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Tony recounts how he literally smashed his golf driver and then the show ricochets into AI investing, honesty metrics for management, huge portfolio outperformance, and the surprising returns of recent pulled porks. Cameron tests Google’s Gemini for a new way to score “able and honest” management and the boys debate whether Buffet’s philosophy can be quantified. They explore whether sentiment-driven market contraction is actually a bullish signal (the new “Reilly Sentiment Ratio”), check a string of pulled pork mega-performers, and marvel at how stealth businesses like hold-my-beer tool retailer Stealth Group and fashion drop-shipper Cettire have exploded. There’s also a Bitcoin conspiracy: is crypto actually a honey trap built by Western intelligence? Tony digs into takeover mechanics using Cash Converters, and delivers a new pulled pork on Aurizon Holdings (AZJ), with takeover and infrastructure-spinoff implications. It’s value investing, gamma waves of AI hype, and billionaire bunkers… all in one classic QAV episode.
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Timestamps
00:00–01:30 Smashing a Ping driver & brand origin Ping
01:30–08:00 “Honest & Able” investing metrics from Gemini & Buffet Berkshire, Munger
08:00–11:40 Portfolio performance breakdown ASG, NWH, CLV, PRN, SRG, PRU, RRL, RSG, LLV
11:40–13:10 Selling EZL, buying CLX EZL, CLX
13:10–18:50 Pulled pork rockets: VAU, WGN, CTT VAU, WGN, CTT
18:50–21:15 More pulled pork wins: EDU, AHX, TYR EDU, AHX, TYR
21:15–23:20 SGI up 422% SGI
23:20–25:00 Sending pulled porks to CEOs Simil (SMS-like reference)
25:00–30:20 “Riley Sentiment Ratio” & buy list compression —
30:20–37:40 Bitcoin = a government honey trap? BTC, NSA
40:00–41:40 AI market dynamics & bonds pressure Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, Oracle
41:40–49:30 Should humanity invest everything in AI? —
50:00–57:00 Cash Converters takeover mechanics CCV, EZCORP
57:00–01:05:00 Pulled Pork: Aurizon Holdings (AZJ) AZJ, QUBE, RIO (rail reference), RIMPEL BAY
01:05:00–End Billionaire bunkers & cryonics —
Transcription
[00:00:00]
Cameron: Welcome to QAV Australia. Tony, episode 8 47. This is the 25th of November, 2025. 25, 11 25 today. Tony, how you doing? What’s good?
Tony Kynaston: Good. Uh, weather’s good at the moment. It, uh, it’s fined up. All of a sudden it’s gone from like 12 degrees to 22, 23 in like 24 hours.
Cameron: Oh, that sounds lovely.
Tony Kynaston: golf
Cameron: No, I,
Tony Kynaston: smashed my driver. Dunno how it just hit a good shot and the head just kept on going. So that’s,
Cameron: wow.
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Tony Kynaston: that’s all right. try and be as quick as I can. A rise in holdings, and I’ve done a rise before, but it was quite a few years ago. It’s back on the bottom of our buy list. It’s QAV score is 0.1, so it’s the very last stock, uh, and I’ve included it today A ’cause it’s new on the buy list, but B, because it’s, um, a large a DT stock, so it will suit, um, large shareholders. I’ve owned the stock in the past, I dunno. Now, uh, it’s, it comes out of a [01:05:00] uh, float back in 2010 of a company called QR National, as you’d expect is a, a rail haulage company in Queensland. And, uh, it was listed originally as QR National and then changed its name to Aurizon Holdings. The marketers got a hold of it. Um, it’s, it’s basic business is hauling coal from the Queensland mines to terminals on the coast. if you don’t like that, if you’re not, um, if you are ESG oriented and don’t like a haulage company, then look away. Now. they do make a bit of a, um, a play with the statement that hauling around Australia using rail is a, is the best, uh, or the lowest emitter, uh, of carbon then compared to rail, compared to road. Or, uh, air. So they do make some claim to, um, to be less carbon intensive, but anyway, you can make your own decision on that. [01:06:00] Um, it, it’s started off life owning the rail tracks, which I think it now leases from the Queensland government. it also allows competitors, uh, onto the rail network and, but it’s also diversified away a lot from coal from the Bowen Basin to the Queensland coast loading it on ships.
