorty. Yeah.

[01:20:01] CR: I’ve, I’ve actu­al­ly got that. I’ve, I’ve got a bunch of Elmore Leonard books queued up to read, and that’s, uh, one of the ones that I’ve got queued up. By the way, the, in the, the intrud­er film is also known as shame. If you look it up in Rot­ten Toma­toes, it’s 80% toma­to meter read­ing. Um, a charis­mat­ic stranger stirs up racist sen­ti­ments in a small town to pre­vent school inte­gra­tion

[01:20:25] CR: from hap­pen­ing there.

[01:20:27] CR: Real­ly, real­ly great film. Any­way, um, Nick Cave’s new album. Wild God. Have you lis­tened to that yet?

[01:20:34] TK: I haven’t, no.

[01:20:35] TK: Good?

[01:20:36] CR: Yeah, real­ly, real­ly good. Um, and there’s a

[01:20:39] CR: track called Oh Wow, Oh Wow, it’s towards the end of the

[01:20:43] CR: album, that I was lis­ten­ing to and it has a female’s voice. It’s obvi­ous­ly like a, uh, answer­ing machine record­ing her talk­ing over the top of it. And I thought, I won­der if that is, and it was, it was Ani­ta Lane.

[01:20:58] CR: It’s like a trib­ute song. Remem­ber I men­tioned Ani­ta Lane a cou­ple of episodes ago? She was Nick­’s girl­friend for years. I’ve been doing, I’ve been re lis­ten­ing to her cat­a­logue recent­ly. She passed away recent­ly. So he’s done a trib­ute song to her, which is real­ly love­ly. Uh, yeah, but I’m real­ly enjoy­ing the album.

[01:21:17] CR: I’ve lis­tened to it a bunch of times and, um, it’s, it’s great. It’s late, clas­sic late Nick Cave. I got an issue with Nick Cave becom­ing a Chris­t­ian late in life. Uh, um, a bit like him and, yeah, and Rus­sell Brandt. I’m

[01:21:32] CR: like, what is going on here? But, uh, yeah, I’ve,

[01:21:36] TK: know it’s, I’m a bit cyn­i­cal about Bran­t’s con­ver­sion, giv­en all the prob­lems he’s had. It could just be a pub­lic­i­ty stunt, but, um,

[01:21:45] TK: yeah, who knows?

[01:21:46] CR: And Nick Cave’s obvi­ous­ly been through a lot of per­son­al, uh, calami­ty, uh, in the last 10 years. Um, but I saw he was, I think it was Aus­tralian Sto­ry or some­thing he did recent­ly. I saw a cou­ple of deep inter­views with him. He’s sort of become a believ­er in old age, which I find fas­ci­nat­ing. Any­way, went to a

[01:22:06] TK: in the fox­hole, hey? The

[01:22:09] CR: Well,

[01:22:10] TK: clos­er you get to death, the more like­ly you are to con­vert.

[01:22:13] CR: I don’t know about that. I

[01:22:15] TK: Oh, speak­ing of Aus­tralian sto­ry, did you

[01:22:16] TK: watch the episode last night about Lach­lan

[01:22:19] TK: Mur­doch?

[01:22:21] CR: No, but I read a

[01:22:22] TK: worth watch­ing. Mmm.

[01:22:24] CR: Hmm.

[01:22:25] TK: Yeah, it’s a part one of a mul­ti part series about it. Um, I watched it on iview.

[01:22:31] TK: Last

[01:22:31] CR: Speak­ing of peo­ple who have dis­ap­point­ed me in their life as they

[01:22:37] TK: he has­n’t dis­ap­point­ed his father.

[01:22:39] CR: Yeah, Yeah, that’s the point. Uh, you

[01:22:42] CR: know. I still, you know, I, I, I think Sarah Mur­doch is wish­ing she’d run off with me now and that when I was hit­ting on her in 2000 at

[01:22:53] TK: Yeah, right. Let that one go.

[01:22:54] CR: the Bill Gates, Bill Gates. yeah.

[01:22:56] CR: yeah. I remem­ber say­ing to her at the time, like, what’s he got that I

[01:22:59] CR: don’t have? And she

[01:23:02] TK: How many zeros did you get to

[01:23:03] CR: Yeah, yeah, Yeah.

[01:23:05] CR: well, apart from good looks and mon­ey and charm, what does

[01:23:09] TK: I kept watch­ing it think­ing

[01:23:10] TK: Roman. This is Roman,

[01:23:12] CR: yeah, yeah,

[01:23:14] TK: That’s exact­ly what Roman would

[01:23:15] TK: say. From suc­ces­sion.

