Crash and Bash — QAV AU 917

QAV AU 917 Actu­al
Cameron: [00:00:00] Wel­come to QAV Aus­tralia, Tony, episode 9 1 7. Um, look, I dun­no about you, Tony, but if I was run­ning the Secret Ser­vice, I would think that, uh, after the first near miss of an assas­si­na­tion on Don­ald Trump, I prob­a­bly tight­ened my game a lit­tle bit. Uh, then the sec­ond one hap­pened. Now a third one’s hap­pened. Like either they’re not real­ly try­ing very hard or the Secret Ser­vice, the impres­sion that I have of the Secret Ser­vice isn’t the one that I get from watch­ing Hol­ly­wood films and, and Wall Street. And Not Wall Street. Um, what was the TV show with. Jed Bart­let, West
Tony Kynas­ton: Wing. Yeah.
Cameron: where there’s this crack team that’s, uh, you know, on the job.
Tony Kynas­ton: they are, there has­n’t, has­n’t been a [00:01:00] suc­cess­ful attempt yet.
Cameron: Oh, right.

that’s one
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.
Cameron: at it I I remem­ber when Oba­ma went to Marc Maron’s house to uh be on his pod­cast and Maron say­ing that the Secret Ser­vice arrived like a month before went to all the neigh­bor’s hous­es checked out sniper lines you know they got there on the day like six hours before Oba­ma was to arrive had the whole street locked down the hap­pen­ing This guy man­aged to run right into the ball­room
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.
Cameron: stopped out­side of the
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.
Cameron: the foy­er of the ball­room run­ning right past every­body I saw a jour­nal­ist being inter­viewed this morn­ing from um Uh the Dai­ly Beast I think who was there And he said before the event he was stay­ing in the hotel I think in the room next to the alleged [00:02:00] shoot­er
Tony Kynas­ton: Wow. He could have got a,
he could have got an inter­view. He could got a scoop.
Cameron: Yeah said um before you know the guests arrived and every­thing He he went out­side had a cof­fee came back inside went up to his room came back down He said no secu­ri­ty no one asked him to He said the only time he had to pro­vide any ID was when he checked into the hotel walk­ing around noth­ing going on And it’s not just the pres­i­dent there First Lady was there vice Pres­i­dent was there Mar­co Rubio was there I think uh Kennedy was there It was like the entire cab­i­net
No And this guy was like no one was check­ing any­thing No met­al detec­tors No Pat Downs like See like I I pro­vide more secu­ri­ty when you go to an event cause I’m wor­ried about you get­ting kid­napped
Tony Kynas­ton: You, don’t pro­vide any secu­ri­ty.
Cameron: I I do You just don’t see it That’s how good my secu­ri­ty is You
Tony Kynas­ton: it’s, it must be judged on that basis is very good.
Cameron: [00:03:00] That’s
have you ever been kid­napped No You haven’t See that’s how good
Tony Kynas­ton: but
okay, so why are you focus­ing on the secu­ri­ty in this? Who cares? Is that the issue?
Cameron: Yes that’s the issue
Tony Kynas­ton: That’s the issue
Cameron: well it’s one issue The oth­er issue is I’m laugh­ing I’m you know I read all the I read all the con­ser­v­a­tive I read Bre­it­bart and Fox and the con­ser­v­a­tive sub­red­dits
Tony Kynas­ton: for laughs?
Cameron: for laughs well not for laughs for under­stand­ing what what
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.
Cameron: spin on these things is And they’re all up in arms and they’re blam­ing blam­ing the Democ­rats for you know incit­ing vio­lence and how the left are so vio­lent and Democ­rats are so vio­lent For­get you know who stormed the Capi­tol
Tony Kynas­ton: Mm.
Cameron: Octo­ber 6th or Jan­u­ary
Tony Kynas­ton: 6th. Yeah.
Cameron: Yeah but I I as I said on Face­book just for shits and gig­gles and just to upset Amer­i­cans for decades I’ve been talk­ing to Repub­li­cans on my pod­casts about [00:04:00] guns and they’re always like their num­ber one jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for guns is so They can defend them­selves against a cor­rupt gov­ern­ment
Tony Kynas­ton: Take back the gov­ern­ment.
Cameron: and use their guns to defend them­selves against a cor­rupt gov­ern­ment they lose their damn minds and blame the Democ­rats for incit­ing vio­lence Uh any­way
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.
Cameron: your take on the recent uh failed attempt
Tony Kynas­ton: It’s, it’s, Amer­i­ca does­n’t have a gun prob­lem. It’s got a tar­get prob­lem, a tar­get­ing prob­lem. I keep miss­ing. That’s, that’s my take on the cur­rent event.
Cameron: get a shot off Yeah I mean to
Tony Kynas­ton: He did.
Cameron: he did­n’t even get a shot
Tony Kynas­ton: Not a tr
Cameron: pres­i­dent
Tony Kynas­ton: On the way in. Yeah. So the, so
so the Secret Ser­vice worked. Yeah.
Cameron: How do you get in
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, I know.
Cameron: had you know a Travis Bick­le pis­tol down his sleeve that he sort of acti­vat­ed by flip­ping He said he went with a shot­ty
Tony Kynas­ton: a, or a 3D print­ed gun that would evade met­al detec­tion or some­thing. Yeah.
Cameron: [00:05:00] uh what was that In the Line of Fire
Tony Kynas­ton: So he, yeah, and he just ran real­ly fast. That’s how he evad­ed secu­ri­ty.
But you know what? I heard one of the Repub­li­cans, I dun­no which one it was, said that the answer is, uh, to build the ball­room in the White House.
Cameron: that’s that was the imme­di­ate uh thing that Trump said we need the ball­room He’s doing events at Mar-a-Lago every oth­er day but
Tony Kynas­ton: yeah, So, yeah, I mean, I, I’ve wast­ed so much time and ener­gy talk­ing to Amer­i­cans about gun con­trol. You, you’ll nev­er con­vince them.
Cameron: No
Tony Kynas­ton: and, you know, it’s, it’s a switch in their brains, like they. I, I can’t believe they live in that soci­ety and they can’t believe that I don’t have a gun at, at home in my night, you know, my night­stand so that if some­one breaks in, I can take them out.
They just think, you know, what plan­et are you liv­ing on? So
Cameron: yeah
Tony Kynas­ton: cuts both ways, but um, I’d rather be in Aus­tralia than Amer­i­ca
Cameron: Yeah
Tony Kynas­ton: that rea­son.
Cameron: Well [00:06:00] enough of that I had to get that off my chest
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.
Cameron: pod­cast that I’ve done since uh all that news broke Uh let’s talk about port­fo­lios Tony the mar­ket um dipped a bit Then it went oh what are we dip­ping for Let’s go back Um it’s down a bit today I see it’s down and been down for the last ah it’s been down for the last four days
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. It’s back under 9,000 points today.
Cameron: hmm Well uh not that that mat­ters a lot to us The dum­my port­fo­lio uh let me see Last one year is up 27.5 27.6 per annum CAGR ver­sus just under 14 for the um SPDR 200 So we’re right on dou­ble mar­ket for the last one year Uh this cur­rent finan­cial year uh we are [00:07:00] 18 ver­sus 5.6 so we’re doing three times uh the mar­ket for this finan­cial year And if I take the last five years we’re 14.4 ver­sus 8.4 So not quite dou­ble mar­ket over the last five years
Tony Kynas­ton: what were those fig­ures again, please?
Cameron: Uh all of them or
Tony Kynas­ton: No, just the last five years.
Cameron: 14.4 ver­sus eight
Tony Kynas­ton: Sor­ry. Okay. Yep. Okay. I thought you said 18.5.
Cameron: Oh no no no no And then the light group um all time light port­fo­lios bun­dled togeth­er is 19 10 And uh this finan­cial year 27 ver­sus six and a half So that’s nuts Um [00:08:00] so
Tony Kynas­ton: We should hire a Goodyear blimp and send it round.
Cameron: Yeah
Tony Kynas­ton: year.
Cameron: Yeah
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.
Cameron: So despite every­thing that should be going wrong with the mar­ket and it heads down a bit
Tony Kynas­ton: Hmm.
Cameron: it’s been a bonkers year for QAV and um just not doing any­thing dif­fer­ent I mean it just I don’t know of even after all these years it still bog­gles my mind I was talk­ing had lunch um on Sun­day with a cou­ple of friends from Kung fu And um uh they’re both uh uh devel­op­ers Indi­ans that have moved here sort of in the last decade or so Uh I was talk­ing with the wife who works at Microsoft and um I dun­no how I think I was talk­ing about shares and you know she was talk­ing about some shares [00:09:00] that she’d invest­ed in over time that had gone bad And um talk­ing about my expe­ri­ence back in the .com days I invest­ed in some IPOs and they went bad and I thought it’s all too hard And then I said about the show and she said oh yeah invest­ing is too hard And I said well actu­al­ly it turns out um you under­stand the prin­ci­ples of invest­ing uh and you have a frame­work that is that you know lever­ages those basic prin­ci­ples it’s actu­al­ly not that hard It’s like real­ly quite sim­ple You just a frame­work that the the fun­da­men­tals of buy­ing some­thing that’s rel­a­tive­ly well run when you can get it at a dis­count and then hold­ing it and you know it just it always I don’t know I I I some­times take it for grant­ed how easy this is now and how um you know um almost sim­ple [00:10:00] it is because of QAV But I you know and I don’t end up in con­ver­sa­tions with peo­ple out­side of QAV about it very often but um know she was like oh it’s just it’s all so con­fus­ing and there’s no way of know­ing what’s going on and it’s all you know blah blah It just seems like this big murky
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah,
Cameron: And I think that’s how most peo­ple prob­a­bly feel about
Tony Kynas­ton: absolute­ly. Yeah.
Cameron: I did before we start­ed the show you know it was yeah
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. I mean, you say it’s, it’s sim­ple and it is, but it took a long time to put togeth­er and it drew on lots of dif­fer­ent sources. Um, so, you know, have, hav­ing the play­book after all of the evo­lu­tion of the play­book makes it sim­ple. Yeah,
Cameron: Well I said that and I
Tony Kynas­ton: yeah.
Cameron: Ein­stein of val­ue invest­ing as I always do Um but I also said like Buf­fett you know in his annu­al let­ter been try­ing to tell peo­ple for
what­ev­er 50 years 60 years what he did He did­n’t give him a [00:11:00] frame­work or a sys­tem like you
Tony Kynas­ton: he did, but it was­n’t as, as rig­or­ous, I don’t think.
Cameron: yeah
he would talk
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.
Cameron: to go through and iso­late those and write em down and
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.
Cameron: around em
Tony Kynas­ton: And I still, hon­est­ly, I still don’t think we under­stand Buf­fet­t’s, um, invest­ing process. There’s been a lot of books writ­ten about it and, and peo­ple have tried to back engi­neer it, et cetera, et cetera. And I think we have a good hold on it ’cause he’s talked at length about it. But, you know, he’s always talked about, he has, if you wan­na sell him your busi­ness, he’ll have five ques­tions and he can make a deci­sion quick­ly after those five ques­tions, but he nev­er tells you what those five ques­tions are.
