In this episode, we kick off with a catch-up on Tony’s golfing escapades before diving into the recent changes in ANZ’s leadership, focusing on the newly appointed CEO Nuno Matos and the potential impacts on the bank. We hear about some success from a new QAV Club member, then Tony’s ‘Pulled Pork’ segment examines Hello World Travel Limited (HLO), covering its business model, financial health, and risks.
Transcription
QAV 750 Club
[00:00:00] CR: Uh, welcome to QAV. Welcome back, TK. How
[00:00:14] TK: Yes, thank you. Good. Thank you to, to your co host while I was away. I listened to it in the car on the way back
[00:00:21] TK: from Wagga.
[00:00:23] TK: Very good.
[00:00:23] CR: on. Yes. Um, how was your golfing tournament?
[00:00:28] TK: fantastic.
[00:00:29] CR: You
[00:00:30] TK: Yeah, really good. Actually finished up playing about six rounds in the last week, so it’s been great. Uh, it started off badly, um, that Royal Melbourne was a really hot day, really hot. I sent a card out to, to, um, The guy, I’m playing with an older guy, he was about to pull out after about 10 holes, I sent a card out to him,
[00:00:52] CR: Oh,
[00:00:52] TK: but it was hot, windy, didn’t play well.
[00:00:54] TK: Second day played really well, that was it, oh, not really well, played well, at um, Peninsula Kingswood North, which is I think probably destined to be one of the best courses in Australia if it’s not already. And then we had our charity day on the third day and we came fifth this year. Last year Ruddy and I won it,
[00:01:12] CR: yeah.
[00:01:13] TK: but he didn’t turn
[00:01:14] TK: up this year so
[00:01:15] CR: Roddy didn’t turn up
[00:01:18] TK: obviously, obviously Ruddy’s the better golfer
[00:01:20] TK: between us. He carries
[00:01:22] TK: me.
[00:01:23] CR: what did what did Roddy have
[00:01:24] CR: to do? He had something better on, had a
[00:01:27] TK: he didn’t. He’s, he’s saving up to buy a car. So he didn’t want to spend the money on the golf trip.
[00:01:32] CR: Right.
[00:01:33] TK: Yeah. Which is fine. So, um, yeah, I had three good days away with the group and then went to Cape Shang for a couple of days and played golf there again. And then went to Wagga and played golf there again with Ruddy.
[00:01:45] CR: Wow,
[00:01:47] TK: Good fun.
[00:01:48] CR: that’s great.
[00:01:50] TK: And now I’m back in Sydney packing. So, um, it’s busy.
[00:01:54] CR: Tell people why you’re packing
[00:01:57] TK: Well, obviously I’m moving. I’m going down to, going down to live at Cape Schanck next year from early January.
[00:02:04] CR: Wow.
[00:02:05] TK: We’re, um, yeah, we’ve decided not to sell the Sky Palace. It’s, it’s, the market’s turned down in Sydney, so we’re going to rent it out for a while and, and test retirement by living at Cape Schanck for at least
[00:02:17] TK: a year.
[00:02:20] CR: Well, the Melbourne crew expects you to turn up to all of their events. When you’re down there,
[00:02:26] TK: I can, I can, well, I’d like to go along to at least some, yeah. I’m sort of learning how remote Cape Schanck is from places,
[00:02:33] TK: but I’m happy to
[00:02:34] CR: you’re learning.
[00:02:35] TK: for an
[00:02:36] TK: event. Yeah, well I’m not going to go down there and stay there.
[00:02:38] CR: 20 years.
[00:02:40] TK: Yeah,
[00:02:40] TK: true, but um, I have a, so the trip before or this last trip, anyway, I had lots of up and backs.
[00:02:46] TK: I was up and back to Melbourne every day,
[00:02:48] TK: going to various
[00:02:49] TK: functions, and it got tiring after a
[00:02:51] TK: while. Because it’s an hour and a
[00:02:52] CR: two hours. Yeah. Okay. And a half, depending on the
[00:02:55] TK: two hours with Melbourne traffic,
[00:02:57] CR: yeah,
[00:02:57] TK: yeah, but anyway, I’ll probably find a
[00:02:59] TK: shortcut after I get used to it.
[00:03:02] CR: Well, maybe you can meet them halfway. Maybe they can meet you in Frankston or something. Is that halfway?
[00:03:08] TK: well they do let the um, the boardroom at the National Golf Club be used, so they can come down there.
[00:03:12] CR: There you go. Perfect.
[00:03:14] TK: Hmm, and
[00:03:15] CR: Well, let’s get into it.
[00:03:17] CR: Get into it, TK. Um,
[00:03:20] CR: ANZ, your favourite CEO.
[00:03:24] CR: Um, he’s, he’s, he’s read the writing on the wall. CEOs are getting assassinated. He’s going, you know what? Might be time to, Pull up stumps.
[00:03:34] TK: What you say is my favourite CEO.
[00:03:36] CR: I don’t know.
[00:03:38] TK: Okay,
[00:03:38] CR: Yeah. Don’t know. Shane Elliott.
[00:03:40] TK: I mean I don’t, I don’t mind
[00:03:41] TK: him. I met him once at a Christmas
[00:03:43] TK: party. Nice guy. Ah!
[00:03:49] CR: who was the last guy you would tell you met at the Christmas party? Alan Jones. Was he with Alan Jones? Was it that
[00:03:54] TK: No, that wasn’t a Christmas party, that was at a, um, a racing function at, um,
[00:03:59] TK: David Hayes house.
[00:04:00] CR: Okay.
[00:04:02] TK: No, no, different. No,
[00:04:03] TK: he’s a nice guy.
[00:04:04] CR: I read in the financial review today that, um, Investors aren’t too happy with his legacy. He, uh, the performance of the ANZ shares hasn’t really been quite, uh, as good as the other banks. It says ANZ shares may be up around 16 percent in the last year, but his rivals have risen more sharply.
[00:04:29] CR: Uh, what are your thoughts on ANZ’s performance? You’ve owned them on and off. Do you own them at
[00:04:34] TK: I own them. I own them at the moment, yeah. I’ll declare that. Oh, 16 percent plus a good dividend yield? Which I think is about 8 percent fully frank. Maybe it’s 9 percent grossed up. Yeah, it’s pretty good. I’m happy with them.
[00:04:47] CR: I own them As well. As it turns out, they’re the only bank I
[00:04:51] TK: There you
[00:04:51] TK: go. Yeah.
[00:04:53] CR: Yeah, all right. So
[00:04:54] TK: But the share price was down on the day of the announcement of the new guy. Portuguese banker, um,
[00:05:01] TK: Nuno
[00:05:02] TK: Matos, who I don’t know. I
[00:05:04] CR: Chanticleer
[00:05:04] TK: to have some friends in.
[00:05:06] CR: had some unkind things to say about him. Did you see that?
[00:05:09] TK: No, no I
[00:05:10] TK: didn’t.
[00:05:11] CR: They were basically saying he wasn’t good enough to get the top job at HSBC. So he’s ended up at ANZ or something to that
[00:05:17] TK: Well that, that thought crossed my mind too, but um, it’s not uncommon for the internal candidate who missed out to, to move. Um, they could still be a quality person. Uh, so I thought that was a little bit unkind. That’s generally you won’t, look, I don’t know how many, what percentage, but a lot of CEOs are in that boat.
[00:05:35] TK: They, they’ve missed out on the top job, they’re getting old, they know they can’t hang around and wait for another try. So they, Get tapped on the shoulder and go somewhere else. But what it does mean is the two internal candidates at ANZ who didn’t get the top job will probably do the same thing. So, that can be good and bad if Nuno has a good team under him and he likes them and he thinks they’ll work well, he’ll poach them and bring them in, which will be a big cultural change for ANZ.
[00:06:04] TK: But, um, you know, he may not have that team under him, so, um, we’ll see. Uh, but, but what it does mean is that, you know, the key roles at ANZ are probably all going to turn over in the next sort of 6 to 12 months, um, which can be good or bad. I don’t know this person. I do know someone in, from, uh, My friend’s circle in Toronto called Mattos, she was Portuguese as well,
[00:06:28] TK: so she may be related.
[00:06:29] TK: I should reach out to her and see if she’s got any,
[00:06:32] TK: like, you know, what does he do at the Christmas party every year? Um, yeah. But, uh, anyway, um, but I do have a couple of comments to make. The shares are down 3. 6 percent on the news. So, um, he’s, he’s wiped, uh, I don’t know how many millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars off the share price.
[00:06:49] TK: So people are voting with their feet, I guess, but it may bounce back. We’ll see. Um, he’s saying he’s happy with the strategy and it’s up to him to implement it, which I think is probably appropriate with ANZ because Shane Elliott is leaving with a few unfinished. And the two big ones are integrating the Suncorp mergers or acquisitions.
[00:07:13] TK: So ANZ took about two years to gain all the regulatory approvals to buy the banking part of Suncorp. The insurance part still remains separately listed. But it’s going to be a fairly big job. Merging that into ANZ and, you know, he, he didn’t sign up, well, he signed up for it, but he didn’t, um, set the synergy targets, but he’ll be held accountable for those.
[00:07:40] TK: So that, that, uh, will be an issue for him, the new CEO. Um, but it also, It also begs the question, the, the scuttlebutt was that ANZ were losing market share in the mortgage market. And so Shane Elliott looked around and said, well, if I buy Suncor Bank, I can get back to where I was by combining their.
[00:08:04] TK: Mortgage share with mine. Um, and that’s, you know, that’s not a bad strategy, but if there was underlying problems with the ANZ mortgages, uh, and they were losing share with their marketing for whatever reason, pricing, or service, or convenience, or product features, then buying Suncorp doesn’t fix it. And so, Nuno Matos is going to have to not only integrate Suncorp, but I’ll probably fix up the mortgage business today in Zed.
[00:08:32] TK: And don’t forget the big four banks in Australia are basically building societies now. That’s all I do is issue mortgages, um, and credit cards and personal loans. But, you know, gone are the days where they had insurance and wealth management and funds management and all that kind of stuff. So, um, Mortgages are important.
[00:08:48] TK: So that’s his first issue. The second issue that he signed up for is to migrate as much as possible of the ANZ customer base across to their new IT platform, which I think is called ANZ Plus or ANZ One. ANZ I think, which, um, his 2IC was developing and it’s been very late to get to market. And there are still questions over whether people will actually want to transition onto it.
[00:09:14] TK: So if it works, you’ll be a hero. If it doesn’t work, you’ll be a villain. But again, he’s inheriting a very pregnant IT project and, uh, he didn’t have a hand in the, in the conception. So, um, he’s got, for someone who’s coming in, he’s got a lot of. He’s an international candidate and Australian banks have had diabolical attempts at expanding overseas.
[00:09:47] TK: And, you know, the most recent notable example is his predecessor, once removed, um, Mike Smith, who I think may also have come from HSBC, but certainly came from one of the big English banks that operated in Asia and then set up, set about trying to expand ANZ into Asia and Shane Elliott’s job was to dismantle that and bring it all back on shore.
[00:10:11] TK: So I’m not sure why they’ve gone with an international candidate if they don’t want to expand overseas. Um, it’s a, it’s an interesting choice, but if he does start to make noises about going overseas, I think that, that for me would be a red flag time to
[00:10:26] TK: sell. Um, it’s been tried before and
[00:10:30] TK: Yeah,
[00:10:30] CR: that would be a, that’d be
[00:10:31] CR: enough for you to. Pull out.
