THE QAV STORY

30 years in the mak­ing

THE PODCAST

QAV start­ed in 2019 as a pod­cast about Tony Kynaston’s approach to val­ue invest­ing. Since then it has turned into a vibrant com­mu­ni­ty of val­ue investors who learn Tony’s QAV sys­tem and help oth­ers to become suc­cess­ful investors.

Tony and his co-host Cameron Reil­ly have known each oth­er for about 20 years. Tony was a fan of Cameron’s ear­ly pod­casts in 2004–2005 and they grad­u­al­ly devel­oped a friend­ship. Over the years they col­lab­o­rat­ed on a num­ber of projects, includ­ing a book and a film, and they and their fam­i­lies trav­elled the world togeth­er.

In ear­ly 2019, as they were wrap­ping up their film project, Tony sug­gest­ed they work on a pod­cast togeth­er. He had recent­ly been on anoth­er pod­cast (pro­duced by Cameron’s sons) where he briefly explained the invest­ing method­ol­o­gy that he had devel­oped over 25 years, which he had used to become wealthy. Cameron sug­gest­ed they do a detailed pod­cast about that invest­ing sys­tem.

That became the QAV Pod­cast.

TONY’S INVESTING BACKGROUND

After a twen­ty-year career as a senior exec­u­tive at Shell and Coles, Tony retired to become a full-time investor.

He stud­ied the greats like Buf­fett and Munger and devel­oped his own QAV (Qual­i­ty At Val­ue) sys­tem which has been refined over the decades. He designed it to meet his needs — he want­ed a sys­tem that would allow him to find shares in well-man­aged com­pa­nies that had a his­to­ry of gen­er­at­ing plen­ty of cash but that were avail­able to buy at a dis­count to their intrin­sice val­ue. He also want­ed to spend his time with his fam­i­ly and play­ing golf, so he did­n’t want it to be a full-time job. It need­ed to be some­thing he could man­age with an hour a day of focus.

From time to time, peo­ple ask to see Tony’s his­tor­i­cal returns. He’s talked about them a cou­ple of times on the pod­cast, the most recent episode being #547.

    • FY03 10%
    • FY04 98%
    • FY05 35%
    • FY06 38.4%
    • FY07 41.4%
    • FY08 ‑19.9%
    • FY09 ‑31%
    • FY10 115%
    • FY11 32%
    • FY12 0.8%
    • FY13 39%
    • FY14 6.5%
    • FY15 6.6%
    • FY16 14.3%
    • FY17 12.4%
    • FY18 1.2%
    • FY19 ‑10%
    • FY20 14.2%
    • FY21 19.4%
    • FY22 ‑17% (Tony’s wife Jen­ny retired from a career as a senior exec­u­tive and they start­ed pulling mon­ey out of the port­fo­lio to live on)

As you can see, there have been good years, aver­age years, ter­ri­ble years and great years. It’s the long-term aver­age (rough­ly dou­ble mar­ket) that counts. All invest­ing strate­gies have good years and bad years. The mis­take most ama­teurs (and even many pro­fes­sion­als) make is to change strate­gies dur­ing the bad years. The smartest approach is to stick to your strat­e­gy dur­ing pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive cycles and ride it out. 

 

CAMERON’S BACKGROUND

Cameron worked in IT for 15 years before co-found­ing the world’s first pod­cast net­work in 2004.

He’s been mak­ing pod­casts ever since, and has writ­ten a few books and made a his­to­ry doc­u­men­tary. He knew noth­ing about invest­ing when they start­ed QAV. Today he man­ages all of the QAV port­fo­lios, as well as his own per­son­al port­fo­lio.

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