This week Tony’s back from the horse sales and dives straight into a Pulled Pork on WEB Travel Group, the B2B hotel bed-banking business spun out of the old Webjet. In the Club episode, we also cover negative gearing changes and how they compare to what Paul Keating tried in the late 1980s, plus a listener question on Servcorp’s recent price wobble, portfolio comparison notes from listener Toby, and the usual after-hours chat covering Topgolf, Bugonia, Spider Noir, and the eternal genius of Steve Austin running in slow motion.
This week’s full episode is for QAV Club members only. The free episode is available below. Also check out our podcast archives link and our pages on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or watch clips on TikTok. Or visit our homepage to learn more about QAV and how it works as a value investing system that you can learn and apply to beat the market.
Transcription
QAV AU 922
[00:00:00]
Cameron: Look who’s back in the studio for QAV 922. It’s our Wagga studio. The, uh,
yeah, the.
Tony Kynaston: studio
Cameron: Yes. Regional QAV. How are you, TK?
Tony Kynaston: Good. Yeah, yeah. Relaxed after a holiday. Lots of travel though, so it’s good to have a, have a bed for the, the same bed for a couple of nights in a row
Cameron: Right. And how did the horse sales, buying, whatever you were doing go?
Tony Kynaston: Well, it was as wet as the weather. It, uh, s- we sold, I sold one, but not for what we’d hoped, and the other one’s passed in, so we’re looking at ways of selling her in the coming weeks or months.
Cameron: Did you buy anything?
Tony Kynaston: or keeping and, and breeding. Uh, no, didn’t buy anything. That’s the only. That’s the one good upside. I wasn’t surrounded by trainers trying to get me to buy a horse ’cause I just sold one, is the usual result you
Cameron: Right. H- hey, uh, [00:01:00] did you listen to my American show last week?
Tony Kynaston: No, I haven’t yet. Was it
Cameron: I, it was a shame you weren’t on it because,
Tony Kynaston: ever.
Cameron: we were, I was talking about a company, uh, and the founder of it, after he left the company, uh, got into the thoroughbred horse business, thoroughbred horse business.
Tony Kynaston: Right
Cameron: he also got himself. He’s also 93 and going through about a dozen sexual harassment trials, so there’s that part of it which hopefully you don’t relate to.
But the other part of it I thought you would’ve liked.
And then he put his daughter in charge of it. Here’s a tip for you. Don’t put Alex in charge of your horse breeding business because he ended up suing his daughter for mismanagement. So lessons, lessons to be learned.
Tony Kynaston: Yeah.
Cameron: Alex into horses?
Tony Kynaston: No, she, she does not like going to the races at all. Mm.
Cameron: Yeah. You know, I. Good for her.
Tony Kynaston: abiding by the law that, of how to make a small fortune in the racing industry. with a big fortune,
Cameron: start with a big one?
Tony Kynaston: horses.
Cameron: Yeah. I saw, I saw a post on, uh, [00:02:00] the value investing subreddit the other day is, um, “I got my portfolio to $200,000 in the last 90 days and I wanna tell you how I did it.” And at the end of it, it was, “Oh, by the way, I started with 500,000.” Yeah.
Tony Kynaston: Oh, very good.
Cameron: Hey, before we get into investing, uh, I got a, Taylor just called me. I thought you’d like this story. He said that his flatmate, Adam, who he manages, um, was, went across the road to the apartment building where Amy lives, Taylor’s old girlfriend, to pick up, uh, somebody that he was going out with, a girl or whatever or something.
He’s walking through the foyer, and coming the other way is Johnny Drama from, really? k- who apparently lives there. And no, but they, they’d just finished watching Entourage, the boys, so he’s like, “Johnny Drama!” Which I’m sure Kevin Dillon hates. Maybe he doesn’t, maybe he does, I don’t know.
It’s probably the only role he’s really known for, apart from Platoon.
Yeah, so they live across the road from Johnny Drama. I [00:03:00] th- thought you’d like that.
Tony Kynaston: That’s fantastic.
Cameron: probably my favorite cha– Yeah, I think he was my fa- apart from Ari Gold, he was my favorite character in the show, Johnny Drama. He was so. You know, like, yeah, he was just kind of pathetic,
Tony Kynaston: Yeah.
Cameron: always, always wishing he was bigger than he was.
Uh,
season, Tony. On the show last week, I reminded everybody and myself that, uh, we’re in the, what used to be known as, uh, confession season. It’s the, uh, Prince version of confession season, formerly known as confession season, which, as seems to be just, yeah, just don’t say anything and yeah. It’s a question mark.
It’s just a question mark. Are they gonna, are they gonna meet their projections or not? We don’t know.
Tony Kynaston: It’s,
Cameron: Um, so I’m not buying anything at the moment, and I told people that.
Tony Kynaston: okay. Yeah. Well, uh, okay. I thought we, I thought we [00:04:00] weren’t buying in the month before the results came out. Is not the roof?
Cameron: Well, isn’t this the month before r- results come out?
Tony Kynaston: No, it’s the month before the results finish, and they get two months before the numbers are, are produced and, and released.
Cameron: Ah, goddammit, how did it. Okay. All right, scrap everything I just said then, people. Buy away. Go nuts. Go crazy.
Tony Kynaston: Yeah.
Cameron: Right.
Tony Kynaston: are, I
Cameron: July.
Tony Kynaston: on old figures, but we’ve got another couple of months before we get new ones.
Cameron: All right. Well, I got another month to buy stuff then. Um, thank you for clarifying that. There you go. Six years, I still don’t know when confession season is.
Um, well, that leads me into my next thing. You ever heard of Philip Tetlock?
Tony Kynaston: No.
Cameron: Philip Tetlock’s a Canadian American political psychologist who wrote a book in 2005 called Expert Political Judgment or something, um, I’ve been reading, where he spent 20 y- well, he didn’t spend 20 years. He was at Berkeley, and he studied 20 years of [00:05:00] predictions from over 82,000 economic and political experts, and then to see how they panned out, and came to the conclusion that they had about the same chances of getting it right as guessing, or a chimp throwing darts at a dartboard, as everyone said.
He came up with another book called Superforecasting, which I’ve also bought, which I’ll read after this one.
Tony Kynaston: That’s a great book.
Cameron: Right. So there you go. Well, it’s, it’s, that was sort of the sequel.
Tony Kynaston: years ago? Yeah.
Cameron: Yeah, it was like 10 years later, I think 2015 he came out with that one.
Tony Kynaston: Yeah. Good book.
Cameron: Yes. Well, there you go. I, I can’t even predict when confession season is, so, um, there you go.
I predict that
Tony Kynaston: along every six months.
Cameron: Thought it was June. How, how I thought it was the end of the, like, the last month of the reporting period. There you go. Well, I’m glad you picked me up on that. See, this is what happens. You go away for a week, and I get everything wrong.
Tony Kynaston: everything? [00:06:00] Yep.
Cameron: I forget everything. Yeah. Yeah. Toby. I wanna shout out to Toby, who sent me his portfolio results for, mm, I guess the year.
No, up till now, I guess. Since his conception. Conception? Inception. Not since his conception. I don’t know. Maybe he conceived something. But the, portfolio. it. He, uh, Toby started his portfolio February ’22, which is when I started the first light portfolio. Now, the first light portfolio is 221. Since inception, it is up 5.71% versus 8, 9% for the, uh, 8.5% for the SPDR.[00:07:00]
So it’s still underperforming. It was underperforming by 15% at one point. He started it in the same month, but his portfolio is up 19%.
Tony Kynaston: Well, Toby, uh, if you’re free on Tuesdays, um, Cameron, Cam- Cameron will be taking a long holiday.