[00:10:34] TK: I think so. Um, I’ve seen it, seen that movie too many times before with Mabb going overseas, with A& Z going overseas twice. They twice tried in my sort of time to expand overseas and it hasn’t worked. Um, so the last point I wanted to make is that in having a turnover of CEO and potentially of the two key players, players under him in the business puts a lot of emphasis back on the board so typically they won’t retire a chair at the same time as they do a CEO transition and Paul O’Sullivan’s been around for a long time nothing against Paul O’Sullivan in fact I knew him at Shell he comes out of Shell didn’t know him well but and he left soon after I joined but um uh he’s a very competent business person uh but the ANZ board It doesn’t have any bankers on it.
[00:11:31] TK: Paul O’Sullivan comes out of the oil industry, and then I think he was CEO of Optus, um, and all of the other members, uh, I think, don’t have any banking experience. So you’ve got a new CEO from overseas, potentially facing the loss of their two lieutenants here. Uh, and a board that doesn’t have any banking experience.
[00:11:49] TK: So, it’s um, it’ll be interesting times for ANZ going forward. That, that may also have contributed to the sell off, um, when the decision was announced about, uh, Nuno taking over. I hope I’m pronouncing his name properly. Nuno, Nano, Nuno,
[00:12:04] TK: Nuno.
[00:12:05] TK: I don’t know, but, um,
[00:12:06] CR: Well, I know Nuno, Nuno Betancourt, do you know Nuno Betancourt?
[00:12:13] TK: Not personally, no.
[00:12:14] CR: You know who he is?
[00:12:15] TK: No.
[00:12:19] CR: He is the lead guitarist of the, uh, metal band, uh, Xtreme, Wholehearted, More Than Words. Remember More Than Words? 90s? Acoustic? Ah, okay. Well, he was married to Susie DiMarchi from The Baby Animals
[00:12:35] TK: now I know who
[00:12:35] TK: it is. Yep.
[00:12:37] CR: But he’s an amazing guitarist. Um, extreme. Still going, actually. They’ve got a new album out. It’s really good. You should check it out. Got a crazy metal, uh, track off of it. I can’t remember what it’s called, but there’s like this crazy guitar solo that Nuno does. But anyway, he pronounces it Nuno. I don’t know
[00:12:55] TK: No, no. Oh, thank
[00:12:57] TK: you. Yeah.
[00:12:58] CR: this is all I know
[00:12:59] TK: Yeah, so ANZ is going to be interesting in the next six months. We’ll have to watch the space. It may, it’s fallen off. It may, it’s still above its cell, but It may,
[00:13:07] TK: drift down
[00:13:08] CR: And he’s not leaving in a hurry, he’s not leaving till July, I think,
[00:13:11] CR: Elliot, right? So, it’s not a, there’s no rush here. He’s got six months to stabilise it.
[00:13:18] TK: Yeah, but that’s also, I mean, I don’t know when UNO’s meant to start, but if, you know, that’s not a great, I mean, it’s not a thing you’d want to have happen to yourself, is it? I’m taking over, but the old, the old person I’m taking over from is going to be there for six months. It’s um, yeah, I’d be sort of progressively moving them further and further away from head office into smaller and
[00:13:39] TK: smaller offices.
[00:13:43] CR: Well, I’m assuming Nuno’s got a job and he’s gotta wrap that job up before he comes and takes this job.
[00:13:48] TK: Yeah, didn’t say when he was
[00:13:50] TK: starting.
[00:13:52] CR: anyway. Um, any more on A and Z? We wanna talk about ABA. So, I did a
[00:13:58] TK: talk about ABA.
[00:13:59] CR: Paul Pork in your absence on ABA
[00:14:01] CR: last week. Um, they briefed just as I was setting up for the show today, they became a three point sell from a moment and then they inched up a cent or something and got above it.
[00:14:13] CR: But, uh, yeah, what, what are your thoughts on the ABA MyState tie up?
[00:14:19] TK: So again, I own shares in ABA, um, not because of QAV, but because, uh, I was offered, um, uh, an allocation in the capital raising I did back in August to buy the finance company you spoke about last week. Uh, and it was known then that they were merging with my estate and Alex Hayes company, my stockbroker, Ord Minettes was the underwriter and, and, um, also gets fees from merging the two companies.
[00:14:46] TK: So he was keen for me to take some shares. I don’t know much. I, um, I just have a little bit of, uh, Oswald, and then it became a, uh, came onto the buy list, so I was happy with that, happy to keep them. Um, I just wanted to, um, I’ll give a quick background to it, but I just wanted to talk about my approach to these kinds of things, rather than necessarily much about the stocks you spoke about last week.
[00:15:10] TK: Um, what can I say? Uh, I’ve got some notes here from Ord Minette, so I’ll flag that. Uh, as you said last week, wasn’t a great day. Result for Auswide this year, MPAT was down 60 odd percent, um, largely due to net interest margin deterioration of 46 basis points. So lots of issues for them. So I can see why they’re keen to merge and that’s not unlikely.
[00:15:39] TK: Unusual in the small banking state and Auswide, I’m not sure about my state, but Auswide and a whole slew of other Queensland building societies listed and became banks back in probably the 90s. I remember living in Mackay at the time and getting a phone call from my cousin who ran one of them and he said, go and open a bank.
[00:16:01] TK: 10 savings account in every building society in Queensland, up and down the state. There was Mackay Permanent, there was The Rock, there was Auswide, there was four or five of them. He said we’re all going to list and you’ll get shares in the issue and we’ll all do well. So that worked out well for me. This is a legacy one of those, Auswide.
[00:16:21] TK: This was the old Wide Bay Capricornia. Building Society. But if you think about Building Societies, they still have started off life almost as a quasi co op. They exist, they’ve been founded by the people in the local area to facilitate lending. And they kind of grow from there, become Building Societies and then become banks.
[00:16:41] TK: But they’re up against stiff competition from the large banks and also an unlevel playing field from. The rules around, the DAPRA set around holding more capital because you’re more likely to go bust. And, um, holding more capital means that you’re financially more secure if you do go broke. Um, but it means that they need interest margin.
[00:17:05] TK: goes up because they’ve got to hold more cash, which isn’t cash or cash equivalents, which isn’t as productive as loaning it out to people. So, um, that’s buy the buy, but that’s what happens to small banks. Uh, the MyState result, which isn’t on the buy list, uh, QAV scores only about 0. 03, uh, was better. So, uh, MyState, I’m just looking up their results, uh, their, Home lending was up 2%.
[00:17:33] TK: They had 14, 000 new to bank customers in the last year. Operating costs were down 1. 6%. Net profit was down 8. 3%. But their capital ratio was up. Their dividend yield was stable. Their net interest margin was stable. And they also have a trustee services business, which did well for them. So, my state isn’t a bad Bank to merge with.
[00:18:01] TK: My state is a Tasmanian bank and so even though these banks often do still have mortgages in different states because they do online lending and they often, they sometimes open up one branch in a different state to get business, uh, but, um, uh, they’re not big in Queensland and AusWide’s not big in Tasmania, so it does, it’s a good synergy.
[00:18:24] TK: Um, and, Just trying to find the benefits. They’re talking about there being 20 to 25 million dollars of synergy benefits in the merge, in the merger. So, um, that’s material for these, these small kinds of banks. Uh, one thing I, I did wonder whether they had accounted for was, are they going to incur more travel costs if one’s based in Tasmania and one’s based in Queensland.
[00:18:50] TK: They’re not like they’re, they’re not kind of side by side. So there might be some costs they haven’t quite taken into account. But anyway, they, they propose synergies. Uh, the deal. Um, and this is part of what I do when I look at these mergers and assessing whether I’m a buyer or a seller or a holder. Um, I look at what they say that will happen in a deal.
[00:19:10] TK: So the deal is the proposed merger sees Auswide shareholders receiving 1. 112 new MyState shares per Auswide share, uh, implying that, um, MyState has the majority ownership of the new bank, 65. 9%, um, It’s, they’re saying that the synergies will come through, but not until 2026, because they do have merger costs to absorb in 2025.
[00:19:39] TK: Um, and they go on to talk about them being high quality complimentary banks. So it doesn’t, it seems like to be a, it’s, it’s kind of these deals have to be done for small banks, but it does seem like it’s a good, a good partnership arrangement. Um, so I’m, the way I treat these, these kinds of deals is I’m a holder.
[00:20:00] TK: And I’ll just trade using three point trend lines, um, through the deal. So if Auswide becomes a sell, I may sell. Um, when I bought into the capital rising, there was a small discount. I think it was about 3 or 4 percent to the Auswide price. And then there’s another discount, um, when the merger takes place.
[00:20:20] TK: So, uh, and then the, the, the. Banks were on a good yield. So I could sort of, um, go on with my eyes wide open, see that the merger was going to produce synergies, but in just buying my allocation and the capital raising, I was pretty sure I was going to make double digit returns over the next sort of six to 12 months.
[00:20:39] TK: So it seemed like a good deal. Um, so I did, I did take some, uh, what else can I say? Uh, ABA is up 10 percent since I bought it. So, um, that’s good. Um, It’s had a 10 percent capital gain and a 4 percent dividend, I should say, so 14 percent plus franking credit, so that’s good. Um, just been through the merger logic, which is something I check if it’s a merger.
[00:21:03] TK: I’ll check the discount, bit like if something’s in the takeover situation. You know, if you’re not getting a discount to do this, then why do it? So that’s something I’d look at. And then I, yeah, as I said, I’ll use my normal sell mechanisms for getting out at the right time. So, I just wanted to take people through that because mergers happen from time to time.
[00:21:23] TK: Um, often times there’s one stock on the buy list and one stock that doesn’t and, you know, my process for dealing with it
[00:21:29] TK: is, well, I just outlined.
[00:21:32] CR: That’s good, thanks. I just, um, checked ABA in the Brettalator. It’s sell price has actually dropped a couple of cents, or sorry, gone up a couple of cents since I ran it on the weekend. So it’s, is actually below its sell price now. Cause it’s sell price is, I think, 4. 43 and it’s trading at 4. 41. So we’ll see, uh, how that plays out by the time I get to look at it.
[00:21:58] CR: But, um, yeah, there you go.
[00:22:02] TK: I should also say one last thing I forgot to mention, the merger is being delayed. until February of next year. It was meant to be happening in December. APRA is taking longer than expected to go over the numbers. They don’t see any problems in that. It’s happened before with bank mergers and, um,
[00:22:19] TK: uh, but it is delayed.
[00:22:21] CR: Alright, well speaking of things that are delayed. I’m still trying to figure out, uh, what the hell is going on with Boom Logistics on, in all of our portfolios since their consolidation. I reached out to Navarre at Navexa yesterday, or over the weekend actually, and told him I was still confused by it. Can you open up Navexa
[00:22:46] TK: Yeah,
[00:22:47] CR: have a look at the BOL holding in the dummy portfolio?
[00:22:53] CR: Here’s an example. So Navexa have sort of an automated consolidation, uh, process that they apply. So they’ve gone through, because I hold it in the dummy in a light portfolio and a couple of other places, maybe, and they’ve applied the reduction in the number of shares. But not really adjusted the share price.
