Hi folks,

The All Ordi­nar­ies dropped over the last cou­ple of days, falling from around 9,150 to close at 9,024.20. Maybe the mar­ket is slow­ly wak­ing up to the real­i­ty that requires high­er “bad debt buffers” as Tony dis­cussed on this week’s show.

The S&P 500 on the oth­er hand extend­ed its ral­ly over the past five trad­ing days. The index main­tained its upward tra­jec­to­ry near record lev­els, seem­ing­ly bliss­ful­ly unaware of what lies ahead. Ostrich­es with heads in the sand.

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

“Bricks and Mortar Always Win” — But Do They?

Aus­tralians have a near-spir­i­tu­al belief in prop­er­ty. It’s prac­ti­cal­ly encod­ed in the nation­al DNA. Bricks and mor­tar. Safe as hous­es. You can’t go wrong with real estate.

And look, they’re not entire­ly wrong. Syd­ney and Mel­bourne prop­er­ty has deliv­ered stun­ning returns over the past 30 years. A house bought in Padding­ton in 1990 for $400K is worth $4M+ now. Hard to argue with that.

But the myth almost always con­flates lever­age with returns. Most peo­ple buy prop­er­ty with an 80% mort­gage. If a $500K house ris­es to $600K, that’s a 100% return on a $100K deposit — not a 20% return. Shares rarely get com­pared on a lever­aged basis. When you strip out the debt and com­pare asset-to-asset per­for­mance, the sto­ry changes.

Even the Fed­er­al Reserve Bank of San Fran­cis­co noticed. In a land­mark 2015 paper “The Rate of Return on Every­thing”, they analysed near­ly 150 years of data across asset class­es. Look­ing at the full dataset, Aus­tralian real estate returned 6.37% per annum in real terms, against 7.81% for stocks. Zoom in on the peri­od from 1980 onwards, the era most rel­e­vant to today’s investors, and it’s not even close: stocks returned 8.78% per annum against prop­er­ty’s 7.16%.

And that’s before you account for the costs prop­er­ty investors pre­fer not to think about.

Stamp duty on a $1M prop­er­ty pur­chase in NSW runs to around $40,000. That’s 4% you need to earn back before you’ve made a cent. Add agent com­mis­sions on sale (around 2–2.5%), annu­al hold­ing costs for rates, insur­ance, main­te­nance and prop­er­ty man­age­ment (typ­i­cal­ly 1–1.5% of prop­er­ty val­ue per year), and the real return shrinks con­sid­er­ably. Com­pare that to a $10 bro­ker­age fee on a $10,000 share pur­chase (0.1%) and you start to see how skewed the com­par­i­son has always been.

None of this is to rain on real estate’s parade entire­ly. Tony often talks about how he lever­aged into prop­er­ty after the GFC to tur­bocharge his stock port­fo­lio. Used strate­gi­cal­ly, it can work. But it’s a tool, not a reli­gion.

Liq­uid­i­ty is anoth­er thing prop­er­ty investors tend to wave away. Tony’s been try­ing to sell his sky palace apart­ment in Syd­ney for a cou­ple of years and can’t find the right buy­er. Out­side of a major cor­rec­tion, he could offload $10 mil­lion in stocks in 24 hours.

For my mon­ey, though, there’s one dif­fer­ence that almost nev­er gets men­tioned in these prop­er­ty-ver­sus-shares debates: you can vast­ly out­per­form aver­age returns if you’re an intel­li­gent, dis­ci­plined investor in stocks. You can’t out­per­form the Syd­ney prop­er­ty mar­ket by being smarter about Syd­ney prop­er­ty. You’re just along for the ride.

QAV’s dum­my port­fo­lio has returned rough­ly 15% per annum over the past 5 years against an ASX 200 bench­mark of 8% — rough­ly dou­ble mar­ket. Tony’s been achiev­ing that kind of result for 30 years, using a check­list that asks hard quan­ti­ta­tive ques­tions prop­er­ty investors almost nev­er apply to their own port­fo­lios.