Cameron: Real­ly he is like Jesus
Tony Kynas­ton: and he, he, like no one who’s ever sold their busi­ness to Buf­fett has ever revealed what those five ques­tions are. So it’s, I find that very inter­est­ing.
there’s spec­u­la­tion, you know, it’s about, um, cash flow and return on equi­ty and moat and those kinds of things. But yeah,
he’s nev­er actu­al­ly come out and said, here’s the, here’s [00:12:00] the A, B, and C of our invest.
Cameron: it’s the Buf­fett ver­sion of the Markan Secret Do you remem­ber the Markan Secret from the film
Tony Kynas­ton: No,
what Phil?
Cameron: time our film what do you mean
Tony Kynas­ton: Oh,
sor­ry. Okay.
Cameron: there’s only one film when we talk about films Tony when the the first time Jesus ever says any­thing In the New Tes­ta­ment he’s in Mark four 12 and he’s he’s on a boat out in the sea of Galilee or some­thing like that with his uh core group of dis­ci­ples a bunch of peo­ple on the shore that were beg­ging him for mir­a­cles or some­thing and he jumps on this boat to get away from him And to para­phrase he says to his dis­ci­ples um I’m only gonna talk to the great unwashed mass­es in para­bles because if they knew the truth they would wan­na be saved
Tony Kynas­ton: Oh.
Cameron: tell you the truth gonna [00:13:00] tell them the truth but then it nev­er says what the truth is that he tells them And when I was doing the film I was inter­view­ing the New Tes­ta­ment schol­ars I’d say so what’s the truth And they’d go We dun­no They
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.
Cameron: get told it’s called the Markan Secret because it’s in Mark and it’s this great secret that Jesus had that no one knows So this is the Buf­fett the Buf­fet­t­ian secret The five ques­tions
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Well, speak­ing of Buf­fett too, that was, um, it’s inter­est­ing. I got around to read­ing the first annu­al let­ter since Buf­fett retired as chair and Greg Abel wrote it. And of course they still start off with the per­for­mance of Berk­shire Hath­away. And they don’t do it as share per­for­mance, they do it as earn­ings per­for­mance.
And, um, it under­per­formed the mar­ket in the last 12 months. Which I found inter­est­ing. And, [00:14:00] uh, I don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly think it’s, it’s a crit­i­cism of Abel or a crit­i­cism of, of, um, of Buf­fett because they’re man­ag­ing a huge, uh, amount of, um, you know, of, of cash to deploy and, and assets to, to run. But it’s, um, it’s, what was I just pulling up the num­bers now.
Berk­shire was up 10.9% last year and the S&P 500 was up 17.9%, uh, last year. So they’re almost half mar­ket and it’s start­ing to impact their long-term CAGR. It’s down a tiny amount, but it was 19.9% per annum. It’s now down to 19.7% per annum. So it’s not, not a mate­r­i­al amount, but it is start­ing to go south rather than north.
So I found that inter­est­ing.
Cameron: I just noticed this is say­ing that you’re on the Mac­Book Air micro­phone and not
Tony Kynas­ton: oh
Cameron: Yeti
Tony Kynas­ton: real­ly?
Cameron: it’s yeah
Tony Kynas­ton: It must have changed then.
Cameron: [00:15:00] before
Tony Kynas­ton: Oh yeah.
Cameron: that’s why I could hear you cause you changed Okay Now you’re back on the Yeti and I can’t hear you Can you make sure it’s turned on
Tony Kynas­ton: That’s off now, isn’t it? That’s off. We’re on.
Cameron: hear
Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, okay. Sor­ry. So sol­id light’s on. Okay.
Cameron: So 19.7 Yeah but how much cash are they sit­ting on
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. A hun­dred $300 bil­lion odd. So
Cameron: Set­tle
Tony Kynas­ton: be a, um, that’s got­ta be a drag. And they’ve been buy­ing back their shares again too. So part of that per­for­mance is, is share buy­back.
Um
yeah, so I find it inter­est­ing. There’s been a cou­ple of oth­er things to note. Um, so there was always a. A port­fo­lio man­aged by War­ren and a port­fo­lio man­aged by Todd Combs, anoth­er one by Ted Weschler and Todd Combs, I think it was, exit­ed the busi­ness.
Um, recent­ly [00:16:00] went to work for one of the oth­er big banks in Amer­i­ca. And Greg Abel has sold his posi­tions. I found that inter­est­ing. Whether that was ami­ca­ble or not, or under­per­form­ing or not, we don’t know. Um, but I, I found that inter­est­ing.
Cameron: Hmm
Tony Kynas­ton: Hmm. And Todd and Ted were always seen as suc­cess­es for, for Buf­fett in terms of, uh, you know, the, the list­ed invest­ment side of things.
So I won­der if he’s made a deci­sion about which one’s worked out and which one has­n’t,
Cameron: hmm
Tony Kynas­ton: or which one’s work­ing bet­ter. They’re prob­a­bly both smart guys.
Cameron: I saw he sold off or Berk­shire have sold off a chunk of their Apple hold­ings as well
Tony Kynas­ton: But I mean that’s, uh, you know, I’ve always strug­gled with those kind of tech stocks and I was always sur­prised to see Berk­shire buy into them, but it’s been a 10 x invest­ment for them since 2017, so it’s turned out real­ly well for them.
Cameron: Yeah Well mov­ing right along uh MMI Metro [00:17:00] Min­ing Lim­it­ed I not­ed dur­ing the week that they announced a one for 20 con­sol­i­da­tion I think I’ve got that right Yes Share con­sol­i­da­tion The pro­posed 20 for one share con­sol­i­da­tion has been approved by the share­hold­ers at the com­pa­ny’s annu­al gen­er­al meet­ing held on the 22nd of April 2026 The effec­tive date of the con­sol­i­da­tion is the 22nd of April 2026 Um so if you hold MMI Uh I don’t but it has been on and off our buy list over the last three or four months Just pay atten­tion to that You will notice that you own as many shares as you used to own but hope­ful­ly they’re worth more
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, it’s, I always strug­gle with that kind of move by a board. Like, unless the, the price is 0 cent or some­thing, and Metro Min­ing isn’t in that camp. It’s, [00:18:00] it’s, you know, prof­itable and we’ve had it on our buy list before. I, I don’t see the point of going through the effort of con­sol­i­dat­ing shares. Real­ly.
They’ve list­ed a cou­ple of rea­sons in the doc­u­ments, um, announc­ing it, but. Did­n’t seem to have hold much water from a log­ic point of view, so I’m not sure.
Cameron: a per­cep­tion thing
Tony Kynas­ton: it is.
Cameron: not wear­ing my Michael Caine glass­es Now I feel
Tony Kynas­ton: You got two sets of glass­es
Cameron: I got like 10 sets of glass­es man cause you can nev­er find
Tony Kynas­ton: I
Cameron: over them all over the house Michael Caine uh yeah it’s a per­cep­tion thing right If your shares are 1 cent you look like a pen­ny stock And if they’re a dol­lar 40 you look like a seri­ous com­pa­ny
Tony Kynas­ton: that is very much a per­cep­tion thing. And, and very much a, a sophis­ti­cat­ed investor would­n’t wor­ry about that. So who are they try­ing to attract? Old peo­ple who, you know, dun­no much about share invest­ing?
Cameron: I [00:19:00] don’t know
Tony Kynas­ton: Well their price.
Cameron: is there anoth­er rea­son I’ve always just thought it was a per­cep­tion
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Well, it’s one of the rea­sons
Cameron: that’s it Yeah.
Tony Kynas­ton: the, um, the price was a dol­lar 42 though before the con­sol­i­da­tion.
So. But, um, I don’t think that argu­ment applies in this case.
Cameron: Well, it’s only a dol­lar 40 now isn’t, how can that be Right?
Tony Kynas­ton: Well, I’m look­ing at, uh, the bread where it’s dropped from a dol­lar 42 to 7 cents.
Cameron: Oh, Stock Doc­tor has it as a dol­lar 40.
Tony Kynas­ton: Okay.
Cameron: Uh, there you go. Um, I’m just look­ing at their paper­work to see if they men­tion what it is on the paper­work.
Tony Kynas­ton: They did men­tion some rea­sons and, and it was large­ly about per­cep­tion. Um, they thought they’d attract more investors, but I don’t buy that argu­ment.
Cameron: I mean, it does­n’t make any sense. Right. On
Tony Kynas­ton: Ooh.
Cameron: busi­ness is the busi­ness. Is
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Like I said, it makes sense if you’re, if you’re in dec­i­mal points of cents, sure. [00:20:00] Con­sol­i­date and make them a dol­lar again or what­ev­er, but, uh, ’cause it’s hard to, it’s hard to trade in shares, which are less than a cent.
But oth­er­wise, why both­er?
Cameron: well, know that lots of investors aren’t very sophis­ti­cat­ed, so maybe it is try­ing to, don’t know. Just to them­selves look seri­ous.
Tony Kynas­ton: In my mind it’s the reverse.
Cameron: Yeah. I get ya. I get ya. Um, SDI, uh, I need to talk to you about SDI so may remem­ber that in ear­ly March, these are the den­tal
Tony Kynas­ton: It is, yeah.
Cameron: Um, in ear­ly March we men­tioned that they had announced that they in the process of being acquired by Bei­jing Gochi Key­board Tech­nol­o­gy.
Tony Kynas­ton: I’m glad you said that.
Cameron: Uh, I love, I love it. Love it. Uh, Chris­sy [00:21:00] was, were with these Indi­an friends. I was say­ing stuff from Bol­ly­wood films and Chris­sy goes, he’s prob­a­bly pro­nounc­ing it wrong. I was like, Hey, the way I pro­nounce it is always the cor­rect way to pro­nounce it.
Tony Kynas­ton: Oh.
Cameron: That’s what I’ve learned from my pod­cast over the years.
I don’t care if I’m the only per­son who pro­nounces it that way. That is the cor­rect way to pro­nounce. I take that posi­tion, that’s my Don­ald Trump posi­tion on it. It’s the great­est way of pro­nounc­ing it, whether or not it’s right. Uh, there was a scheme con­sid­er­a­tion they said of a dol­lar 40 per share. Now, uh, they haven’t had a meet­ing on it yet.
They’re hav­ing the share­hold­ers will have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to vote on the scheme at the scheme meet­ing. Cur­rent­ly antic­i­pat­ed to take place in late April to ear­ly May. I dun­no, I don’t think that’s hap­pened yet,
Tony Kynas­ton: No.
Cameron: but the share price is cur­rent­ly a dol­lar 23 and has been since the announce­ment. It’s just sort of hov­ered there.
