Hi folks,

It’s Fri­day morn­ing (Aus­tralian time) and I’m about to hit the road back home. Here’s a pho­to I took of the sun set­ting at Elliott Heads beach last night where we took Fox to chase sol­dier crabs (his cur­rent favourite thing to do). We have to get back to Bris­bane for kung fu train­ing tonight, so I thought I’d get the newslet­ter out before I leave.

The All Ordi­nar­ies gained mod­est ground over the five-day peri­od, climb­ing up 0.03% for the ses­sion. Reports of a cease­fire deal with Iran, and the poten­tial open­ing of ship­ping straits, gave the mar­ket a lit­tle buoy­an­cy over the last cou­ple of days.

The S&P 500 ral­lied strong­ly over the five-day peri­od, climb­ing 0.62% on the final ses­sion alone. Trump’s announce­ment of a cease­fire with Iran sent stock futures surg­ing while oil prices plunged 15%.

So, let’s get into my week­ly updates and see where we are at.

All the Best,
Cam

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QAV MYTH KILLERS

“The Value Trap”

When we start get­ting inter­est­ed in val­ue invest­ing, one of the first things well-mean­ing friends warn you about are “val­ue traps.”

A val­ue trap is an invest­ment that looks cheap based on met­rics but stays cheap (or gets cheap­er) for good rea­son, usu­al­ly because of under­ly­ing weak­ness­es in the busi­ness or its indus­try that aren’t imme­di­ate­ly obvi­ous.

Peo­ple who believe in the Effi­cient Mar­ket Hypoth­e­sis (EMH) think val­ue stocks are basi­cal­ly too good to be true, like a politi­cian who does what they promised before the elec­tion, or a Niger­ian prince who just needs your bank details to release $47 mil­lion. Accord­ing to EMH, there are no gen­uine mis­pric­ings. If a stock looks cheap, it’s cheap for a rea­son, and the mar­ket already knows some­thing you don’t.

It’s easy to see why this sticks. It sounds sci­en­tif­ic. It has Nobel prizes behind it (Eugene Fama won in 2013), and it con­ve­nient­ly excus­es doing noth­ing.

We side firm­ly with the behav­iour­al finance peo­ple, Kah­ne­man and Thaler, who blew a mas­sive hole in EMH by show­ing that prices are sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly dis­tort­ed by human psy­chol­o­gy: pan­ic, herd­ing, recen­cy bias. The mar­ket prices fear effi­cient­ly. Val­ue is anoth­er mat­ter entire­ly.

Here’s the thing: we aren’t experts in any par­tic­u­lar busi­ness, sec­tor, or indus­try. We don’t claim to be. Some peo­ple, like Buf­fett and Munger, are hap­py to spend their days study­ing the intri­ca­cies of var­i­ous mar­kets, and if you want to do that (and have the time and ener­gy), best of luck to you. That’s not what we do. Tony would rather play golf. Cameron would rather do kung fu.

Our approach is to trust the algo­rithm to find val­ue stocks, and then use our sell­ing rules to exit if some­thing goes wrong. We assume we’re going to get some wrong. That’s built into the sys­tem. Even Buf­fett has always claimed a win rate of around 60%, and that’s what we aim for too.

Our U.S. pulled porks are a per­fect exam­ple. We know very lit­tle about the Amer­i­can mar­ket. The major­i­ty of com­pa­nies we’ve cov­ered on QAV Amer­i­ca were com­plete­ly new to me, and prob­a­bly to most Amer­i­cans too. Have you heard of Mam­moth Ener­gy Ser­vices (TUSK)? Pre­ci­sion Drilling Cor­po­ra­tion (PDS)? Korea Elec­tric Pow­er Cor­po­ra­tion (KEP)?

Over the past year or so, we’ve done pulled porks on 45 Amer­i­can com­pa­nies that were high on our buy list at the time. As of the day I’m writ­ing this, 31 of them (68.9%) are up since we cov­ered them. Of the remain­der, our sell trig­gers would have had us out and into some­thing else on the buy list before the dam­age got seri­ous.

So I don’t lose sleep over val­ue traps. I buy what the check­list tells me to buy, and I let my sell trig­gers tell me when to leave. The algo­rithm wor­ries so I don’t have to.

I do still steer clear of Niger­ian princes, though.

STOCK ANALYSIS OF THE WEEK

I added a cou­ple things to the Light port­fo­lios this week and you can see my Light posts here.