[00:23:26] CR: And I’m not exactly sure how to work this. So, I think in the dummy one, I can’t remember, I think I may have edited the buy price. So it was, I think our buy price originally back in April was 0. 14. I adjusted it to 1. 40, but now it’s made it all look ridiculous.
[00:23:45] CR: I’ll compare this one to the light one, soon as I figure out how to share this,
[00:23:51] CR: so, if I look at the chart here, you can see that April, when the buy happens, the value of it drops by like 90%. So, they processed this consolidation, which reduced the number of shares that we owned by, I guess, what, 90%? Um, but there was no, uh, adjustment to pricing or anything with that.
[00:24:21] CR: And of course, if this remains at 14 cents Uh, it doesn’t work because the current price is 1. 40, so then that is all haywire. If I show you the way they’ve, I haven’t touched the one in the light portfolios, so, similar situation, they’ve processed the reduction in the number of shares, the price is still at 14 cents, but, uh, you know, the, the, I don’t know,
[00:24:55] TK: No, it just looks to me like the price hasn’t come through yet, so it could be still trading on a deferred
[00:24:59] TK: basis.
[00:25:02] TK: So, they have,
[00:25:03] CR: says it’s 1. 40 up here.
[00:25:06] TK: Yeah, I’m seeing that in Stock
[00:25:08] TK: Doctor too.
[00:25:10] CR: So I don’t know if I should, um, manually process a sell for the date of the consolidation at the price it was pre consolidation and then apply another buy post consolidation at that price, but then it’s going to mess with all of my capital
[00:25:34] TK: I wouldn’t,
[00:25:35] CR: you know?
[00:25:36] TK: I’d be asking Navarre to fix that for you. They’ve done half the job in the consolidation, but not the full job.
[00:25:42] TK: So
[00:25:43] CR: Yeah, I did ask him and
[00:25:45] TK: I wouldn’t,
[00:25:46] CR: he went,
[00:25:46] TK: I wouldn’t change the buy price manually because it’ll, um,
[00:25:50] CR: Okay.
[00:25:50] TK: he’ll probably do it. Yeah.
[00:25:53] CR: Right. So, um, when you’ve had these things happen in the past, um, is there a process you go through or you just let them handle it?
[00:26:01] TK: No, let them handle it.
[00:26:03] CR: Okay. Well, I’ll
[00:26:05] TK: Yeah. They should be handling it.
[00:26:06] CR: I’ll put this back to 14 cents here and worry about it later. Yeah.
[00:26:11] TK: Yeah. Yeah. It’s surprising the price hasn’t come through yet. So, It’s, so the price, the price is right on the screen on the, when you look up Boom Logistics. It’s just not coming through in the portfolio for some reason.
[00:26:26] CR: Yeah.
[00:26:28] TK: that’s a bug.
[00:26:30] CR: Okay. I’ll wait for them to sort that out then.
[00:26:36] TK: Mm hmm.
[00:26:39] CR: Alright, what else, um, couple of notes, uh, about the buy list this week, in the last couple of weeks, uh, people may or may not have gathered. Alex, your daughter, who normally does the buy list for us each week, is on vacation. At a secret location, I won’t discuss it so the fans don’t hunt it down, but um, I’ve been doing the buy list, and people may, I got an email from Daniel asking why the manual data sheet in the buy list hasn’t been updated.
[00:27:06] CR: Okay, so,
[00:27:07] TK: Mm hmm.
[00:27:08] CR: Alex uses the manual data sheet from Tony’s system, which I don’t use, because I’ve got it all hacked. Software
[00:27:14] CR: coded. So there’s a sheet called cam code, which Alex uses, but then she manually updates all of her thing. I can’t be bothered doing that. So my bylaws process just uses my software. So if you want to see the
[00:27:28] TK: You know, I had to, I had to download my own buy list today. And, uh, cause Alex Norby does my version and your version
[00:27:36] CR: yeah, okay. I, I, what are you, you’re not buying anything though. So what do you care?
[00:27:40] TK: No, I’m doing a pulled pork.
[00:27:41] CR: Oh, I’m
[00:27:43] TK: I, and all
[00:27:44] TK: the, only half the data’s available in
[00:27:46] TK: yours.
[00:27:47] CR: Well, no, it’s all there. You should have just told me. I’ve got it all. Could have just sent it to
[00:27:51] TK: Okay. Ha
[00:27:52] CR: Anyway, so for, sorry, I didn’t, I didn’t even
[00:27:55] CR: think you’d be using it for a poor pork. You’re right. So for people that are looking for the manual, latest manual data, while Alex is away, look at the CAM code sheet in the buy list.
[00:28:03] CR: That’s the one that I generate, and it’s all software driven, so you’ll see the current. Um, sentiment and the, the, the PE and the equity and all of that kind of stuff that’s in there. If you’re looking for it. When Alex is back on deck, we’ll go back to the usual system that she uses. Uh, I should have
[00:28:25] TK: She got delayed.
[00:28:26] CR: that. Oh
[00:28:28] TK: been delayed in New Zealand for
[00:28:29] TK: a day. Yeah.
[00:28:30] CR: Trying to get back out.
[00:28:32] TK: Yeah, they had high winds or something and they couldn’t fly, or the crew was late coming down from the North Island, so. But, yeah, New Zealand put her up in a hotel, so she was very chuffed.
[00:28:42] CR: Oh, that’s nice.
[00:28:43] TK: Yeah.
[00:28:45] CR: A couple of things with the buy list though, this week and also today. So a lot of movement in the commodities section. Um, There was, there was a bunch of things this week when I checked the commodities that had changed. Um, Gold, AUD had become a buy, Coal Thermal had become a sell, Crude Oil had become a sell, Copper had become a buy, Aluminium and Zinc were buys, Steel was a sell, LNG was a Josephine, Grain, Wheat and Lithium all Josephines.
[00:29:20] CR: But, um, I saw this thing in the Fin today that China’s had one of their confabs and they said they’re going to do more, uh, to boost their economy. And all of a sudden everyone’s excited about the Chinese economy. It was, you know, it was all going to end in tears yesterday, but today everyone’s excited about it again.
[00:29:41] CR: And I went and I read in the Fin that the commodity prices were all going up and I went and had a check of the commodities today. Um, and some of them are getting close to being a buy again. Iron ore is close to being a buy, not quite above its buy line, but it’s heading there. If it keeps going up in the next week or so, it might be a buy again.
[00:30:00] CR: Gold USD is a buy, uh, but, you know, I tend to use the Australian one. Do you use the USD one for anything? No.
[00:30:08] TK: No. Australian. I don’t think so. I think we were tracking them both there for a
[00:30:12] TK: while, but I used the AUD.
[00:30:16] CR: Nothing else had changed, but a couple of other things were looking positive, turning around, so we might see some more commodities as a buy next week if the China news continues to put some wind in the sails of commodities.
[00:30:33] TK: Good. I also read something about China today that they’re, Thinking about opening an anti monopoly case against NVIDIA in the chip space, which sent NVIDIA share price down overnight.
[00:30:46] CR: An anti monopoly case. Hmm. In what? The, um, world, um, whatever it is.
[00:30:55] TK: AI graphics
[00:30:57] TK: chip, whatever it is, AI chip
[00:30:58] TK: space, I suppose.
[00:31:00] CR: Yeah, no, I mean, they’re going to take it up with who? The World Trade Federation or something?
[00:31:05] TK: With, with China!
[00:31:08] TK: I don’t know, I can’t recall the article.
[00:31:11] CR: China’s going
[00:31:12] TK: signed up to any world? Are they, Are they,
[00:31:14] TK: even,
[00:31:15] CR: Yeah, yeah, they’re members
[00:31:16] TK: of any
[00:31:17] CR: Yeah, they’re members of all of them now, but everyone’s always complaining that they don’t abide by them, and they go, well, what are you going to do about it? Bite me, like America. Um, all right, well, that’ll be interesting. NVIDIA do have a, sort of, an interesting, um, monopoly, but, um,
[00:31:38] CR: Couple of other things, uh, shout out to a relatively new member, Lindsay, sent me an email.
[00:31:44] TK: uh huh.
[00:31:45] CR: Figured I’d just follow up after six or so months doing QAV now. I’ve taken my time learning everything, and I’ve definitely learned a lot in regards to investing in the stock market. I’ve got limited experience with Excel, Stock Doctor, Stockopedia, but I’m beginning to grasp how running a download works, and I’m looking to have, It fully nutted out over the Christmas break.
[00:32:08] CR: Given my limited experience with investing and not really knowing what I’m doing, following the QAV method, I’ve had a 30. 13 percent return since May 1st, 2024. I
[00:32:20] TK: There, you’re all done, Lindsay. Merry Christmas.
[00:32:22] CR: and a testament to how the QAV method works to investing. My best performers have been FND, 75%, I was up 130 percent until yesterday, sent me this email a week or so ago, yes, we all feel your pain with FND, Lindsay.
[00:32:39] CR: SGI up 78%. Everything else in my portfolio is average about 10 to 30% of that time. And my worst performing is MMS down 10%. Thanks, Lindsay. So congratulations,
[00:32:52] TK: I own MMS.
[00:32:54] CR: That’s why it’s down.
[00:32:56] TK: Out of all those three, yeah. Although, um, yeah, well done, Lindsay. Thanks for sharing. SGI, I think is SG Fleet, from memory. It’s under a takeover.
[00:33:04] TK: Offer.
[00:33:05] CR: Yeah, right?
[00:33:06] TK: be aware of that. Lindsay, don’t get caught if it gets
[00:33:09] TK: compulsorily acquired.
[00:33:10] CR: Hmm. No, that’s great. Well, and the, the counter to that is Nick, uh, was posting on our, uh, Facebook chat, uh. room, and saying that his portfolio hasn’t been doing well. He says he’s been doing QAV for a few years and hasn’t made an FY profit yet and has had a lot of, um, rule ones, but then said that he sometimes doesn’t check his sell alerts for a couple of weeks due to having a couple of young babies and working a lot and stuff like that.
[00:33:46] CR: So I said, yeah, that’s probably not great. Not checking your sell alerts. He said that he’s had a lot. I think
[00:34:00] TK: I’ll set some alerts, Nick. And, um, thanks for the feedback. Uh, I did see in the email you sent me, Cam, that there was, he had his own rule one as well. I think it was 10 percent below buy price, but when it went up, when the share price went above buy price, it became buy price. So that, I don’t know if that’s affecting
[00:34:20] TK: him at all.
[00:34:21] CR: that’s, I gather that’s something he has implemented, uh, more recently because he was sick of seeing shares go up, like F& D, go up a lot and then, you know, drop back and, and then you sell them. And this has happened to me from time to time. Like you end up, like I think Myer was a classic example a couple of years ago, was, you know, Up like 60, 70 percent and then came back to being a rule one also.
[00:34:48] CR: No, I think I got out of it as a small profit when it hits 3PTL or something. But, um, yeah,
[00:34:54] TK: can I say I’ve had, I’ve had tons of those. So it’s not, it’s not, uh,
[00:35:00] TK: it’s not usual, but it’s, it’s
[00:35:01] TK: not uncommon to see it happen.
[00:35:04] CR: yeah. So he’s fudged his rule one rule. Um, and look, everyone is entitled to fudge
[00:35:13] TK: teach people.