So I dun­no if I should just be hold­ing it. We do own in one of the port­fo­lios, some SDI shares. I think [00:22:00] it’s a light port­fo­lio. Should we just sit and wait for it to get to a dol­lar 40? Assume it all goes
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, we should. Yeah.
Cameron: Why would it just be sit­ting at a dol­lar 23? Is it just peo­ple think­ing, well, I’m not gonna pay more for it.
And it’s just that’s, it’s stuck in a hold­ing pat­tern.
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, I think, I think, um, usu­al­ly that means there’s a risk that the acquir­er will go away. Um, so the mar­ket’s, mar­ket’s think­ing there’s a risk there, so they’re not pay­ing the acquir­er’s price. Um, but it could also mean that, um, it’s an inter­est­ing sit­u­a­tion. One of the share­hold­ers, and I’ve for­got­ten his name, you might might look it up for me, but he owns 45% of the shares.
Cameron: Yeah.
Tony Kynas­ton: he owned 49%. Ear­li­er in the year and he sold some. But, but, so, you know, it’s a scheme meet­ing which is required under the Cor­po­ra­tions Act, but all you got­ta do is find 6% of peo­ple to vote with this guy and it goes through,
Cameron: Yeah.
Tony Kynas­ton: although I’m not, I’m not sure of the rules. I’m pret­ty sure it’s a, a major­i­ty of, of shares it, [00:23:00] look, it may require more, it could be a two thirds major­i­ty, but it does­n’t require all the share­hold­ers to, to vote this through ’cause he owns a large block.
Cameron: right.
Tony Kynas­ton: so he’s already come out and said he’s gonna accept the offer, um, unless there’s a, a bet­ter offer in the mean­time. Uh, so. Yeah, that, that, would you nor­mal­ly be enough for the mar­ket to trade, um, clos­er to the, the acquir­ing num­ber? Um, it’s pos­si­ble that insti­tu­tions, for exam­ple, won’t both­er with this stock because the free float’s too small, so they’re not gonna try and arbi­trage it.
But I would think if the scheme meet­ing goes through, um, it’ll go up towards much clos­er to the acquir­ing costs. Usu­al­ly it trades a cent or two below, um, as peo­ple sell out, you know, push­es the price down a lit­tle bit and then some­one buys back into make a one or 2 cent arbi­trage. Um, so they nor­mal­ly trade a lit­tle bit below, uh, once there’s cer­tain­ty.
Um, but [00:24:00] until that vote’s tak­en, there’s always the risk that it does­n’t go through. And in which case it’ll drop, um, back again. But my read­ing of it is, it’s, it’s a kind of a fore­gone con­clu­sion giv­en that 45% of the votes are, are vot­ing yes already.
Cameron: And that share­hold­er is the chair­man, Jef­frey Ham, OAM. And uh, I assume his daugh­ter Saman­tha Jane Ham is the CEO. I dun­no how much she holds, but uh, yeah, I assume daugh­ter, she looks con­sid­er­ably younger than him, or he’s, uh, mar­ried young. No. Any­way.
Tony Kynas­ton: I dun­no.
Cameron: I dun­no either.
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah,
Cameron: Any­way, that’s, yeah, so it’s the chair­man owns 46% rough­ly.
So yeah, it’s pret­ty much a done deal, you would think,
Tony Kynas­ton: I would think so. Let’s just wait for the vote in a cou­ple of weeks.
Cameron: Right. Okay. So we just [00:25:00] sit and wait.
Tony Kynas­ton: Yep.
Cameron: Bye bye, Mr. Lon­go. Tony, um, Steven Mabb sent us, uh, this arti­cle from the Fin, uh, Joe Lon­go, the chair­man of ASIC, is depart­ing he thinks he’s done a pret­ty, pret­ty, pret­ty good job at ASIC in his, uh, five or six years he’s been there.
Tony Kynas­ton: Well, if you get to write your own assess­ment, you nor­mal­ly do well, don’t you?
Cameron: Yeah, I love this. And so this is from the arti­cle. Dur­ing Lon­go’s tenure, ASIC more than dou­bled for­mal inves­ti­ga­tions from 110 to 252 increased civ­il pro­ceed­ings by a third from 17 to 23. In the six months to Decem­ber 31st, ASIC secured a record six month­ly civ­il penal­ty haul of $350 mil­lion in the sec­ond half of 2025.
It also [00:26:00] record­ed crim­i­nal fines of about 17 mil­lion from $151,000 in 2021. Real­ly? They were on all cylin­ders in 2021. Were they?
Tony Kynas­ton: I think they kept qui­et dur­ing COVID ’cause busi­ness­es were doing it tough.
Cameron: Okay. Does­n’t mean you can get away with doing crim­i­nal stuff and you just, ’cause times are tough.
Tony Kynas­ton: Well, maybe ’cause busi­ness was ground to a halt. Noth­ing was noth­ing. So was crime. There was noth­ing bad going on too. Yeah,
Cameron: whether he has any prob­lem, chil­dren, direc­tors, or com­pa­nies that keep reap­pear­ing or doing the wrong thing, he answers not by com­pa­ny, but by sec­tor. Banks, and the super­an­nu­a­tion funds sec­tor require con­stant atten­tion. He says dur­ing his tenure, ASIC secured sig­nif­i­cant penal­ties of 250 mil­lion from ANZ for sys­temic risk fail­ures, 113 mil­lion from West­pac for com­pli­ance fail­ures.
15.5 mil­lion from NAB for fail­ing to respond to cus­tomers fac­ing [00:27:00] hard­ship. And 35 mil­lion from Mac­quar­ie Group for sys­tem fail­ures that caused the mis­re­port­ing of tens of mil­lions of short sales in super­an­nu­a­tion. ASIC secured 27 mil­lion from Aus­tralian Super for fail­ing to merge mul­ti­ple mem­ber accounts.
23 and a half mil­lion from CBUS for fail­ures when han­dling insur­ance claims. 24 mil­lion from AMP group for charg­ing dead cus­tomers and $20 mil­lion from Aware Super for fees for no ser­vice. Now, did I just dream this or was there some­thing called the Hayne Roy­al Com­mis­sion that hap­pened a few years ago where these, uh, finan­cial sec­tor busi­ness­es were hauled over the coals and all promised to clean up their act?
Tony Kynas­ton: yeah. Well, you did­n’t dream it. And some of those, I think some of those, uh, cas­es prob­a­bly were out of the Hayne Roy­al Com­mis­sion, so they’re a result of the Hayne Roy­al Com­mis­sion. Um, but yeah, no, you’re right. It’s, uh, there’s still ongo­ing issues with the bank­ing and super sec­tor as Lon­go says, but Lon­go goes on to say it’s a [00:28:00] heav­i­ly reg­u­lat­ed and very com­plex sec­tor as well.
Cameron: I read that sort of a get out­ta jail free card for them, but I’m like, hold on, this is your job.
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.
Cameron: up to do is to these busi­ness­es and
Tony Kynas­ton: Yep.
Cameron: it to the book. They’ve got thou­sands of staff, bil­lions of dol­lars. It’s not like, oh well you know, Joe Blogs at the local cafe. He’s strug­gling to get his paper­work done.
Like I don’t see that as a Yeah, it’s com­plex. Like so what? Get, get it done.
Tony Kynas­ton: Hmm
Cameron: you have one job, do it.
Tony Kynas­ton: Yep.
Cameron: dun­no.
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Look,
Cameron: but you, you’ve, you’re mar­ried to a
Tony Kynas­ton: yeah.
Cameron: and you know, you’ve got some insight to this, but is it real­ly that dif­fi­cult to run these busi­ness­es accord­ing to the let­ter of the law in your opin­ion?
Tony Kynas­ton: In my opin­ion, they’re co [00:29:00] high­ly reg­u­lat­ed and com­plex busi­ness­es. Um, and because of cap­i­tal­ism, they have con­flict­ed inter­ests at cer­tain, cer­tain lev­els. It’s, you think about it, you, you are the, if you’re the CEO or the chair of a major bank, how much do you real­ly know what’s going on down below? It kind of almost becomes some­thing has to blow up before you know there’s an issue, and then you got­ta, it’s, it’s how you deal with that issue.
That’s the impor­tant thing, I think. And, you know, as, as Lon­go says in the arti­cle, fes­s­ing up to the issue and self-report­ing does­n’t cut any mus­tard with the reg­u­la­tor. You still get creamed. So then what do you do? Do you try and fix it? Make it go away, try and hide it? You know, I, I. I’m always remind­ed of Buf­fet­t’s quote about, uh, integri­ty, you know, where he says some­thing like, um, uh, lose mon­ey for the firm and I’ll be under­stand­ing, lose a shred of rep­u­ta­tion for the firm and I’ll be ruth­less.
I think that’s, you know, that’s the, that’s the [00:30:00] mantra that I think you should live by when you’re in a cor­po­rate envi­ron­ment, and I think that’s def­i­nite­ly the mantra that Jen­ny oper­ates under. But, um, if you’re sit­ting on top of some­thing, how do you know that the peo­ple under­neath you’re doing that?
You just got­ta keep try­ing to imbue that cul­ture into the orga­ni­za­tion. And I, I think the best, um, reg­u­la­tor I’ve seen in my life­time was, um, Allan Fels because he kind of put Buf­fet­t’s lever­age to work, and he, he, he, he would almost every day have a head­line about some kind of cor­po­rate malfea­sance, even if it was­n’t proven, if it was just sus­pect­ed or, you know, I, I’m look­ing into the banks because of x, y, and.
So he just, he just try and attack their integri­ty in the pub­lic eyes. And I, I think that’s almost the best way to, to approach reg­u­la­tion. Yes, you’ve got­ta do all the legal side of things, but how much does it cost to have ASIC extract a cou­ple of hun­dred mil­lion dol­lars from the super sec­tor? Um, it’s prob­a­bly a zero sum game if you’re look­ing at [00:31:00] it from a P&L point of view.
But, but it’s, um, it’s much more effec­tive if he goes out in the head­lines every night say­ing, look, we are look­ing at this super, this super, well just the super indus­try or this type of super com­pa­ny for doing these, for charg­ing dead peo­ple or what­ev­er. Um, the hit to the rep­u­ta­tion will hurt their, their bot­tom line.
And, and that’s more effec­tive almost than tak­ing a fine. So, um,
Cameron: But
Tony Kynas­ton: I
nev­er saw Lon­go do that much. In terms of the, the pro­file sort of thing, you or the sham­ing side of things? He’s done a lit­tle bit of it, but he’s adopt­ed, he’s adopt­ed main­ly. Let, let’s sue them. Um and I think with mixed results, I mean the, the, the clas­sic exam­ple I think at the moment is Coles and Wool­worths who are both being, being, uh, sued for, uh, mark­ing prices up and then dis­count­ing them back above the pre markup price.
