Hi QAVVERS,

It’s been anoth­er week of “will he, won’t he” in Iran. JD Vance said there’s no way the U.S. will be send­ing in ground troops, which I believe, although I don’t trust any­thing any­one in the Trump admin­is­tra­tion says. I can’t see send­ing in ground troops as being some­thing that they can sell polit­i­cal­ly — but, on the oth­er hand, I can’t see how they get out of this morass with­out doing that, either. In the mean­time, the Strait of Hor­muz remains closed.…

MARKET UPDATE

Wall Street had anoth­er lousy night. And the Aus­tralian mar­ket is fol­low­ing along.

Chip stocks copped it for a sec­ond day run­ning. TSMC beat prof­it expec­ta­tions and its US-list­ed shares still fell 2.3%. Appar­ent­ly even good results aren’t good enough when every­one’s ner­vous about AI val­u­a­tions.

BHP report­ed record FY26 iron ore pro­duc­tion and about 2Mt of cop­per, with realised prices up on last year (cop­per by about 35%), and the stock still fell. The mar­ket’s prob­lem was­n’t FY26, it was the out­look, with reports point­ing to soft­er FY27 cop­per guid­ance at Escon­di­da.

The Chi­na back­drop isn’t help­ing the min­ers either. Q2 GDP land­ed Wednes­day at 4.3% year on year, down from 5.0% in Q1 and the weak­est quar­ter since late 2022. First half growth of 4.7% keeps Bei­jing’s full-year tar­get of 4.5% to 5% alive, but only just. The weak­ness is domes­tic: soft con­sump­tion, weak pri­vate invest­ment, the prop­er­ty mess grind­ing on. Exports are the one thing still work­ing, up 20.8% in June. Chi­na grow­ing at its slow­est pace in three and a half years while buy­ing most of our iron ore is not a great com­bi­na­tion.

Brent set­tled at US$84.23, down 0.8% on the night but still up around 10% for July after plung­ing 25% in June.

And the rea­son oil is doing what it’s doing: the Strait of Hor­muz remains effec­tive­ly closed to com­mer­cial traf­fic. Iran declared it shut on 12 July; the US dis­putes that, and the US Navy-backed mar­itime cen­tre says a south­ern route on the Oman side is still open for two-way traf­fic. In prac­tice, bare­ly any­one is using it. S&P Glob­al count­ed 32 tran­sits on 10 July, 30 on 11 July and just 11 on 12 July, the low­est since mid June, against a pre-cri­sis norm some­where between 60 and 88 a day depend­ing on whose base­line you use. Hun­dreds of ships are strand­ed, war risk insur­ance is run­ning at least 8 times nor­mal, and some­where between a fifth and a quar­ter of the world’s oil sup­ply is at risk. Esti­mat­ed cost is north of US$4 bil­lion a day.

Short ver­sion: noth­ing much wrong with Aus­tralia this morn­ing beyond a soft BHP out­look. We’re down­wind of Amer­i­can AI nerves, a slow­ing Chi­na, and a shoot­ing war in the Gulf.

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

Be Like Water

Chris­sy and I cel­e­brat­ed our 18th anniver­sary last week­end at a two-day Wing Chun sem­i­nar. As you do.

It was run by Mas­ter Andrew Che­ung, Chief Instruc­tor of the Glob­al Tra­di­tion­al Wing Chun Kung Fu Fed­er­a­tion. His father is Grand­mas­ter William Che­ung, who trained under Ip Man in Hong Kong, and who in 1954 walked his friend, a 15-year-old Lee Jun Fan, aka Bruce Lee, into Ip Man’s school and talked the old man into tak­ing him on. Ip ini­tial­ly said no. Lee had Cau­casian blood on his moth­er’s side, and the con­ven­tion of the day was that you did­n’t teach for­eign­ers. Che­ung argued the case and won.

One of the core prin­ci­ples of Wing Chun is “don’t fight force with force”. Or, as I like to say:

Accord­ing to tra­di­tion, the art was devel­oped by two women, a Shaolin nun named Ng Mui and her stu­dent Yim Wing Chun. Whether that’s his­to­ry or leg­end is an argu­ment I’ll leave to oth­er peo­ple (but I do get into it on my Kung­fused pod­cast). The design brief is the same either way.

This is a sys­tem built for a small­er per­son fac­ing a larg­er one. You don’t get to rely on strength, because you haven’t got any. You use struc­ture, tim­ing, and your oppo­nen­t’s own momen­tum. When she push­es, you don’t push back. You turn, and let her fall into the space where you used to be.

Which brings us to the most famous thing that Bruce Lee ever said.

“Emp­ty your mind. Be form­less, shape­less, like water. Now if you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. Put it into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow, or creep or drip or crash. Be water, my friend.”

Lee said that in Sep­tem­ber 1971, in an episode of the TV show Longstreet called “The Way of the Inter­cept­ing Fist”, which is what “Jeet Kune Do” (the name of the kung fu style he cre­at­ed) means in Eng­lish.

So… what does this have to do with invest­ing? I thought you’d nev­er ask…

There’s this idea in invest­ing — par­tic­u­lar­ly in val­ue invest­ing — that you should stick to your guns.

You’ve got to have CONVICTION IN YOUR BELIEFS. BUY THE DIP. DOUBLE DOWN.

If you’ve done your research and decid­ed that a stock is under­val­ued, you should buy it, regard­less of what’s hap­pen­ing to it in the mar­ket.

We say (to use a recent WORDLE selec­tion) — pshaw!

To fight the mar­ket is like fight­ing force with force. It’s one part ego, one part sunk cost fal­la­cy. “I spent a lot of time and effort decid­ing this is a good invest­ment, so damn you all to hell!”