[01:23:17] CR: Yeah. Um,

[01:23:20] TK: okay. Wow.

[01:23:21] CR: a ter­rif­ic White­ley exhi­bi­tion on at the Logan Art Gallery of all places that we went to on Sat­ur­day. Sur­rey Hills is closed for ren­o­va­tion, and they must have, I went to this thing think­ing it would be some minor Works. No, it was astound­ing. It had sev­er­al major works, um, includ­ing the self por­trait that he won the, the, um, uh, yeah, what’s the bloody por­trait prize?

[01:23:54] CR: Archibald 4 and 76. Uh, the bal­cony, the big blue bal­cony,

[01:24:00] TK: Oh, that’s one of my favourites.

[01:24:01] TK: Laven­der Bay. Yeah.

[01:24:03] CR: Yeah.

[01:24:03] CR: just astound­ing every, like,

[01:24:06] TK: Wow.

[01:24:06] CR: said, I was say­ing to Chris­sy

[01:24:08] CR: after­wards, every time I stand in front of this, I think to myself,

[01:24:13] CR: there are a lim­it­ed num­ber of times in my life when I’m going to be able to stand in front of this. Is this the last time?

[01:24:18] CR: Like it’s, it’s such a pro­found, Wiley’s

[01:24:22] TK: mm

[01:24:22] CR: this real­ly pro­found expe­ri­ence for me. It’s like a very deeply spir­i­tu­al thing. But it’s

[01:24:27] CR: like, I don’t know. Paint­ings I’d nev­er seen in real life before. Some I’d nev­er even seen in books before. Sculp­tures. Um, just, it was, it was real­ly, uh, an, an astound­ing trav­el­ing exhi­bi­tion of White­leys.

[01:24:41] CR: I was grate­ful to have had the oppor­tu­ni­ty. See, nor­mal­ly I need to go to Sur­rey Hills, uh, to, you know, see that many White­leys in one place.

[01:24:49] TK: walk past it prob­a­bly once a week, and I prob­a­bly drop in two or three times a year. And I know they’ve changed the exhi­bi­tion. It’s, I agree. It’s, it’s great

[01:24:58] CR: Yeah,

[01:24:59] TK: but in the Logan Art Gallery, I can’t imag­ine. That’s a real jux­ta­po­si­tion, isn’t it Did you, when you came out, was your car up

[01:25:06] TK: on cin­der blocks and the

[01:25:07] CR: Yeah, it was. Yeah, it was on fire. I, I, I took a, took a shiv when I went into the art gallery,

[01:25:12] CR: just, you know, just to

[01:25:13] CR: pro­tect myself. Get­ting ready to throw Fox in front of any­one who tried to

[01:25:17] CR: attack me, like, take him first. Um, but the real thing I want­ed to talk to you about, cause I’ve been think­ing about you while I’ve been read­ing this guy’s book. Have you heard of an Amer­i­can, um, his­to­ry pro­fes­sor called Alan Licht­man? Seen any of the media cov­er­age about him over the years? And his 13 keys to the White House?

[01:25:40] TK: no.

[01:25:41] TK: these are metaphor­i­cal keys, I’m

[01:25:43] TK: guess­ing.

[01:25:45] CR: Uh, no, keys to win­ning the White House. So

[01:25:47] TK: right,

[01:25:48] TK: okay.

[01:25:49] CR: I was remind­ed of him. I’ve read up on him before, but he had, there was a thing about him in the New York Times in the last week. This guy has pre­dict­ed the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion suc­cess­ful­ly every year since 1984 in the U. S. with one excep­tion, and that was Al Gore.

[01:26:10] CR: And Al Gore actu­al­ly won, but then lost it. You know, um,

[01:26:15] TK: hang­ing chad.

[01:26:16] CR: the, hang­ing Chad thing, right? And so I read one of his, well, I’m read­ing one of his books, uh, it’s called Pre­dict­ing the Next Pres­i­dent. And I’m going to, and I’m going to read you a quote from this. Pres­i­dent, pres­i­den­tial elec­tions do not work the way most peo­ple think they do.

[01:26:31] CR: Con­trary to assump­tions made by poll­sters, pun­dits and polit­i­cal experts who track pres­i­den­tial cam­paigns, and by the way can we just stop and appre­ci­ate the allit­er­a­tion in that sense, poll­sters, pun­dits and polit­i­cal experts who track pres­i­den­tial cam­paigns, love it, our qua­dren­ni­al con­tests for exec­u­tive pow­er are not con­tests at all.