I also added some­thing to the U.S. Light port­fo­lio this week. U.S. Light and Club mem­bers can read about it here. It was also the sub­ject of the Amer­i­can episode. See the pod­cast link down below if you want to lis­ten to my analy­sis.

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

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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.

QAV Val­ue Invest­ing Buy List (AU) 2026-04-05

Below is a link to the US list for this week (avail­able to our U.S. Club mem­bers):

QAV Val­ue Invest­ing Buy List 2026-04-03

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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 and see why an ama­teur active investor (who has a sys­tem to fol­low) can out-per­form most of the “pro­fes­sion­als”.

AUSTRALIAN

QAV DUMMY

Five Year Report: Over the last 5 years, the QAV AU port­fo­lio deliv­ered a return of approx­i­mate­ly 15.5% pa, while the ASX 200 bench­mark returned around 8.9%.

Month­ly Report: Over the past 30 days, the QAV AU port­fo­lio deliv­ered a return of approx­i­mate­ly 0.23%, while the ASX 200 bench­mark gained around 1.86%.

I did sell CGF from our port­fo­lio this week and replaced it with EDU.

For FY26: Over the finan­cial year to date, the QAV AU port­fo­lio deliv­ered a return of approx­i­mate­ly 18.9% pa, while the ASX 200 bench­mark gained around 7.6%.

QAV LIGHT

All Time

Over the all-time peri­od, the QAV AU Light port­fo­lio deliv­ered a return of approx­i­mate­ly 19.4% pa, while the ASX 200 bench­mark returned around 10.8%.

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Financial Year to Date

Over the finan­cial year to date, the QAV AU Light port­fo­lio deliv­ered a return of approx­i­mate­ly 26.6% pa, while the ASX 200 bench­mark returned around 7.6%.

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Last 30 Days

Over the past 30 days, the QAV AU Light port­fo­lio deliv­ered a return of approx­i­mate­ly 1.3% pa, while the ASX 200 bench­mark gained around 1.9%.

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Last 12 Months

Over the last 12 months, the QAV AU Light port­fo­lio deliv­ered a return of approx­i­mate­ly 42.9% pa, while the ASX 200 bench­mark returned around 25.5%.

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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.

(Note: Amer­i­cans inter­est­ed in join­ing QAV Light or Club please go here instead.)

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AMERICAN

QAV DUMMY

The QAV Amer­i­ca port­fo­lio has deliv­ered returns of +105% since incep­tion, sig­nif­i­cant­ly out­per­form­ing the S&P 500 bench­mark which gained +52% over the same peri­od. This rep­re­sents out­per­for­mance of approx­i­mate­ly 53 per­cent­age points.

Over the past 30 days, the QAV Amer­i­ca port­fo­lio deliv­ered a +7% return com­pared to the S&P 500’s flat per­for­mance near 1%.

No trades this week.

QAV LIGHT

The QAV Amer­i­ca Light port­fo­lio has deliv­ered a +3% return since incep­tion (Dec 2025), sig­nif­i­cant­ly out­per­form­ing the S&P 500’s ‑1% gain over the same peri­od.

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THIS WEEK’S EPISODES

Dead Cat or Dead Cert? Nav­i­gat­ing the March Sell-Off – QAV AU #914

Truck Sausage (CVGI) – QAV Amer­i­ca #47

STOCK NEWS AND UPDATES

COMMODITIES

This week the big changes to com­modi­ties were the fol­low­ing:

Gold (USD) — BUY
Coal (ther­mal) — JOSEPHINE
Coal (cok­ing) — BUY
Alu­mini­um — JOSEPHINE
Mag­ne­sium — SELL
Steel — JOSEPHINE
LNG — SELL

DISCLOSURE

Please review our trad­ing and dis­clo­sure pol­i­cy.

SIGNING OFF

That’s a wrap on anoth­er week! Our deep dives into TWR and CVGI should give you plen­ty to chew on over the week­end. The Iran sit­u­a­tion will no doubt remain flu­id and the mar­kets will con­tin­ue to run around with its kilt over its head. Remem­ber, in this game of patience and dis­ci­pline, the best oppor­tu­ni­ties often come to those who stick to their process and keep their emo­tions in check. Stay focused on the fun­da­men­tals and let the mar­ket noise fade into the back­ground.

SSDD!

• Cam

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That’s it for the week!

QAV A GOOD SHAREMARKET!

Got a ques­tion? [email protected]