Hi QAVVERS,

It was great to read out some of our mem­bers’ out­stand­ing FY26 results on the AU show this week! Keep them com­ing in!

As weeks go, this one was… chop­py? The US/Iran truce is appar­ent­ly over for the time being, although the Hor­muz mon­i­tor says 34 ships are cur­rent­ly tran­sit­ing, which is the high­est num­ber I’ve seen since the war start­ed in Feb­ru­ary. Oil prices have spiked again though. So try to fig­ure that one out. I think crude oil is back to being a buy. Unfor­tu­nate­ly the AU mar­ket has been so chop­py that it’s been dif­fi­cult for us to buy oil stocks. The U.S. mar­ket is dif­fer­ent, but we’ve got plen­ty of buy­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties over there, as usu­al.

As usu­al, we just keep play­ing it day by day, obey­ing our rules, and not get­ting too caught up in the noise.

Let’s get into the details!

AUSTRALIAN MARKET UPDATE

The All Ordi­nar­ies fin­ished the 5‑day peri­od lit­tle changed, with the index sit­ting around 8,910 and the pri­or com­plet­ed week (to 4 July) show­ing the ASX 200 up around 0.9%:

• The Aus­tralian share­mar­ket extend­ed its los­ing streak to a fourth straight ses­sion on Thurs­day as esca­lat­ing Mid­dle East ten­sions weighed on sen­ti­ment, with the ASX 200 falling to 8,762.50 and slip­ping below its 200-day mov­ing aver­age.
• Aus­trali­a’s trade bal­ance swung from a $1.4 bil­lion sur­plus to a $3.0 bil­lion deficit in May, dri­ven by a sharp fall in exports includ­ing a 35% drop in non-mon­e­tary gold exports, along with soft­er LNG vol­umes and low­er com­mod­i­ty prices.
• Local­ly, ele­vat­ed bor­row­ing costs, a cool­ing hous­ing mar­ket and geopo­lit­i­cal uncer­tain­ty con­tin­ued to weigh, with the ASX 200 los­ing ground across four con­sec­u­tive ses­sions this week as broad sec­toral pres­sure hit mate­ri­als, tech­nol­o­gy, com­mu­ni­ca­tion ser­vices and finan­cials.

US MARKET UPDATE

The S&P 500 end­ed Thurs­day July 9 at 7,543.64, up rough­ly 0.8% from the pri­or week’s close of 7,483.24, amid a volatile stretch dri­ven by geopol­i­tics and a semi­con­duc­tor rota­tion:

• Stocks recov­ered on Thurs­day, lift­ed by a jump in semi­con­duc­tors and a pull­back in oil prices, with the S&P 500 ris­ing 0.81% to close at 7,543.64 and the Nas­daq gain­ing 1.30% to 26,206.89, as mar­kets tried to sta­bi­lize despite ongo­ing US-Iran ten­sions.
• Oil spiked sharply mid-week after Iran attacked a Qatari LNG tanker near the Strait of Hor­muz, which typ­i­cal­ly han­dles around 20% of glob­al oil traf­fic; Brent set­tled 3% high­er at $74.16 per bar­rel and WTI advanced 2.8% to $70.44 on Tues­day.
• Trea­sury yields rose after Pres­i­dent Trump declared the cease­fire with Iran was “over,” and the move was com­pound­ed by min­utes from the Fed’s June meet­ing, which showed some pol­i­cy­mak­ers saw a case for fur­ther rate hikes if infla­tion remains ele­vat­ed.
• Week­ly job­less claims came in at a sea­son­al­ly adjust­ed 215,000 for the week end­ed July 4, down 4,000 from the pri­or peri­od and below the Dow Jones con­sen­sus esti­mate of 218,000, the low­est total since May 23.

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

You Don’t Get Dealt Blackjack Every Hand

Our new mar­ket­ing tagline is “Sys­tem­at­ic Out­per­for­mance.” Tony came up with it last week and I love it. Appar­ent­ly he’s not just a pret­ty face. But he also said some­thing else on the pod­cast this week that’s worth drilling down on.