It now does a lot of iron or haul, um, haulage. It does a lot of grain haulage. it runs the rail networks between Darwin and almost all the way to Adelaide, so in, in the Outback and as well over in wa. So it’s diversified away a lot from coal. but it still still does a lot of coal haulage. Uh, what else can I say about it? That’s probably all I wanna say about it. In that sense, it was listed, um, the listing was fairly contentious. I remember ’cause I was, um, investing around the time when it was listed. Uh, the sort of thematic was that this was a government owned business and government [01:07:00] owned businesses when they were taken out of government ownership into private hands had a bump because, um, private ownership could do more with the cost base, more with efficiency, um, was less beholden to unions, that kind of thing. And certainly that had been the case with some of the listings before that, most notably CSL. Uh, but, um, over the years, even though the stock price went up, it’s now back around where it was when it listed some 15 years before. So, uh, it listed $2 55. Um, price today is, I’ll have a quick look. It was around $3 something, $3 10, I think I did the analysis. Uh, no, 3 53. So it’s, it’s actually climbing, but it could get back around to its listing price back in May of this year. Um, they reported bad numbers in their latest results, so they reported a 25% fall in net profit after [01:08:00] tax. And, uh, they, they claimed that the group earnings were pressured by weaker bulk haulage, containerized freight losses, impairments, um, due to, to companies not being able to, to pay them and higher restructuring and legal costs.
So, uh, they, and they also provide the guidance at the lower end of, um, of, for growth. So, um, a subdued earnings outlook dividend performance was also below market expectations. Final dividend of 6.50 cents fell short of the 6.90 cents expected, and this company is driven by its dividend. So that wasn’t good. but interestingly enough, the, the market digested that now the share price is going up again, uh, because of the action that’s been taken. So announced 250 job cuts this year in answer to its profit decline, and they also increased their share buyback program. Um, and the other thing that’s kind of [01:09:00] keeping the market interested is that they are thinking about what to do with the Queensland Rail Network. And the AFR back in August 18 reported that a rise in Chief executive, Andrew Harding said, no decision has been made on whether to sell or keep the company’s Queensland Rail Network, which earn steady income from operating and maintaining rail tracks. But the CEO confirmed Horizon had been asking potential buyers to put a value on its network. And there’s been a few articles around like that. One from the week before in discussions to sell $4 billion stake in Queensland Rail is in talks to sell up to 49% of its Queensland Rail tracks a key piece of infrastructure for the export of coal seeking bids of up to 4 billion to arrest sliding profits and restore investor confidence. largest rail freight business and its advisors have invited private infrastructure investors, hedge funds and insurers. To take a highly confidential look at the 2,670 kilometer Central Queensland Coal Network, [01:10:00] a sale of a minority stake in the network or spinning it off via the merger would be the biggest shake up of the horizon since it was privatized back in 2010, et cetera, et cetera.