And, um, call­ing it a, you know, a price sav­ing for cus­tomers or a spe­cial for [00:32:00] cus­tomers. Um, that’s always been a sort of murky area. But the sort of rule of thumb is that if you keep a price for six months and then mark it up, up and then bring it on dis­count, it’s got­ta be below that, that price that it was for six months pri­or.
Um, now the prob­lem is that. There’s been lots of, uh, price ris­es in the sup­ply chain, and so it’s been hard to keep prices steady for six months. So they’ve gone up and then ASIC’s charg­ing that they weren’t held at the, at the new price long enough before they were dis­count­ed back to the, above the long term price, if you like.
Um. It’s that kind of whether he wins or los­es that fight. And orig­i­nal­ly I thought that Coles and Woolies would get off because there’s a lot of, but they do have a lot of pro­ce­dures in place to, to safe­guard against that kind of, uh, prob­lem. But it’s the rep­u­ta­tion­al dam­age. It’s, it’s putting in peo­ple’s minds that the Coles and [00:33:00] Woolies are rip­ping you off is, is much more pow­er­ful than extract­ing a fine from them real­ly.
Or even extract­ing an apol­o­gy from them. It’s, it’s the head­line that they’re being looked at, which is, which is caus­ing peo­ple to change their shop­ping behav­ior or be more, more, um, cyn­i­cal about, uh, and skep­ti­cal about these dis­counts that are going on in the super­mar­kets. And that that’s a, that’s almost, that’s prob­a­bly a more effec­tive reg­u­la­tion than tak­ing them to court.
Cameron: So we should put Der­ryn Hinch
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.
Cameron: uh,
Tony Kynas­ton: Hinch had such a high pro­file. Because he would do things like that. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, that cur­rent affairs shows have devolved into sort of foot in the door sub­ur­ban solic­i­tor type take downs, which is almost com­i­cal, real­ly. But yeah, no, exact­ly. If you had a well fund­ed, that’s one of the prob­lems too.
You don’t have well fund­ed news rooms any­more. If you had a well fund­ed, a well-fund­ed news­room out there going into super­mar­kets and, you know, and, and say­ing, look, here’s our evi­dence that Mars bars were a dol­lar last week. They were a dol­lar this time last year, and [00:34:00] now, you know, they’re a dol­lar 30 and you’re claim­ing they’re on spe­cial.
Cameron: Hmm.
Tony Kynas­ton: what’s going on? Let’s, let’s bring the
Cameron: Shame, shame, shame.
Tony Kynas­ton: shame, shame, Let’s get the door. Let’s get the door Stop. Inter­view from the man­ag­er of the local coal store. That’s very pow­er­ful.
Cameron: But you know, it gets back to this thing that we’ve talked about with politi­cians. It is like, where’s the jail time? Well, who’s get­ting banned from being direc­tors? Where, where are the
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.
Cameron: um, um, con­se­quences for the peo­ple run­ning these busi­ness­es?
Tony Kynas­ton: Right?
Cameron: There aren’t any real­ly.
Tony Kynas­ton: Not real­ly. And that comes down to the idea of a lim­it­ed lia­bil­i­ty com­pa­ny. I mean, that was the, the game chang­er in the his­to­ry of com­merce. If you are a direc­tor of a cor­po­ra­tion, you, you, your assets aren’t the cor­po­ra­tions and the lawyers will call it pierc­ing the cor­po­rate shield. So what, what the cor­po­ra­tion does is one thing, you can run the cor­po­ra­tion and if the cor­po­ra­tion does some­thing bad and has to fold you, [00:35:00] you get to live anoth­er day.
You’re not, you know, your house and chairs and what­ev­er else isn’t drawn into the mess. And that’s very impor­tant. If you, if you don’t have that pro­tec­tion, then who’d be a direc­tor or oth­er­wise, com­pa­nies have to pay tens of mil­lions of dol­lars for direc­tors to take the risk. At the moment, there’s a risk.
It’s, it’s more of an infor­mal risk. Now, if you are, if you’re on a board and, and the com­pa­ny does sil­ly things, you won’t get anoth­er job as a direc­tor. You’re sort of ex ostra­cized from the direc­tor’s club. But
Cameron: Unless, the com­pa­ny, you know, nets out of it prof­itably.
Tony Kynas­ton: pos­si­bly, yeah.
Cameron: You know, you do some­thing that’s shady, but you get a slap on the wrist fine from ASIC and the com­pa­ny pock­ets a bil­lion dol­lars. Then it’s like, oh good. Good job.
Tony Kynas­ton: Well, give me an exam­ple.
Cameron: Well, all of these banks pay­ing a few mil­lion bucks here or
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah,
Cameron: I’m sure all of
Tony Kynas­ton: I,
Cameron: go on to oth­er jobs
Tony Kynas­ton: yeah.
Cameron: here. Exec­u­tives
mean, slaps on the [00:36:00] wrist, but you know, if you get caught doing insid­er trad­ing and you’re a direc­tor, so you know, you go to, sup­pos­ed­ly you get jail time.
There’s per­son­al con­se­quences. So there are per­son­al cons, con­se­quences for some activ­i­ties
the direc­tor of a com­pa­ny,
not oth­ers.
Tony Kynas­ton: Um, it’s not just insid­er trad­ing, but I think there’s also, um, per­son­al con­se­quences if there’s a, a fatal­i­ty, for exam­ple, poten­tial­ly any­way, if you, if you knew about it, did­n’t stop it or did­n’t change the process to pre­vent it, I think there’s a per­son­al lia­bil­i­ty there too. But, um you’re right, there’s very, very lim­it­ed pierc­ing of the cor­po­rate shield,
Cameron: hmm.
Tony Kynas­ton: um, to attack direc­tors direct­ly.
Cameron: And that gets back to incen­tives. Like what are the incen­tives? What do they need to be to cre­ate the cul­tur­al con­di­tions that pay more sig­nif­i­cant atten­tion to these sorts of things? But any­way,
Tony Kynas­ton: No, I think it’s a good, I think it’s a real­ly excel­lent debate. What, you know, what makes [00:37:00] the best reg­u­la­tor? I think it’s the debate that we have all the time. I, I don’t think ASIC is very effec­tive. And, um, but you know, in fair­ness to ASIC, it’s a large orga­ni­za­tion that cov­ers the water­front. You know it’s, it’s reg­u­lat­ing banks one day and it’s reg­u­lat­ing gam­bling com­pa­nies anoth­er day, and it’s reg­u­lat­ing super­mar­kets the day after.
I mean, do you need a spe­cial­ist in each indus­try or do you need a reg­u­la­tor for each indus­try? And then
Cameron: mm
Tony Kynas­ton: look over­seas where they do some­times adopt that kind of silo approach and the reg­u­la­tors don’t talk to each oth­er. So you have
Cameron: mm
Tony Kynas­ton: exec­u­tives get­ting off on some­thing that you would­n’t get off on if you were in a dif­fer­ent indus­try.
So yeah, there, there’s, it’s, it’s very hard. I, I actu­al­ly hope and, and believe that AI might play a big­ger part in this, because real­ly what you need is to be across all of the. All of the com­pa­nies that are list­ed at least,
Cameron: Mm-hmm.
Tony Kynas­ton: and going through their, their audits or their num­bers with a fine tooth comb, because a lot can get picked up.
You can’t hide a lot of things.
Cameron: Hmm.
Tony Kynas­ton: you know, and if they, not just the num­bers, but there’s oth­er, you know, [00:38:00] reports that get sent into ASIC all the time. I, I won­der how much, you know, how much of that is being checked thor­ough­ly or with the kind of, um, you know, um, mag­ni­fy­ing glass that will allow, um, red flags to be raised, um, for, you know, um, devi­a­tions from the norm, for exam­ple.
So,
Cameron: Mm-hmm.
Tony Kynas­ton: I think if there’s enough brain pow­er and whether it’s AI or whether it’s peo­ple applied to it, you should real­ly have each com­pa­ny being checked all the time by the reg­u­la­tor. And that would improve the sit­u­a­tion.
Cameron: Mm-hmm.
Tony Kynas­ton: Peo­ple will always game it though.
Cameron: Well, I think AI is, uh, an inter­est­ing approach. I think you’re right. think AI might be, uh, one avenue for this along with many oth­er things before it kills us all. Um, alright. What do you got on your list of talk­ing points, TK, before you get into your Pulled Pork?
Tony Kynas­ton: that was it. I had just to talk about, um, the annu­al let­ter from Berk­shire Hath­away, Greg [00:39:00] Abel’s first report, and we’ve cov­ered that. So I’ve just got a Pulled Pork to do on inter­est­ing com­pa­ny, a smash repair­er, AMA
Cameron: Hmm. AMA, the Aus­tralian Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion. It’s not, it’s not
Tony Kynas­ton: at the, I dun­no what AMA actu­al­ly stands for. Erbil or
Cameron: hmm,
Tony Kynas­ton: some­thing or oth­er asso­ci­a­tion. It’s, yeah, it’s just called AMA Group. And that’s the code is AMA and it’s called AMA Group. So I, I prob­a­bly could ask AI, I dun­no what AMA stands for.
Cameron: Well, why don’t you get into it and then we’ll fig­ure it out as we go along.
Tony Kynas­ton: Okay. Um,
grab­bing my notes. Uh, so AMA, AMA Group, it’s Aus­trali­a’s largest and only pub­lic list­ed col­li­sion repair and auto­mo­tive sup­ply spe­cial­ist. They oper­ate a net­work over 140 loca­tions across Aus­tralia and New Zealand, and they per­form more than 300 crash repairs annu­al­ly. [00:40:00] Uh, the com­pa­ny has a num­ber of key seg­ments.
Um, col­li­sion repair is, it’s prob­a­bly its main one. Uh, and one of the brands there is called Cap­i­tal SMART, S‑M-A-R‑T. And that’s the, uh, rapid. High vol­ume repairs done for major insur­ers. So the kind of crash and bash that we’re prob­a­bly most used to as motorists and SMART stands for small to medi­um acci­dent repair tech­nol­o­gy.
And that’s one of the core seg­ments of this busi­ness. It’s, it’s basi­cal­ly hav­ing a kind of almost assem­bly line approach to smash repair. You know, you get the, you get the pan­el beat­ing done in one sec­tion of the fac­to­ry and then it goes through to the spray paint side, and then it goes through to the rapid heat­ing side, and then it’s checked on the mon­i­tors and then it’s sent back out in a cou­ple of days.
So that’s prob­a­bly the main part of the busi­ness. Um, but it also oper­ates, uh, heavy motor. Repairs under the Wales brand, W‑A-L-E‑S. They han­dle com­mer­cial vehi­cles, bus­es, earth mov­ing equip­ment and the like. Uh, they have a parts divi­sion. This is an inter­est­ing part of the busi­ness too, called ACM Parts.
And they man­age a sup­ply chain for recy­cled after­mar­ket and gen­uine parts. And they serve both, uh, inter­nal­ly in the AMA Group, but also exter­nal cus­tomers. So if you think about parts, uh, for the crash repair indus­try, they’re often com­ing out­ta scrap yards. So AMA owns a whole lot of the, uh, the wreck­ers and the smash yards in Aus­tralia.