When it comes to invest­ing, the mis­take I think a lot of us make is think­ing like this: if a strat­e­gy actu­al­ly beats the mar­ket, it should beat the mar­ket every year. And if it has a flat year, or a bad year, then some­thing must be bro­ken. Time to change it, tin­ker with it, or bail out and go back to tips from the bloke at the bar­be­cue or that sem­i­nar I saw adver­tised on Face­book.

That’s human nature. We want the graph to always go up and to the right in a nice smooth line, every quar­ter, for­ev­er and ever, amen. And the whole finance indus­try feeds the fan­ta­sy, because “con­sis­tent out­per­for­mance” sells a lot bet­ter than the truth.

Here’s the truth. Out­per­for­mance is lumpy.

Maybe “Lumpy Out­per­for­mance” is even bet­ter than “Sys­tem­at­ic”, but it prob­a­bly isn’t as mar­ketable. Any­way, I digress.

Let me show you what I mean with our own num­bers, because we pub­lish them and you can check them on our web­site.

The QAV AU Mod­el Port­fo­lio (for­mer­ly known as the Dum­my Port­fo­lio) has been run­ning since April 2019. Over those sev­en finan­cial years it’s returned about 16.1% a year, against the SPDR ASX 200’s 7.7%. Bet­ter than dou­ble the mar­ket. That’s the “Sys­tem­at­ic Out­per­for­mance” the tagline is talk­ing about, and it’s real and it’s ver­i­fi­able.

But look under the bon­net and it’s any­thing but smooth.

Take FY2022-23 and FY2023-24. The index ran 14.5%, then 12.2%. We did 10.8%, then 9.4%. Two years run­ning we did­n’t just have a bor­ing year — we lost to the mar­ket. By 3.7 points, then 2.8. Two straight years fol­low­ing the exact same rules that had thrashed the index the year before and would thrash it again the year after. That is what lumpy looks like, and it does not feel like a sys­tem work­ing. It feels like a sys­tem bro­ken.

If you’d thrown in the tow­el at the end of that sec­ond los­ing year — and plen­ty did — you’d have walked away right before FY2025-26, when the Mod­el Port­fo­lio did 28% against the mar­ket’s 5.8%.

That’s what most years look like. A lit­tle bit in front. Some­times a lit­tle bit behind. And then, every few years, the mar­ket hands you a black­jack.

This finan­cial year just gone was one of the good hands. The sev­en gods were good to us this year (yes, I’m watch­ing House Of The Drag­on). Mem­bers have been email­ing their FY26 results and some of them are ridicu­lous. Jim up 74.5%. Scott up 26.6%. Daryl up around 34% and his win-loss ratio jumped from 55/45 to 70/30. Tony rolled off 17.5% against an STW that did about 5.8%, so near­ly triple mar­ket. These are not aver­age years. These are the fish you catch once every few sea­sons.

The mis­take is think­ing those years are the nor­mal ones and the flat years are the fail­ures. They aren’t fail­ures, they are the nor­mal years.

My favourite exam­ple is Ed. Ed’s been with us since the dark ages and he wrote in this week with the first gen­uine­ly hap­py email I’ve had from him in years. His run: down 4.5%, then up 8.3%, then up 3.7%, then up 13.3%, then up 15.5% this year. Look at those first three num­bers. Years of just keep­ing pace, or worse. If Ed had quit after year three — and plen­ty of peo­ple did — he’d have locked in the mediocre part and missed the part that made it all worth­while. As he put it, it’s easy to stay faith­ful when every­thing’s green. It’s hard when it goes red and Rule 1 keeps trig­ger­ing week after week.

As TK said on the show: You don’t get dealt black­jack every hand. You can’t sit out the bor­ing cards and stroll back to the table only for the good one. You have to play every hand the way the rules tell you to, so that you’re still sit­ting there when the good one comes. The sys­tem Tony designed stops us from los­ing cap­i­tal dur­ing those years. It keeps us at the table, patient­ly play­ing hands, wait­ing for vingt-et-un. Because you nev­er know when the black­jack year is going to start.

And that’s some­thing most of the pro­fes­sion­al investors can’t do, and it’s our edge.