Cameron: Oh, there you go. That’s, that’s, that’s loyalty for you, people. Um, so if I look at his chart it looks very much like mine for the first, um, mm, couple of years. Like, it was seriously underperforming as well, sort of 2023, 2024. But then started to improve from, mm, like, uh, early 2024 actually onwards. Whereas mine [00:08:00] didn’t really start to improve greatly until late 2025.
So I, I had a look at, I asked him to send me a list of the current holdings that he’s got, and very different to mine. Some overlap, but very different stocks. So, um, he said probably did 70 trades and a bit less the year before. Last year, sorry, last financial year probably did about 70 trades, bit less the year before.
Been flat this year except a few recent, uh, ones recently. Flat in terms of, um, trading, I think. No trading.
Tony Kynaston: 70 trades.
Cameron: port- Yeah. Well, that was, you know, 2022, 2023. You know, it was kind of, remember the, what did we call it? The,
um,
Tony Kynaston: This
Cameron: one cycle of death or something? Spiral of death. Yeah. But, um, interestingly too, looking at our two portfolios, mine has been declining since January.
It, it w- [00:09:00] it pipped a- got peaked above the SPDR in January a- and then has been falling ever since. His also has been falling since January, but, um, he was way above it at the time. So, you know, he’s come back a few points, but, um, he was way above it. So just, like, it’s interesting because I was doing some analysis, um, just last week of the live portfolios.
The, the second live portfolio that I started in April 2022 is up 13% since then, versus 8% for the SPDR. The third one, which I started in August 2022, is up 24% versus 10% for the SPDR. And the last one, which I started November 22, is up 25% versus 9.8. So, [00:10:00] uh, you know, I know that, that, that first couple of months made all the d- made all the difference in a negative sense for that first portfolio.
But he started his the same month and it’s doing really, really well. S- so it wasn’t actually the month, uh, it was just, you know, the stocks. And, and it still did badly. So at some point he’s, he’s replaced the stocks with different stocks than I replaced for some reason. And, um, you know, it’s made all the difference.
So I just thought, interesting, the system worked for Toby starting the same month that I started it. Worked better for him than it did for me. So it’s just really, uh, like. Well, well, well, let me, I won’t say what it is. What do you, what, what, what would you deduce from that, Watson?
Tony Kynaston: Oh, I’ve, I’ve always thought that starting dates matter in terms of returns and, um, someone claims a number, I look when they started because, you know, if you start in [00:11:00] 2007 before the GFC, you get a lot, you get a very different result to starting just after the GFC or for dotcom booms, the same for COVID, all that kind of stuff.
So I think starting dates do matter. Um, that, I think it’s possibly just random because it depends on. There is, well, I shouldn’t say random. so many variables at play over the last five or six years in terms of when you sold something, when you bought something, what sell? What did you buy?
Um, that it just, it, it just, you know, I, I don’t know whether his performance is the upper outlier and your performance is the lower outlier or, you know, whether we take the average of both to say that’s what the result should have been. It’s, it’s, you know, hard to say.
Cameron: Well, I tell you what I noticed straight away looking down his list. The stocks, you know, um, so I had four portfolios running for tho- that period of time, and if I had to, you know, there was quite often times when I had to replace stocks in different [00:12:00] portfolios in the same week, and which portfolios the new stocks ended up in was just random, right?
Tony Kynaston: Right.
Cameron: So my three portfolios that are outperforming hold PRN, hold NWH.
Tony Kynaston: Right.
Cameron: Um, the f- the first one doesn’t, right? Uh, what else has he got in here? KAR. Um, I’m sure I’ve got KAR and it’s not in 223. Yeah, KAR, oh, that hasn’t done that well since I added. Okay, skip KAR. But PRN has had a. Yeah, PRN’s had a great run, right?
Tony Kynaston: Yep. It
Cameron: As we all know.
Tony Kynaston: own it.
Cameron: So
Tony Kynaston: So it’s,
Cameron: the,
Tony Kynaston: whether or not you
Cameron: yeah.
Tony Kynaston: ship stock. Yeah.
Cameron: Yes. Yeah, NWH, which is in my second portfolio, is up 163%, uh, PA since I added it, right? So, you know, if [00:13:00] I’d put that in my first portfolio instead of in my second portfolio. When did I buy that? Um, yeah, May, oh, May ’25. Oh, okay, just last year, and it’s up 163% per annum. Geez. So yeah, uh, if I’d put that in a different portfolio, it would’ve done really well.
So it is a little bit of, I, I think he had one portfolio versus my four that I’ve ended up scattering stocks across, you know?
Tony Kynaston: Well, what’s the average for the
Cameron: But
Tony Kynaston: It’d, it’d still be doing okay, wouldn’t it?
Cameron: Oh, yeah. So th- the average
Tony Kynaston: in a portfolio, I guess.
Cameron: Well, the funny thing is the average of my four light portfolios is pretty much the same as his one portfolio. It’s 19.5%.
Tony Kynaston: Yeah, right.
Cameron: over that period of time. But they all started in 2022,
Tony Kynaston: Mm-hmm.
Cameron: there is some overlap between them. But, um, [00:14:00] yeah, 19.5 versus 9.8 for the index. So it’s doing double, the four of them combined are doing double market.
Tony Kynaston: Rock.
Cameron: let me see how many I’ve got. One, two. See, ANZ’s held in three of those. ASG is held in three of those. BFG, BFL, BOL, BRK are in two each. CLX, CVL, DUR are, are in two or three each. EHL, FEX. There’s quite a lot of overlap between them for some reason.
Tony Kynaston: So
Cameron: But, um
Tony Kynaston: 80 stocks across the four is what we’re starting with. 80 individual stocks.
Cameron: Yeah. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42. I’ve got 42 stocks across four portfolios.
Tony Kynaston: Okay. And
Cameron: and in the first portfolio, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, [00:15:00] 10, 11, 12, 13 in the first one.
Tony Kynaston: Okay, so perhaps the first one’s
Cameron: So it doesn’t even have a f-
Tony Kynaston: yeah
might be just a little bit too concentrated, which lowers your chance of getting onto a PRN, I suppose. Do you know what
Cameron: Yeah, and I don’t know
Tony Kynaston: stocks does he hold?
Cameron: Yeah, currently he’s got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.
Tony Kynaston: Right.
Cameron: So yeah, I don’t know why. I, I mean, I, it looks like I’ve got two parcels maybe of WGN, which has actually done okay. It’s up 125%. Couple of parcels of CLV. Oh, no, maybe just one. It’s up 90%.
Tony Kynaston: Right.
Cameron: Um, anyway, yeah, so it’s a little bit concentrated for some reason.
Maybe there just wasn’t much to buy when I was, uh, having to replace things back in 2022, 2023. Anyway, bottom [00:16:00] line is, I thought that was really interesting, and I thanked, and will thank Toby again for sharing that, ’cause it just proves that, you know, at the end of the day, it’s a little bit about which stocks you end up putting in, right?
Tony Kynaston: Well,
Cameron: Little bit of luck of the draw.
Tony Kynaston: Yeah, but I s- I suspect, um, that the light port, number one light portfolio will improve given, it has improved and will improve given
Cameron: Oh, I do too. Yeah, yeah.
Tony Kynaston: Yeah.
Cameron: Yeah. Like, as I said, it was, it was underperforming by 15% at one point. Now it’s underf- underperforming by 2.8%, so it’s caught up a long way, and it was ahead of it, uh, a couple of months ago. So yeah, give it another five years and I’m sure it’ll be singing. But, um, it’s the one that’s letting me down at the moment.
Tony Kynaston: Mm-hmm.