If we have bought some­thing and the force, i e the mar­ket, is push­ing against us, we don’t push back. We flow with the force. We sell and then redi­rect that cap­i­tal into anoth­er invest­ment.

There are, of course, also prac­ti­cal rea­sons for not want­i­ng to sell some­thing you believe in. It’s time and effort. You have to pay bro­ker­age. You might have cap­i­tal gains tax impli­ca­tions. You have to spend time fig­ur­ing out what to replace it with. I remem­ber in the DARK AGES of 2022–2023 when we were in RULE 1 HELL. I get it. That sucked.

But we are real­ists. We do our research before we buy some­thing — but we aren’t mag­ic. We can’t see into the future. We can’t know every­thing about every stock, or sec­tor, or indus­try. And there are peo­ple out there who know a LOT more than we do about this or that par­tic­u­lar stock or sec­tor. If they are dri­ving the price down, whether it’s a sin­gle stock or an entire sec­tor, hey, maybe they know some­thing we don’t.

So we have rules that tell us when we should sell. Rule 1. 3PTL. Com­mod­i­ty sell. We might still be right and the mar­ket might be wrong. We might sell some­thing and then check back a few months lat­er and see it went through the roof. That hap­pens. But we’ve done back­test­ing and found that as often as it hap­pens, it hap­pens more the oth­er way — our rules get us out, and the stock keeps drop­ping.

Con­vic­tion is force. It’s a shape you com­mit to before you know what’s com­ing. Which is the exact thing Lee is telling you not to do, and the exact thing Ng Mui built a whole fight­ing sys­tem to avoid.

We don’t do con­vic­tion.

There’s no box on the QAV check­list for “how com­mit­ted are you?”. It asks whether the com­pa­ny throws off cash, whether it’s cheap against its own num­bers, whether the trend has bro­ken. It nev­er once asks what you think. In fact, it’s designed to AVOID your opin­ions. Opin­ions are bad for investors to have. Facts are far supe­ri­or to opin­ions (I tend to think this is a pret­ty good rule for life out­side of invest­ing, too).

Rule 1 is “don’t fight force with force” bolt­ed straight into the sys­tem. Down 20% and you’re out. You don’t get a vote. You don’t get to explain why the mar­ket’s got it wrong, why the the­sis is intact, why this is actu­al­ly a gift. You turn, and you let it fall into the space where you used to be.

The QAV AU Mod­el Port­fo­lio has returned about 16.1% a year since April 2019, against 7.7% for the SPDR ASX 200. Bet­ter than dou­ble the mar­ket, and you can go and check it on our web­site. Not one dol­lar of that came from a strong­ly held view. It came from rules that fire whether or not Tony and I agree with them, built by a bloke who’s been wrong plen­ty of times and designed a sys­tem that does­n’t care.

The mar­ket is always going to be big­ger than you. Don’t fight it. Re-direct the force.

Be water, my friend.

STOCK ANALYSIS OF THE WEEK

I bought a cou­ple of stocks for QAV AUSTRALIA Light this week. Noth­ing to sell. Details here.

I did have to replace some­thing from the QAV AMERICA Light port­fo­lio. Details here.

Tony did a deep dive on IVE Group (IGL), Aus­trali­a’s largest print­er and cat­a­log dis­trib­u­tor, includ­ing the remark­able detail that 14,000 peo­ple walk let­ter­box cat­a­logs around the coun­try every sin­gle week. Check out the full analy­sis in the pod­cast link below.

This week on the Amer­i­can pod­cast I did a deep dive on Tele­com Argenti­na (TEO), a near-monop­oly tel­co whose sto­ry comes with a Javier Milei sub­plot involv­ing dead dogs, clones, and chain­saw eco­nom­ics. The num­bers are gen­uine­ly sol­id, and you can hear the full analy­sis at the link below.

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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) 2026-07-12

U.S. BUY LIST

QAV Val­ue Invest­ing Buy List 2026-07-12

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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.

Aus­tralian Mod­el Port­fo­lio: No trades this week.

Amer­i­can Mod­el Port­fo­lio: No trades this week.

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Become a QAV Light Member today and start your investing on the right track

If you want to find out what we’re trad­ing in QAV Light each week, sign up to become a mem­ber. You’ll get an email from me every Mon­day let­ting you know what we’re buy­ing and sell­ing in that port­fo­lio. You can choose to copy our trades or not. It’s the eas­i­est way to start your rules-based invest­ing career… and you don’t even need to know the rules. I’ll fol­low the rules for you. It’s a good first step to even­tu­al­ly becom­ing a QAV Club mem­ber and learn­ing how to run the sys­tem by your­self.

QAV LIGHT: You don’t need to build it to tell the time.

(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

Phig­i­tal Monop­oly: IGL — QAV AU #928

Conan the Bar­bar­ian (TEO): QAV Amer­i­ca #61

STOCK NEWS AND UPDATES

COMMODITIES

This week the big changes to com­modi­ties were the fol­low­ing:

Com­mod­i­ty	Sta­tus
Coal (ther­mal)	BUY
Coal (cok­ing)	JOSEPHINE
Crude Oil	JOSEPHINE
Cop­per	BUY
Plat­inum	JOSEPHINE
Zinc	BUY
Man­ganese	SELL
Nick­el	JOSEPHINE
Wheat	BUY
Lithi­um	JOSEPHINE
WTI Crude	BUY
On the pod­cast, TK and I agree that Brent Crude is prob­a­bly a BUY, despite my code argu­ing over 50 cents.

DISCLOSURE

Please review our trad­ing and dis­clo­sure pol­i­cy.

SIGNING OFF

That’s the lot for this week. Hap­py hunt­ing!

SSDD!

• Cam

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That’s it for the week!

QAV A GOOD SHAREMARKET!

Got a ques­tion? [email protected]