Hi folks,

The All Ordi­nar­ies con­tin­ued its down­ward tra­jec­to­ry over the past five days, slid­ing from around 8,950 to close near 8,887, rep­re­sent­ing a decline of approx­i­mate­ly 1.5%, as the “ASX heads for longest los­ing streak since 2018 as oil pass­es $US124” (source).

The S&P 500, on the oth­er hand, con­tin­ues to act like a meth addict on the Titan­ic. In this case, the meth is the Mag7. It rose 1.42% to close around 7,209. “Basi­cal­ly, it is com­put­er chip stocks – and almost noth­ing else – that have lift­ed the mar­ket from its wartime lows and back to record highs, as investors bet that demand for AI chips can run for many years” (source).

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

“This Time It’s Different”

There’s a line in invest­ing, usu­al­ly attrib­uted to Sir John Tem­ple­ton, that the four most expen­sive words in the Eng­lish lan­guage are: “This time it’s dif­fer­ent.”

I think about that one a lot.

Long-time lis­ten­ers to the QAV pod­cast will remem­ber that one of Aus­trali­a’s most respect­ed finance com­men­ta­tors once said exact­ly those words to us, on air, with a com­plete­ly straight face. He was wrong. They almost always are.

The phrase gets pulled out when­ev­er a new tech­nol­o­gy, a new eco­nom­ic par­a­digm, or a new busi­ness mod­el is being sold as the rea­son it’s now safe to throw out the rule book. AI today. Cryp­to in 2021. The “new econ­o­my” in 1999. The Nifty Fifty in 1972. Rail­roads in 1869. The South Sea Com­pa­ny in 1720. Tulips in 1637.

We don’t buy it.

As Tony likes to say, his­to­ry may not repeat but it rhymes. (He stole that from Mark Twain, who almost cer­tain­ly nev­er said it. Either way, the point holds.)

There are always new busi­ness mod­els and par­a­digm shifts that are the flavour of the month. So far, none of them have fun­da­men­tal­ly changed the basic prin­ci­ples behind invest­ing — which is to find com­pa­nies that are well run, that know how to make a dol­lar, and to only buy them when you can get them at a dis­count.

I Was There For The Last One

Tony and I were both around for the dot-com boom in the late 90s. We remem­ber the hype. We remem­ber being told all the rules were obso­lete because the inter­net had changed every­thing.

And here’s the thing: it had. Sort of.

The inter­net real­ly did rev­o­lu­tionise large parts of the econ­o­my. Ama­zon and Google emerged from that era and pro­duced tril­lions of dol­lars in share­hold­er val­ue. But that did­n’t mean every dot-com start­up was a good invest­ment. Most of them were spec­tac­u­lar­ly bad ones.

Between March 2000 and Octo­ber 2002, the Nas­daq fell from 5,048 to 1,114. A drop of about 78%. Pets.com, Web­van, eToys, Boo.com, Koz­mo, Flooz — all vapourised. Com­pa­nies that had been val­ued at bil­lions on the strength of a slide deck and a clever URL went to zero.

I was per­son­al­ly invest­ed in a num­ber of those star­tups. Friends of mine were run­ning and float­ing them dur­ing those heady days, with huge dreams of build­ing dot-com empires that all end­ed in dust like the king­dom of Ozy­man­dias.

I had a front-row seat in Sil­i­con Val­ley dur­ing those years. And I can tell you with con­fi­dence that the loud­est voic­es sell­ing the future had no more idea whether they were right than you or I did. They just had more con­fi­dence in pro­mot­ing their ideas. That’s not insight. That’s mar­ket­ing.

When peo­ple get caught up in the hype of a par­a­digm shift, it’s easy to for­get that the peo­ple sell­ing them the brave new world are mak­ing it up as they go along.

So What Is A Quality Business?

The ques­tion every “this time it’s dif­fer­ent” pitch tries to dodge is this: how do you tell the real busi­ness­es from the hype machines?

Is it the qual­i­ty of the slide deck? The pro­mo­tion­al video? The amount of ven­ture cap­i­tal raised? The mar­ket cap the day after the IPO?

Obvi­ous­ly not. We can all rat­tle off a list of very flashy, very splashy com­pa­nies that did­n’t sur­vive their own hype cycle.

A ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist once told an audi­ence I was sit­ting in, back in the late 90s: “A big vision and 50 cents will buy you a cup of cof­fee.”

What mat­ters is exe­cu­tion. Can you turn that vision into a real busi­ness? And the only hon­est way to answer that ques­tion is to look at the out­put.