Cameron: Not a big deal. Uh, question f- I’ve got a couple of [00:17:00] questions. Uh, do you want me to do those or do you want to do some of your talking points first? You’ve just got a Pulled Pork, right?
Tony Kynaston: A Pulled Pork, yeah.
Cameron: No talking points apart from playing golf and wet weather. Hmm.
Tony Kynaston: day about golf if you like, but you don’t want that.
Cameron: How’s the back doing? The back’s okay?
Tony Kynaston: No, back’s a bit sore today. We played yesterday, so
Cameron: Hmm.
Tony Kynaston: just, just kinda managing.
Cameron: Hmm.
Tony Kynaston: Mm.
Cameron: Right. Is it, is Ruddy giving you lots of massages?
Tony Kynaston: No, thank goodness he’s not. That would, that would be a pr- That would be a s- I don’t know what to describe that as. It would, it wouldn’t be fun.
Cameron: Michael, uh, “Hi Cam and Tony, love the show. Listen religiously.” Uh, Domine pater, filii, et Spiritui Sancti there, Michael. Uh, “Question around negative gearing, and if we should rush in to make changes, as history may just repeat itself or it could be different this time. [00:18:00] Recap, Paul Keating reversed his own decision to abolish negative gearing in September 1987.
He reversed the decision as Australia experienced a tightening in the housing market and a shortage of residential rental properties, leading to rising rents. In his 1987 budget speech, Keating stated that reversing the policy was necessary to restore investment symmetry and encourage the supply of residential accommodation.
Thank you, Michael.” Um, I don’t understand Michael’s question at all, Tony. Do you understand that question?
Tony Kynaston: I, I, I thought the question was, are we gonna see a drop in housing prices because of the budget changes or projected budget changes? They still haven’t been enacted into law yet, so they could change again during, um, the passage through parliament. But, um, so back in the ’80s, uh, late ’80s, Keating, uh, the change he made was to scrap negative gearing entirely, uh, which [00:19:00] was diff– is different to what’s being proposed by the budget.
So, Keating, uh, stopped rental losses being used as rebates against other income, like wages, for example. He did continue to allow rental losses to be offset against other rental income gains, um, and against capital gains. So there was some similarities, but his, um, rescinding of negative gearing was a lot more widespread than the current budget, uh, So what happened in the late ’80s was that because, uh, land– uh, because landlords were happy to buy a property and then negatively gear it, weren’t that concerned about making sure that the rent covered their costs. And as soon as they lost negative gearing, the rents went up. So they rebalanced from negative yield to positive yield, and that was a backlash which caused, uh, Paul Keating to, uh, put negative gearing back in place. Um, different this time because [00:20:00] the budget contemplates allowing negative gearing against new builds, so new construction of, of housing and apartments. it also, provides grandfathering for existing property owners, so they can continue to, uh, claim negative gearing on their tax returns. And, um, it, it also, um, still allows for losses to be carried forward and offset against income and capital gains.
So that’s a, a lot– it’s a lot narrower in what it’s doing compared to what Paul Keating did. said all that, um, I still think there will be a rise in rental yields, uh, but it may be more muted than, um, than the past. So the risks as I see it are that, new builds don’t meet the rental market supply, and that forces renters to– back into established housing therefore rents go up.
So there’s more demand for the established housing market, so rents are gonna go up there. And I also see [00:21:00] that it’s, um, longer term it’s foreseeable that as owners of established housing change hands and they become exempt from negative gearing, the new owners raise the rent. So I– it, it could wind up being like it was in 1987, but it may take longer ’cause we’ve gotta wait for who are grandfathered to sell to, to new people who can’t claim negative gearing. Um, but I certainly see a huge risk in undersupply in the new construction market, which is happening now. So it’s not– not making any sort of prediction. It’s actually happening now. so, that’s gonna cause people to still seek rentals in the in the established housing market, which will force rents up there too.
Um, but there are also other secondary effects which, um, I don’t think. probably– they won’t reveal themselves for a while, but they may happen, and that is that, um Uh, negative gearing is still allowed against shares, and so that may boost the share ownership. Uh, people might start to direct more of their [00:22:00] investment income into shares rather than property. Um, that’s– I think that’s what the government hopes for ’cause it will lower the price of housing, which will let more people buy houses. Um, it may also take more landlords out of the market as well. renting may, may still be a constrained market and therefore the rents may still remain high. Um, and it’s also negative gearing is still allowed against commercial property, um, the changes that are envisaged. And so that may boost property syndication models and who are now happy to buy a house and rent it out might decide to enter into a syndicated pool and buy a service station or a Seven-Eleven or a chain of, um, or a warehouse or whatever. And so that may change the nature of property investing for, um, investments rather than for owner-occupied. So there’s a few things that have to play out there. Um, and I don’t think that what’s been proposed in the budget is necessarily locked in as law at this stage. That’s the [00:23:00] other, uh, hard thing to, um, to come to terms with yet.
And then the market’s kind of sitting on the sidelines waiting for the law to be enacted because, um, there are possible changes coming through. There’s a lot of feedback. A lot of people are saying, “Well, understand the government’s trying to make it easier for first-home buyers to enter the housing market. does adding more capital gains tax to a small business, achieve that?” And of course, it doesn’t, so there may be some changes there as well. Um, then of course, the big wildcard is whatever gets passed into legislation now get amended in next year’s budget or in the year after before an election if there’s an– if there is indeed a negative, um, enough negative opposition to it.
Um, much the same as it happened when Keating brought in– uh, removed negative gearing. He then had to put it back two years later. and of course, you know, the latest polls are saying that, uh, anyone disaffected with the current budget is going to vote for One Nation. Whether that actually transpires or not, it’s certainly putting pressure on the government to, [00:24:00] um, to either rethink what they’re doing or change what they’re doing to put in place what they’ve contemplated, but then maybe amend it before the next election.
So a lot of moving parts there, I know, Michael. Um, really answer your question. Uh, I do think it’s– that this time it’s different to what happened when Paul Keating took negative gea- negative gearing away for a couple of years in the late eighties.
Cameron: So what’s Pauline going to do when she’s the PM? That’s the question that we all need to ask.
Tony Kynaston: Well, she’s
Cameron: Queensland’s revenge.
Tony Kynaston: she’s gonna say, “Gina, what should I do?” I don’t think there’ll be
Cameron: Oh, dear me.
Tony Kynaston: uh, when Pauline takes over.
Cameron: Hmm. Taylor, uh, saw something about the polling, um, from LA and he sent me a text going, “What the hell is going on over there?” And I said, “This is what happens when millennials get all of their information from TikTok.”
Tony Kynaston: [00:25:00] Yeah, well, possibly. it’s. I’ve gotta say the government, the leadership in the government hasn’t been great at selling change. They, they didn’t get the, um, voice to parliament referendum up, and now they’ve tried some moderate changes, I would say moderate to the tax system, and they’re, they’re tripping at the first hurdle.
So, um, yeah, remains to be seen
Cameron: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Tony Kynaston: will actually happen.
Cameron: Hmm. All right. Well, thank you, Tony. Thank you, Michael. Uh, Sc- only other question I’ve got is from Scott. This was a late one he sent through this morning. “Hey, Cameron, take a peek at Servcorp. I bought it in April, and it dropped pretty quick, then hovered around 7 to 10% off my buy price before jumping 11% or so on Friday last week in some after-market closed trades.
Went quickly back today, dropping about 5%. Scott.” Do you have any insights into what’s happening in [00:26:00] Servcorp, Tony?