[00:35:14] TK: Once you get comfortable with, with investing Yeah.
[00:35:17] CR: Fudge away.
[00:35:19] TK: Fudge your, well, not fudge your way. Set your own
[00:35:21] TK: rules,
[00:35:21] CR: Yes. And then report
[00:35:23] TK: and
[00:35:23] TK: then share the results. Yeah.
[00:35:24] TK: exactly. Yeah.
[00:35:26] CR: But I do encourage everyone to, I mean, you know, I, look, I know everyone’s busy, um, and has stuff going on, but checking your sell alerts is pretty important. Um, it only takes a couple of things to get away from you to have a big impact. I mean, I think, I know I’ve had things slip past me on occasion, and I know you have.
[00:35:49] CR: I’ve had two, sometimes things slip through the cracks, but two, and one thing won’t kill you, but if it happens on a regular basis, it can really take the wind out of your sails. And, um, you know, I, the way I do it, people know if you’ve been listening for a while, I have a spreadsheet where I track everything and I just open it up like first thing in the morning when I sit down on my computer, I open up my spreadsheet, just have a quick check where things are at and if I need to do something that day, I’ll do it.
[00:36:16] CR: And if not I don’t worry about it usually until maybe the end of the day. I will check again if I’ve got the time, but normally it’s just the first thing in the morning. I have a quick check, takes me 10 seconds to look at it. And, um, that’s it. I don’t bother after that. That just keeps me abreast of what’s happening.
[00:36:36] CR: But you need some form. And I think, actually, this conversation, I think, I don’t know if Nick started it or somebody started it, was about automated selling. Whether or not many people use an automated, um, sell trigger. And I was saying that,
[00:36:51] TK: A
[00:36:51] TK: stop loss. Yep.
[00:36:53] CR: yeah, and I said that I don’t because I want to check things
[00:36:57] CR: before they sell because something could go, we get ex dividend, for example, and You have to factor that in, et
[00:37:07] CR: cetera, et cetera.
[00:37:08] CR: So there’s a, there’s a few things that I want to manually check before I hit a sell order.
[00:37:15] TK: And you’ve also seen too with your Boom Logistics experience that sometimes the machinery of portfolio management gets a bit
[00:37:24] TK: of sand in the cogs.
[00:37:26] TK: So yeah,
[00:37:27] CR: That too. And, and also, as I said, um, in the, in the chat group, you know, I have fudged things like, is it AS, ASL, um, Supergroup, ASG. Yeah. From time to time, I mean,
[00:37:40] TK: sports,
[00:37:42] CR: I tend to follow the rules unless I don’t, um, but there will
[00:37:48] TK: the pirate way,
[00:37:50] CR: I’m wearing an eyepatch
[00:37:51] CR: today because I’ve got a swollen eye, it’s a long story, but I’m slowly completing my full transition to pirate mode.
[00:38:00] CR: Um, anyway, that’s the pirate QAV is, uh, you fudge things from time to time. If you give some, like, the way I have learned to do it, and I think you’ve,
[00:38:10] CR: you’ve, you’ve Um, suggested this back in the early days, if I buy something and within a day or two it drops through a three, it’s close to the three point sell line when I buy it and it drops a couple of
[00:38:23] CR: cents and it goes below the three point sell line, quite often I’ll go, well, like I’ll give it a grace period of a week or two to see what happens.
[00:38:32] CR: If it keeps dropping, I’ll probably sell it, but you know, I’m not, I don’t want to be too trigger fingery. If it’s just trading within a margin of, you know, a few cents here or there, and I bought it really close to its sell line. So there are
[00:38:48] TK: Yeah.
[00:38:48] TK: normal volatility shouldn’t be triggering sells. You may, I mean, your buying may have pushed the price up and that’s resettled again. So, um, you could be part of the volatility and you don’t want to be
[00:39:01] TK: causing your own sell once you exit the market from buying. So
[00:39:04] CR: you been speaking to my couples therapist? I’m part of the volatility. Is that what you’re saying? It’s,
[00:39:10] TK: you have a, you have a couple’s
[00:39:11] TK: therapist.
[00:39:12] CR: I’m causing the volatility.
[00:39:15] TK: Can, can you get them on the show so we can commiserate?
[00:39:21] CR: Actually, Chrissy and I have been using GPT. As our communication therapist recently, um, if we’re
[00:39:30] TK: can’t imagine you
[00:39:31] TK: guys not communicating.
[00:39:32] CR: oh, we communicate, but sometimes it’s not positive
[00:39:36] TK: uh.
[00:39:38] CR: So, I’ll write what I want to say in GPT, it’ll reframe it. Which I can then give to her and then she’ll reframe it, give it back to me, or we’ll both send it to GPT and let’s say, okay.
[00:39:51] CR: I think what Cameron’s trying to say here is, and I think what Chrissy’s trying to say here is, and it acts as the intermediary. We have an AI intermediary things get a little bit hairy, that’s great. Anyway, okay. Uh, thank you for that feedback, Nick. And yeah, I mean, I know it’s hard, but. Any system’s
[00:40:15] CR: gonna struggle if you’re not selling stuff.
[00:40:18] CR: I mean, we do have a stop loss driven system, so if we miss those stop losses, it’s gonna pull everything down. Then again, you and I had a couple of bad years, uh, post Ukraine
[00:40:32] CR: invasion when the stop
[00:40:34] TK: Yeah. interest rates rising. Yep.
[00:40:37] CR: that’s great. Yeah.
[00:40:39] TK: I checked my shares today actually up 17 percent for the calendar year So I was happy with that.
[00:40:47] TK: I was gonna, I was gonna do some kind of year end wrap
[00:40:52] TK: on my portfolio But I ran out of time prepping. Might save it for tomorrow or a special
[00:40:58] TK: show or something.
[00:41:00] CR: Okay. Speaking of which, um, I’m going on Phil Muscatello’s show tomorrow and he’s coming on this one. I’m going to do, we’re going to do an interview, uh, a joint
[00:41:13] TK: mm
[00:41:14] CR: my, him interviewing me will be on his show and me interviewing him will be on our show over Christmas. so yeah, we’ll have that in the bag for when you take a Christmas holiday.
[00:41:27] CR: Uh, What else? RBA’s meeting today, Tony?
[00:41:32] TK: Yes, uh, well, we’ll probably know the result in about 10 minutes. Really like them to see them to cut interest rates, but I don’t think
[00:41:39] TK: they will. Um,
[00:41:42] TK: and
[00:41:42] CR: What does
[00:41:43] TK: the latest economic data
[00:41:44] TK: about,
[00:41:45] CR: Is she given
[00:41:46] TK: I haven’t seen, no, no hints.
[00:41:50] TK: I haven’t seen
[00:41:51] TK: anything out,
[00:41:52] CR: Uh, they left it
[00:41:53] TK: beforehand.
[00:41:54] CR: on the fin already. Cash rate 35%.
[00:41:58] TK: okay, bugger. Well, when the results came out saying that Australia had anaemic productivity growth and it was all government spending. I thought that might’ve. Cut some slack for them to reduce rates, but they haven’t. So, um, they’re going to get caught because it’s going to be a federal election some stage in the first half of next year.
[00:42:19] TK: And the RBA is loathe to change rates during an election because it’s seen as being an endorsement of either the government or the opposition. And, um, ever since they did that during John Howard’s election loss, Back in 07 they’ve shied away from it, so I thought that that may have gone into their thinking today.
[00:42:38] TK: If they’re going to move, they might move early, but um, it hasn’t unfortunately. Oh well. Coal for, coal for presents for Christmas again this year, Kev.
[00:42:49] TK: A lump of coal.
[00:42:51] CR: Somebody, one of Chrissy’s violin students just gave, she just did a lesson for and they gave her a Christmas present. It was a tray of mangoes. Beautiful, ripe mangoes. I was like, that’s the perfect, you know, gift for a teacher at the end of the year is just a tray of mangoes. Brilliant. Forget the smelly candles and all that kind of stuff.
[00:43:12] CR: Just a tray of mangoes. What a great idea.
[00:43:15] TK: Oh,
[00:43:15] TK: that’s really good.
[00:43:16] CR: I’ve got a question.
[00:43:18] CR: Oh,
[00:43:18] CR: sorry, you got anything else? No? Question,
[00:43:20] TK: I don’t think so.
[00:43:21] CR: Dave sent this through a week or two
[00:43:23] CR: ago, but you were away, so.
[00:43:24] CR: I held it over.
[00:43:25] TK: Oh, okay.
[00:43:26] CR: He says, Fleet Partners reported their annual results on the 18th of November. The results are in Stock Doctor.
[00:43:32] CR: For the third half in a row, operating cash flows are negative. Therefore, FPR is no longer a QAV stock. Digging a little deeper into the numbers, receipts from customers are still far exceeding payments to suppliers, i. e. true cash flow from operations is still positive. What’s changed is the other operating cash flows line.
[00:43:55] CR: Below is an extract from the 1H23 results where operating cash flow first went negative and an extract from 30th of September 2024 annual report. I’ve tried, but can’t fully understand what’s going on. There seems to be two approaches to funding the vehicles, finance leases and warehouse funding.
[00:44:13] CR: Presumably, they hit the financial statements in different ways. Given warehouse funding is increasing over the last three periods, I’m assuming that is what is incorporated in the operating cash flow as investment in lease portfolio, sending it negative. Property plant and equipment in the non current assets is increasing proportionally.
[00:44:34] CR: Two questions. One, can Tony explain this in layman’s terms, please? And two, are we really saying FBR is no longer a QAV stock? Thanks, Dave from Newey.
[00:44:46] TK: Thanks, Dave. Um, I’ll try and explain it as much as I can. I’m not an expert in warehouse leasing, but I did some Googling. Uh, and this is from Fleet Partners March 23 accounts. Um, their results when they, uh, publish them. Uh, and it says, Warehouse facilities are so called because they can be drawn and repaid on an ongoing basis up to an agreed limit subject to conditions.
[00:45:15] TK: A group of assets funded via a warehouse facility can be pooled together and refinanced via the creation of a special purpose Asset backed securitization vehicle, which issued debt securities to wholesale investors such as domestic and international banks and institutional funds. Funding novated leases through the warehouse funding structure impacted revenue.
[00:45:41] TK: by spreading the revenue over the life of the lease as net interest margin, rather than receiving the revenue at the start of the lease as funding commissions. So I think that’s, that’s the reason for the change in operating cash flow. In a nutshell, it’s being spread over a number of years because these vehicles are generally being leased for four years, um, rather than, um, recognized when the lease is signed up front.
[00:46:12] TK: I suspect what that means is in the early years of this change to their financing, uh, it will look worse at the operating cash flow line, but I suspect once, you know, a lease cycle goes through, it’ll look about the same. Um, it just, I don’t know enough about Fleet Partners funding to know how lumpy they were raising these funds.
[00:46:35] TK: Um, But it’s a change in accounting. Uh, I think in the long term it won’t have any effect on the accounts. Um, if I look at earnings per share over the last couple of years, it’s been reasonably flat. So I think it has had an effect on, on their results, which makes me wonder why they did it. But, um, anyway.