So there’s a, a little bit of work going on there. So perhaps that’s coming down to the sharp end. Um. There’s a few other articles about that too, uh, and maybe the market’s getting excited about the spinoff of that, um, coal Haulage Business and Network. But the other thing that may be getting exciting, excited about was on the front page of today’s AFR there’s a story announcing that Macquarie Group’s infrastructure arm is launching a takeover for Cube Logistics, QUBE, which is part partially a competitor, certainly in the infrastructure space for logistics. And I’m drawing along Bow here and saying that that could lead to consolidation in the industry. Um, may or may not, but certainly was a bit of an eyeopener, I think in this space. I would classify this company as a bond proxy. We’ve talked about [01:11:00] them before. They’re kind of companies like say Rimple Bay, is possibly where, uh, horizon takes its coal to. So that’s Rimple Bay is the terminal, which loads the, the coal ships and has a steady income stream of contracted work and then pays a, a high dividend based on its margin for doing that contracted work. So it’s a bond proxy. So in other words, it’s a, you give me your money as an investor for a while, I’ll give you a dividend coupon, and the business will still be around in 10 years time to pay you back. Um, I would’ve thought a ZJ would make a good fit with a large super fund or for a large super fund. And the, the large super funds have been busy hoovering up. Um, infrastructure type assets and then taking them off market, uh, to put into their own super funds as unlisted assets, uh, and the likes of Sydney Airport come to mind in certain toll roads.
So wondered why Horizon wasn’t in that camp, given that it’s, um, [01:12:00] uh, part of its business anyway is regulated. It’s mono monopolistic a defensive infrastructure business. Um, but I think, uh, one of the reasons why it’s hasn’t been picked up by Superfund is because of the, the ESG concerns with, um, with, uh, the coal exposure.
So like 70 plus percent of Horizon’s EBITDA is still coal related, which is the network. and the haulage business. And even though those volumes are contracted and stable, the market provi applies a permanent ESG discount and assumes a long-term volume decline. Um, another thing which is that made super funds a bit wary about buying a stock like a rising, is that. At the moment, it’s not going through a period of high capital investment, but it has in the past and there’s been a need to upgrade. It’s, um, it’s network, it’s rail network, um, it’s, it’s, uh, rolling stock or it’s trucks. [01:13:00] So it’s, uh, trailers on the, um, behind the engines, uh, and what they call corridor maintenance.
So the land around the, uh, the railway. Um, so it does have a, a high CapEx usage, which is not necessarily appealing to And I think the last case, last sort of reason for it is that it’s no obvious growth story. So it’s a mature business, um, which is not a bad thing because like I. Super funds will take on those low growth businesses if they either can combine them with other low growth businesses.
So oftentimes if they buy one airport, they buy other regional airports as well and try and look with some synergies through, um, management or combining ’em together there. but they haven’t had a bite of the horizon. But perhaps if there’s consolidation in the industry, that may change and that might some interest because the share price has been going up this second half of the year and based on bad results.
So something’s up. Um, I guess, um, in summary, it’s not, it’s not a broken business. It’s not expensive. [01:14:00] It’s, uh, it’s gonna be around for a long time. It still has some monopoly like characteristics, uh, but I think it probably needs a catalyst before it sees a real upturn in share price more than it’s now.
Anyway, some of the analysis I read said that. The, uh, non coal bulk haulage rates had to probably double in scale to make it attractive to offset coal. Um, coal has had a bit of a vol volatile outlook in terms of its, um, its shipments and so some kind of, uh, state stability has to come to the coal market to make this some company more attractive. and I guess, you know, once one takeover bit appears, I think it might garner some interest in this company. So, um, that’s what’s going on with the business. I can look at the numbers now, so it’s a large A DT stock, 14.3 million. Uh, stock price for my [01:15:00] analysis was $3 51, which is greater than iv, one of a dollar six and IV two of $2 42 actually greater than consensus target of 5%.
So we don’t often see that, but it is, in this case, can’t buy it for book or book plus 30, which is $3 and 3 cents. So it’s, um, trading above that yield is nearly 4.5%, which is not bad, but we don’t score it ’cause it’s not bigger than, um, the mortgage rate. Uh, Stock Doctor, financial health and trend is strong and steady.
