QAV Weekly Update 2026-01-30

Hi folks,

I hope you’re all hav­ing a great week and your port­fo­lios are going strong. The mar­kets have been skit­tish again this week but we’re still hav­ing a great year. Let’s break it down.

All the Best,
Cam

QAV MYTH KILLERS

The Myth: Marry the Business, Not the Ticker

If you’ve spent five min­utes read­ing main­stream invest­ment media or lis­ten­ing to the high priests of Old Guard val­ue invest­ing, you’ve heard the ser­mon. They tell you to find a great com­pa­ny, buy it, and hold it until the heat death of the uni­verse. They preach that if you’ve done your home­work, you should be pre­pared to “weath­er the storm” and “ignore the noise.”

The gurus want you to believe that sell­ing a stock is a sign of intel­lec­tu­al weak­ness, a fail­ure of your orig­i­nal the­sis. They’ve roman­ti­cised the act of hold­ing through a 40% draw­down as a badge of hon­our, a test of your “con­vic­tion.”

Why People Believe It

It’s easy to see why this sticks. It feels noble. It sounds like the “sophis­ti­cat­ed” thing to do. We are told that War­ren Buffett’s favourite hold­ing peri­od is “for­ev­er,” so we try to emu­late that sto­icism. It also appeals to our nat­ur­al human lazi­ness and our psy­cho­log­i­cal aver­sion to admit­ting we were wrong. If we don’t sell, we haven’t lost. We’re just “long-term investors.” It’s a com­fort­ing blan­ket that pro­tects us from the harsh real­i­ty of a red screen.

The Trap: Your Thesis Doesn’t Control the Market

Here is the blunt truth: The mar­ket does not care about your the­sis. It doesn’t care how many late nights you spent pour­ing over annu­al reports or how much you love the CEO’s “vision.”

The trap of “falling in love” is that you stop being an investor and start being a fan-boy. You become invest­ed in being right rather than mak­ing mon­ey. When the price starts to slide, the “Buy and Hold” cult tells you to dou­ble down because the “fun­da­men­tals haven’t changed.”

But fun­da­men­tals are lag­ging indi­ca­tors. By the time the bal­ance sheet reflects the rot, your cap­i­tal has already evap­o­rat­ed. The log­ic that you should stay loy­al to a falling stock assumes the mar­ket is “wrong” and you are “right.” That is a lev­el of arro­gance that leads straight to the poor­house. In 2008, plen­ty of “great busi­ness­es” with “strong the­ses” went to zero or spent a decade in the wilder­ness. Loy­al­ty to a piece of paper is not a strat­e­gy. It’s a sui­cide pact.

The Humility of the Exit

A major point of depar­ture between us and the Buf­fett acolytes is a sim­ple admis­sion of real­i­ty: we aren’t experts on these busi­ness­es. We don’t spend hun­dreds of hours study­ing the intri­ca­cies of a com­pa­ny’s logis­tics or its five-year mar­ket share pro­jec­tions. We have bet­ter things to do with our lives, like play­ing golf, doing kung fu, or spend­ing time with our fam­i­lies.

How­ev­er, we know there are thou­sands of ana­lysts at mas­sive funds who do spend their lives doing that. They might know some­thing we don’t. When the mar­ket starts dump­ing a stock, it’s often because those peo­ple are head­ing for the exits. Maybe they see a struc­tur­al shift in the indus­try or a loom­ing debt cri­sis that has­n’t hit the head­lines yet.

The mar­ket might be wrong, but we aren’t going to bet our retire­ment on it. We err on the side of cau­tion. If the big mon­ey is leav­ing, we fol­low them out the door. We don’t need to be the smartest per­son in the room; we just need to be the one who isn’t left hold­ing the bag when the lights go out.

The Hidden Cost: The Decade of Lost Time

The main­stream log­ic ignores the most expen­sive thing in the world: Oppor­tu­ni­ty Cost.

When you “stay the course” through a mas­sive mar­ket col­lapse, you aren’t being brave. You’re being a hostage. Look at the GFC. It took the All Ordi­nar­ies ten years to claw back to its 2008 peak. Ten years of your life. Ten years where your cap­i­tal sat stag­nant, doing noth­ing but try­ing to get back to zero.

If you’re “in love” with your stocks, you’re par­a­lyzed. You watch the val­ue plum­met and you do noth­ing because your “the­sis” says the com­pa­ny is still good. Mean­while, the real pro­fes­sion­als are liq­ui­dat­ing. The hid­den cost isn’t just the mon­ey you lost on the way down; it’s the mas­sive gains you could have made if you had pre­served your cap­i­tal and had it ready to deploy when the mar­ket final­ly bot­tomed. In 2020, the “con­vic­tion” crowd sat trem­bling while their port­fo­lios halved. The mer­ce­nar­ies sold, wait­ed for the dust to set­tle, and bought back in when the tide turned. They did­n’t care about the names on the stocks. They cared about the direc­tion of the mon­ey.

The Hint of the Fix: Logic Over Loyalty

We don’t do “con­vic­tion.” We don’t do “loy­al­ty.” We are cold-blood­ed mer­ce­nar­ies.