[01:26:50] CR: They do not pit one can­di­date’s pop­u­lar­i­ty, lead­er­ship abil­i­ty, posi­tions on the issues or vision against anoth­er’s. They do not turn on the par­ty loy­al­ties of vot­ers, their devo­tion to lib­er­al or con­ser­v­a­tive ide­olo­gies, or their per­cep­tion of which can­di­date is clos­er to the cen­ter of the polit­i­cal spec­trum.

[01:27:08] CR: The elec­torate does not sim­ply vote its pock­et­book, retain­ing the par­ty in pow­er in good times and throw­ing the ras­cals out in bad. Elec­tions cer­tain­ly are not horse races, in which can­di­dates surge ahead or fall behind as they sprint toward elec­tion day. Pres­i­den­tial elec­tions are pri­mar­i­ly ref­er­en­da.

[01:27:27] CR: on the per­for­mance of the incum­bent admin­is­tra­tion dur­ing the pre­vi­ous four years. And he has a check­list. Stop me when this sounds famil­iar. He has a check­list of 13 things that he looks

[01:27:44] TK: hmm.

[01:27:45] CR: and whichev­er can­di­date gets more of those checks than the oth­er is going to win the White House. And this has been suc­cess­ful in every elec­tion since 1984.

[01:27:57] CR: He’s pre­dict­ed it and he devel­oped it by study­ing every pres­i­den­tial elec­tion since 1860 or some­thing like that.

[01:28:06] TK: Yep.

[01:28:07] CR: And it’s about look­ing at past per­for­mance and deter­min­ing based on past per­for­mance of the incum­bent admin­is­tra­tion, who’s going to win. So here are the four, I’ll run through them quick­ly, but I thought, oh my God, this is the QAV check­list when I was

[01:28:20] TK: Yeah,

[01:28:20] TK: right.

[01:28:22] CR: Key one, incum­bent par­ty man­date. After the midterm elec­tions, the incum­bent par­ty holds more seats in the US House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives than it did after the pre­vi­ous midterm elec­tions. So he’s look­ing at the per­for­mance of the midterms. Key two, nom­i­na­tion con­test. There is no seri­ous con­test for the incum­bent par­ty nom­i­na­tion. Three, incum­ben­cy. The incum­bent par­ty can­di­date is the sit­ting pres­i­dent. Four, third par­ty. There is no sig­nif­i­cant third par­ty or inde­pen­dent cam­paign. Key five, short term econ­o­my. The econ­o­my is not in reces­sion dur­ing the elec­tion cam­paign. Key six, long term econ­o­my. Real annu­al per capi­ta eco­nom­ic growth dur­ing the term equals or exceeds mean growth dur­ing the pre­vi­ous two terms.

[01:29:07] CR: Key 7. Pol­i­cy change. That’s con­sis­tent­ly increas­ing equi­ty, is that one? Key

[01:29:11] TK: Yeah,

[01:29:13] CR: Pol­i­cy change. The incum­bent admin­is­tra­tion affects major changes in nation­al pol­i­cy. Key 8. Social unrest. There is no sus­tained social unrest dur­ing the term. Key 9. Scan­dal. The incum­bent admin­is­tra­tion is untaint­ed by major scan­dal.

[01:29:30] CR: Key 10, For­eign or Mil­i­tary Fail­ure. The incum­bent admin­is­tra­tion suf­fers no major fail­ure in for­eign or mil­i­tary affairs. Key 11, For­eign or Mil­i­tary Suc­cess. The incum­bent admin­is­tra­tion achieves a major suc­cess in for­eign or mil­i­tary affairs. Key 12, Incum­bent Charis­ma. The incum­bent par­ty can­di­date is charis­mat­ic or a nation­al hero.

[01:29:52] CR: Key 13, chal­lenger charis­ma. The chal­leng­ing par­ty can­di­date is not charis­mat­ic or a nation­al hero. So he scores based on those. And then

[01:30:05] CR: he says it’s a Kamala Har­ris vic­to­ry.

[01:30:08] TK: Real­ly?

[01:30:09] CR: And he said, when they got rid of Biden, he was like, don’t get rid of Biden because that’s one of the keys. You’re weak­en­ing your posi­tion if you get rid of

[01:30:18] TK: right.