Tony Kynaston: had a drill around for about an hour today trying to work it out, but I can’t see, uh, anything that has caused the price to move quickly than a couple of things which are more broader. So back in, at the end of January, they came out and said that they were going to upgrade their on profit. So, um, that was upgraded from a range of seventy-two to seventy-six million to, uh, a range of eighty to eighty-four million, and that gave the sh- the shares a bit of a rocket. They also forecasted they were going to increase their dividend from thirty cents to thirty-two. So, uh, that was all good in terms of, um, pushing the share price up. they did release their latest results, they, um, flagged that, uh, indeed, uh, their sales had gone up a lot and that they were expanding quickly. But the analysts picked up on the fact that their margins had come down a little bit, um, largely [00:27:00] driven by marketing costs of eight percent and a three percent wage rise due to inflation. Um, and margin decline was only from sixteen and a half percent to fifteen point seven percent. So personally, I wouldn’t have worried too much about that, but I know that analysts always worry that if a company’s growing quickly, paying for it, um, in, in margin, so it’s the old volume margin game. Um, know if Servcorp will take that under its wing and slow down its growth a bit and protect its margin or not. most of the analysts, like in Stock Doctor, for example, the consensus forecast is still ten dollar sixty-nine, is way above the current share price of six-fifty. So that the analysts, that, that valuation has come down a little bit.
I think it was like around twelve dollars at the start of the year. Uh, so that might be forcing the stock price down. Other things that I look for when I see a stock drop quickly or rise quickly is things like, has it been included [00:28:00] in any index rebalancing? But I couldn’t see that it had. And was it ex-dividend? And it did go ex-dividend in early March, and it does have a, yield of four point six percent. So it did drop, you know, by a similar sort of amount at the end of March and, sometimes that can lead to, uh, follow-on declines. But, um, other than those things, I’m sorry, I can’t give much more insight into what’s happening at Servcorp.
Cameron: And we hold it in a few portfolios. I do. It’s in a couple of the light portfolios where it’s up between 22 and 54%, depending on when I bought it. It’s in the dummy portfolio, it’s up 54% since I added it in April ’24, a little over two years. That’s not bad. It’s reasonable sort of growth. But I note that it’s very close to its thr- it’s very close to its three-point sell line now despite that.
Currently trading at $6.29. The three-point sell price is about $6.10, and it’s dropping pretty [00:29:00] quickly. It was, uh, $7.88 in February, so keep an eye on that. If you, uh, hold it, make sure your alerts are in place, Scott. Um, but yeah, strange one. There you go.
Tony Kynaston: Yeah, no obvious reasons that I
Cameron: Well, that’s it. Yeah, I couldn’t find anything either.
All right, Tony, what you got?
Tony Kynaston: I pulled pork on, uh, W‑E-B, Web Travel Group, which was a holdover from a couple of weeks ago. Can’t remember the name of the person who requested it, but it was a, a listener request. Um, I highlight the fact that WEB is now a sell, so it may not have been back then. I think it probably was, but, it’s not on.
It’s not a buy for us at the moment, and its QAV score is a little bit below point one zero. So two reasons, it’s not a buy for us. But I’ll, I’ll still go through and pull the pork. It’s an interesting story, [00:30:00] um, and of course, it may well come back onto the buy list at some stage or be on the buy list at some stage.
I don’t know if it has been for, um, uh, for a while, if at all. Uh, who are they? Uh, so WEB is the Web Travel Group, and it’s a major ASX-listed global travel company in Melbourne. The company is the world’s second-largest business-to-business of hotel accommodation bookings. So it’s, it’s a little bit confusing, uh, for anyone coming in to look at, uh, this company now ’cause it was split a couple of years ago. And, um, Web Travel Group is the one I’m doing a pulled pork on, which is the code WEB. But there’s also another company which is of like the one that’s been– that Webjet has been over the last twenty-plus years, and that’s the, um, online airline booking service. So I’m focusing on the B2B, [00:31:00] accommodation booking provider. So of history. It launched in nineteen ninety-eight, and it was one of the pioneering Australian companies, and it pioneered online travel agency bookings in Australia, which allowed retail customers to compare and book flights, hotels, and holidays, et cetera. Um, it did hold the number one travel agency position in Australia and New Zealand. Um, I guess it’s been challenged since then and, and certainly its other– other Australian company in the space, Flight Centre, um, was a, um, strong competitor for it. although Flight Centre came to the web a bit later than Webjet.
So, Webjet, know, had the digital space to itself for a while, then Flight Centre went online, and eventually other people have too. At one stage, though, uh, I think this is pre-COVID, back in, uh, two thousand and eighteen, I think these numbers are, um, [00:32:00] Webjet was the bigger domestic air travel market shareholder, and both Webjet and Flight Centre held about twelve percent of the domestic, um, pre-pan-pre-pandemic.
So large player in the market. history. It started in nineteen ninety-eight, um, and three f- three founders decided that, uh, they didn’t like a flight either calling an airline or walking into a travel agency where the price of the flight was notoriously opaque and hard to compare and hidden behind fees and commissions. So they saw an opportunity to aggregate data from, uh, uh, airline systems and put them together into a consumer-facing web browser. Uh, Webjet went public on the ASX in two thousand, and of course, that was right as the dot-com bubble its peak, then it began to aggressively unravel. Um, while thousands. I [00:33:00] mean, we all know about the dot-com companies that survive. Webjet did survive due to the fact that it actually made, um, real money, and it collected fee revenue every time a domestic flight was processed, unlike a lot of dot-com books that, um. dot-com companies, sorry, that relied on eyeballs or click numbers to, um, to, uh, achieve the valuation. Uh, another thing that happened in the early two thousands was the airlines drastically cut back the commissions they paid to the brick-and-mortar travel agents. they could see that the future of booking was online, and it didn’t need the same sort of commission structure, uh, as, um, the, bricks and mortar did.
So they started pushing more towards companies like Webjet, and that played into their hands. Um, and they, they proved to the airlines that, uh, channel could move seat inventory faster and at a much lower cost than the bricks and mortar agencies. So they did well, uh, for a long time.[00:34:00]
But of course, like a lot of dot-com startups or startups in general, they didn’t make money for, for many years. And, um, it didn’t. took until about two thousand and three or thereabouts when uh, managed to build enough infrastructure in their platform, uh, achieved enough scale to match their overheads, and they started turning, uh, a profit, early in this century. Another thing that happened around that time was, uh, the MD, John Gousich, the board and then later became MD. and he saw, um, a bit of a change for this company, a big technological leap, and, he introduced what was called a travel services aggregation matrix, that allowed customers to log on to the website and dynamically mix and match different airlines on a single screen. once that sort of took off, their booking volumes, um, increased, uh, dramatically, and Webjet [00:35:00] became highly profitable. Um- Webjet did though realize that they couldn’t just rely on the domestic market, so they needed to expand both internationally and into adjacent businesses. John Gousich did this, um, by both.