And, um. For a long time, they were inde­pen­dent­ly oper­at­ed and then the insur­ers start­ed to acquire them. And now AMA has con­sol­i­dat­ed a lot of those togeth­er to try and improve its sup­ply chains. And the last sec­tion of AMA is called the Advanced Dri­ver Assis­tance Sys­tems sec­tion, and it tends to do more spe­cial­ized detail work on [00:42:00] either a, a new­er vehi­cle that’s had a major col­li­sion or on, um, EVs, for exam­ple, where there’s a lot of, um, elec­tron­ic work that’s required and, um, that this seg­ment looks after high tech sys­tems, uh, for vehi­cles that require smash repairs.
Um, the busi­ness has come off a high in its share price and it’s been knocked around a lot since COVID, and it’s cur­rent­ly into a. Uh, a turn­around phase focus­ing on oper­a­tional effi­cien­cy and reduc­ing its debt. Um, but it’s, it’s been quite volatile. It’s been, um, bounc­ing around its lows and it’s just kind of nudg­ing, uh, nudg­ing up above its buy line at the moment.
In fact, when I did the analy­sis for this com­pa­ny this morn­ing, the share price was right on, its buy price. So don’t be sur­prised when you lis­ten to this. If it, if the share price has gone back below, its buy price or it might have con­tin­ued up, but please check that before you make a deci­sion one way or the oth­er if you’re inter­est­ed in this [00:43:00] com­pa­ny.
Um, the board recent­ly announced, uh, the inten­tions for a share buy­back pro­gram, and they cit­ed the fact that the stock was trad­ing at its lows and was volatile, and they thought it was an oppor­tu­ni­ty, uh, to, uh, sta­bi­lize their bal­ance sheet. We don’t score it for a buy­back though until we see a reduc­tion in the share count and in fact.
In the last 12 months, the share, the num­ber of shares went up slight­ly. So that would nor­mal­ly indi­cate, uh, share options being issued for staff. Uh, but at the moment we can’t score it for a buy­back. Um, the, I’ll, I’m just gonna jump around here a lit­tle bit, but there was, um, a lot of restruc­tur­ing going on.
Uh, they have in the main sold off, uh, under­per­form­ing out­lets, so they’ve been reduc­ing the num­ber of. Uh, crash and bash doors that they have, um, clos­ing or relo­cat­ing under­per­form­ing sites, uh, amal­ga­mat­ing sites togeth­er, and [00:44:00] also doing a lot of work in the parts busi­ness to which, um, on a sort of silo basis or seg­ment basis has been los­ing mon­ey.
Um, and it’s now back to, I think, a slight prof­it, um, after some opti­miza­tion there as well. But I want­ed to focus a lit­tle bit on the main cus­tomer for this busi­ness, which are the insur­ance com­pa­nies. And it’s a, it’s a kind of a dance between a smash, repair­er and insur­ance com­pa­ny to see who, uh, wins. I guess in terms of the rela­tion­ship, who makes the biggest mar­gin?
Um, so the AMA Group’s busi­ness mod­el is fun­da­men­tal­ly entwined with the insur­ance indus­try and in Aus­tralia, the vast major­i­ty of col­li­sion repairs are fund­ed by insur­ance claims. Um, so that makes the insur­ers the pri­ma­ry cus­tomers, even though the repair is per­formed on the pri­vate indi­vid­u­al’s vehi­cle.
Uh, ’cause you, you know, you have a crash, you exchange insur­ance, you go along, it gets towed to the repair­er, you get the, the car fixed. It’s gen­er­al­ly your cov­ered by [00:45:00] insur­ance. You’re not out of pock­et, uh, for that. Um. So AMA Group oper­ates as a pre­ferred part­ner for the major insur­ance com­pa­nies like SUN, IAG, and Allianz.
And it, the rela­tion­ships are gen­er­al­ly through two avenues. The SMART one, which I talked about before, S‑M-A-R‑T, that’s the high vol­ume, um, rela­tion­ship. Uh, it was orig­i­nal­ly built in part­ner­ship with Sun­corp, um, to oper­ate a rapid repair mod­el designed for low to medi­um sever­i­ty acci­dents. And, uh, that was seen as a way of stream­lin­ing the process.
So, uh, Sun­corp would have a sort of fixed rate for pay­ing for that kind of repair. And it was gen­er­al­ly for cars that would take one or two days in the shop. And Sun­corp liked it because, uh, it meant that if the car was back with the own­er with­in two days, it lim­it­ed their. Um, their costs of pro­vid­ing [00:46:00] rental vehi­cles, um, while the car was being repaired, for exam­ple.
Um, and it was at an, at an agreed rate. So AMA knew what two days worth of work was worth so they could charge Sun­corp for that and still make mon­ey. So not a bad sort of, uh, solu­tion to the bulk of the work. And it was good for AMA ’cause it pro­vid­ed a steady stream of high vol­ume work, which kept their, their sites busy.
Um, oth­er­wise, the rela­tion­ship with the insur­ers is usu­al­ly via ser­vice lev­el agree­ment, or SLA and, uh, they, AMA oper­ates under strict con­tracts that dic­tate every­thing from the cost of parts to the key to key time, which is how long the cus­tomer’s with­out their car. Uh, so if it’s not a, a one or two day oper­a­tion, it’s still heav­i­ly agreed to between AMA and the insur­ers.
Um. The good thing for AMA about that kind of rela­tion­ship is that a, it guar­an­tees a base load of work. Uh, and that means that AMA does­n’t have to engage in much mar­ket­ing itself, so [00:47:00] it saves on mar­ket­ing cost ’cause it’s got a steady stream of work. It’s also good for AMA because it, it becomes increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult for small, inde­pen­dent mum and shop mum and pop shops to oper­ate, um, as they’re often cut out of the refer­ral loop unless they agree to the pric­ing terms.
Um, of the insur­ance com­pa­nies and the insur­ance com­pa­nies set their terms based on a high through­put type mod­el that AMA that suits AMA but not a small shop. And there there­fore, AMA has had a good, um, num­ber of years at rolling up, uh, small inde­pen­dent oper­a­tors because, um, either some­times the inde­pen­dent oper­a­tors still.
Of work in the busi­ness. Um, but they get access to the insur­ance busi­ness and they get access to parts at a cheap­er rate, et cetera, that, um, AMA can give them, uh, or they get ful­ly bought out by AMA and then they just get rolled up in and, uh, part of the AMA, uh, insur­ance rela­tion­ship. So if you think [00:48:00] about AMA is the ten­ant in this indus­try and the insur­ance com­pa­nies are the land­lord.
That’s kind of the rela­tion­ship we’re look­ing at here. Um, the oth­er thing I want­ed to just touch on, uh, is what’s hap­pen­ing with mod­ern cars and mod­ern cars. Recent cars are essen­tial­ly com­put­ers on wheels, and they require expen­sive cal­i­bra­tion of the advanced dri­ver assis­tance sys­tems, even if they just had a minor, um, fend­er ben­der.
Uh, ’cause you know, you think about the revers­ing cam­eras, the, the, um, uh, sen­sors which tell you’re get­ting close to some­thing, they, they can get dis­rupt­ed even with just a minor bump to a fend­er. So, um. Uh, this is also help­ing AMA because, uh, insur­ers are increas­ing­ly demand­ing that the work­shops that they refer to hold orig­i­nal equip­ment man­u­fac­tur­er cer­ti­fi­ca­tions, and of course that costs mon­ey and it, it gen­er­al­ly costs invest­ment in equip­ment, which can cost up to a hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars or hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars [00:49:00] for diag­nos­tic tools.
And so, AMA has the com­pet­i­tive advan­tage of being able to do that on a net­work basis, where­as the small­er shops can’t, um, or can’t do across the board, and there­fore, again, they become, they become more out of the loop and there­fore prey to AMA for con­sol­i­da­tion. So that’s the kind of sum­ma­ry of what AMA does and, and the indus­try fac­tors.
It works with bit of a his­to­ry now, uh, so. Uh, AMA Group was large­ly built by buy­ing the repair busi­ness away from Sun­corp. Um, I’m gonna just, uh, well, let me just start at the begin­ning. I, I sup­pose, uh, before I get to that, ’cause that hap­pened in 2019, but AMA was found­ed back in 2005, and back then it was called AOAC Lim­it­ed.
And it was, it was, uh, found­ed to acquire auto­mo­tive after­care busi­ness­es, um, which is more about, you know, bull bars and roof racks and [00:50:00] things like that. Sell­ing, sell­ing what’s called the, uh, sell­ing into what’s called the after­mar­ket class of busi­ness. So adding things to cars after they’re bought it, list­ed on the ASX in 2006.
Uh, but in 2007, they branched out into the col­li­sion repair busi­ness. And AMA bought Mr. Gloss, uh, one of the, uh, repair­ers in Vic­to­ria, which the com­pa­ny still owns and oper­ates today. 2009, they changed their name to AMA Group. In the 2000 and tens, they shift­ed, uh, away from the AFR after­mar­ket busi­ness to become more of a smash repair giant.
And that was under the lead­er­ship of the for­mer exec­u­tive chair­man, Ray Mal­one, uh, who, um, began aggres­sive­ly buy­ing inde­pen­dent repair shops across Aus­tralia. Uh, and by 2017, they’d become the dom­i­nant play­er in the indus­try. But the te, the crown jew­el was still to come. So in 2019, they, [00:51:00] uh, as I allud­ed to before, they bought, um, the smart busi­ness from uh, Sun­corp, and that was good and bad for them in 2019.
Um. The com­pa­ny, the com­pa­ny that Sun­corp sold was called Cap­i­tal Smart. And it was set up again, uh, by Sun­corp who sort of thought they could get into the, the smash repair­er busi­ness to sort of ver­ti­cal­ly inte­grate, uh, their busi­ness. But they, they found that being an insur­er and run­ning a, a crash and bash, um, repair­er net­work was two dif­fer­ent things.
And they did­n’t have, um, exper­tise in, in the smart, uh, busi­ness. So they sold it to AMA or they were con­vinced to sold it to AMA who paid rough­ly $420 mil­lion for it. And that was basi­cal­ly almost all debt ser­vice by AMA. Um, so. It was good for AMA ’cause they, they picked up a large chunk of busi­ness and they had the rela­tion­ship with Sun­corp [00:52:00] to guar­an­tee the, uh, flow of cus­tomers.
Uh, and it was good for Sun­corp because, um, instead of own­ing the repair shop, they signed a 25 year ser­vice agree­ment with AMA and that gave Sun­corp the best of both worlds. They can con­trol pric­ing and pri­or­i­ty of repairs through the con­tract, but they did­n’t have to man­age the staff or real estate.