[01:30:19] CR: He says, well, there’s a cou­ple of things that could change between now and the elec­tion time. For­eign or mil­i­tary fail­ure, you know, depend­ing on what hap­pens with Ukraine, depend­ing on what hap­pens with Israel and Gaza could be, could taint the admin­is­tra­tion. Um, the econ­o­my could maybe, depend­ing on what hap­pens, you know, there’s a cou­ple of things that are up in the air.

[01:30:45] CR: But basi­cal­ly he’s, he’s got Kamala down as a win for this elec­tion. He’s, I think she got 8 out of the 13. When he

[01:30:55] TK: bit sub­jec­tive though, like how do you rate Kamala for charis­ma?

[01:30:59] TK: I don’t think she’s that charis­mat­ic myself, but some­one else might think that she’s

[01:31:02] TK: very charis­mat­ic.

[01:31:04] CR: well, he says

[01:31:04] CR: the same about Trump. And he said, you know, 2016

[01:31:08] CR: was chal­leng­ing. He actu­al­ly called 2016 for Trump. One of the very few pun­dits to call it before the elec­tion for Trump. Called it about Sep­tem­ber. I think he called it for Trump. Uh, no, sor­ry. A bit ear­li­er than Sep­tem­ber. Um, but, uh, Yeah, he says, you know, some peo­ple find him hor­ren­dous, not charis­mat­ic at all, but obvi­ous­ly a lot of peo­ple do find him charis­mat­ic.

[01:31:31] CR: So he, as opposed, like I was talk­ing to Chris­sy about it, like, she was like, I won­der how this would apply in Aus­tralia. And we’re like, well, I was like, when was the last time we had a charis­mat­ic Prime Min­is­ter can­di­date? Hawk. Yes. That’s what I said. Hawk. Yeah, exact­ly. I mean, Keat­ing. To a less­er extent, I mean, Keat­ing had some­thing, but, um, yeah,

[01:31:55] TK: Jen­ny and I had the same con­ver­sa­tion. We were watch­ing a Trump ral­ly on TV and she goes, this guy’s got no charis­ma at

[01:32:00] TK: all. And I said, I think he’s high­ly charis­mat­ic. Look at all the peo­ple he’s drag­ging to his.

[01:32:04] TK: Yeah,

[01:32:05] TK: shit yeah. Look at all the peo­ple he’s drag­ging to his ral­ly.

[01:32:09] CR: Well, they’re all paid for and shipped in most­ly, but I don’t

[01:32:15] TK: he had to use a cer­tain amount of charis­ma to cap­ture the Repub­li­can Par­ty as well. He did­n’t have pho­tos on all of

[01:32:21] TK: them, but um, I think he’s, high­ly charis­mat­ic.

[01:32:25] CR: think he’s

[01:32:25] CR: charis­mat­ic, but I think he’s built him­self into a WWE char­ac­ter. He’s Hulk Hogan.

[01:32:31] TK: Which is charis­mat­ic.

[01:32:34] CR: it’s bul­ly­ing. It’s demean­ing. He’s,

[01:32:36] CR: he’s, he’s per­fect­ed the. Aggres­sive, Bul­ly, Car­i­ca­ture, Can­di­date.

[01:32:45] TK: at charis­ma through your per­spec­tive,

[01:32:48] TK: charis­ma, I mean, the def­i­n­i­tion of charis­ma would be some­thing like being able to charm peo­ple and hold influ­ence over them by your per­son­al­i­ty, which is that, it’s what WWE does, it’s what Hulk Hogan does, it’s what

[01:33:00] TK: Trump does.

[01:33:02] CR: pres­ence or charm that oth­er

[01:33:04] CR: peo­ple.

[01:33:04] CR: find psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly com­pelling accord­ing to my dic­tio­nary?

[01:33:07] TK: Yeah,

[01:33:08] CR: Yeah, well, peo­ple def­i­nite­ly find him com­pelling, no doubt about that.

[01:33:13] CR: Uh, speak­ing, I mean, of the WWE sequel per­sona, you remem­ber who Hans Nie­mann is?

[01:33:23] TK: I do not.

[01:33:24] CR: the guy that was accused of cheat­ing in a chess tour­na­ment by Mag­nus Carlsen, and then there was the whole anal

[01:33:30] TK: anal beads.

[01:33:31] CR: Yeah, yeah. He has devel­oped his own sort of

[01:33:35] CR: WWE per­sona. He’s 21. He’s just arro­gant and mouthy and ridicu­lous­ly self con­fi­dent and, you know, going around say­ing he’s going to be the great­est chess play­er who ever lived and his name will be remem­bered for­ev­er and he’s the best and any­one who dis­agrees is, you know, just an idiot and a retard and this and stuff.