Well, what he called the buy and build strategy. So both by building out, uh, Webjet’s IT, but also by buying companies to support growth. so at the early, early stage of this century, Webjet expanded into hotel bookings, packages and travel insurance. when John Gousich joined in two thousand and three, he brought with him a lot of knowledge of a, um, pretty arcane sector of the travel market, uh, which was the wholesale selling of vacant hotel beds. Um, so there, there are companies which go around buying up vacant hotel beds, uh, pooling them into a large, um, I guess, portfolio, and then selling them to travel agents who then add a margin and sell them off [00:36:00] individually. Uh, so Gousich had been the global chief op-operating officer of a company called GTA, was one of the, I think, if not the largest, one of the world’s, largest original wholesaler, uh, of what they call bed banks. he knew that market well, and he, um, decided that Webjet should get into that field as well. So to do that, he, um, spent a bit of time building a business called Lots of Hotels. Um, they spent a minimum amount of money developing that business, and, uh, it took its first commercial booking in February of two thousand and thirteen. They based the team in Dubai and focused on the hotel room inventories in the Middle East, and then pooled them, bought them, pooled them, and sold them to local travel agencies to, uh, on-sell to consumers. Um, Gousich realized, though, that scaling the Lots of Hotels business organically would take decades. in two thousand and fourteen, Webjet acquired Sun Hotels for twenty-five million euros. And Sun Hotels was a similar sort of business [00:37:00] based in Spain, operator with, um, leadership in the European countries, particularly in the north, also big networks in the Mediterranean beach properties, uh, So that acquisition gave Webjet immediate high profitable footprint in Europe, it allowed them to package European hotel rooms directly into its Australian consumer business. So that worked well for them. on. Based on that success, Webjet then bought a company called Jac Travel in two thousand and seventeen, and that was a large, um, a large bill for them, three hundred and thirty million dollars Australian, it, it did transform the company.
So Jac Travel was headquartered in London. it was again, one of these, um, independent, uh, B2B platforms for hotels to sell their vacant beds, uh, on and, uh, they specialized in large European city properties. So That [00:38:00] transaction propelled Webbeds, is what the internal department of Webjet was called, uh, to, um, to, to, uh, house this business. And that made Webbeds the number two global B2B hotel bed provider world. It added, um, ten thousand directly contracted hotels to the platform and obviously, um, revenue synergies across the whole Jac Travels, business in Europe. And, um, they were again able to provide packages to Australian customers as well, which, which helped them. and they kept going from that. So in two thousand and eighteen they paid a hundred and seventy-three million US for Destinations of the World, another of these, um, wholesale bed bank companies. Destinations of the World had, properties in Middle East and Africa, but also the US and both North and South America.
So, uh, Destinations of the World provided, uh, Webbeds with, uh, [00:39:00] geographic diversification away from Europe, uh, and the Middle East and made it a, a truly a big player on the global scale. Um But it wasn’t just all about acquiring. So one of Webjet’s key advantages was an internally developed system called RezChain, and that used blockchain technology to, to track and reconcile bed bookings. in this particular industry, the wholesale B2B travel industry, it was estimated by one of the analysts I read that roughly one in twenty hotel bookings suffered from data dis-discrepancies between the wholesaler and the hotel, to, uh, booking losses and refunds. And every time, um, Webbeds or Webjet, uh, which owned Webbeds, bought an international company like Jac Travel Destinations of the World, they immediately migrated the acquired infrastructure onto RezChain, that systematically eradicated booking errors, which pushed up their internal operating margins, [00:40:00] and it turned messy acquisitions into clean, automated, uh, digital engines. So that’s been working well for them. Um, if I fast-forward then to, the end of the twenty-teens, there was a couple of major setbacks that the business took. Um, firstly, a large travel company called Thomas Cook went into sudden liquidation in September two thousand and nineteen. Thomas Cook was the largest client for Webjet’s, um, division called Webbeds. the sudden bankruptcy, bankruptcy, uh, wiped out forty-three million dollars in Australian revenue, or sorry, forty-three million dollars in Australian dollars in revenue, forced Webjet to write off massive bad debts, causing it, the share price to plunge percent in a matter of days, according to an AFR article that I read. Uh, less than six months after the Thomas Cook shock, COVID-19 hit. March twenty [00:41:00] twenty, uh, the global borders shut, as we all know. Flight schedules collapsed and Webjet’s revenue plummeted by ninety-five percent virtually overnight. And the AFR, in their article, um, this phase of Webjet’s, uh, history as Seventeen Days in Virus ICU, when the, uh, Webjet’s executive team worked from their living rooms to save the company from insolvency. they did that by, um, uh, undertaking a massive, um, injection and a quick institutional equity raise at a steep discount. Uh, so they raised three hundred and forty-six million dollars Australian. They also issued some, uh, debt, notes of a hundred million euros. And though they diluted existing shareholders a lot, it gave the company a cash buffer to survive a full year without, um, a single dollar of income.
Um, since then, though, the company has recovered well. Um- uh, [00:42:00] travels back to pre-pandemic levels and they’ve got plenty of, uh, cash flow coming in. Um, but the board grappled with another issue, um, that they were, uh, tr- key to solve And that was the fact that the beds business, Webbeds, was not being properly valued because it was part of the overall travel business. so they decided to de-merge the beds business, um, in twenty twenty-four. It was a very simple structure where each Webjet shareholder received one new share the beds business called WEB and one share that they already held in the business. Um, I’m just trying to look up the name.
The travel business, uh, is Webjet
Cameron: Correct
Tony Kynaston: Group, WJL. Yes, sorry, I just missed it. Lost its code there for a minute. Um, uh, two, two businesses since twenty twenty-four. Um, the WJL is like the original, um, [00:43:00] business and, uh, contains the online travel agency and a few other small businesses. One called GoSee, which is, uh, vehicle rentals, and one called Trip which helps you plan a trip, um, and the B2C online, uh, booking platform. the other one, the other one, WEB Travel Group, is the B2B, uh, beds business, hotel wholesale bed-selling business. both businesses, however, since the merger have gone down in share price, it, does seem like the web business, the B2B bed business is, is the better of the two. So, uh, both stocks’ prices fell after the immediate demerger. Um, but Web Web Group, WEB, the beds business, um, has performed better, uh, since the de-listing, even though the share, the share [00:44:00] prices So, um, initially investors backed the, um, B2B business as a high-growth global technology player. a few things have happened in the last couple of years.
A lot of, um, these, uh, tech companies have suffered from AI fears and, uh, that’s seen the price sold off, um, as has the fact that, uh, you know, the, changes to travel and, uh, oil prices, um, have affected it too. Uh, for example, bookings in the Middle East for hotel beds in the last couple of months have been way down. Um, but even that, even though the share price has declined, um, the company is still doing well. uh, their latest results, they reported that, uh, transaction. total transaction volume was up twenty percent to five point eight billion dollars, so revenue’s up by twenty percent, and net income, uh, was up by two hundred and twenty percent to thirty-five million dollars.
So while [00:45:00] the market has compressed the stock’s PE ratio, the core, um, B2B business remains intact, and it’s, um, it’s still growing. Uh, so that’s the better of the two businesses. Um, WJL, the other side of things, has, issued a profit warning recently, and the share price has been declining. also being fought over by a couple of potential takeover suitors, Ariadne Group being one, um, and Helloworld being another.
Helloworld, I’ve done a Pulled Pork on before. It’s a travel agency, so makes sense for them to want to take over the online travel agency business, WJL. And, uh, Ariadne has had a history of, um, of corporate raiding. you know, I think Web is the better business. Um, the latest results for Web are quite good.
As I said, revenue up twenty percent, earnings per share up sixteen percent, which is good. they did report that there was a slowdown in the Middle East for bed bookings, as I said. But, [00:46:00] and to put that into context, bookings growth from October to February, February was up nineteen percent, March, the growth dropped to eleven percent.
So it’s still growing. It’s just that, um, slowed down a bit, uh, from its past high growth rates. and they also point out that the Middle East business is only about ten percent of the total global business anyway. So it’s, um, it’s still growing quite well. Um- A couple of comments that they’ve made because obviously there must be a lot of analyst questions about the future of a wholesale B2B bed booking business in the, um, era of AI, they make a couple of points about that in their latest results.