The out­put takes the form of finan­cial reports. What did the busi­ness actu­al­ly pro­duce in the last 12 months? Two years? Three years? Five years?

That’s where the rub­ber meets the road. And it does­n’t mat­ter what tech­no­log­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion or busi­ness mod­el inno­va­tion is sup­pos­ed­ly dri­ving your sec­tor. At the end of the day, for a com­pa­ny to be a suc­cess­ful invest­ment, it needs to be mak­ing mon­ey. Real mon­ey. The kind that shows up in the cash flow state­ment, not the kind that lives in a pitch deck.

Why We Anchor On Operating Cash Flow

This is why QAV’s pri­ma­ry val­ue met­ric is oper­at­ing cash flow. Not earn­ings. Not adjust­ed EBITDA. Not “annu­alised recur­ring rev­enue at scale.” Oper­at­ing cash flow.

Cash is hard­er to fake than almost any oth­er line on the finan­cial state­ments. A com­pa­ny can tell you a beau­ti­ful sto­ry about its future. It can man­age its earn­ings with­in account­ing rules. It can find cre­ative ways to describe its loss­es. But it has a much hard­er time invent­ing the cash that phys­i­cal­ly lands in its bank account each quar­ter.

When AI is the next big thing — and right now, it very much is — the same rules apply. A hand­ful of real busi­ness­es will emerge from the cur­rent cycle and pro­duce cash for decades. Hun­dreds more will look iden­ti­cal from the out­side, until the music stops.

The QAV check­list does­n’t care which sec­tor is in vogue. It cares whether the num­bers stack up.

That’s why we don’t get caught up in “this time it’s dif­fer­ent.”

Because every time, it isn’t.

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 AMA. 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) 2026-04-25

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

QAV Val­ue Invest­ing Buy List 2026-04-26

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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 14.5%, while the ASX 200 bench­mark returned around 8.4%.

Month­ly Report: Over the past 30 days, the QAV AU port­fo­lio deliv­ered a return of approx­i­mate­ly +2.8%, while the ASX 200 bench­mark gained around +1.5%.

No changes to our port­fo­lio this week.

For FY26: Over the finan­cial year to date, the QAV AU port­fo­lio deliv­ered a return of approx­i­mate­ly 18.3%, while the ASX 200 bench­mark gained around 5.0%.

QAV LIGHT

All Time

Over the all-time peri­od, the QAV AU Light port­fo­lio deliv­ered a return of approx­i­mate­ly 19.2%, while the ASX 200 bench­mark returned around 9.9%.

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Financial Year to Date

Over the finan­cial year to date, the QAV AU Light port­fo­lio deliv­ered a return of approx­i­mate­ly 26.9%, while the ASX 200 bench­mark gained around 5.0%.

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Last 30 Days

Over the past 30 days, the QAV AU Light port­fo­lio deliv­ered a return of approx­i­mate­ly 2.8%, while the ASX 200 bench­mark fell around ‑0.1%.

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Last 12 Months

Over the last 12 months, the QAV AU Light port­fo­lio deliv­ered a return of approx­i­mate­ly 31.5%, while the ASX 200 bench­mark gained around 11.2%.

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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: We know where to drop your line.

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

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AMERICAN

QAV DUMMY

Since incep­tion (Sep 2023), our port­fo­lio is +110% vs the S&P 500 +62%.

Over the last 30 days our port­fo­lio is +10% vs the S&P 500 +10%.

No trades this week.

QAV LIGHT

Since incep­tion (Dec 2025), our port­fo­lio is +11% vs the S&P 500 +4.81%. Over the last 30 days our port­fo­lio is +8.87% vs the S&P 500 +10%.

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THIS WEEK’S EPISODES

Crash and Bash — QAV AU 917

The $3.6 Bil­lion Illu­sion (MRP) – QAV Amer­i­ca #50

STOCK NEWS AND UPDATES

COMMODITIES

This week the big changes to com­modi­ties were the fol­low­ing:

Com­mod­i­ty	Sta­tus
Crude Oil	BUY
Steel	BUY

DISCLOSURE

Please review our trad­ing and dis­clo­sure pol­i­cy.

SIGNING OFF

Keep buy­ing qual­i­ty com­pa­nies at dis­count prices, keep fol­low­ing the check­list, and trust that Mr Mar­ket will even­tu­al­ly come to his sens­es. Here’s a poster you can print out and stick to your wall to keep you on track.

SSDD!

• Cam

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That’s it for the week!

QAV A GOOD SHAREMARKET!

Got a ques­tion? [email protected]