It Ain’t About Willpower — QAV Weekly Update 2026-09-04

Hi QAVVERS,

Well… fare-thee-well, Win­ter, we hard­ly knew ya. It’s 29 ° in Brizve­gas at the moment, 11:20am, and 32 ° in my office. So yeah. Hel­lo El Nino. I’m still read­ing “Pale Fire” by Nabokov and a cou­ple of books about the Japan­ese con­cept of wabi-sabi which ties nice­ly into my per­son­al phi­los­o­phy of non-dual­ism, which has a lot of over­laps with Zen. Cur­rent­ly lis­ten­ing to Gen­e­sis’ 1983 album “MAMA” after I pro­mot­ed it to TK on one of the shows this week. Just to see if it stands up as well as I remem­bered. Not bad, sounds like one of Phil Collins’ solo albums from around that time. If you like that kind of thing. Also been lis­ten­ing to a lot of Ryuichi Sakamo­to this week.

Any­way… stocks. Noth­ing to report real­ly. Our port­fo­lios are gen­er­al­ly doing very well. Report­ing sea­son is offi­cial­ly over did­n’t present many issues for our port­fo­lios. The Amer­i­can port­fo­lio saw a huge drop this month, most­ly due to two stocks: FG, which we had to sell, and WFLC, which is a big chunk of our port­fo­lio val­ue (near­ly 40%) since it’s up 252% since we bought it, even after drop­ping 10% in the last month. Noth­ing to wor­ry about.

AUSTRALIAN MARKET UPDATE

The All Ordi­nar­ies shed around 1.9% over the five-day peri­od to sit near 9,230 points:

• Aus­trali­a’s Q2 2026 GDP came in at 0.4% quar­ter-on-quar­ter, beat­ing the 0.3% con­sen­sus, with annu­al growth of 2.1%, ahead of the 1.8% fore­cast, keep­ing the prospect of a fur­ther RBA rate hike firm­ly on the table.
• Major bank econ­o­mists are split on tim­ing, with NAB and Deutsche Bank expect­ing a Sep­tem­ber RBA hike and ANZ and CBA favour­ing Novem­ber.
• Sen­ti­ment was weighed down by renewed Mid­dle East ten­sions that pushed oil prices high­er and trig­gered a glob­al bond sell-off, com­pound­ed by hawk­ish sig­nals from US Fed Chair Warsh’s speech at Jack­son Hole the pre­vi­ous week.
• Aus­tralian bond yields pulled back mod­est­ly from mul­ti-year highs by Thurs­day, with the 10-year down 4 basis points to 5.16% and the 3‑year down 5 basis points to 4.77%, though both remain ele­vat­ed.
• A record cur­rent account deficit of AUD 27.2 bil­lion for Q2 was also released, though the fig­ure came in below mar­ket fore­casts.

US MARKET UPDATE

The S&P 500 is track­ing a down week through Wednes­day Sep­tem­ber 3, with the index sit­ting around 7,667 after clos­ing at 7,666.60 on Wednes­day (mar­kets remain open Thurs­day at the time of writ­ing this):

• Stocks fell Mon­day as US-Iran hos­til­i­ties esca­lat­ed, spik­ing oil prices, with WTI crude set­tling at $91.01 per bar­rel and Brent at $95.63.

• The yield on the 10-year US Trea­sury note hit 4.818% this week, its high­est lev­el since Novem­ber 2023, as ris­ing oil prices stoked infla­tion con­cerns.

• Fed funds futures pric­ing showed a 68% chance the Fed rais­es rates at its next meet­ing, accord­ing to the CME Fed­Watch tool.

• The US trade deficit surged 24.4% in July to $88.6 bil­lion, the high­est since March 2025, dri­ven by ris­ing imports of tech­nol­o­gy-relat­ed goods linked to the AI build­out.

• On the indi­vid­ual stock front, Nvidia jumped 3.2% on reports of a poten­tial $14 bil­lion acqui­si­tion of AI start­up Hug­ging Face, Dell soared 15.8% after beat­ing earn­ings expec­ta­tions, while Palo Alto sank 9.3% despite post­ing bet­ter-than-expect­ed results.

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

Success is about willpower

This week’s myth: Invest­ing suc­cess is about willpow­er.

Read the full arti­cle →

STOCK ANALYSIS OF THE WEEK

Aus­tralian Mem­bers can check out the stocks we trad­ed in QAV Aus­tralian Light port­fo­lios this week.

Amer­i­can Mem­bers can check out the stocks we trad­ed in QAV Amer­i­can Light port­fo­lios this week.

Tony did a Pulled Pork on Heal­ius (HLS) this week, the pathol­o­gy giant he described as qui­et­ly turn­ing the cor­ner after a bat­ter­ing. Find the full deep dive in the pod­cast link below.

On the Amer­i­can pod­cast this week, I did a pulled pork on SND, the com­pa­ny that puts sand in the frac crack. 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) 2026-08-30

U.S. BUY LIST

QAV Val­ue Invest­ing Buy List 2026-08-31

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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.

Sep­tem­ber 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: 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

The Speed of Light: Why Dou­ble Mar­ket Is as Good as It Gets: QAV AU #945

Sand Up Your Crack: The Last Frac Sand Com­pa­ny Stand­ing: QAV Amer­i­ca #68

STOCK NEWS AND UPDATES

COMMODITIES

This week the big changes to com­modi­ties were the fol­low­ing:

Com­mod­i­ty	Sta­tus
Iron Ore	JOSEPHINE
Coal (ther­mal)	BUY
Crude Oil	BUY

DISCLOSURE

Please review our trad­ing and dis­clo­sure pol­i­cy.

SIGNING OFF

SSDD!

• Cam

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That’s it for the week!

QAV A GOOD SHAREMARKET!

Got a ques­tion? [email protected]