[00:46:58] TK: Um, and the share price has come off a little bit too, so, uh, it’s, it perhaps is causing a bit of confusion in the analyst community, as it is with Dave, and I must say, it is with myself as well. Should it be a QAV stock? Um, look, rules are rules. I use operating cash flow rather than, um, NPAT as my, you know, basis for working out a valuation because it’s hard to manipulate.
[00:47:27] TK: But hats off to Fleet Partners because they’ve managed to manipulate it. Um, all I can say is if you hold it, Dave, use the three point trend lines to decide when to sell. Um, if you, if it’s not in the buy list and you want to buy it, buy it, but it’s not on our buy list so I’m not going to look at it until this gets sorted out.
[00:47:48] TK: Um, but there’s, you know, 89 other stocks on the buy list to choose from, so I’m not going to get tied up in knots trying to work out the arcane ins and outs of warehouse leasing. But I think that’s the reason they’re being, it used to be recognized up front as income when a car was leased and now it’s being spread over three or four years.
[00:48:10] TK: So, uh, that’s the
[00:48:11] TK: difference.
[00:48:13] CR: Right. Yeah, I threw this into, uh, GPT to get its analysis on it. It said, um, The business has two main ways of getting vehicles onto its books to lease out to customers. One way is by using what’s known as finance leases, and another is by using something called warehouse funding. Both mess th th bleh.
[00:48:34] CR: Both Methods allow the company to provide vehicles to customers, but each is treated differently in the cash flow statement. If the company uses finance leases, they often don’t have to front up all the money for the vehicle purchase as part of their day to day operating cash flow. The accounting rules treat it more like a financing arrangement.
[00:48:51] CR: Think of it like borrowing money to get the asset, so the initial cost might show up under financing rather than crushing the operating cash flows. But that sounds to me like it doesn’t really understand the business the fleet partners is in. It’s talking more about them as a Company
[00:49:06] TK: they were leasing.
[00:49:07] CR: Yeah, it does. I didn’t give it the full
[00:49:09] CR: background.
[00:49:11] TK: I think they possibly are. And I’m not, again, I’m not that familiar with fleet partners, even though it’s been a good share for the dummy portfolio over the years. Um, I don’t know whether they buy the cars and then lease, lease them out and then sell them when they’re returned.
[00:49:26] TK: Um, or whether they go and get a cheaper lease. to lease the car and then when they lease it to the end user, the retail customer, there’s a margin in the lease charge that the retail user pays and therefore they’re kind of clipping the ticket. So I’m not sure on that. Sounds like that they’re funding it via the second way, they’re leasing the car as well, and then outsourcing it for a higher price.
[00:49:55] CR: just trying to figure out the last time it was on our buy list.
[00:50:02] TK: It did well, um, I owned it when it was called Eclipse, um, way back when, um, and there’s typically always one of these fleet, uh, Leasing companies and salary sacrificing companies on the buy list. We mentioned before, Nick had SGX, I’ve got MMS, and Fleet Partners is the third. Uh, so they’re kind of, you know, a bit like the big banks, they go through their day in the sun.
[00:50:28] TK: Fleet Partners is interesting because they, rather than pay dividends are buying back their shares and that’s supported the share price for a long time. So that could also, I don’t know if there’s been a change in that policy, that could also be affecting their share price in the last
[00:50:42] TK: six months, but it’s certainly gone
[00:50:44] TK: down.
[00:50:45] CR: Well, what I can’t figure out
[00:50:46] CR: is it seems to have last been on our buy list in May of this year, but when I look at their cash flows in Stock Doctor, they’ve had negative cash flow, according to this, going back to September 23.
[00:51:05] TK: Yeah, but Stock Doctor used a rolling 12 month, so may could have been a mixture of a positive and a negative cash flow when the accounting change happened, for example.
[00:51:14] TK: I’m not sure.
[00:51:17] CR: Um, no, it’s going back to September 23 as negative cashflow Last time. According to stock doctor, now they had positive cashflow in a, um, six month period. An interim period was March of 23, so 18 months ago. Um, so I dunno if that it’s been, something’s gone on with it being retrospective with the reporting on that.
[00:51:43] CR: Couldn’t have, it couldn’t have been on our buy list if it had negative cash flow, right. Price to operating cash flow would just blow out.
[00:51:51] TK: Yeah, but if we owned
[00:51:52] TK: it prior to that period, we don’t sell it when it
[00:51:54] TK: goes negative cash flow.
[00:51:55] CR: was on our buy list in May of this
[00:51:57] CR: year.
[00:51:58] TK: Oh,
[00:51:58] TK: sorry. Gotcha. Okay.
[00:51:59] CR: Shouldn’t have been on our buy list under
[00:52:01] CR: those
[00:52:01] CR: circumstances.
[00:52:02] TK: Well, all I can think of is, is that at that stage, before the results were out, perhaps the prior two halves added to a positive cash flow
[00:52:15] CR: Hmm.
[00:52:15] TK: because Stock Doctor does say that it, it rolls, it adds the two halves together rather than taking the, the one half as the, um, as the annualized
[00:52:25] TK: amount.
[00:52:25] CR: Hmm. All right. Well, something’s going on there, but anyway, there you go. That’s, uh, Fleet Partners for you, Dave. Tony says, no. Tony says no.
[00:52:39] TK: Well, yeah, and like if we have to We have to manipulate accounts to make things work for us. Um, it’s, it’s gonna, it’s gonna add a
[00:52:48] TK: lot of time to the investment
[00:52:50] TK: process, I think.
[00:52:51] CR: But as you
[00:52:52] CR: said, it’s not like there’s nothing else to buy. So why have to work so hard just for the sake of one company that’s doing clever stuff with their accounting? Alright, that’s the only question we’ve got for this week. Tony, you got a pulled pork for us this week?
[00:53:14] TK: I do. Hello World Travel. Code is H L O. Remember John Laws? I used to start off every day with Hello World. I need
[00:53:24] TK: to
[00:53:24] TK: use broadcast. Anyway, that reminded
[00:53:26] CR: Well, that’s why
[00:53:26] TK: when I saw
[00:53:27] CR: first
[00:53:28] CR: podcast G’day World. It was, uh, sort of a reference to that. Yeah.
[00:53:33] TK: I
[00:53:34] TK: didn’t know that.
[00:53:35] CR: It was also a reference to, so when you learn to code, I don’t know when you learned to code, but when I learned to code in C or whatever it was, the first language I learned to code at in the eighties, Hello World was the first script you learned to write.
[00:53:50] CR: You know, you would write something and it would print Hello World. You learn how to print something. So also a reference to that, but yeah,
[00:53:58] TK: I learned to code in BASIC and HELLO was the first thing you learned to print there too.
[00:54:02] CR: go. Yeah.
[00:54:03] TK: It wasn’t HELLOWORLD, it was HELLO. And also displayed on screen. Yeah.
[00:54:08] CR: print screen,
[00:54:09] TK: Okay. Interesting. Anyway, HELLOWORLD, travel company. It’s currently moved above its buy line, so it’s on the buy list, I think, Um, fairly recently, maybe this week might be the first time, uh, but today it’s a Josephine.
[00:54:23] TK: So if you’re listening to this, just watch what happens to sentiment before you make a decision on whether to buy or not. Uh, Hello World Travel Limited is a travel distribution company, headquartered obviously in Australia, providing international and domestic travel products and services to clients around the world.
[00:54:42] TK: They have a lot of brands. Um, and they have a lot of different channels. So they have technology platforms that they, um, on sell to end users, uh, like Smart Tickets and Smart Fares and ResWorld. Uh, they have what’s called a Consolidation Business, which I struggled to work out what it was, but the brands there are called Air Tickets and Express Tickets.
[00:55:06] TK: So I think that’s like they bulk buy. Tickets, and then I’ll sell them in parts to, uh, other people. They have a lot of retail travel brands, and they operate, uh, franchise businesses around Australia and New Zealand. Uh, under the banners of, obviously, Hello World Travel, but also Magellan, My Travel, Independent Travel Group, um, Express Travel Group, Elatus.
[00:55:31] TK: Phil Hoffman, Travel, etc, etc. There’s a lot of brands here that they, they support. Uh, they have some tour operating businesses. One of them’s called Entertainment Logistics, and they actually are the biggest movers of um, of shows around Australia. They also have tourist transport, um, Fiji. They operate in Fiji.
[00:55:55] TK: They do what’s called inbound services. So basically you get off the plane, hop on a bus and do a tour. So ATS Pacific, Australian Riser, uh, E Air, It’s a tour company in New Zealand, AOT Inbound, AOT NZ, ETA, which is Experiences Tours Australia, and they wholesale, so they sell products to other travel agents through brands like Ready Rooms, Viva Holidays, Creative Cruising, and Cruise Co.
[00:56:27] TK: So quite a large business, they have more than 2700 members, I call them members, which is the end, uh, or the travel end. shops, I guess, that use their services and they employ 600 staff. They have over 530 franchisees and over 1500 agencies in their buying groups and 650 members of their broker business networks.
[00:56:51] TK: So all in all, there’s over 10, 000 travel advisors across the HLO network in various forms. Yeah, I spoke about Fiji. They have a significant presence in Fiji, um, spoke about entertainment logistics business that they own, uh, one of the things I saw in their results, which I thought was a little interesting, is they hold 1. 4 million shares in another to ASX listed travel company called Corporate Travel Management, CTD.
[00:57:19] TK: That was at least when the results were announced back in June. Um, so that’s interesting, they must have a, um, a need or a liking of Corporate Travel Management to hold shares in it. Um, don’t know what that means ongoing though. Uh, at the end of, FY24, one of the things that’s, um, is good for this business is that the travel numbers in and out of Australia are now back to pre COVID levels in FY19 and just slightly lower in New Zealand, they’re about 85 to 95 percent of FY19 levels.
[00:57:53] TK: So, um, Yeah, it suffered badly during COVID, obviously, when things were shut down, but getting back there now. Hello World was launched in 2013 after the consolidation of legacy brands Harvey World Travel, Travel Scene, Jet Set, and Travel World. A merger with the AOT group followed in 2016 and the business name was changed to Hello World Travel in 2017.
[00:58:20] TK: So, short history, It’s been going for about 11 years in this guise anyway, but the underlying brands that have been rolled up have been around for a long time. Full year results, um, were pretty good. Revenue growth, uh, of 37. 5 percent year on year. Net profit after tax, uh, up 60 percent year on year. And, uh, earnings per share up 55 percent year on year.
[00:58:46] TK: Dividend was, uh, 6 cents per share. Um, which was up 37 percent year on year. The other interesting thing in their numbers is they have zero bank debt. So, I can’t think of any other company on the ASX that I’ve come across that has zero bank debt. So, um, that’s pretty good from a quality point of view, um, and probably scope for them to, um, to raise some funds at some stage to continue doing what they’re doing.
[00:59:13] TK: Uh, from the numbers point of view. QAV numbers. Stock price used in the analysis is 1. 99 and when I looked this morning it was 1. 98. However, that’s still only 70 percent of the consensus target and below our IV2 valuation of 2. 15. It’s above IV1 of 1. 15 but as we know that’s a pretty low Uh, Valuation.
[00:59:37] TK: Uh, Methodology. ADT is 500 million dollars, so it’s a reasonably large company and should suit most listeners. Yield is 5. 5%, which is very strong, but it doesn’t quite meet our threshold to score, so we score it zero. Stock Doctor financial health is strong and the trend is steady. Stockopedia quality, however, is only 67.