So, um, that kind of worked for both of them. But of course. 2019 was, uh, right on the cusp of the COVID um, out­break. And because of COVID, um, few­er cars were on the road, which meant few­er acci­dents. And the high vol­ume smart mod­el, which relied on lots of cars crash­ing, basi­cal­ly stopped, and rev­enue plum­met­ed.
And so, uh, this com­pa­ny, even though um, it was a good deal, was sud­den­ly sad­dled with $420 mil­lion debt and not much rev­enue com­ing through the door because of COVID. And that’s, that kind of sit­u­a­tion was best summed [00:53:00] up in a AFR arti­cle from the time, which was, uh, dat­ed Sep­tem­ber 2nd, 2021 by Antho­ny McDon­ald and Yolan­da Redrock.
The head­line was AMA Group on Col­li­sion course with lenders. And it goes on to say, AMA group is star­ing down a trip to the cor­po­rate pan­el beat­ers and needs a cap­i­tal injec­tion to pre­vent a poten­tial smash, which is one of the best open­ing lines I think for an arti­cle in the busi­ness paper I’ve read for a while.
Uh, it goes on to say, well, the direc­tors and it’s ordered to sign the doc, sign the accounts KPMG devot­ed, uh, 208 words to mate­r­i­al uncer­tain­ty relat­ing to going con­cern in its audit opin­ion. In oth­er words, a qual­i­fied audit, which is a red flag, um, goes on to say that the AMA group said that it was com­pli­ant with its watered down covenants as of June 30 that year.
Uh, and they had obtained waivers for the upcom­ing Sep­tem­ber and Decem­ber test­ing peri­ods for those covenants. Um, but it, it had agreed [00:54:00] with its banks to restruc­ture its debt, uh, before the end of the year. And so, um, there was a lot of, uh, nego­ti­a­tions with the banks around fund­ing and around some kind of relief to its debt covenants to get it through the, the COVID peri­od.
But that peri­od kind of had ram­i­fi­ca­tions in this com­pa­ny’s his­to­ry. Um, and it, it, uh, yeah, had had dif­fi­cul­ties for a num­ber of years that had a, a red flag qual­i­fied audit in 2000, uh, 2021. But by 2024 and 2025, the focus shift­ed from growth to effi­cien­cy, and the group began clos­ing under­per­form­ing sites, merg­ing small­er bou­tique shops into larg­er, more effi­cient hubs.
They suc­cess­ful­ly rene­go­ti­at­ed sev­er­al lega­cy con­tracts with insur­ers. Um, and because those con­tracts weren’t account­ing for the ris­ing costs of parts and labor and new man­age­ment was brought into pro­fes­sion­al­ize the oper­a­tions, mov­ing away from a founder led style. [00:55:00] Of the ear­ly days towards a data dri­ven cor­po­rate approach.
And I guess that leads into the, um, his­to­ry of a cou­ple of the key peo­ple. There is no own­er founder today, but there it is worth men­tion­ing two key fig­ures in the his­to­ry of this com­pa­ny. I, I men­tioned Ray Mal­one before he joined in 2009 as exec­u­tive chair­man and served in that role for many years. And under his lead­er­ship, the com­pa­ny trans­formed from a small auto­mo­tive acces­sories busi­ness into a major smash repair.
Rollup Mal­one was known for a hand­shake style of busi­ness trav­el­ing across Aus­tralia to buy out fam­i­ly owned pan­el shops. But in 2020 he retired and, uh, uh. Uh, rode off into the sun­set fol­low­ing the AMA acqui­si­tion of the Cap­i­tal Smart Busi­ness from Sun­corp and prob­a­bly one of the best timed hand­balls of cor­po­rate his­to­ry.
’cause, uh, he, he left around the time that COVID, or before COVID had a prob­lem with this or caused prob­lems with this [00:56:00] busi­ness. The oth­er iden­ti­ty, uh, to talk about is Andrew Hop­kins and he joined AMA. Back in 2015 when the group acquired his own mas­sive repair busi­ness called Gem­i­ni. And because Gem­i­ni was so much larg­er and more prof­itable than AMA at the time, at least the deal was often described as a back­door list­ing for, uh, Andrew Hop­kins.
So he became CEO and was, uh, the pri­ma­ry dri­ver behind the 2019 deal with Sun­corp. But he also left the com­pa­ny in ear­ly 2021, fol­low­ing a fair­ly tumul­tuous peri­od, which I’ve out­lined before, but also mark­ing all of inter­nal fric­tion. And that basi­cal­ly was the end of the founder led era, uh, for, for AMA. Oth­er thing to high­light dur­ing the his­to­ry was about two years ago, the parts busi­ness had a for sale. Sign hung up about it when it was los­ing about $3 mil­lion a year. Um, how­ev­er, no one’s stepped up to buy it, and man­age­ment has restruc­tured that [00:57:00] busi­ness and it’s now prof­itable. But the for sale, uh, sign remains on it.
And, uh, I guess the ben­e­fit is that, um, they’re sell­ing a prof­itable busi­ness now, which should result in a bet­ter sale. But also if they don’t sell it, they’ve, they’ve kind of cleaned up that sup­ply chain to make some mon­ey and, uh, pro­vide the best, uh, ser­vice to the gen­er­al AMA group. So that’s, um, it’s been, uh, worth doing.
Lat­est results for the com­pa­ny. Decem­ber 20, 25, half year results are out and, um, sor­ry, 20, 26, half year results are out, um, which end­ed Decem­ber, 2025. Any­way, rev­enue was up 6% com­pared to the com­pa­ra­ble peri­od. EBITDA was up 21.9%. Oper­at­ing cash­flow was up 16.2%. But, uh, the rea­son for men­tion­ing EBITDA is that it we’re still show­ing a loss at the EPS lev­el, um, but almost back at break even.
So the first half 25 loss [00:58:00] was neg­a­tive 3.9 mil­lion, and in 2026 the loss is 600,000 and the com­pa­ny is fore­cast­ing to actu­al­ly return to prof­it. Um, going for­ward, uh, there was also, I guess of note a one for 10 share con­sol­i­da­tion in 2026. So again, anoth­er com­pa­ny who thought their share price was too low to, um, uh, be of ser­vice.
Um, and they con­sol­i­dat­ed. Not sure if that’s helped or not, and they’re still kind of trad­ing around what they were when the con­sol­i­da­tion hap­pened. Uh, but any­way, they did, um, QAV num­bers for the stock. ADT is 300,000, which isn’t too bad, but, um. Not, not huge, but, but not, uh, small. Uh, share price for the analy­sis is 56 cents, and that’s right on the buy price in the bread lay­er as a buy­er, as I said.
So watch that if you are think­ing about look­ing at this com­pa­ny. Um, inter­est­ing thing is that it’s near­ly half the con­sen­sus price that bro­kers have on this [00:59:00] busi­ness. Uh, but it’s above our, the i, our IV1 of 4 cents and IV2 of 24 cents. So the bro­kers are putting a much high­er price on it than we are.
The com­pa­ny does­n’t pay a div­i­dend, so we can’t score it for that. Inter­est­ing­ly enough, this com­pa­ny, um, even though it’s on our buy list, I think is, is um, is uh, kind of real­ly scrap­ing the, the bot­tom of the bar­rel for qual­i­ty. Stock Doc­tor finan­cial health is mar­gin­al, so we can’t score it using that met­ric.
The trend is steady, so it’s not get­ting worse. So we score it for that and I expect that the, these scores will improve as the com­pa­ny gets back to prof­itabil­i­ty. But at the moment it’s mar­gin­al and steady. Stock Doc­tor qual­i­ty rank is 69, so again, it’s, um, it’s not up there, but not, it’s not, uh, dis­as­ter, but it’s not up there.
It F scores sev­en out of nine, so that’s pret­ty good. But the over­all rank in Stock­o­pe­dia for AMA is only 64. Um. Um, the val­ue score is 97, how­ev­er, so, [01:00:00] um, it scores well on val­ue, which I think is what’s dri­ving it on our buy list, but not, uh, for qual­i­ty. Uh, the PE is 64 times, so, um, we can’t, uh, score it. It’s, and, and in fact, it’s the only PE score it’s had in the last three years.
’cause the earn­ings have been neg­a­tive, I’m guess­ing, giv­en that it’s neg­a­tive EPS at the moment, that, that this is a fore­cast PE score, but it, um, we can’t score it any­way. It’s, it’s a, uh, zero for us. Uh, net equi­ty per share is 49 cents and plus 30 or 63 cents. So we can actu­al­ly score it for being a book plus 30.
How­ev­er, again, I do cau­tion peo­ple. This is a, a rollup of, of, uh, small com­pa­nies in the indus­try and the NTA is actu­al­ly show­ing a slight­ly neg­a­tive, um, uh, amount. So even though. Net equi­ty is, is, uh, is show­ing it’s a buy. Um, when you add net equi­ty plus [01:01:00] 30%. Um, NTA cer­tain­ly would­n’t sup­port that, which is, again, not unusu­al as we’ve seen with oth­er rollups.
Um, like, uh, the group, uh, that, uh, Autosports, uh, Group in the car indus­try, uh, when they do buy these things, there’s often good­will on the bal­ance sheet and it some­times gets impaired if, um, if you can’t jus­ti­fy the car­ry­ing cost of what you’ve paid for the busi­ness. Uh, so, um, NTA is neg­a­tive. PROPCAF is only 3.4 times.
So that’s what’s dri­ving our val­u­a­tion. Um, so it’s def­i­nite­ly a val­ue. Buy earn­ings per share growth fore­cast is 176%. So it’s also a growth sto­ry. And so growth over PE is 2.74 times, um, which scores a two on our buy list. Uh, and it’s pret­ty good. Uh, no own­er, founder direc­tors hold 3%, so we can’t score it for that.
Does­n’t have con­sis­tent­ly increas­ing equi­ty, but it’s close, but we can’t score it for that. Uh, it is a recent [01:02:00] buy, but it’s hov­er­ing around our buy price, but tech­ni­cal­ly we can score it for that. So all in all qual­i­ty is 10 out­ta 15 or 67%. Which is a bit low, but the, the QAV score is still 0.19 because of the, uh, oper­at­ing cash flow.
I want­ed to take some time to go through the risks and oppor­tu­ni­ties for this com­pa­ny. The oppor­tu­ni­ty is obvi­ous­ly the restruc­tur­ing, um, of the busi­ness, includ­ing the parts busi­ness, which has improved mar­gins. And we asked this com­pa­ny is improv­ing mar­gins. Um, so that’s, that’s a good thing. One of the things which is they’re say­ing is allow­ing that to hap­pen is, is all the com­plex­i­ty in your vehi­cles, which means that they can, um, they can invest and they can charge a high­er mar­gin back to the insur­ance busi­ness­es.
