Subprime Time: Lending to America’s Underbanked at 36% APR – QAV America #49

QAV America 49 Club
Cameron Reilly: [00:00:00] Welcome to QAV America TK. It’s the 21st of April, 2026. Before we get into the news of the week, TK, I just thought I’d do a quick update on our portfolios ’cause it’s a crazy time in the markets at the moment. The QAV dummy portfolio, uh, all time, which is September 23, is currently up 115%. Over that period of time versus the S&P 500, which is up about 60%.
So that’s, uh, September two and a two and a half years, not gonna lie. The S&P being up 60% in two and a half years
TK: it’s good.
Cameron Reilly: is not a bad, not a bad couple of years. Um, we are doing pretty much double that, so, yeah. Crazy, crazy time over there. Uh, at the moment, for the last 30 [00:01:00] days, our portfolio is up 14% versus the S&P up nine.
Our QAV light portfolio, which we started in December last year. Is up 6% over that period of time versus the S&P up 3%. So again, sort of double market, but it’s only over a few months. Um, I did mention to you on our last show that some of the stocks that have been doing well, we’ll talk about Topgolf in a minute, but our, our friends at Kodak.
Um, that we talked about a few weeks ago are now up Conex up 65% in our light portfolio. Um, in a matter of,
TK: bid or something for them?
Cameron Reilly: I dunno, it didn’t come up in my news search. Yeah, we added them on the 23rd of March, which is a month ago, less than a month ago, but almost a month ago. It’s up 65%. No idea why [00:02:00] Scripps is up 48.7% since we added them, uh, on the 25th of February, two months ago.
TK: Well, of course it’s, uh, corporate reporting season over there now, so they could be putting out some good
Cameron Reilly: It’s always corporate reporting season. They do it every three months. I did see that Scripps announced some sort of deal came up in my news. Well, it didn’t seem like that big a deal, some sort of a thing that they did. But yeah, I mean the market is just absolutely bonkers. you know, we’re gonna start a new segment on this show this week, which is, uh, Tony reads the Bible uh, that’s what Donald Trump’s doing this week. Uh, America reads the Bible. Have you heard about that?
TK: No.
Cameron Reilly: He’s doing a televised session where he reads from the Bible. I’m not sure if it’s a daily thing or a weekly thing.
I’m not sure when he is gonna learn to read, but that’s
TK: picture book? Oh, look at that. That’s a very ugly guy. There he is. Got terrible clothes, bad hair,
Cameron Reilly: very low IQ
TK: [00:03:00] straggly beard. Yeah.
Cameron Reilly: Very low IQ loser. Yeah. I
prefer my
TK: that’s Jesus.
Cameron Reilly: killed. Yeah.
TK: Look at that. He’s not to a cross. It’s a very basic cross. Not even the gold cross. Well, I see. He’s obviously doing penance for the AI post of him being Jesus. He’s trying to get back into good books with the Americans. Yeah, the Christians. Mm.
Cameron Reilly: Well, uh, Tony, crazy week, uh, as has become the norm. Um, York Times article in front of me. White House shrugs off shaky economy as war exceeds Trump’s timeline. Stocks may be soaring again, but the war in Iran has started to pinch the finances of many Americans. Uh,
TK: Was that White House or Wall Street did you misquote there?
Cameron Reilly: no, says White House.
TK: Really well, of course they’re gonna shrug it off. It’s bad news.
Cameron Reilly: roughly seven weeks into the war with Iran, investors have shrugged off the [00:04:00] sky high price of oil, sending the S&P 500 this week to a fresh record high. This is dated April
TK: Yeah, so that’s Wall
Cameron Reilly: old.
TK: Street shrugging off the wall.
Cameron Reilly: exuberance on Wall Street has offered a sharp contrast with the hardships facing many Americans who are feeling the financial blowback of a conflict that President Trump once promised would be brief, but seems to have no end in sight
TK: You once promised there wouldn’t be any foreign wars too. Forget about it being brief. That’s like,
Cameron Reilly: Oh,
TK: that’s like a, an excuse you give when you didn’t do your homework. Well, I’ll be brief. It was brief anyway.
Cameron Reilly: so. 2024. Thinking of you Tony, have changed with high gas prices cutting deeply into many families’ budgets. The US economy is under increasing strain, raising the odds that inflation will worsen, unemployment will rise, and growth will slow. This year
TK: All completely correct, but look, Americans are whinging bitches. I, uh, [00:05:00] I compare the cost of, um, petrol in the US or gas as they put it to Australia. And uh, the $4 a gallon is equivalent to a dollar 50. Even taking into account the currency changes exchanges. Dollar 50 per liter, which is half what I’m paying at the moment at the bowser.