The QAV check­list does­n’t ask “is this a nice sub­urb?” It asks whether a busi­ness is gen­uine­ly prof­itable, whether the price is right, and whether the num­bers jus­ti­fy the risk. That’s it. No stamp duty. No tradies. No ten­ants.

Prop­er­ty made a gen­er­a­tion of Aus­tralians wealthy. But it did it on bor­rowed mon­ey and bor­rowed time. A sys­tem that com­pounds qual­i­ty returns, rein­vests div­i­dends, and does­n’t charge you stamp duty does­n’t need a nar­ra­tive. It just needs to keep run­ning.

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.

On the full Aus­tralian pod­cast this week, Tony did a deep dive on CCL. 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) 2026-04-18

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

QAV Val­ue Invest­ing Buy List 2026-04-19

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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 14.79% per annum, while the ASX 200 bench­mark returned around 8.54%.

Month­ly Report: Over the past 30 days, the QAV AU port­fo­lio deliv­ered a return of approx­i­mate­ly 3.9%, while the ASX 200 bench­mark returned around 3.0%.

No changes to our port­fo­lio this week.

For FY26: Over the finan­cial year to date, the QAV AU port­fo­lio gen­er­at­ed a return of approx­i­mate­ly 18.9%, while the ASX 200 bench­mark returned around 6.5%. TRIPLE MARKET.

QAV LIGHT

All Time

Over the All Time peri­od, the QAV AU Light port­fo­lio deliv­ered a return of approx­i­mate­ly 19.7%, while the ASX 200 bench­mark returned around 10.4%.

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Financial Year to Date — QUADRUPLE MARKET.

Over the finan­cial year to date, the QAV AU Light port­fo­lio deliv­ered a return of approx­i­mate­ly 27.98%, while the ASX 200 bench­mark gained around 6.53%.

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Last 30 Days

Over the past 30 days, the QAV AU Light port­fo­lio deliv­ered a return of approx­i­mate­ly 5.95%, while the ASX 200 bench­mark gained around 3.32%.

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Last 12 Months

Over the last 12 months, the QAV AU Light port­fo­lio deliv­ered a return of approx­i­mate­ly 36.9%, while the ASX 200 bench­mark returned around 15.6%.

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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.

QAV LIGHT: You don’t have to build it 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 +107% since incep­tion, sig­nif­i­cant­ly out­per­form­ing the S&P 500 bench­mark which gained +60% over the same peri­od.

Over the past 30 days, the QAV Amer­i­ca port­fo­lio deliv­ered a +8% return com­pared to the S&P 500’s flat per­for­mance near 7%.

No trades this week.

QAV LIGHT

Since incep­tion (Dec 2025), our port­fo­lio is +8% vs the S&P 500 +3%. Over the last 30 days our port­fo­lio is +8% vs the S&P 500 +8%.

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THIS WEEK’S EPISODES

The Hap­py Zone – QAV AU #916

Sub­prime Time: Lend­ing to America’s Under­banked at 36% APR – QAV Amer­i­ca #49

STOCK NEWS AND UPDATES

COMMODITIES

This week the big changes to com­modi­ties were the fol­low­ing:

Com­mod­i­ty	Sta­tus
Mag­ne­sium	JOSEPHINE
Steel	JOSEPHINE
Iron & Steel Scrap	SELL
Lithi­um	BUY

DISCLOSURE

Please review our trad­ing and dis­clo­sure pol­i­cy.

SIGNING OFF

Hope you found this week’s deep dive into CCL insight­ful – some­times the best oppor­tu­ni­ties are hid­ing in plain sight right in our own back­yard. Remem­ber, we’re not try­ing to time the mar­ket per­fect­ly, we’re just fol­low­ing our check­list and let­ting the num­bers guide us to qual­i­ty com­pa­nies at rea­son­able prices. Stay dis­ci­plined, stick to the process, and keep build­ing that port­fo­lio one stock at a time.

SSDD!

• Cam

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That’s it for the week!

QAV A GOOD SHAREMARKET!

Got a ques­tion? [email protected]