Busi­ness­es for the com­plex­i­ty pre­mi­um, I guess of, of work­ing on EVs and work­ing on late mod­el cars, um, it’s obvi­ous­ly an oppor­tu­ni­ty if they do return back to, to prof­itabil­i­ty. Uh uh, which is [01:03:00] good. Um. And I guess the last thing to point out is the, the under­ly­ing busi­ness of smash repairs is high­ly prof­itable and the com­pa­ny makes mon­ey at the oper­at­ing lev­el, makes a lot of mon­ey at the oper­at­ing lev­el, which is why we’re see­ing oper­at­ing cash flow so strong.
How­ev­er, it’s still car­ry­ing debt from its acqui­si­tion in 2019, and there are also oth­er charges. Below the oper­at­ing cash line, like depre­ci­a­tion on build­ings, which means that, uh, it’s a slight loss at the EPS lev­el. So if it does get debt, um, under con­trol even more, uh, and, and uh, takes away some of these kind of his­tor­i­cal imped­i­ments, then it will be a very prof­itable busi­ness.
And I think it’s prob­a­bly on the cusp of that now, but it’s just a ques­tion of, of how long it will take to, um, to pay off that debt. Um, I guess on the risk side of things, it, it does have, you know, two or three big cus­tomers who can exert. Price con­trols. And so this kind of [01:04:00] dance between the insur­ance indus­try and their prof­it mar­gins, um, is def­i­nite­ly a risk if the insur­ance indus­try push­es back on some of the, the prices they’re charg­ing or the price increas­es they’re ask­ing for, for these EVs and more com­plex, um, uh, elec­tron­ics in cars that, uh, that could, um, hurt their mar­gins.
So all in all, um, we’re see­ing this in the US stocks, um, a lot that there, these are turn­around sto­ries, often car­ry­ing some debt, but throw­ing off lots of cash, which tends to cure debt from my expe­ri­ence and return­ing to prof­itabil­i­ty. So AMA back on the buy list and the def­i­nite turn­around sto­ry, have a look if you are, um, inter­est­ed in that, that kind of com­pa­ny.
Cameron: Thank you. TK did actu­al­ly have them in a light port­fo­lio, I think a year or so ago, and had to sell them when they broke through their three point sell line. Sold ’em at though, one of those rare times when I guess the, [01:05:00] uh, three PTL must have been going up and they’re still below where we sold ’em at though.
So it was a good sell, good call. I hate, uh, those sorts of busi­ness­es, you know, mechan­ics, den­tists, smash repairs. Just have a gen­er­al of dis­trust about the whole indus­try. What about you?
Tony Kynas­ton: Uh, well, no, I used to run a net­work of work­shops, so, um, there are some, cer­tain­ly some back­yard chunks out there, but, uh
Cameron: Wait, wait, wait, wait, What?
Tony Kynas­ton: not some smash repairs. I, uh, one, a long time ago I ran the auto care net­work for Shell in Queens­land and North­ern Ter­ri­to­ry. Yeah.
Cameron: Huh?
Tony Kynas­ton: doing, uh, mechan­i­cal repairs on cars and, um. You know, the ben­e­fit of going to a Shell Auto Care ser­vice sta­tion was the war­ran­ty, which was backed up by Shell and the process.
So there was a check­list, believe it or not, that the mechan­ics fol­lowed when they were [01:06:00] doing stan­dard ser­vic­ing, um, and a process for oth­er repairs if they were need­ed. Uh, yeah. So that was one of the major ben­e­fits, a check­list and the process and the fixed price.
Cameron: I am just skep­ti­cal that they know that dun­no what they’re talk­ing about. It’s like. Tech peo­ple, you know, it’s just like, oh, I’ll just throw some real­is­tic sound­ing jar­gon in here, and peo­ple will upgrade for a bet­ter, you know, more tires or bet­ter bumper bar, or what­ev­er it
Tony Kynas­ton: I think, that’s a short-lived busi­ness strat­e­gy. We cer­tain­ly had peo­ple in our net­work who tried that, but they did­n’t get repeat busi­ness if the cus­tomer was skep­ti­cal, like if, you know, the eas­i­est thing in the world is to put a car up on a hoist and say, Hey, you need four new tires, or a, a new muf­fler or what­ev­er.
Um, if, if gen­er­al­ly the cus­tomer’s kind of switched on and they think, oh, okay, if you’re rec­om­mend­ing that, but hey, I bought new tires last year and I’ve only dri­ven 20,000 Ks, what’s going on? So they don’t, they sort of ques­tion your ethics, I guess, and they don’t become [01:07:00] repeat cus­tomers, but the whole idea of, of hav­ing a net­work and a process was get­ting repeat cus­tomers.
If, if you knew you were going in and it was gonna cost 150 bucks for a ser­vice and it did. Um, yeah, that was, it was just, you come back next year and get the ser­vice with them again.
Cameron: Yeah, I’ve been with the same mechan­ic for, I don’t know, 10 years now. Actu­al­ly, I dun­no if I told you this, but there was a guy that um, used to be our mechan­ic and he’d come to our house and he was a
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.
Cameron: that we met and he was a him. So he would come here and do a mobile thing and then he retired, sold his busi­ness to his appren­tice. Um, guy who’d been train­ing under him for a few years and he’s had our busi­ness
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.
Cameron: since. But it is one of those things that if you do trust the per­son, you keep going back to them.
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Trust is very impor­tant.
Cameron: my den­tist ’cause I felt like he was scam­ming me, been with this one den­tist for 10 years and I think I put a new wing on his house and I was like, yeah, I am not sure. I’m just skep­ti­cal. [01:08:00] Alright, well, TK after hours. I’ll, I’ll kick it
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. I don’t have much,
Cameron: I don’t have much either. Did I talk to you about the Pogues last week? I’m
Tony Kynas­ton: no.
Cameron: to you about the Pogues. I’ve been get­ting back into the Pogues and the Popes, uh, Shane McGowan’s, post Pogues band, like the Pogues kicked him out at one point and he went to the Popes. Uh, always liked the Pogues, but you know, just had­n’t lis­tened to ’em for years. And then my CFUs at kung fu went to see the Pogues a cou­ple of weeks
Tony Kynas­ton: Ah,
Cameron: they were in Bris­bane. I
Tony Kynas­ton: yeah. Right.
Cameron: they’re still tour­ing. They’re like, yeah, yeah. They just all take turns singing the songs like they did when Shane was just one of my seafood.
Said she saw them in Bris­bane in 1990 and Shane just sat on the shad­ow on the chair and was just So they all sang his songs any­way, so it’s
Tony Kynas­ton: I saw ’em in 87, I think 86, 87 in Mel­bourne at Fes­ti­val Hall, and
Cameron: Right.
Tony Kynas­ton: was still hang­ing off the micro­phone, stand­ing [01:09:00] up with real­ly bad teeth and
Cameron: Yeah.
Tony Kynas­ton: with a, with a pint in his hand the whole time. It was great. Great con­cept.
Cameron: I’ve been learn­ing Fairy­tale of New York on the gui­tar, just try­ing to, so it’s so I can pull it out and play. But lis­ten­ing, get­ting back into the cat­a­log, both the Pogues and the Popes cat­a­logs just, just, um, incred­i­ble songs. Like, um, Dirty Old Town is
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.
Cameron: my head for the last few days for some rea­son. Any­way, I’ve enjoy­ing that. Um, after read­ing Sum­mit of Galileo, I think I told you last week, I was read­ing Galileo’s writ­ings. I’ve end­ed up get­ting a biog­ra­phy on Galileo that I’m read­ing. So I gave more of a per­spec­tive of where he came from and how he end­ed up in that, uh, doing all that sort of stuff, which is fun.
Did­n’t know, dun­no much about Galileo. He’ll prob­a­bly come up in the Renais­sance show, like he’s in Flo­rence. He’s, we’re doing well, we just took a break from Michelan­ge­lo and we’re doing witch­es and lep­ers at the moment. But, um, you know, he’s sort of a hun­dred years in the time­line ahead of us, I [01:10:00] guess. Uh, we’ll, we’ll get to him if we sur­vive long enough.
But, um, yeah, fas­ci­nat­ing Galileo’s sto­ry. And I just love, so I, I end­ed up read­ing one of his let­ters where he starts talk­ing about geo­cen­trism ver­sus, um, the oppo­site of that, what­ev­er it is. Sun, cen­trism, Helio. Yeah, that’s prob­a­bly it. And Coper­ni­cus, and it’s, it’s, it’s just an amaz­ing let­ter. So he’s writ­ing a let­ter to, I think a car­di­nal that he had met through some­body.
And his let­ter is fan­tas­tic. He’s like, well, of course God cre­at­ed the earth, the cen­ter of the uni­verse. Of course that’s true. And of course, of course the Bible is the inher­ent word of God. Absolute­ly. Let’s agree on that upfront. Hav­ing said that, and then he just starts to pick it apart. This whole argu­ment lev­el by, it’s a mar­velous piece of [01:11:00] writ­ing that was just mak­ing me laugh my ass off.
And then sort of read­ing the bio, real­iz­ing that before he became an astronomer, he was a math­e­mati­cian. And before he was a math­e­mati­cian. Like he stud­ied poet­ry and lit­er­a­ture and he was one of these guys like Da Vin­ci that was just
a mas­ter in 20 dif­fer­ent things. And um, so yeah, he could not only build a tele­scope, he could draw the moon, and then he could write let­ters, run­ning cir­cles around the great­est minds of the time.
Cameron: And, uh, I think I told you last time, I remem­ber read­ing in, in maybe his Wikipedia pro­file, I took in a AI about it that when he was placed under house arrest for his. Pub­lish­ing his stuff on Coper­ni­can­ism imme­di­ate­ly, he just sat down and start­ed writ­ing. They, they banned him from talk­ing about it. And he is like, sure, sure, sure.
And then sat down and start­ed writ­ing a book, uh, defend­ing it. But he was like, I did­n’t, I’m not real­ly defend­ing it, I’m just [01:12:00] point­ing out why it’s prob­a­bly less wrong than your
oth­er view. But I’m not, I’m not, I’m not pro­mo. He, he was banned from pro­mot­ing it. I’m not pro­mot­ing it. I’m just point­ing out why it’s less wrong.
You know, you got­ta got­ta admire that. It’s like that sto­ry of, um, Man­dela or his love, like when they were let­ting Man­dela out­ta jail after 27 years, and they said, the one promise you have to make is that you won’t go and. Talk shit about apartheid. He is like, absolute­ly. So they let him out. He got in a car and went straight to a ral­ly and talked shit about apartheid.
So they arrest­ed him and put him back in jail, but then they had to let him out a cou­ple of weeks lat­er. But I like how, imag­ine spend­ing 27 years in jail and the first thing you do when you get out is go and piss off the gov­ern­ment. So they’ll put you back in like
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.
Cameron: the cahones on that guy.
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.
Cameron: And we, I think we, [01:13:00] we are near­ly at the end of the House of the Drag­on where I think we’ve got Tay­lor, accord­ing to Tay­lor.
