QAV Weekly Update 2026-04-17

Hi folks,

The All Ordi­nar­ies was up again this week, as the mar­kets shrug off the pend­ing eco­nom­ic doom that Trump has thrust upon the world in a feat of either blind opti­mism or maybe they know some­thing I don’t know.

The S&P 500 also had a good week, climb­ing from around 6,800 to close at 7,041, mark­ing a sol­id 3.17% gain for the week.

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

“GOING TO CASH”

Peter Lynch once said: “Far more mon­ey has been lost by investors prepar­ing for cor­rec­tions, or try­ing to antic­i­pate cor­rec­tions, than has been lost in cor­rec­tions them­selves.”

War­ren Buf­fett liked that one so much he repeat­ed it.

And yet, every time mar­kets get wob­bly — and right now, with the US-Iran war push­ing oil toward $100 a bar­rel and the Strait of Hor­muz block­ade threat­en­ing what the IEA is call­ing the largest sup­ply dis­rup­tion in oil mar­ket his­to­ry, they are very wob­bly — the advice comes flood­ing back: go to cash. Pro­tect your­self. Sit it out. Wait for the bot­tom, then buy back in.

On the sur­face of it, this makes sense.

Here’s the prob­lem: nobody can actu­al­ly do it.

Not the tim­ing part. Not reli­ably. Not even Howard Marks, who has been doing this for 50 years and is one of the smartest peo­ple in the busi­ness. His view? “In my expe­ri­ence, most peo­ple who are lucky enough to sell some­thing before it goes down get so busy pat­ting them­selves on the back they for­get to buy it back.”

But for­get the buy­ing-back prob­lem for a moment. Let’s just talk about what sit­ting in cash actu­al­ly costs you.

Accord­ing to Hart­ford Funds, if you’d been invest­ed in the S&P 500 over the last 30 years but missed just the 10 best days, your returns would have been cut in half. Miss the 30 best days — 30 days out of rough­ly 7,500 trad­ing days — and your returns drop by 84%. And here’s the part that should make any cash-hold­er ner­vous: 76% of the mar­ket’s strongest days hap­pened either dur­ing bear mar­kets or in the first two months of a bull mar­ket.

Here’s the kick­er: the mar­ket’s best recov­er­ies hap­pen fast and with­out warn­ing. If you’re in cash wait­ing for the sig­nal to get back in, you’ll almost cer­tain­ly miss them.

We saw a per­fect illus­tra­tion of this on April 8th. Mar­kets had been tank­ing on war fears. Then a US-Iran cease­fire was announced and the Dow surged over 1,000 points in a sin­gle ses­sion. That was one of those days. If you’d been sit­ting in cash wait­ing for things to “calm down”, you missed it.

This is the trap. The instinct to go to cash feels like pru­dence. It feels like doing some­thing. And right now — with econ­o­mists pre­dict­ing reces­sions, oil prices spik­ing, and war head­lines every morn­ing — I under­stand the temp­ta­tion more than ever. Even Tony, who’s been at this for 30+ years, would tell you the macro pic­ture looks gen­uine­ly alarm­ing.

But that’s exact­ly the point. We don’t actu­al­ly know what the mar­ket will do next.

We’ve said this on the show for years, and it keeps being proved right. And yet mar­kets keep sur­pris­ing us — both up and down — and nobody calls the turns with any con­sis­ten­cy.

So in QAV, we don’t try to.

Instead, we use a rules-based sys­tem to tell us when to act. When a stock drops below our Sell Line, we sell. When the check­list iden­ti­fies a high-scor­ing stock at a com­pelling val­ue, we buy. We’re not sec­ond-guess­ing the macro. We’re not read­ing head­lines and mak­ing gut calls. We have no opin­ion about whether the Iran war will cause a reces­sion — because that opin­ion would­n’t be reli­able, and even if it were right, we still would­n’t know when to get back in.

There are times when the sys­tem nat­u­ral­ly puts us in cash — when the check­list can’t find any­thing worth buy­ing. But that’s a dif­fer­ent thing entire­ly from going to cash because you’re scared.

Think of it this way. Our sell trig­gers are our hel­mets and seat belts. There’s real risk in being in the mar­ket, just like there’s real risk every time you get in a car. But the answer isn’t to nev­er dri­ve. The answer is to buck­le up.

You accept the risk. You take pre­cau­tions. You fol­low the rules that give you the best chance of get­ting where you want to go in one piece. What you don’t do is leave the car in the garage for­ev­er because some­thing bad might hap­pen.

That’s not pru­dence. That’s just being stuck.

Far more mon­ey has been lost by investors wait­ing for the all-clear than by investors who stayed in, pro­tect­ed them­selves as best they could, and let the sys­tem do its job.

STOCK ANALYSIS OF THE WEEK

I added one stock 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 PPC. 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) 2026-04-11

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

QAV Val­ue Invest­ing Buy List 2026-04-12

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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 15.35%, while the ASX 200 bench­mark gained around 8.83%.

Month­ly Report: Over the past 30 days, the QAV AU port­fo­lio deliv­ered a return of approx­i­mate­ly 3.2%, while the ASX 200 bench­mark returned around 3.8%.

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 19.16%, while the ASX 200 bench­mark gained around 8.39%.

QAV LIGHT

All Time

Over the all-time peri­od, the QAV AU Light port­fo­lio deliv­ered a return of approx­i­mate­ly 19.57%, while the ASX 200 bench­mark gained around 10.96%.

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Financial Year to Date

Over the finan­cial year to date, the QAV AU Light port­fo­lio deliv­ered a return of approx­i­mate­ly 27.3%, while the ASX 200 bench­mark gained around 8.4%.

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Last 30 Days

Over the past 30 days, the QAV AU Light port­fo­lio deliv­ered a return of approximately4.93%, while the ASX 200 bench­mark gained around 3.78%.

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Last 12 Months

Over the past 12 months, the QAV AU Light port­fo­lio deliv­ered a return of approx­i­mate­ly 37.15%, while the ASX 200 bench­mark gained around 20.07%.

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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

Since incep­tion (Dec 2025), our port­fo­lio is +6.06% vs the S&P 500 +0.00%.

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THIS WEEK’S EPISODES

Lumpy Pay­back — QAV AU 915

Not Tom Sel­ic (PAGS) – QAV Amer­i­ca #48

STOCK NEWS AND UPDATES

COMMODITIES

This week the big changes to com­modi­ties were the fol­low­ing:

Coal (cok­ing) — JOSEPHINE
Crude Oil — JOSEPHINE
Cop­per — BUY
Plat­inum — BUY
Alu­mini­um — BUY
Tin — BUY
Man­ganese — JOSEPHINE
Steel — SELL
Nick­el — BUY
WTI Crude — JOSEPHINE

DISCLOSURE

Please review our trad­ing and dis­clo­sure pol­i­cy.

SIGNING OFF

Well, that’s anoth­er week in the books, QAV’ers! While the mar­ket con­tin­ues to throw its usu­al tantrums and the media keeps scream­ing about the cri­sis du jour, we’re stay­ing focused on the fun­da­men­tals and let­ting Mr. Mar­ket serve up oppor­tu­ni­ties on a sil­ver plat­ter. Our deep dives into PPC and PAGS this week show there’s still plen­ty of val­ue to be found for those patient enough to look beyond the noise. Keep stack­ing those qual­i­ty com­pa­nies at rea­son­able prices, trust the process, and remem­ber – keep wear­ing a hel­met.

SSDD!

• Cam

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That’s it for the week!

QAV A GOOD SHAREMARKET!

Got a ques­tion? [email protected]