So they, they point out that, um, hotel contracts and their allotments require relationship that is difficult to replicate cheaply. So saying is they’ve now spent years going around to all the ho-hotel groups and doing deals with them so that they can, um, you know, agree [00:47:00] prices and terms to buying up, these, uh, vacant beds to then on-sell, and that, um, a kind of moat around this business. other thing they’re also positioning themselves, uh, by saying is that, um, they’re calling themselves a, a B2A business. So they’re saying that they’re seeing a, they’re forecasting a shift away from B2B to becoming business to agent. And, uh, they’re saying that, you know, they expect that both buyers and suppliers of beds will deploy AI agents that select partners based on performance using existing interfaces, um, but that see themselves as being the bedrock for that.
So they say, “Given their strength in data aggregation and transaction volume at scale technological integration capability, Webbeds is well-placed to capture that opportunity as it emerges.” So they’re clearly, um, stock price is feeling the heat from AI, but they’re, trying to position themselves as being complementary to AI. [00:48:00] Uh, if I move on to the numbers, and bear in mind that this company is a sell on sentiment, so we can’t buy it at the moment. Um, I can say they’re a high ADT trading of, you know, nearly seven million dollars per day, so that’s pretty large. share price, um, the, the share price I’ve used for analysis is two dollars fifty-five, and that’s almost half the consensus target.
So, uh, it’s undervalued on that metric, it’s over the price that, uh, we calculate for IV1, which is fifty-four cents IV2 of two dollars twenty-three. Interestingly enough, it’s not scoring well on the, the independent raters. So Stock Doctor financial health and trend is satisfactory and recovering, and Stock Doctor has decreased the financial health from good down to satisfactory half. Stockopedia rank it poorly. They, they give it a seventy-one for quality, seventy-four for value, nineteen for, um, [00:49:00] for momentum, their overall rank is only fifty-eight. Uh, PE is twenty-four times, um, but it is in the range between the highest and the lowest. Uh, we don’t score it for that. PROPCAF is interesting.
It’s less than seven. It’s six point nine seven, so we do score it for that. Uh, net equity per share is valued at one sixty-one and if I add thirty percent, two dollars and nine. we can’t score it for being less than book or book plus thirty. Uh, companies forecasting or analysts are forecasting large growth in the EPS of a hundred and eighteen percent. growth over PE, even though the PE is rather high, is still scoring at four point nine, which is, two ticks for us. There’s no dividend, so we can’t score it for that. Interestingly enough, directors only hold one percent, including, Gousich, who’s been around since the start of, um, pretty much of Webjet.
So I was a bit surprised to know. I thought he might have had a bigger holding. Um, so it’s not really a vote of confidence by him. [00:50:00] Um, it does not have increasing equity, so we can’t score it for that. Uh, Gousich would probably qualify as an owner-founder, but he has a small shareholding, so we can’t score it for owner-founder. Overall, the quality score is seventy out of fifteen or forty-seven percent, and the QAV score is point o seven. it doesn’t, um, rate as a buy for us. course, a couple of risks that sprung out at me was that, um, if the oil price remains high, international travel will, may be constricted, and so that’s a risk. of course, you know, they may not turn out to be a good, um, a, a good place for AI agents to do their business. if they’ve got that wrong too, that’ll be a risk for them as well. But on the positive side, they are a fast-growing business, and they have a, a global presence with a very high market share.
So, um, they’re well-positioned in this space, and they’re still growing, which, um, is very interesting. So that’s Web, W‑E-B
Cameron: Thank you, Tony. While you were talking, I [00:51:00] jumped into Google Gemini and said, um, you know, “Can you find me the cheapest flight from Brisbane to Melbourne leaving on July 2nd before 10:00 AM and returning three days later?” Just to see what it would do. And, uh, it’s given me a number of options. Jeps- Jetstar, Jetstar, Virgin Australia, and then a link to Google Flights comparison.
Um,
Tony Kynaston: Well, that’s the flight comparison
Cameron: and in
Tony Kynaston: is the B2B bed, uh, seller
Cameron: Yeah. I was, I was looking for
Tony Kynaston: Yeah
Cameron: Y- yeah. Well, I think whether it’s flights or it’s beds, um, you know, I do think this stuff is all gonna be intermediated somehow by AI
Tony Kynaston: So I do have some sympathy with what WEB are arguing, and that is that they have the infrastructure. So you ask Gemini to find the cheapest hotel in Paris right now or [00:52:00] something like that, they’re still reliant or the, or the agentic AI is still reliant on to the person who’s aggregated all the beds in Paris and then selling them through travel agencies.
So it might. AI might be able to go and look at the travel agents’ websites and find you the cheapest price, but that price is because WEB have aggregated the vacant beds in Paris and then on-sold them
Cameron: Hmm. Yeah, no, I get that. It’ll be interesting to see, though, how they compete with all of the other businesses around the world that do the same thing, though. Like, they don’t, they don’t have
Tony Kynaston: share, so they’re competing rather well
Cameron: Globally?
Tony Kynaston: Yeah.
Cameron: It’s global.
Tony Kynaston: Yeah
Cameron: Yeah, right. Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out
Tony Kynaston: Yeah, definitely. But, but you know, the market sort of is skeptical at the moment and the share price is half since the demerger. It’s, it’s still going down. So yeah, um, until they– until I think it becomes clearer exactly [00:53:00] what role AI has in this whole space there, gonna be depressed, the share price will be depressed.
But the business is still growing sort of rates at the moment anyway
Cameron: Yeah. Yeah, all of these businesses, you know, Xero and Atlassian and these guys, Mm-hmm. are all trying to make the argument that they’re gonna survive and thrive in an AI world. So
Tony Kynaston: As you’d
Cameron: we’ll see how it plays out. Yeah.
Tony Kynaston: No,
Cameron: Yeah, yeah
Tony Kynaston: no CEO ever got up and said, “Jeez, I didn’t get any sleep last night shitting myself about what I was gonna do to my business.”
Cameron: Yeah.
Tony Kynaston: Yeah
Cameron: Yeah, no, a- and it’s, it’s gonna be interesting to see how it all plays out
Tony Kynaston: Mm.
Cameron: Thank you for that. And I don’t know, I tried to figure out who requested that, and I couldn’t figure it out either, but I know it was a couple of weeks ago.
Tony Kynaston: Yeah
Cameron: What episode are we doing now? Nine twenty-two, so it probably would’ve been nine twenty
Tony Kynaston: Might even be a month [00:54:00] ago, ’cause it, like I was away last week and I did a couple of other Pulled Porks in between that were requests as well
Cameron: Oh, right. Okay. Yeah. Um, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Anyway, it doesn’t matter
Tony Kynaston: Yeah
Cameron: So what else you got for me, Tony?
Tony Kynaston: Just after hours, Cam. Um, that what we’re
Cameron: Yeah, what’s in after hours? It is
Tony Kynaston: I mean, I’ve been away, so lots of traveling. Uh, played at Topgolf in the afternoon. It’s been raining a lot down the eastern seaboard, as people will know who live on this side of the country. I think it’s even raining in Perth. In fact, there was one morning I looked up, the weather forecast and every major capital city in Australia had rain at the same time, I can’t recall ever seeing before, so, um,
Cameron: Hmm
Tony Kynaston: So anyway, we couldn’t play golf on the
Cameron: Hmm.
Tony Kynaston: so we went to Topgolf on the Gold Coast instead, we’ve spoken about in, uh, the US show before. That was a lot of fun.
Cameron: Hmm.
Tony Kynaston: [00:55:00] Um,
Cameron: Hmm
Tony Kynaston: yeah. Uh, it– look, it’s, it’s– I enjoyed it. It’s a, it’s a good outing, good thing to do on a rainy day. Um, I mean, I guess if you– it’s– I think it’s probably aimed at people who aren’t golfers because the equipment wasn’t that great, um, to use.