Stock edia equality rank is 80, which isn’t too bad, the S score is seven out of nine, which is good. The overall stock, EDIA stock rank was 82 and it falls down on momentum. only ranks 53. ’cause as I said, until the last couple of months, the share price has been going down. Uh, the PE is nearly 17 times, but it’s not the highest or the lowest, so we don’t score it for that. is good. It’s, it’s trading at 4.21 times. So that’s the attractive part of this business is it’s throwing off lots of cash. [01:16:00] Notwithstanding the fact that from time to time it does have to invest back in itself as well. From, for a CapEx point, from a CapEx point of view, earnings per share forecast growth is 16% and questionable by some of the analysts I read about, uh, looking at this company. But even so, even if it does get, do 16% earnings per share forecast, it doesn’t score on our growth over PE anyway. Growth over PE is only 0.97. Uh, doesn’t have an owner, founder and directors have very negligible ownership in this company, and that was a. Another interesting tidbit I thought is the company’s been run for about 10 years by an ex, I think it was Rio Tinto, uh, senior manager, um, who I guess might be ruining the fact they left Rio Tinto.
But I wonder when, um, 10 years or long is enough for this person, um, and whether they may counter countenance a rollout or a spinoff of the rail network or part of the rail network to try and get, uh, the share price moving again. [01:17:00] Um, certainly the right time to do it. I mean, you can’t roll out, you can’t spin off that network when the share price is high.
It doesn’t make any sense. When the share price is low, you can get a, um, an attractive bid, which makes it, uh, more achievable. How can I summarize? This company lacks, sorry, the, I should sum it up. First of all, um, the total quality score is seven outta 16 or 44%, and the QAB score is 0.1. the company lacks quality.
We’re giving it 44%. Um, stocker Pdia was a bit more generous, but it’s certainly, uh, made up for by stronger cash flow, so it gets onto our buy list on that side of things, plenty of recent opportunities for the company. obviously the coal side of the business. Whilst being volatile is, uh, an ESG markdown, um, on its valuation. It’s, it’s recently had a lot of disruptions to its haulage business, either because of, um, floods or cyclones or industrial action. there have been some derailments which have shut down their network for a while. So it’s, it’s, um, a little bit volatile from that [01:18:00] point of view. As I said before, um, there is CapEx drawdowns from time to time, and there’s also regulatory risk, um, not just around ESG, but also perhaps on the, on the pricing that they have to get agreed by the government for the, um, Queensland, uh, coal haulage on the positive sides. Um, if they do spin off some of the rail line assets, that may lead to a re-rating of the rest of the company. Um, and it’s, uh, its valuation it also gives them a potential use of funds to go after consolidating in the haulage space as well themselves, but at the low end of their share. Graph there, I think, um, potentially a takeover, a takeover target.
And if they do, somehow split the coal business, I think it makes ’em even more attractive. So that’s what, uh, is probably occupying the board’s minds at the moment. So that’s A‑S-J-A-A-S-J-A-Z‑J, sorry, horizon Holdings?
Cameron: Any explanation [01:19:00] why they’re called All Horizon au? Is it Australian Horizons? Is that what it’s play on? Mm-hmm.
Tony Kynaston: I mean, it was, yeah, like I said, I, I remember it being a fairly contentious listing. There was lot of conjecture that the Queensland government had a fairly efficient role network going on. So the valuation that was slow to that was too high. And then about a year or two later, the market has got a hold to rebrand it.
So it’s always had a kind of spin side to the valuation on this company. And it did, it did go up in price, but now it’s back down to a little bit above where it floated.
Cameron: All right. Thank you, Tony. A horizon. I’ll email their CEO and let him know after hours.
Tony Kynaston: Well, thank you for putting me on the Pluribus. That was fantastic. We, um,
Cameron: How many episodes have you watched?
Tony Kynaston: well,
Cameron: Well, four.
Tony Kynaston: Really,
Cameron: Yeah.
Tony Kynaston: Loving it. It
Cameron: It’s an interesting premise, isn’t it?
Tony Kynaston: great. It’s got all the best parts of the matrix, you know, plugging into the hive mind and, [01:20:00] and uh, solving the productivity issues. Just if you wanna fly a plane, you just walk in and fly the plane.