[01:00:02] TK: And the total ranking for this company is 90, which isn’t too bad. Um, I drilled down into the quality ranking on Stockopedia. The F score is 6 which is, you know, we’ve seen that before. It’s pretty good. The Z score, which is the bankruptcy score, though, is 1. 1, um, which is, uh, marked as distress. And I drilled down into that, and it wasn’t scoring much in the Z score, um, metrics.
[01:00:27] TK: And I wonder whether that was due to the nature of the industry where small commissions are clipped on large revenues. Um, so some of the ratios that uses to do the Zed scoring maybe didn’t make so much sense in the, um, in that industry, but I’ll highlight it. Um, doesn’t have a good Zed score, but um, in stock doctorate it does have a good quality score.
[01:00:48] TK: Uh, PE is 8.8 times, which is the lowest in the last three years. There was a couple of years when it didn’t make any money ’cause of Covid, so. They get eliminated, but of the ones where it has, it’s trading at the lowest in three years. PropCaf is only five times, so it’s throwing off lots of cash, there’s no debt, so we can buy it reasonably cheaply.
[01:01:10] TK: Net equity per share is interesting. It’s 2. 04, so the share price at 1. 99 is almost allowing us to buy the book, certainly less than book plus 30. However, again, this is one of these companies where the net tangible asset is only 29 cents. So, big difference and there’s been lots of acquisitions and roll ups in the travel space since the company listed and that means a large amount of goodwill on the balance sheet.
[01:01:37] TK: So, as you know, I don’t necessarily balk at that, but it is a risk that like the goodwill could be written down in future years, just depends how well the business has performed that it’s acquired.
[01:01:55] TK: What else have I got here? Directors hold 36 percent of the company. The CEO and CFO hold around 19 percent each. And they are Andrew and Chinzia Burns. I’ll read out the little bios that Stock Doctor has on these two. Mr Burns was Honorary Federal Treasurer of the Liberal Party of Australia from July 15 to June 2019.
[01:02:19] TK: Andrew was appointed a Director and subsequently Deputy Chairman of Tourism Australia in July 2004 until 2009. He was a trustee of the Travel Compensation Fund from 05 09 and a board member of the Australian Tourism Export Council from 98 and National Chairman from 99 2003. Chinzia Burns. Commenced in 1982 in travel and after working as a travel wholesaler in Italy for nine years, she has played a role over 26 years in growing AOT, which was one of the companies that Hello World brawled up.
[01:03:00] TK: Uh, grew AOT from a regional safari operator into one of Australia’s travel distribution businesses. Uh, I think I mean one of the largest Australian travel distribution businesses. The AOT group was privately owned by Andrew and Chinzia Burns until its merger with Hello World Travel in February 2016.
[01:03:20] TK: Chinzia was a director of Tourism Victoria from 2013. 15. She has also served as a board member of Health Services Australia and the Australian Tourism Commission from 2001 to 2004. Zi was appointed a director of Australian Federation of Travel Agents on 14th of December, 2022. So a lot of experience in the travel agents, uh, in the travel industry.
[01:03:50] TK: Um, big shareholding both on the board. Uh. Andrew Burns has been buying shares over the last few months, but not in overly large parcels compared to his total holdings, but obviously likes where the company’s going. In terms of manual data, it’s a new three point trend line, so we score it for that. It does not have consistently increasing equity, but it was close.
[01:04:13] TK: So quality score for this company is high, 15 88%, and the QAV score is 0. 17. So kind of middle of the buy list. Uh, the pros, no debt and vast management ownership and experience on the board. And the risks, it suffered during COVID, no doubt. So, you know, something like that could affect it again in the future.
[01:04:39] TK: And the other risk is that, as I said before, there could be goodwill write downs. at some stage in the future if some of those, um, businesses they’ve acquired aren’t worth what they were when they were acquired. So, um, have a look, people. Not a bad, um, a bad business and a decent size to be on our buy
[01:04:56] TK: list.
[01:04:57] CR: What did you say the um, average daily trade is? I
[01:05:01] TK: Uh, half a bill.
[01:05:04] CR: think it’s 500. I think it’s 500 000.
[01:05:07] TK: Oh, is it? Oh, sorry. Cut my unit strong?
[01:05:09] CR: reading my stock doctor wrong. Yeah,
[01:05:12] TK: Okay, thank you. Thanks for picking that up. I
[01:05:14] CR: it’s all right.
[01:05:14] TK: to be my, uh, what’s the word? I was going
[01:05:17] TK: to say intern, but you’re not my intern. AI. yeah.
[01:05:20] CR: AI. I’m your AI.
[01:05:23] TK: Yeah,
[01:05:23] CR: of which, that’s
[01:05:24] TK: backstop.
[01:05:25] CR: my first thought when I see this
[01:05:26] CR: business is, this is, they’re, they’re a dead man walking.
[01:05:31] TK: Really?
[01:05:32] CR: Well, with AI.
[01:05:33] TK: think AI is going to drive tourist buses
[01:05:36] TK: around Australia?
[01:05:36] CR: I think it’s, in terms of travel agent business, like in terms of, um, planning and booking and arranging, all of that kind
[01:05:46] TK: Mm
[01:05:46] TK: hmm.
[01:05:47] CR: Yeah, I think businesses like this, um, are going to be one of the early targets for disintermediation.
[01:05:57] CR: Unless they get on the front foot and they have their own AI that does it and they just fire all of their human stuff. But even that, I mean, there’s, there’s, I’m not sure there’s a lot of upside with that because your basic AI will just be able to do all of that stuff for you. You’ll just say to whatever the AI does, thing is on your phone.
[01:06:16] CR: Hey, I want to book a trip, I want to book a trip to Italy and it’ll take care of it all for you. Tell you where to go. It’ll make the bookings, et cetera, et cetera.
[01:06:27] TK: I like your faith in AI, I’m not so sure, and my skepticism is rooted in the fact that I’ve heard this argument before when the internet came along and everyone said, Oh, travel agents are dead. You can just go online and book an Expedia and Booking.
[01:06:44] TK: com are gonna take
[01:06:46] TK: over the market.
[01:06:47] CR: and they did.
[01:06:48] TK: large
[01:06:48] CR: Yeah. They took a huge
[01:06:49] CR: chunk of the market.
[01:06:50] CR: Yeah. No, and I
[01:06:51] TK: Hello World point out in one of the presentations I read that particularly in Australia, being so remote from overseas, you don’t have the kind of connections and experience to make your own travel bookings. And so they still have a lot of face to face Consults with people around the details of where they’re going.
[01:07:12] TK: You know, have you been to Italy? Yes. Where would you recommend? Here. Oh, I can trust it. Yes. So there’s a fair, still a fair bit of hand holding that goes on, particularly in our
[01:07:20] TK: country and booking international
[01:07:23] TK: trips.
[01:07:24] CR: Well, when we did our trip with a bunch of my listeners back in 2018 to Europe, I organized all of that through, uh, Flight set? No, I don’t know. Well, some travel booking might’ve been hella well. I don’t know, some guy. I said, just, you know, I need, I need to take 20 people to Europe, organize it all, and he did, and he did a great job.
[01:07:47] CR: So I get that. But again, I think AI is going to do all of that for us.
[01:07:53] TK: Yeah, look at my, and no, I know you are. I am, I am, um, I’m not ignoring what you’re saying, but I think I’ve seen it before, that companies still survive the technology transformation. I’m not saying hello world will. Someone will.
[01:08:09] CR: some, or maybe. Um, yeah, thank you. That’s my first, that’s just my impression. When I see businesses like this, like in terms of low hanging fruit for AI, not
[01:08:22] CR: driving tour buses, although I’m sure Elon will have, uh, self driving tour buses, uh, out there. Cyber, cyber buses. And what did he call them? He called them
[01:08:34] TK: Remote control cyber
[01:08:36] TK: buses.
[01:08:37] CR: or was it, or, uh, bu Autobus, he, he had, he had some fancy way of saying auto bus when he did his launch a couple of months ago with the self-driving buses. I think he was calling them Autobus or, or
[01:08:54] TK: Ah, all right.
[01:08:56] TK: All right.
[01:08:57] CR: Anyway.
[01:08:57] TK: Yeah, okay. Your South African accent, huh? Yeah, and then the humans will just be relegated to the bugs that load and unload the,
[01:09:05] TK: the exhibition equipment
[01:09:06] CR: I’ll be
[01:09:07] TK: onto the autobuses. Oh, robots will do it? Okay.
[01:09:10] TK: Uh huh.
[01:09:11] CR: that. Yeah. Uh,
[01:09:14] TK: who
[01:09:15] TK: has the holiday?
[01:09:16] CR: well the robots. the
[01:09:17] CR: robots go on
[01:09:18] TK: Oh, the robots. Oh, okay. They do a tour of human zoos. Don’t touch the humans, kids.
[01:09:26] CR: It’ll be the apes. The apes, when they take over, will be going.
[01:09:30] TK: Uh huh.
[01:09:32] CR: Uh, Well, you know, I guess we’re under half our hours now. Thank you for that, Tony. Um, I did see, I was going to tell you about this, I, um, I saw, uh, Elon being interviewed by Peter Diamandis.
[01:09:47] CR: You, you know Peter Diamandis, I’m sure you’ve come across him over the years.
[01:09:51] TK: Well, you told me about him
[01:09:53] TK: two weeks ago when we were on the
[01:09:54] TK: podcast then,
[01:09:55] CR: did we have the, oh yeah, I talked about the Mooch.
[01:09:58] CR: Did I tell you about his interview with Elon, that I also watched?
[01:10:03] TK: I can’t recall. Sorry. The Mooch or Diamandis?
[01:10:05] CR: No, Diamandis?
[01:10:06] CR: um, he was, he was doing a, he was running some sort of AI forum in Riyadh or somewhere like that. And Elon was like a Zoom guest. And Elon was talking about, if we get this right, um, this will be the end of capitalism.
[01:10:23] CR: He talks about How it’ll just be a world of abundance. Peter Diamandis wrote a book some years ago called Abundance, which was about, you know, uh,
[01:10:30] TK: That’s right.
[01:10:31] TK: Yeah.
[01:10:32] CR: And Elon was like, if we get this right, it will be a world of abundance that we’re heading into. And I thought, it’s interesting, despite your snickering, when the richest man in the world, who runs several very, very large businesses is talking about working on the end of capitalism, that the technology that he’s trying to develop will bring about the end of capitalism if he gets it right.
[01:10:58] TK: And would he be the world president of this non capitalist
[01:11:01] TK: society?
[01:11:03] CR: Yeah. I think emperor is the word he likes
[01:11:06] TK: Emperor. Right.
[01:11:08] CR: Emperor Elon. Um,
[01:11:11] CR: but, uh, yeah, so that’s interesting. Did you, so you heard our show last week, you heard my, uh, review
[01:11:19] TK: I did.
[01:11:20] CR: book on
[01:11:20] CR: Bitcoin.
[01:11:22] TK: I did.
[01:11:23] TK: Yes. Agree with you 100%.
[01:11:25] CR: I was like, shocked but not shocked. Like, I really thought, okay, he’s, he’s like, all in, um, there’s gonna be a lot of good meat in here about why, and there’s literally nothing.