We have one episode left to go. We saw the joust
Tony Kynas­ton: it’s episode. j Oh, so you haven’t got­ten to the, the sev­en, what’s it called? The, the sev­en inquisi­tors or
the
Cameron: The tri­al of the sev­en. No, that’s the one we saw. That’s the one,
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.
Cameron: Yeah. I think for my mon­ey, prob­a­bly one of the most bru­tal hours of tele­vi­sion, or not even an hour, what­ev­er it is that I’ve ever seen, just. Absolute­ly gut-wrench­ing­ly
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.
Cameron: bru­tal, right? Even when he is hav­ing his flash­back, when he is a kid with his young friend, the girl, and they’re try­ing to get out of Flea Bot­tom or what­ev­er it is, and she just, and she gets her throat slipped.
I mean, just sor­ry for spoil­ers for peo­ple who ever watched it. Uh, yeah, just bru­tal, bru­tal hour of tv, what­ev­er it was.
Tony Kynas­ton: Mm. Oh,
But the, the char­ac­ters are great, aren’t they? The,
Cameron: oh, real­ly? Well done. Yeah. Real­ly well done.
Tony Kynas­ton: [01:14:00] that. Uh, the guy who’s, uh, always whin­ing and dying and comes to help him and fight the joust and Yeah, it’s incred­i­ble.
Cameron: the guy from The Gen­tle­men,
Tony Kynas­ton: yeah,
Cameron: yeah, he, he was the.
Tony Kynas­ton: the.
The Gen­tle­men. The dumb broth­er in The Gen­tle­men. Yeah. It’s basi­cal­ly the same role, except he’s got a bet­ter hel­met on this time. Yeah, yeah. He does that so well. He’d be a good, he’d be a good doc­tor or some­body like that. And then the oth­er thing I meant to men­tion is I, I caught a bit of, um, Bot­tom Live on YouTube the oth­er day.
Cameron: You know, Bot­tom, the old Rik May­all Edmond­son thing. I nev­er real­ly watched that series. I saw a cou­ple of episodes of it, I think on SBS or ABC or what­ev­er in the nineties, but I real­ly want to get a copy of it some­where and watch it. Just watch­ing them do it in front of a live audi­ence
was, uh, just tremen­dous.
Oh, real­ly? Yeah. Well, me either. But they had this shtick and peo­ple were say­ing it’s total­ly script­ed. They, they’re doing this thing live where. Uh, they [01:15:00] start fight­ing and argu­ing with each oth­er on stage about the play that they’re doing and they break char­ac­ter and they start snip­ing and then Rik turns on the audi­ence ’cause the audi­ence is cheer­ing Ade and Rik turns on them and starts attack­ing them and call­ing them bas­tards.
And peo­ple in the com­ments on YouTube was say­ing, I saw this, you know, I saw this, uh, them do this live a month lat­er at a dif­fer­ent venue. And it was exact­ly the same, you know, it was, it was all com­plete­ly script­ed, but made to look like it was spon­ta­neous and the whole thing. But any­way, yeah. Any­way, that’s it.
I was think­ing of that because we saw Ade in, what was he in? Oh, that, um, alien show. Yeah,
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah,
Cameron: yeah, yeah.
Tony Kynas­ton: good. Yeah. Poor old
Cameron: Alright.
Tony Kynas­ton: so that’s no good. Yeah. I mean, Rik, uh, I clips of him keep turn­ing up on YouTube and stuff that I watched, man. He was, I saw an inter­view with him talk­ing about Black­ad­der, his, um, cameo on Black­ad­der.
Flash. Lord what’s it
Lord Lord Flash­heart.
[01:16:00] Flash­heart. That’s right. Yeah.
Cameron: He said, I do. He said, lots of actors have a deep range. He said, I do one thing, ego. Yeah. That’s what I do. Just ego.
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. But, and there, there had, uh, Rowan Atkin­son say­ing, I always felt sor­ry for peo­ple that came on to Black­ad­der to do cameos, but, uh, not Rik. Rik. They said Rik’s one demand when he agreed to do it, was that he would get more laughs than Rowan did or, or some­thing. Any­way, what about you? What do you got?
Uh, not much. I’ve got?
you know, we’ve still been watch­ing all the stuff we’ve been work­ing through like Roost­er and Your Friends and Neigh­bors, but, um, think it was you who rec­om­mend­ed The Boys. I’m just lov­ing it. I’ve been stay­ing up late watch­ing episodes.
Cameron: Did you start at sea­son one? You had­n’t seen it?
Tony Kynas­ton: I
had­n’t
Cameron: Oh,
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, because I, like, when it came out, it did­n’t sort of appeal to me and then a lot of peo­ple said, oh, it’s okay, but very vio­lent and what­not.
So I nev­er got into it, but I’m [01:17:00] quite sad I did­n’t because it’s great. lov­ing
Cameron: That’s good.
Tony Kynas­ton: real­ly
Cameron: I’m actu­al­ly slight­ly sur­prised that you like it, but it’s good.
Tony Kynas­ton: Eliz­a­beth Shue’s fan­tas­tic in it.
Cameron: Oh, yeah.
Tony Kynas­ton: Karl Urban’s great in it.
Cameron: Yeah.
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. I, mean, he’s a Kiwi with an Eng­lish accent play­ing it like a Kiwi
play­ing
Cameron: okay.
Tony Kynas­ton: Eng­lish­man liv­ing in Amer­i­ca. It’s just great
Cameron: Yeah.
Tony Kynas­ton: Um,
and
Cameron: S.
Tony Kynas­ton: I, I dun­no if you noticed, but all of the. All of the actors who are in it kind of remind me of some­one who’s more famous as an actor. I dun­no if they were cast that way, but, uh, um, Translu­cent looks like, uh, oh, what’s his name? Um, the Eng­lish actor, Jude Law. And, um, guy who plays Home­lander looks like Chris, is it Chris Evans?
The, um, guy who played Jim Kirk in Star Trek, but they’re all, they all kin­da looka­likes in my mind any­way,
Cameron: Chris, uh, some­thing. Chris Evans is Cap­tain Amer­i­ca, I think.
Tony Kynas­ton: yeah. [01:18:00] Okay.
Yeah, well, did you know that the actor that plays Home­lander is actu­al­ly an Aussie?
no, I did­n’t.
Cameron: Yeah. So Karl Urban is a Kiwi
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.
Cameron: and Antony Starr is, um, oh no, he’s also a Kiwi. They’re both Kiwis.
Tony Kynas­ton: Okay.
That’s Yeah.
Yeah.
Cameron: And the girl who plays,
um,
Tony Kynas­ton: Or
Cameron: no Kimiko
Tony Kynas­ton: Okay.
Cameron: as Kimiko. Yeah. She’s the Mute.
Tony Kynas­ton: Asian.
Cameron: yes,
Tony Kynas­ton: yes, she has. Yeah.
Cameron: she’s an Aussie,
Tony Kynas­ton: Ah,
Cameron: uh, hold on. No, she’s not an Aussie. Okay, I get that. Uh, sor­ry. Some­body else is an Aussie any­way. Yeah, it’s full of Aussies and Kiwis.
Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.
right. good and like just lov­ing the sort of, um, cor­po­rate cyn­i­cism that’s going on.
But you
Cameron: Yeah.
Tony Kynas­ton: me of it, it just reminds me of mythol­o­gy. It’s like, it’s like that, uh, series that gob­lin was in
chaos.
Cameron: Yeah. [01:19:00] Yeah,
Tony Kynas­ton: You know, the gods don’t care at all for humans. They just ants that they can manip­u­late and kill and,
Cameron: yeah.
Tony Kynas­ton: they fight amongst them­selves and there’s all pow­er strug­gles and it’s just great.
Cameron: And I think, as I prob­a­bly told you last week, the longer the series goes on, it becomes a bit samey after a while, but the longer it goes on, the more they just lean into MAGA and Trump’s Amer­i­ca. So they’re, yeah, they’re basi­cal­ly by this stage where we’re up to the, they’re basi­cal­ly just, you know, they’ve turned Home­lander into Trump and, uh, you know, they basi­cal­ly, they’re just lean­ing into the cyn­i­cal manip­u­la­tion of the pop­u­la­tion under reli­gion and patri­o­tism and the whole thing, just straight up sort of glossy cor­po­rate fas­cism.
Tony Kynas­ton: Yep. Any­way, thanks for that. I, I stayed up late last night. Last night watch­ing it.
Cameron: I was watch­ing an episode, the lat­est episode in bed last night too.
Tony Kynas­ton: Uh, I was­n’t in bed, but, [01:20:00] but Jen’s away at the moment, so, um,
yeah. Could, uh, on the couch for many hours going through episodes. It was great.
Cameron: Hmm. Got any­thing else for me?
Tony Kynas­ton: Uh, I’m going to be away May 27, so I’m up on the Gold Coast at the brood­mare sales, so sell­ing Dou­ble Mar­ket up there
and, you’re sell­ing Dou­ble Mar­ket buy­ing Triple Mar­ket, Dou­ble Mar­ket’s not good enough any­more.
uh, hope­ful­ly she’s good enough. And then, um, we have anoth­er horse that Steve Mabb and I have shares in, called Char­lie 99. It’s off to be geld­ed, so, um, lucky that Char­lie’s not around to about that.
Cameron: Well, speak­ing of which, I’m gonna be in the Gold Coast next Tues­day. Um. After the show to attend the Gold Coast Pre­mier, the Aus­tralian Pre­mier of the New Mor­tal Kom­bat film with Hunter,
which Karl Urban stars in. So
Karl, Karl Urban’s gonna be there.
Tony Kynas­ton: ah,
Cameron: [01:21:00] Um, so yeah,
Tony Kynas­ton: oh. Say hi to from me. He’s doing the great,
Cameron: I will,
Tony Kynas­ton: job as Butch­er.
Cameron: I’m gonna have to, um, uh, get out­ta the show real­ly quick­ly next Tues­day in order to get a share.
Have a show­er and get out­ta here.
Tony Kynas­ton: great than The Boys too. Like they have the butt bomb
to kill.
Cameron: Oh, it’s all, it’s all like, you know, Seth Rogen is the exec­u­tive pro­duc­er behind it, so it’s all, you know, lots of crude, filthy, yeah. Com­e­dy and Yeah. Um, sort of, uh, gra­tu­itous sex and vio­lence as the show goes on.
Tony Kynas­ton: now I’m enjoy­ing it. Thank you. Thanks
for the ref­er­ence. I would’ve just nev­er
Cameron: very pure and, and, sil­ly in places, but.
Tony Kynas­ton: Hmm.
Cameron: Okay, well, let’s get on, uh, got a tricky one for the Amer­i­can Show, A stock that I could­n’t buy until I get your approval.
So
it’s a, it’s a, MRP. We’ll talk about it, um, in the next show.
Tony Kynas­ton: All
Cameron: Have a good week. Thank TK. Thank
Tony Kynas­ton: Bye. [01:22:00]
Cameron: you every­one.