’cause you plug into the hive mind if you wanna, you know, clean up someone’s house. You just walk up and clean up someone’s house just to tag and hand over. very interesting.
Cameron: And I really like, and spoilers for people who haven watched it, but I really like the premise that he set up. There’s the, the. One scene where Ray Sea Hearn’s character Carol is asking her main hive mind girlfriend contact thing about why they’re going to force her to join the hive mind. And she says, if you saw someone drowning, would you wait for them to ask you to save them?
And she goes, you think I’m drowning? And she goes, yeah, you just dunno it yet, like the premise that they’re all happy and they’ve, you know, they’ve found peace and happiness as part of the hive mind. They see that she’s miserable and they’re like, well, we want you to come and join us. And it has all these overtones of religiousy culty things, Mormons [01:21:00] knocking on your front door, et cetera, et cetera.
But, uh, yeah. Interesting.
Tony Kynaston: Great
Cameron: premise are like, well, we’re happy. We want you to be happy. Come join us.
Tony Kynaston: some, it’s really shot. Well, it’s some great moments of whimsical humor. Like, you know, like they, the, the league character wants to meet the others. Half a dozen people who speak English and weren’t taken over at the same time, and they all jump on planes and get flown into Bilbao and Spain, and you see all the airliners land at the same time and just
Cameron: Yeah.
Tony Kynaston: into the, into the terminal at the same time.
Uh,
Cameron: Yeah.
Tony Kynaston: great.
Cameron: I was reading an interview, uh, Bob Odenkirk was interviewing Ray about the show and he hadn’t seen it, and she was explaining how it sort of blends this sort of sci-fi horror tropes with just comedy,
Tony Kynaston: Hmm.
Cameron: like typical Vince Gilligan, though in all of his shows, he’s able to just make it funny along the way, find the
Tony Kynaston: Yeah.
Cameron: humor in [01:22:00] violence or tragedy or whatever it is.
He’s, he’s a great writer.
Tony Kynaston: um, uh, cherry pickers, upside down going, oh, hi Carol. As she walks across. Yeah.
Cameron: Yeah, but you haven’t watched the chair company yet.
Tony Kynaston: No, I, I only heard about it last night for the first time.
Cameron: Didn’t I tell you about it?
Tony Kynaston: I don’t think so.
Cameron: I’m sure I did tell you about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tony Kynaston: No,
Cameron: About this, this, this, this guy who’s, he’s giving a talk in front of his company. He sits on the chair and the chair collapses and he believes there’s a huge conspiracy going on from the chair company. And he just becomes completely insane driven by uncovering this conspiracy.
Um, I dunno if you like it, like it’s typical Tim Robinson comedy. It’s like completely off the wall. Trippy, uh, really bizarre, but we dig it.
Tony Kynaston: Yeah. I wanna check it out. Looks
Cameron: I [01:23:00] mentioned, yeah, well, I, I haven’t started the Scorsese thing yet, but I’m looking for the right opportunity to start that. I, now that we have Apple briefly. Um, as I mentioned to you, uh, before we started the show, my son in LA Taylor sent me a text yesterday going, uh, do you know who this guy is? And, um, this guy was Jimmy Barnes, ’cause he didn’t know who Jimmy Barnes was.
And then Hunter, my other kid called me 10 minutes later and said, are you gonna ask me who Jimmy Barnes is too? And he is like, who? What? I was like, oh my God. What country did you grow up in? How do you not know who Jimmy is? Millennial losers.
Tony Kynaston: they didn’t have a working class man for a father. They have a Napoleon medal recipient.
Cameron: Who sings Flame Trees and Ksan and, you know, all the chisel songs constantly in the car. But you know, even Chrissy was just looking out the window at a tree [01:24:00] across the road the other day. She goes, is that one of those flame trees you always sing about? I go, yeah, I think so. I got a, I got two music recommendations for you this week.