[01:11:41] CR: The entire book is just waffle. About the history of money and the, and blockchain and the history of fiat currency and blardy, blardy, blardy, blar. And the only argument about why Bitcoin is a great investment is the usual same two we’ve been hearing for
[01:12:03] TK: hmm. Yeah, it goes up.
[01:12:06] CR: There’s only a limited amount. There’s only ever going to be 12, 21 million of them.
[01:12:11] CR: And
[01:12:13] CR: there is a good, there is a chance that it, you know, it will become the dominant currency in the world.
[01:12:22] TK: Mm hmm.
[01:12:23] CR: Why? No one knows. When? No one knows. You know, what’s going to happen to all the other coins? Eh, you know, it’ll just be this one.
[01:12:32] TK: all the world governments are
[01:12:33] TK: going to say, yeah, sure, here you go, crypto
[01:12:35] TK: bros,
[01:12:37] CR: Well, Trump is. Trump is now, Trump is out there saying he’s going to make America the crypto capital of the world
[01:12:45] TK: Yeah, but that’s not like saying I’m going to stop
[01:12:47] TK: printing dollars and you can start buying
[01:12:49] TK: crypto.
[01:12:50] CR: But my point is that there was nothing, like literally nothing that I haven’t been hearing for 10 years in this book. No,
[01:12:58] TK: Mmm.
[01:12:58] CR: no arguments, no, no science, no rational, logical arguments. I was like, really? Like, what? I mean, so the question is then, what do these, what do these,
[01:13:11] TK: I’m shocked.
[01:13:14] CR: what, you know, I was in a debate with somebody online about this, uh, during the week, and, you know, I, I was quoting Charlie, and he goes, well, Charlie was in his late 90s when he said that, and I was like, yeah, you say that like it’s a bad thing.
[01:13:27] TK: Yeah, yeah. From his, from
[01:13:29] TK: his gold plated
[01:13:30] TK: toilet he was saying it.
[01:13:31] CR: Yeah, Charlie had seen all of the scams come and go for 70 years. That’s why he was able to say this.
[01:13:41] CR: But like I say, the question then is, what do these guys see that we don’t see? Why? Like apparently, Mooch on this, uh, Diamandis podcast was saying that he’s got 55 percent of his, um, you know, fund. Whatever it is that he runs invested in Bitcoin. And the only conclusion I can come to is that it’s a pump and dump is the only, if, if I sink all my money in, and then I write a book about it and I go on a million podcasts and tell everyone to buy it. So then I was riding my bike, uh, the other
[01:14:18] TK: So where have we seen that before, Cam?
[01:14:20] CR: Yeah,
[01:14:21] TK: every day in LiveWire and almost, you know, Mondays in the AFR. We’re going to interview this fund manager. What’s your favourite stock? Oh, this
[01:14:29] TK: one.
[01:14:30] CR: pump and dump.
[01:14:30] TK: one I own.
[01:14:31] CR: So the, so, I was thinking, so I read this book and we did the podcast, I was on my bike ride yesterday and I was thinking about this and I was thinking,
[01:14:39] TK: Should have been thinking, about the car
[01:14:40] TK: coming up behind you.
[01:14:41] CR: that was Thursday night. Um,
[01:14:44] TK: okay.
[01:14:45] CR: why does the Bitcoin price retreat? If the people that buy Bitcoin genuinely believe that it’s going to hit a million dollars a coin, like everyone says,
[01:14:59] TK: Mm hmm.
[01:15:00] CR: why does the price ever retreat by
[01:15:01] CR: 50%?
[01:15:04] TK: Well, the price goes down
[01:15:05] TK: when people sell.
[01:15:07] CR: So why are they selling it though, if they believe in all of the evangelism that they claim about it, that it’s only ever going to go up, that the sky’s the limit, 21, why do they then dump it? So I asked GPT and it said, well, GPT said profit taking and, you know, maybe the economy, they’ve got investments in other areas that take a dump and they need to cover their losses by, you know, going to cash and that kind of stuff.
[01:15:35] CR: So there might be some of those reasons, but again, um, I mean, I don’t know, it just seems to me that it is, it’s just a pump and dump cycle, that they drive the price up for a year,
[01:15:46] CR: then they
[01:15:48] CR: say sorry suckers, and they sell it and take their cash and wait till the price goes back down, then they buy
[01:15:54] TK: Yeah,
[01:15:55] CR: drive it back up again.
[01:15:56] TK: And it was, and it’s hit 100, 000 recently and everyone’s up and about who owns Bitcoin, pushing it again. Um, so the people who know about Bitcoin are selling at the moment. And you know, the Bitcoin’s rising because Trump’s saying he’s not going to regulate it. And it’s like, is that a good thing?
[01:16:16] TK: Do you really want to own a wild west unregulated asset where anybody can, who knows a little bit more than you, can have the edge and rip you off every day? Anyway,
[01:16:30] TK: it’s like, it’s like buying a banana taped to the wall, Cam. In fact, I think he used the, I think he
[01:16:36] TK: used the profits to buy Bitcoin.
[01:16:40] CR: Uh, have you ever seen the arena? Tony, Pam Greer film, 1974. Have you seen
[01:16:47] TK: Pam Grier being the actor, actress who starred in the Quentin Tarantino film. Ron, was based on Ron Punch. I forgot what it’s called.
[01:16:58] TK: Uh,
[01:16:59] TK: Yeah. Jackie Brown.
[01:17:01] TK: Thank you. Yes.
[01:17:01] CR: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Have you ever seen
[01:17:03] CR: like her other seventies films? The Big Dollhouse, Women in Cages, The Big Bird Cage, Black Mama, White Mama,
[01:17:11] TK: big dollhouse ring. Yeah. I would have seen, seen them, but I’ve
[01:17:14] TK: forgotten them.
[01:17:15] CR: lots of like, Just great sort of Roger Corman esque films in the early 70s. So yeah, well, and, and I can’t remember what the term for it is. It’s like women in prison films, basically, I think is the
[01:17:33] TK: Mm hmm.
[01:17:34] CR: genre, um, that, you know, you just get a lot of scantily clad, beautiful women, little bit of quasi rape going on, which apparently was cool in the seventies.
[01:17:47] CR: Um, And, usually in her films, there’s sort of, um, male revenge stuff against the men, she’s being mistreated, she and other beautiful women are being put in prison, and there’s usually some lesbian scenes, um, and there’s a lot of nudity, sex, violence, and then female revenge. In this one, there are a bunch of, um, slaves in ancient Rome.
[01:18:16] CR: Who are getting, you know, uh, sexually assaulted by the men, et cetera, et cetera, and treated, there’s always like a mean female prison warden or head of the Roman household that’s treating the mean, et cetera, et cetera, and then they get naked and fight, usually, and then the women rise up. Roger Corman said it was a women’s lib film, um, in
[01:18:40] TK: Ah, ha,
[01:18:41] CR: in this one they all become gladiators,
[01:18:45] TK: Right.
[01:18:46] CR: one of the guys who runs the Gladiator Club tournament sees them fighting in his kitchen and has this bright idea that he’s going to make them all gladiators. So then there’s great, lots of opportunities for them to be naked in a arena and an amphitheatre with, uh, swords and chain mail, tridents and whatever.
[01:19:04] CR: Anyway. It’s a little, it’s a little bit hard to watch with some of the um, like the, the rape fantasy stuff that was common in films of that era.
[01:19:16] CR: We’ve talked about this before, it was um, I think the Eiger Sanction or one of those Clint Eastwood films from the late 70s early 80s where he literally threatens his female co star that if she’s not careful he’ll rape her.
[01:19:30] CR: And he’s, and it’s like in a jokey sort of uh, You know, slightly. She then makes out with him. Like she thinks that’s such a hot thing for him to say that they get it on. Like, it was
[01:19:42] TK: Ha, Ha,
[01:19:43] CR: like, from a modern perspective, you look at it, you go,
[01:19:46] CR: what, what, how is this, how is this funny or cute or romantic?
[01:19:52] TK: I know, yeah. There’s one of the, um, one of the other Clint Eastwood movies, uh, one of the sequels to Dirty Harry, where he’s in the, in the gym working out in Genevieve. Bejewelled is the other, if I’ve pronounced that right, is the other um, is the female lead and he walks up to her and says, I’d like to lick the sweat off your body.
[01:20:11] TK: It’s like, that’s not gonna work. It worked, there’s a line in the movie, but like,
[01:20:17] CR: like in a, I’ve said that to Chrissy more than once after a fitness class at Kung Fu, but that’s different.
[01:20:25] TK: but you know her already,
[01:20:26] CR: yeah, it wasn’t my
[01:20:26] CR: pick up
[01:20:27] TK: Yeah, exactly.
[01:20:29] CR: If I tried to use that as a pick up line in Corsica, she would have kicked me in the nuts. Uh, yeah, anyway, apart
[01:20:37] TK: I agree, different times. I equate that to architecture, right? You walk down the street and you see a building and you think, that’s awful, how could they have built that? But, back in the 50s or 60s or whatever, that was the cutting edge of architecture.
[01:20:51] TK: Just the taste change.
[01:20:53] CR: mm. I mean, Chrissy’s watched a bit of this film with me and she’s as women’s lib as I am, or anyone is, and she’s, like, we’re both going, wow, this is, like, really distasteful, but it’s also awesome, because No, not that bit of it, but the rest of it, because Pam Grier is awesome in these films, as is her co star in this, uh, Margaret Markov, who was this tall, statuesque blonde, who was also in, I think, Black Mama, White Mama, or one of those other films, uh, from the early 70s.
[01:21:28] CR: She was, um, American, but always had this, like, weird European accent that they’d put on. She was born in California, but she’s always talking like she’s some sort of Slavic, uh, goddess or something. But they’re, like, they’re, they’re strong and they’re, they’re fierce. Women who, if a man, you know, eventually looks at them wrong way, they’ll, you know, cut their testicles off or shoot them or, you know, get revenge.
[01:21:56] CR: And so there’s this strong women side of it after they’ve been molested one too many times kind of thing. Anyway, Chrissy’s a big fan of Pam Grier. She’s like, oh, she was so sexy and so strong and so, you know, Fierce and all those sorts of things, which is why Tarantino wanted her in Jackie
[01:22:15] CR: Brown. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, And I’m so happy that, uh, Quentin gave her that opportunity to work alongside De Niro and Sam Jackson and Robert Forster in that film because she really Held her own and did a great job.
[01:22:31] TK: Well, you heard the story that she wasn’t just working alongside Robert. They went missing
[01:22:35] TK: for the first three days of the shoot.
[01:22:36] TK: Well,
[01:22:39] CR: he has a history with, uh, black ladies. He likes, uh, I think every relation, every marriage or relationship he’s had has been with an African American woman. I know I hadn’t heard that though, but, uh, good luck to both of them. Yeah. So anyway, um, the, the arena, check it out. If you are on Plex, a lot of, a lot of sort of early seventies, uh, exploitation fun.
[01:23:07] CR: What have you been
[01:23:08] TK: speaking of strong women, have you seen Black
[01:23:11] TK: Doves yet?
[01:23:12] CR: Haven’t heard of
[01:23:12] TK: come out on Netflix. No, it’s kind of a spy thriller.