Accord­ing to SPI­VA’s Aus­tralia score­card for the year end­ed Decem­ber 2025, 74% of active Aus­tralian equi­ty funds under­per­formed the ASX 200 that year. Over the full decade, a sol­id major­i­ty under­per­formed in every cat­e­go­ry. Get paid a for­tune to trail the index. Nice work if you can get it.

Part of the rea­son is struc­tur­al, and it’s the same lumpi­ness we’re talk­ing about. When a fund has a flat or down year, its investors pan­ic and pull their mon­ey out. The man­ag­er is forced to sell into weak­ness to fund the redemp­tions — and, as Tony points out, the down year is very often the year right before the big one. They get liq­ui­dat­ed out of their own recov­ery.

You don’t have that prob­lem. You can sit through the aver­age years and be there for the black­jack. But you’ve got­ta have the cojones to stick it out.

So when we say “Sys­tem­at­ic Out­per­for­mance,” don’t read it as “we beat the mar­ket every sin­gle year.” Read it as this: fol­low the rules through the bor­ing hands, and the math com­pounds to rough­ly dou­ble the mar­ket over time.

The sys­tem does­n’t promise you a good hand every deal. It promis­es that if you keep play­ing the way the rules tell you to, you’ll still be sit­ting at the table when the good hands come around.

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STOCK ANALYSIS OF THE WEEK

In the AU port­fo­lios, we had to trade a bit this week. I sold TLS and SRV, and bought MSV. Hard to find things to buy, near­ly every­thing was hav­ing a down day when I looked.

In the U.S. port­fo­lios, I sold AERO, and bought FG.

Tony did a Pulled Pork on New Murchi­son Gold (NMG), a pen­ny-stock gold min­er in WA that went from zero to prof­itable in under a year by avoid­ing the cost of build­ing its own pro­cess­ing plant. Full details in the pod­cast link below.

On the Amer­i­can pod­cast this week, I did a pulled pork on FG. The pod­cast link is down below if you want the full 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.

AUSTRALIAN BUY LIST

QAV Val­ue Invest­ing Buy List (AU) 2026-07-05

U.S. BUY LIST

QAV Val­ue Invest­ing Buy List 2026-07-06

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PORTFOLIO PERFORMANCE

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”.

We pub­lish a fresh per­for­mance snap­shot once a month. Week­ly noise does­n’t tell you much in a val­ue-invest­ing sys­tem — what mat­ters is the trend.

July 2026 per­for­mance snap­shot.

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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: Same des­ti­na­tion. You choose where you sit.

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

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Add QAV America — US stocks, the same QAV method

Already a QAV mem­ber? You can add QAV Amer­i­ca as your sec­ond mem­ber­ship at 50% off — US-list­ed stocks, the same QAV approach, billed in AUD through this site (just one pay­ment to keep an eye on). Add QAV Amer­i­ca →

Not a QAV mem­ber yet? Join QAV first, then you can add QAV Amer­i­ca at the 50% mem­ber rate.

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THIS WEEK’S EPISODES

Gold, Glo­ry, and the Art of the Deal: New Finan­cial Year Results Roundup: QAV AU #927

Guar­an­teed Returns (FG): QAV Amer­i­ca #60

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STOCK NEWS AND UPDATES

COMMODITIES

This week the big changes to com­modi­ties were the fol­low­ing:

Com­mod­i­ty	Sta­tus
Gold (USD)	BUY
Coal (ther­mal)	JOSEPHINE
Coal (cok­ing)	BUY
Plat­inum	BUY
Alu­mini­um	BUY
Mag­ne­sium	BUY
Man­ganese	JOSEPHINE
Wheat	JOSEPHINE
Lithi­um	BUY

And Crude Oil as become a buy too.

DISCLOSURE

Please review our trad­ing and dis­clo­sure pol­i­cy.

SIGNING OFF

That’s the lot for this week. Hap­py hunt­ing! And keep send­ing us your FY26 results!

SSDD!

• Cam

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That’s it for the week!

HAPPY HUNTING!

Got a ques­tion? [email protected]