You ever heard of the four Horsemen?
Tony Kynaston: Oh, I think I have, is that the bass player from The Clash? Is he one of the Horsemen?
Cameron: I doubt it. No. Only made one album and then they broke up. ’cause I think somebody died of a drug over heroin overdose. Uh, but Rick Rubin produced it. 1991. Nobody said it was easy. Um, British band. Play this rock that’s sort of a cross between Guns N Roses and ac DC. Um, it’s not bad, it’s not great, but I was listening to it this morning.
It came up in a playlist that Spotify gave me, and I was enjoying it, kind of, sort of that sort of bluesy, early nineties blues heavy rock kind of thing. You know,
Tony Kynaston: Yep.
Cameron: like sort of, you know, ac DC kind of blends the blues and the [01:25:00] rocks, so there’s a lot of, you know, four bar blues, you know, kind of stuff. Anyway, not bad, but the other thing I’ve been listening to a lot is Ethiopian Jazz that a friend put me onto this week.
Um, there’s this fascinating, I, I’ve listened to quite a bit of Nigerian jazz, but I never really got into the Ethiopian stuff. But there’s this whole thing about, it’s called,
Tony Kynaston: that’s, that’s a great line. Oh, I’ve been listening to Nigerian Jazz, but never got into Ethiopian Jazz.
Cameron: I Dunno Why you find that so amusing, but there’s this.
Tony Kynaston: Jazz or Randan hip hop
Cameron: There was this period of a decade or so when Hayley’s, when Hay SSI
Tony Kynaston: Yeah.
Cameron: running Ethiopia, when there was this like burgeoning modern, um, sort of social cultural epoch and a lot of their musicians went to America and came back and, and put a [01:26:00] jazz overlay on traditional Ethiopian modal music. And then he lost power.
And, you know, one of the military coups happened and it all got crushed. So it all disappeared. But there was a period of 10, 14 years or something, I think it ended in the early seventies. And there was a French musicologist, a decade or two ago who spent a decade digging up archival recordings of this stuff and put it out in a series of 30 albums called Ethiopias, QUES, um, covering all the major artists of this Ethiopian jazz.
And it’s, it’s really unique because it, it’s built around these tra, this traditional Ethiopian Ethiopian music, which is a very African Muslim kind of thing, but uh, with a jazz overlay on it. So really, really interesting. Anyway, that’s been my week.
Tony Kynaston: thank you. I’ll check that out. have you had one [01:27:00] last thing before uh, I go, have you heard of Ignatia Fernandez?
Cameron: No.
Tony Kynaston: Um, Google her, she was the, I think I’m gonna say Brazilian Miss Universe winner. And I think
Cameron: Okay.
Tony Kynaston: have placed highly in the international pageant, she’s also a death metal singer. for her
Cameron: Oh, I have seen that. Yeah. I saw the clip this week. Yeah.
Tony Kynaston: Yeah, So it’s just
Cameron: This, yeah. Yeah.
Tony Kynaston: doing death metal. It’s fantastic.
Cameron: I did see that. It was hilarious. Yeah. Good for her. I don’t like her chances of being able to speak, uh, a year from now, but, alright, well, this week on the US show, um, we’re doing another power company, but Korean this time and there is an assassination that I get to talk about.
It’s not as blood thirsty as last week’s episodes, not as this company has not been found guilty of manslaughter.
Tony Kynaston: good.
Cameron: uh, there, there is some good backstory [01:28:00] to it. So let’s go talk about, uh,
Tony Kynaston: you P.
Cameron: HECO on the US Show.
Tony Kynaston: Ken.
Cameron: you tk. Have a good week everyone.
Tony Kynaston: Bye.
Bernard: Q A V is a checklist-based system of value investing developed by Tony Khyneston. over 25 years. To learn more about how it works and how you can learn the system, visit our website, Q A V Podcast dot com dot A U.
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