The secret to sur­viv­ing and thriv­ing in this game isn’t find­ing a bet­ter “sto­ry” to believe in. It’s remov­ing the human ele­ment entire­ly. You need a way to kill your dar­lings before they kill your bank account. You need a cold, hard set of trig­gers that tell you exact­ly when the par­ty is over, regard­less of how much you like the host.

We don’t “hope” a stock recov­ers. We don’t “feel” like it’s a good time to buy. We oper­ate based on a rig­or­ous, dis­pas­sion­ate frame­work that pri­ori­tis­es the preser­va­tion of cap­i­tal above all else. When the light turns red, we stop. When it turns green, we go. No ego, no “the­sis,” and absolute­ly no love.

We use a sys­tem of rules because our brains are designed to make us fail at invest­ing. Rules don’t get emo­tion­al. Rules don’t care about “for­ev­er.” And rules are the only thing that will keep you from being the one hold­ing the bag when the next “unfore­seen” crash hits.

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STOCK ANALYSIS OF THE WEEK

For edi­tion 207 of my week­ly Aus­tralian Light mem­ber email this Mon­day, I did an analy­sis of almond farmer Select Har­vests (SHV). Aus­tralian Light and Club mem­bers can read it here.

For edi­tion 6 of the U.S. Light mem­ber email, I did an analy­sis of a huge shale oil min­er in North Dako­ta, Chord Ener­gy (CHRD). U.S. Light and Club mem­bers can read it here. We’re also talk­ing about it in more detail on the U.S. episode this week.

On the full Aus­tralian pod­cast this week, Tony did a deep dive on HUMM (Hum). See the pod­cast link down below if you want to lis­ten to his analy­sis.

BUY LIST

Each week, we pro­duce a buy list based on our val­ue invest­ing sys­tem that we share with our QAV Club mem­bers. The intend­ed pri­ma­ry pur­pose of this buy list is for club mem­bers to use as a ref­er­ence for com­par­ing their own buy list. In the­o­ry, all of our buy lists should look pret­ty sim­i­lar each week.

Below is a link to the AU list for this week:

QAV Aus­tralian Val­ue Invest­ing Buy Lists 2026-01-24

Below is a link to the US list for this week:

QAV Amer­i­can Val­ue Invest­ing Buy List 2026-01-25

PORTFOLIOS

We com­pare our per­for­mance to what we think is the most rel­e­vant bench­mark (SPDR 200 in Aus­tralia, S&P500 in the USA), but if you’re new to invest­ing, these com­par­isons might not mean much. Instead, you can com­pare our per­for­mance to the top-per­form­ing Super Funds in Aus­tralia.

AUSTRALIAN

QAV DUMMY

Five Year Report: Over the last five years, our port­fo­lio is +17% p.a. vs the bench­mark +10% p.a.

Month­ly Report: The AU Dum­my Port­fo­lio was +2% p.a. for the last 30 days vs the bench­mark +1.9% p.a.

No trad­ing in that port­fo­lio this week.

For the 2025 FY, our port­fo­lio is +23% vs +6% for the index — near­ly QUADRUPLE MARKET.

QAV LIGHT

In the last 30 days, the Light port­fo­lio was +1.56% vs the index which was +1.87%.

Our most impres­sive return for the last 30 days is pow­er and com­mu­ni­ca­tions infra­struc­ture ser­vices provider GNP, which is +25% for the month. We’ve owned GNP since 14/11/2024 when we bought it at $2.54 — it’s now $7.76 which means it’s up 206% in a lit­tle over a year.

For the last 12 months, the Light port­fo­lio is +38% vs the index +9%, rough­ly QUADRUPLE MARKET.

Since incep­tion (Feb 2022), the Light port­fo­lio is +21% vs the index +11%, dou­ble mar­ket, right on tar­get.

Become a QAV Light Member today and start your investing on the right track

If you want to find out what we’re trad­ing in QAV Light each week, sign up to become a mem­ber. You’ll get an email from me every Mon­day let­ting you know what we’re buy­ing and sell­ing in that port­fo­lio. You can choose to copy our trades or not. It’s the eas­i­est way to start your rules-based invest­ing career… and you don’t even need to know the rules. I’ll fol­low the rules for you. It’s a good first step to even­tu­al­ly becom­ing a QAV Club mem­ber and learn­ing how to run the sys­tem by your­self.

AMERICAN

QAV DUMMY

Since incep­tion (Sep 2023), our port­fo­lio is +96% vs the S&P 500 +57%. Not quite dou­ble mar­ket but get­ting close. It’s been boom­ing again for some rea­son since late last year.

Our U.S. port­fo­lio for the last 30 days was +18% vs +0.9% for the S&P 500.

No trades this week.

QAV LIGHT

I recent­ly start­ed our U.S. Light port­fo­lio, and it’s had a slow start, and is cur­rent­ly ‑2% vs the S&P 500 +1.3%.

THIS WEEK’S EPISODES

QAV AU 904 — Humm-ing a Dif­fer­ent Tune

AMTD: The Murky Spi­der­Net – QAV AMERICA 36

STOCK NEWS AND UPDATES

COMMODITIES

The big changes this week were that Crude and LNG both became buys again.

DISCLOSURE

Please review our trad­ing and dis­clo­sure pol­i­cy.

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That’s it for the week!

QAV A GOOD SHAREMARKET!

Got a ques­tion? [email protected]