[01:23:17] TK: On the positive side, it stars
[01:23:19] TK: Ben Whishaw,
[01:23:20] CR: Oh, Yeah,
[01:23:21] TK: Q from the James Bond films,
[01:23:22] CR: Yeah, yeah, love him.
[01:23:23] TK: later ones.
[01:23:24] CR: He’s also Paddington
[01:23:26] CR: in the Paddington
[01:23:27] TK: Knightley. Ah, okay,
[01:23:28] CR: Oh, come on. I love Keira Knightley. What are you, what, what, what’s wrong with Keira Knightley?
[01:23:32] TK: Okay, I’m a bit ambivalent about it.
[01:23:34] TK: I’m, not my taste. I think, I think, um, what’s that, uh, Love Actually movie sort of spoiled her for me. Anyway, she’s in it, does a good job, but great. I really enjoy what went through about four episodes last night in a row. But speaking of strong women, there’s this one for me, the highlight, there’s a couple of highlights.
[01:23:55] TK: One of the highlights is Ben Whishaw plays a, an
[01:23:58] TK: assassin and a lot of the I know, a lot of the casting is against type,
[01:24:04] CR: Yeah, right?
[01:24:05] TK: he’s a gay assassin and he’s blackmailed into going and killing a drug dealer. Another great casting choice, the head of one of the gangs in London is played by this Greek grandmother called Lenny.
[01:24:25] TK: It’s just, it’s almost, almost like early, um, Early Guy Ritchie, like Snatch, um, yeah, and so, um, he, he has to go on and, uh, attack this nightclub where the, his target is, um, held up, and there’s, you know, 20 henchmen or something there waiting for him, and he’s got no one to help him except these two Irish girls who look like they’re straight out of Dairy Girls, and, and like the three of them, uh, talk about casting against type, these, these two, two young Irish girls are like, yeah.
[01:24:59] TK: Yeah, I’m totally up for it. Come on, let’s go. And like that, wielding machine guns, and they go in, they shoot someone. Oh, stunning. Did you see that one? And then, and then like, you know, blow up something. Hold on to your funnies, ladies. Here we go. It’s just hilarious. It’s so good. But, um, yeah, it reminded me of early Guy Ritchie, because it’s, it’s essentially, it’s about, The assassination of the Chinese ambassador in London.
[01:25:25] TK: But that’s kind of the MacGuffin. It’s like the center of the story, but everything’s about the characters that revolve around it, you know, gang members in London and, and Keira Knightley plays this, um, uh, sort of double, not double agent, an agent, you don’t know really who she’s working for, might be the CIA.
[01:25:43] TK: Like everything’s fairly obscure. In it, you come in late to all the stories and you get a bit of backstory about it. But she’s, she’s married to the defense secretary. Like they pick him out as a young politician, marry her to him, and he’s likely to become the prime minister. And he’s feeding, she’s feeding information to whoever she works for, which is unspecified.
[01:26:06] TK: And then the Chinese ambassador dies and his daughter goes missing, and so it kind of gets interwoven into the plot. And, and, um, Yeah, I’m really enjoying it, it’s well written, it’s well acted, um, casting is against type, which I love. And, and it starts off, the opening scene is, um, in a pub in London at Christmas time and they’re playing the Fairy Tale of New York, my favourite Christmas song.
[01:26:30] CR: Yeah, it’s
[01:26:31] TK: So that got me in straight away,
[01:26:33] TK: by the Pogues,
[01:26:34] CR: Yeah, can’t go wrong. As soon as you play that, you know, you know, it’s going to be a good ride. Anyone who’s got enough taste to play that. It’s the only song I allow in the house around Christmas is that. It’s the only Christmas song I’ll get behind.
[01:26:50] TK: Mmm, same. I love it.
[01:26:52] CR: Um, I noticed that, uh, Sam Troughton is in it. Um,
[01:26:59] TK: Ooh, don’t, know.
[01:27:01] CR: don’t know who he plays in it, but, um, he was in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon film, played Robespierre, but he, um, he’s also in The Outlaws, the, um, Stephen Merchant TV show, but, um, he is Patrick Troughton’s grandson.
[01:27:21] TK: Yeah, I wondered if there was a relationship there.
[01:27:23] CR: Mmm.
[01:27:24] TK: Doctor who?
[01:27:25] CR: Mmm. The second
[01:27:27] CR: doctor. Oh, good, I’ll check that out. Good tip, thanks.
[01:27:32] TK: yeah, he, he plays the uh, police chief.
[01:27:35] TK: Just call him up. Yeah.
[01:27:38] CR: Um,
[01:27:40] CR: uh, I think, have I spoken to you since we watched The Banshees of Anishinaabemowin? Did we talk
[01:27:46] TK: Yes. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Loved it. Love it.
[01:27:49] CR: fantastic. Yeah, really good. Did you ever watch the Brendan Gleeson show Mr. Mercedes?
[01:27:56] TK: Yeah.
[01:27:57] CR: Is that
[01:27:57] CR: good?
[01:27:58] TK: Read the books. Um, not as good as the books. I thought the books were excellent. Stephen King trilogy.
[01:28:04] TK: Lost a bit on
[01:28:05] TK: the TV screen. Not bad, but
[01:28:07] TK: not great.
[01:28:08] CR: I watched the trailer of it the other
[01:28:10] CR: day and went, eh, it just looks a little bit sort of hokey. Yeah.
[01:28:14] TK: Yeah. it was. But the books are great. Really enjoyed the books.
[01:28:20] CR: Um, Chrissy and Fox went to see Wicked yesterday, which they loved. Have you seen
[01:28:28] TK: Good.
[01:28:30] TK: No. Nor will I. I’ve seen the play.
[01:28:33] CR: Oh, right. I’d like
[01:28:34] TK: Years ago. Ten Years ago.
[01:28:37] TK: or something.
[01:28:37] CR: But she was saying that, um, the, the
[01:28:39] CR: wizard, um, Oz, the great Oz is played by.
[01:28:45] TK: Yes. Zeus.
[01:28:46] CR: Zeus,
[01:28:47] CR: yeah, Goldbloom, he had a blank
[01:28:49] TK: Yeah. Jeff Goldblum. yeah.
[01:28:51] CR: I thought, perfect casting,
[01:28:52] CR: like,
[01:28:53] TK: Yeah.
[01:28:54] CR: that’s, but he’s perfect casting for everything, really, that he does. He’s just, you can’t go wrong with Goldbloom, really.
[01:29:03] TK: Did you ever see The Fly?
[01:29:04] TK: The remake of The Fly?
[01:29:05] CR: Uh, so, um,
[01:29:08] CR: Chris, yes, when Chrissy first arrived in Brisbane, Many, many years ago, um, we went out with some local people for some, um, drinks, um, to welcome her to Brisbane. And then a couple of people came back to my place afterwards. And I put on The Fly for them to, as like a, as a film for everybody to watch.
[01:29:33] TK: Oh, haha, ha,
[01:29:34] CR: For some reason, I just thought, Oh yeah, let’s watch The Fly. And, um, they had never seen it before. And everyone was like, Chrissy just arrived in Brisbane. I put that on for her to watch.
[01:29:44] TK: ha,
[01:29:44] CR: She’s like, what kind of a welcome
[01:29:46] TK: Hahaha.
[01:29:47] CR: And I’m like, what’s, you know, it’s great. Yeah, no, I love it. I love that film.
[01:29:53] CR: Yeah.
[01:29:54] TK: Yeah. It’s good, isn’t
[01:29:55] CR: I love the original too. Like I think it
[01:29:57] TK: Me too.
[01:29:58] CR: Vincent Price is
[01:29:59] TK: Me Help me. Yep.
[01:30:01] CR: But the Goldbloom
[01:30:02] CR: one is particularly, yeah, twisted and disturbing. Yeah. He’s great. Yeah.
[01:30:09] TK: Yeah.
[01:30:10] TK: Yeah. Loved it. Mmm. Well, most of my week’s
[01:30:14] TK: been ta Will be taken
[01:30:15] TK: up with packing. I’m shredding.
[01:30:16] CR: when do you, when do you head
[01:30:18] TK: Shout out to, uh. Uh, so we’re, I’m going down for Christmas and then coming back for New Year’s, our last New Year’s here for a while. Um, and then we get packed up starting January 2 by the removalists.
[01:30:32] CR: Right.
[01:30:33] TK: and then they, they drop their stuff off on January 9 at Cape Schanck. So I’m down there
[01:30:39] TK: in between,
[01:30:40] CR: Right. Um, so that’ll be it. First week of January and you’ll be gone.
[01:30:46] TK: correct? Yeah,
[01:30:49] CR: Well, that’s, uh, going to be fun for you. All the packing and everything. Yeah.
[01:30:55] CR: Take it
[01:30:56] TK: out to Rexel, biggest bullshit artist in the country. I’ve got this shredder. I’m trying to lighten the load a bit. I’ve got like, you know, tax files and share stuff going back more than 10 years. So I’m shredding all the old stuff rather than move it. And I bought this shredder, which says it shreds a hundred things at a go.
[01:31:15] TK: It doesn’t. Advertising it, it shreds a hundred pieces of paper at once. It can shred through staples and paperclips. It can’t. And you can feed it through six items at a time, which is what I’ve resorted to, because if you put a large load of paper and it keeps stopping. But even if it works, It shreds for two minutes and then has to cool down for eight minutes.
[01:31:45] TK: And it shreds about, I don’t know, ten pages a minute. So it’s, it does like 20 pages and then stops for eight minutes. So I’m doing about a hundred pages an hour at the moment. It’s very, I might, might just get a match.
[01:31:59] TK: Get rid of them.
[01:32:00] CR: out of the deck. Just set fire to it.
[01:32:02] TK: Yeah,
[01:32:03] TK: yeah.
[01:32:04] CR: Alright, well, uh, thank you TK, you’re gonna be busy then I guess for the next few weeks, we’ll have to,
[01:32:12] TK: No, I’ll be around. I’m happy to make time. The only time I won’t be able to is when we’re actually being uplifted
[01:32:18] TK: on the Tuesday after New
[01:32:20] TK: Year’s.
[01:32:21] CR: well, um, I’m still reaching out to people to come on and do some guest hosting stuff, and Ed suggested instead of getting people who have had good success with QAV, we get people on who haven’t had good success and we can unpick it, so
[01:32:37] TK: and me.
[01:32:37] CR: Yeah. Well, that’s just a regular show.
[01:32:41] TK: been good. Yeah.
[01:32:45] CR: so if anyone listening has not had a good run and you want to come on and dump on me, um, while Tony takes some breaks over Christmas, feel free, happy to have that conversation.
[01:32:57] CR: But if it comes down to, I don’t check my alerts for several weeks, I’m going to go, well, what do you want me to tell you? I mean,
[01:33:06] TK: Oh, Excel. Oh, I don’t use Excel.
[01:33:08] CR: Yeah, yeah, yeah,
[01:33:11] TK: One of my, one of my buddies said, I want to learn about share markets, but I have to tell you up front, I’ll subscribe to your show, but, um, I don’t use Excel and I don’t listen to things. I just watch
[01:33:21] TK: YouTube. I’m like,
[01:33:23] TK: okay.
[01:33:24] CR: well I’ll have to start putting all of our things on YouTube just for him then. Alright, thank you TK, have a good week.
[01:33:32] TK: Have a good week. Thanks.


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