[01:33:57] CR: And they just had the World Speed Chess Cham­pi­onships in Paris. Uh, well he was a con­tender, but he got com­plete­ly crushed in the semi finals by

[01:34:09] TK: was he call­ing it the fake tour­na­ment?

[01:34:13] CR: No, but uh, going into

[01:34:16] TK: stolen?

[01:34:17] CR: going into it, he said he was going to crush every­body and then he got absolute­ly

[01:34:21] CR: crushed by Mag­nus and then by Hikaru Naka­mu­ra, who, when Mag­nus was enough points ahead in his semi final game against Hans, uh, Uh, Mag­nus just stopped car­ing as he does and is like, yeah, he just gave up and let the guy win and get a cou­ple of vic­to­ries.

[01:34:38] CR: But Mag­nus cruised to Vic­to­ry. Hikaru, they both have a bit of a grudge against this guy. Hikaru just did­n’t let the pres­sure up. He beat him like 20, I think it was like 29 to sev­en or some­thing. Hikaru just like pul­ver­ized him into the ground to teach him a les­son. Any­way, but he’s got the same sort of per­sona.

[01:34:57] CR: But any­way, I thought this was inter­est­ing, like, um. If this guy is right, it’s a check­list approach to who’s going to

[01:35:05] CR: win. And, um, it’s a, and yeah, it’s a fas­ci­nat­ing, uh, approach

[01:35:12] TK: It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing way to pre­dict, isn’t it?

[01:35:14] TK: Yeah.

[01:35:14] CR: yeah. Yeah.

[01:35:16] TK: Yeah.

[01:35:17] CR: And I just struck me as very QAVE, you know, look at, look at a bunch of per­for­mance, the cur­rent admin­is­tra­tion, look at their per­for­mance.

[01:35:27] CR: And look at how, you know, look at the, look at the met­rics. Look at the sci­ence, the stats behind, it’s a sci­en­tif­ic approach to deter­min­ing who’s going to be the win­ner. So yeah, there you go. We’ll see if he’s

[01:35:38] TK: And it reminds me of Bob Hawkes. Oh, no, sor­ry, Bill Hay­den’s state­ment that a dri­ver’s dog could win the elec­tion from here. So it’s again, it’s a, as, as this econ­o­mist says, it’s a, it’s a ref­er­en­dum on the per­for­mance of the incum­bent rather than being how, depend­ing on how good the per­son is, is

[01:35:53] TK: chal­leng­ing. Yeah,

[01:35:57] CR: there you go, L I

[01:35:58] TK: well, I’m just, I’m just in my head try­ing to fill out the check­list for Biden. I don’t think his per­for­mance has been that great, has it? I’m not sure of the midterm results and whether they improved in the midterms. And there’s a lot of data to say the econ­o­my’s not, well, it has­n’t grown as much as it had in the past.

[01:36:18] TK: So yeah, not sure.

[01:36:21] CR: Um, well, let me, uh,

[01:36:26] TK: I think Biden’s son would have been a huge scan­dal, but it’s

[01:36:29] TK: being swept away now that

[01:36:31] TK: the spot­light’s off Biden.

[01:36:33] CR: yeah. And he did, I mean, he’s just, um, pled guilty too, which is inter­est­ing.

[01:36:41] TK: Yeah,

[01:36:42] CR: See if I can see his break­down.

[01:36:44] CR: Um,

[01:36:46] TK: But you know, Trump would have just cru­ci­fied

[01:36:48] TK: Biden over that Biden was the can­di­date. And

[01:36:52] CR: well, yeah, but

[01:36:54] TK: at all.

[01:36:54] CR: accord­ing to Licht­man, no, he would­n’t have. Um, he believes they would have won even with Biden. I mean, I don’t know if the, the Hunter Biden scan­dal would have played out against, in, against his favour, but he was say­ing they were going to win any­way. I mean, it’s,

[01:37:11] TK: Yeah, okay.

[01:37:12] CR: I mean, whether or not you think Biden has charis­ma, I’m not sure how you

[01:37:16] TK: No, he

[01:37:19] CR: obvi­ous­ly a lot of peo­ple did, I guess.

[01:37:21] TK: kept me mag­net­i­cal­ly watch­ing the debate, that’s for sure. Oh

[01:37:28] TK: real­ly? Oh, oh real­ly? That

[01:37:36] CR: that’s all I got, that’s the show for this week, thank you TK, QAV, good week every­one.

[01:37:40] TK: Yep, hap­py ASX.