And I guess you can bring along your own clubs. Some people were doing that. But, um, you know, if you compare, I think it was like sixty-five bucks an hour to play, um, which is, you can probably easily find a golf course to play eighteen holes for four hours at sixty-five dollars. So, um, if you’re a, you’re a golfer looking for a, um, value, you’re better off going and playing golf than going to Topgolf.
So it’s probably at the hit and giggle sort of market that it’s at. But it was, it was, it was– I think it was packed. It was like almost full when we were there on a rainy afternoon. I think it was a Wednesday. So yeah, it’s popular
Cameron: Hmm. Hmm.
Tony Kynaston: And then,
Cameron: Hit and giggle, is that what you called it?
Tony Kynaston: Yeah, hit and giggle. Yep. And it’s got a bar, so it was hit and giggle and get [00:56:00] drunk as well, think. So, um, that
Cameron: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah
Tony Kynaston: And then, uh,
Cameron: And you watched Begonia
Tony Kynaston: Begonia, have you seen that?
Cameron: I watched it. Well, we, Chrissy and I watched it last week, yeah
Tony Kynaston: Yeah. I, it was great. I really enjoyed it. Another one of those, uh. Is it Christos Santos, I think the chap’s name is, who made it? Um, has a history of making out-there movies, Poor Things and other ones, and, uh, yeah, I really enjoyed it
Cameron: Lanthimos. Lanthimos. Yeah, he made The Lobster and a couple of things with her. Um, I really enjoyed it too, and, and I thought it was very original until I found out it was a remake of a 2003 Korean film, and the director of the Korean film was gonna make the English language version, but then he had to step down for health reasons or something, and Lanthimos, uh, took over.[00:57:00]
But, you know, I thought the cast was fantastic. I thought Jesse Plemons did a great job and, uh, kept me on the edge of my seat for the whole thing. And, uh, yeah, I really, really enjoyed it. I thought it was great
Tony Kynaston: he’s becoming the new Philip Seymour Hoffman, isn’t he? Taking on those quirky sort of roles. He’s, uh, very good
Cameron: Eh Yeah, he’s, he’s really has, uh, built a career for himself as a terrific character actor. Yeah, I enjoyed that.
Tony Kynaston: Yeah.
Cameron: Um, well, what have I. Uh, well, Chrissy and I went to see Spa- well, Chrissy Fox and I went to see Sparks on Saturday night at QPAC. Uh, again, they were in town, and that was fantastic. We loved that.
Tony Kynaston: They’re only here
Cameron: I finished The Colossus. It was two and a half years ago. Yeah.
Tony Kynaston: a half years ago. Did they release a new album or something in between, or what was the reason for backing up so quickly?
Cameron: Uh, they’re really old and they need to get as much touring in as while they can still do it. Yeah, no, they [00:58:00] have had an album come out,
uh, months ago, so they’re touring to support that. And they- this, the, their top single off their, um, most recent album is the QAV theme song, Do Things My Own Way it’s called.
You ever heard that? It’s great.
Tony Kynaston: I
Cameron: It’s a banger, banger track. Yeah.
Tony Kynaston: Okay.
Cameron: It’s got some great lines in it. It’s all about doing things our own way. Uh, people inviting them out to lunch, they don’t wanna do lunch. There’s a great line, “Called the Pope, told him nope, gonna do things my own way. My guru told him too, gonna do things my own way.”
It’s all just about them saying, “No, we’re gonna do things our own way, and we don’t care what you think,” which has been their career, which is, you know, why they’ve survived, I think, as long as they have. Um, I finished the Colossus book that I mentioned to you a while back. Uh, the, the first of the trilogy.
Really enjoyed it, and then managed to get a copy of the film. It’s got, like, a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, the film.
Tony Kynaston: [00:59:00] Okay. It was okay,
Cameron: Chrissy and I are gonna sit down and watch that at some point. Hmm.
Tony Kynaston: it’s
it’s I’ve watched the first five minutes of it. It’s beautifully shot.
Okay
Cameron: Yeah, but it’s, it’s got really great cinematography and visuals, that sort of early ’70s epic style AI with computers with lots of flashing lights and spinning tape wheels and yeah, punch tape coming out of stuff and whatever.
Tony Kynaston: Yeah It’s, which is always fascinating to me. Like, the science fiction writers and filmmakers could imagine a super powerful AI, but they couldn’t imagine getting beyond ticker tape and spinning tape wheels, you know?
Mm-hmm.
Cameron: E- except for Kubrick, like you know, in 2001
Tony Kynaston: Yeah. true. But even when they did in, um, science fiction movies, it w- they would sometimes just have like a pulsing of clay with some lights inside flashing on and off, you know, as, as supposed
Cameron: Eh?
Tony Kynaston: kind of positronic brain of the [01:00:00] future.
Yeah
Cameron: And personally, I say bring back the flashing lights. I, I, I think I’d feel much better if my computers were covered in flashing lights. I like that. I was actually looking at my hard drive dock, my external hard drives. It’s got flashing lights on it to tell me if the hard drives are active, and I was like, “Yeah, good for you.
Keep the flashing lights. That’s good.”
Tony Kynaston: Good.
Cameron: Um, we finished the Dan Levy series, Big Mistake, which I think I may have mentioned to you before. I know you didn’t like Schitt’s Creek, but, um, that’s. This is a, is a really good series. It’s, Okay. it’s very funny, about a couple, a brother and sister who get themselves into, uh
It’s one of those shows where something relatively innocuous happens in the first episode, and then there are consequences, and then consequences to the consequences, and consequences to those, and it just keeps spiraling out, out of control, and they find themselves in [01:01:00] deep shit. It’s good.
Tony Kynaston: Like, uh, like
Cameron: And the Nicolas Cage-
Tony Kynaston: increasing capital gains tax? Is that the on consequences that’s far out of our control? You know
Cameron: yeah. Unknown unknowns, as
Tony Kynaston: Yes
Cameron: liked to say. Spider-Man Noir, Nic Cage. Have you, I haven’t that yet?
Tony Kynaston: yet, no. It’s. I haven’t really watched much TV since we’ve been away. Yeah
Cameron: Three or four episodes into it. Not, no, not really sold on it. Um, and I love Nic Cage, as you know, but, um, yeah, it’s, yeah, it’s not really, it’s not.
Tony Kynaston: Do you
Cameron: Out of,
Tony Kynaston: we
Cameron: you know, I have, I have a, a bucket list goal of watching every film he’s ever made. It’s sort of my bucket list,
uh,
Tony Kynaston: Mm-hmm.
Cameron: working my way through them. This is, I think there are probably better places to go.
He’s just too muted so far in this. He, I wanna see him go, if you, he, he, he, you know. You spend an hour with Nic Cage, you want him to go full Nic Cage at least once in [01:02:00] that hour, right? What’s the point if he’s not going full Nic Cage? So,
Tony Kynaston: a
Cameron: yeah
Tony Kynaston: read in, I think it was in The Weekend Fin, said it was a slow burn, would take it to about episode four to, to take off. But I mean,
Cameron: That’s what Hunter told me, and that’s why I’m still watching it
Tony Kynaston: Haven’t we reached peak Marvel? I
Cameron: Well, the interesting thing about this so far is it’s really, you know, it’s really not a superhero thing. It’s more of a detective noir. Brendan Gleeson’s in it as the Irish mob boss in New York, and Brendan Gleeson’s always fun to watch, even when he doesn’t have a lot to work with.
He’s playing your stock standard Irish mob boss, but,
Tony Kynaston: Yep.
Cameron: you know, he’s great. You know? He c- he could do it standing on his head with that face and that voice. You know, he can make anything sound interesting.
Tony Kynaston: Yeah
Cameron: So the two of them together, Brendan Gleeson and Nic Cage, it should be a complete screamer, you know?
But it’s, there’s very little superpowers in it so far. It’s more of a Bogart-era,
Tony Kynaston: [01:03:00] okay.
Cameron: know, Big Sleep kind of thing. Yeah, not as good as a Bogart film though, obviously, but, you know. it’s
Tony Kynaston: No.
Cameron: they’re g- they’re, they’re leaning more heavily into the noir than they are the superhero side of it, which I assume is why Nic Cage signed up to it in the first place
Tony Kynaston: Hard to beat Lauren Bacall, isn’t it? The Big Sleep was fantastic
Cameron: Oh, oh my God. I just watched that again. Was it that one? It was one of her early films with Bogie I watched again recently, and, um, I think it was The Big Sleep. She was just stunning. Just, she’s like 19 years old, he’s like 50, and she’s just, just n- she’s just a knockout. Just the amount of cool, calm, charisma, sex appeal that she had was just,
Tony Kynaston: And I, I’m a
Cameron: eh,
Tony Kynaston: of The
Cameron: phenomenal
Tony Kynaston: it up there with Casablanca. Can be underrated,
Cameron: Oh yeah
Tony Kynaston: Yeah
Cameron: Fantastic films. And even, uh, Bogie, [01:04:00] just going back and watching Bogart films, like just, you know, he’s, he’s iconic for a reason. Don’t know what it was about him, but he just. That sort of cool delivery for everything is just, it’s holds up so well, whatever, 70, 80 years later. It’s just amazing.
Tony Kynaston: Yeah.
Cameron: All right.
Well,
Tony Kynaston: I had– Also, before
Cameron: H-
Tony Kynaston: say I had, had
Cameron: Mm.
Tony Kynaston: introducing Rudy to a couple of clips on YouTube, so just by the by. So have you– I forget now what he was doing. He was saying, “What?” a lot, so I s- started calling him Captain. I said, “What?” “Captain.” didn’t know that song, so I played it
Cameron: What?
Tony Kynaston: him. I said, “Captain.”
Cameron: ” Captain.” I said, “What?” I said, “Captain.” I said, “What you want?” Wow
Tony Kynaston: the cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger, no Coke, Pepsi sketch either on Saturday Night Live, so I played
Cameron: Wow
Tony Kynaston: So we’ve been [01:05:00] repeating that a lot on the trip.
Cameron: I had a friend of mine,
Tony Kynaston: I recommend people go and look
Cameron: yes. I had a friend of mine over here the other day. Yeah, and he came over one night. I was looking after his kid. You know, he’s one of Fox’s friends, and I had, uh, the Blues Brothers on.
was the, um, it was the Aretha Franklin scene, and so we were watching that and, and then I was trying to remember who the band was, like w- whose band the band was, and he goes, “Well, aren’t they just actors?”
And I was like, “No, no, no.” Yeah, that’s right. I couldn’t remember. I was like, “Sam Cooke or.” But it was Otis Redding. It was a bit of Otis Redding’s band, and Booker T, and the SNL band and, you know, a bunch of them pulled together. But then I said to him, “You’ve seen the original SNL Blues Brothers clip, haven’t you?”
He goes, “No, never seen it.” So I had to put that on for him, ’cause that’s– I said, “Look, this is one of my favorite things of all time.” Like, if, if I’m ever wanna, if I ever just want a smile on my face, I just pull that up. And when they start dancing, when the
Tony Kynaston: Belushi [01:06:00] cartwheeling.
Cameron: kicks in.
Tony Kynaston: great, isn’t
Cameron: Yeah, yeah.
Tony Kynaston: you don’t. It’s so unexpected, but it’s, it’s joyous, yeah.
Cameron: Oh, it never fails to put a smile on my face, that clip. Um, agree I was gonna say something else too. Uh, clips. music. Oh, yes. In bed last night, I discovered on YouTube, uh, an extended clip from a 1989 m- movie, maybe 1990, called The Bionic Showdown
Tony Kynaston: Ooh
Cameron: Uh, Lee Majors,
Tony Kynaston: Mm-hmm.
Cameron: Lindsay Wagner,
Tony Kynaston: Mm-hmm.
Cameron: and Sandra Bullock as the Bionic Girl pre her whole career
Tony Kynaston: There wasn’t a bionic dog
Cameron: fighting.
Tony Kynaston: And Lex Luthor?
Cameron: Well, that was, that, that was in, uh, that was in The Bionic Woman. Lindsay Wagner had the bionic dog, I think. But, um, this was the- they’re, like, fighting [01:07:00] evil Soviet bionic people. And, and so I watched, like, 20 minutes of this, and it was just fantastic.
But as, so I saw somebody in the YouTube comments say, “Who was the genius?” And I need to look this up. Who was the absolute genius, right up there with Euler, and Galileo, and, and Einstein, and da Vinci, who figured out in the ’70s that Steve Austin runs really fast, and the way we’re gonna show that is by putting him in slow motion?
Because the audience will figure out that he’s so fast we need to slow him down so you can see how fast he’s going. Like, who figured we would buy that as an audience? But we did. We totally bought into that.
We, we will show him go really slow, and, and you will f- you will somehow translate that [01:08:00] as really fast.
And when. And really strong. When he’s lifting things, if we make it really slow,
Tony Kynaston: And use a sound
Cameron: A, it uses up minutes. It what?
Tony Kynaston: And you put a sound effect behind it too
Cameron: Oh, your sound effect. Yeah.
Tony Kynaston: Hmm.
Cameron: My dad used to love to tell that when I was playing soccer when I was, like, five or six in Bundaberg, I would run s- in slow motion and do the sound effects out loud. Did we?
Tony Kynaston: Oh,
Cameron: But I was supposed to be, I was supposed to be defending the goal. People were scoring goals while I was doing Steve Austin slow motion running.
My team and my coach was not happy. Uh, yeah, but I mean, just, oh, brought me so much joy just watching The Six Million Dollar Man. And at this stage, like in the late ’80s, early ’90s, whenever it was, Lee Majors,
Tony Kynaston: Yeah
Cameron: had put on a few [01:09:00] pounds. He wasn’t look- he wasn’t looking that bionic. I guess bionics just, uh, don’t.
I mean, I mean, it must be hard to stay fit when you’re bionic. You go, you go for a jog, you don’t burn any calories ’cause it’s your, it’s your bionics that, that, that are doing the work, so gotta feel sorry. Lindsay Wagner looked in good shape, though. She was hot. She was still very, very hot. Had a whole Olivia Newton-John vibe thing going on
Tony Kynaston: Okay. So if the Bionic Man, we– if we see the Bionic Man in the street today, he’s got a big beer belly, uh, big man cans, one, big arm, one small arm, and two, two chicken legs
Cameron: Well, actually, I did some looking up and I saw that, uh, Lee Majors and Lindsay Wagner were at a Comic-Con or something like that. He’s still alive. He’s 87.
Tony Kynaston: Wow
Cameron: And they’re. And he look- he’s in good shape. Like, he looks pretty fit for an 87-year-old. They’re still out there doing, you know, conventions, a bit like [01:10:00] Shatner, you know, out there doing stuff, wagging the, shaking the whatever.
Pro- probably getting paid to turn up to conventions and that kind of stuff, so
Tony Kynaston: that her father
Cameron: good for him
Tony Kynaston: Yeah
Cameron: Yeah, I’ve seen that on the wall. I, I saw it in your place in Sydney, in a bedroom in Sydney. Mm-hmm. All right, we gotta go and do this US show, ’cause I got kung fu to go to soon.
Tony Kynaston: All right
Cameron: All right, happy hunting everyone
Tony Kynaston: Happy ASX

0 Comments