So, you know, get over yourselves. Americans
Cameron Reilly: $3
TK: pony up. Yeah. For diesel. Absolutely.
Cameron Reilly: got a diesel car.
TK: Yeah.
Cameron Reilly: I was surprised. I filled up our car yesterday or the day before and it was only, I think two bucks.
TK: Okay.
Cameron Reilly: It was like
TK: That’s good.
Cameron Reilly: a few days earlier or a week earlier. Um, whinging bitches. I guess that’s the new, um, title for the episode. Uh, so yeah, like as we’ve said before, I think week after week after week after week, the stock market doesn’t seem to care. Uh, Washington Post article, here’s what the, uh, it wants me to pay for it. God damnit.
TK: Stop shouting at [00:06:00] clouds.
Cameron Reilly: Okay. Hold on a second here. Uh, let
TK: Yeah. You sent me, you said listen to this. Cameron sends me all these links to the behind paywalls and I don’t get to see them.
Cameron Reilly: you’ve
TK: Alright.
Cameron Reilly: Post subscription. I know it’s Wall
TK: No.
Cameron Reilly: You’ve got, yeah.
TK: I do find a way to get around them, but yeah.
Cameron Reilly: Here’s what the stock market might’ve gotten wrong about the Iran war. surge in optimism contrasts starkly with continued energy supply, challenges that threaten long lasting economic harm, and a market reckoning as stocks soared.
This week in oil prices dropped amid an apparent cooling of tensions between the United States and Iran. It may have left the impression that the energy shock that rattled the world is quickly fading along with the risk of sending the global economy into a recession. But beneath that surface, a starkly different reality is unfolding.
It is defined by disrupted supply lines and damaged infrastructure, sparking increased [00:07:00] concern among the people who produce, transport, and depend on energy. The people closest to the industry are far more concerned about these disruptions and recognize the length of time it will take for things to return to normal.
If they ever do, said Jerry Morton oil and gas co-chair at the law firm, Baker Botts. The further away you get from actually being involved in producing oil, the less you seem to be concerned about the physical reality and problems that are there. is the thing that gets me, Tony, is like, there’s just this sense of exuberance and optimism in the markets.
That makes absolutely no sense to me.
TK: It, it doesn’t, and unfortunately, I, yeah, I don’t like to predict, but it, it’ll catch up with us, with us at some stage and the market will retrace dramatically, I think. Um, not just, so a couple of points on what you just reported. Uh, I [00:08:00] can’t see the oil majors relying on the Straits of Hormuz if they can avoid it going forward, because even if, even if they have to, in the short term, they’re possibly gonna have to pay a toll.
To use it, whether that’s a toll on Iran’s permission or whether that’s some kind of support for the US keeping the straits open. Um, there has been plans to build a pipeline down the western side of the Strait so that oil can get through without having to worry about intervention. That’s a. Big, big cost, but I, I’m sure that that is being dusted off and they’re having a look at that, or they’ll find some other way to, to get the oil out, which will be more expensive.
Um, so that’s problem number one. Problem number two is that the Straits of Hormuz aren’t the only narrowing in the supply chain for oil. There’s also other places like the Straits of Malacca, which um, could be shut down by China in a sort of similar way that [00:09:00] Iran’s controlling supply chain, uh, the supply chain.
And given China’s moving away from its dependency on oil and gas, it’d be a really neat trick to go for the electric and then close down the Straits of Malacca, which would stop oil from getting to Southeast Asia and possibly to us as well. So it’s, it’s not just one choke point. I, I would think that the oil industry’s looking at all the chokepoints and building plans and they, the problem is not gonna be the lowest cost plans.
They’re gonna be the risk free plans and not cost money. And it’s not just oil. It’s gonna flow through to plastics, chemicals, fertilizers. Almost every part of the supply chain has a cost increase because of this.
Cameron Reilly: I was reading a little bit about the idea of building a pipeline across, well, what a cartel or Oman or whatever is down on
that other side of it. And yeah, it doesn’t sound like a weekend project.
TK: No it doesn’t.
Cameron Reilly: go to Bunnings, get some pipe, throw it down. there’s some pretty big mountain [00:10:00] ranges through there, so
TK: right.
Cameron Reilly: I read like hundreds of billions of dollars and decades to build a pipeline through there.
TK: Really.
Cameron Reilly: yeah, It’s not a, not a short term solution.
TK: Right.
Cameron Reilly: Elon can just fly rockets, some rockets there. Rockets can come up and come down on the other side. Reusable rockets.
TK: Yeah, he’s, he’s pretty good at finding economies and infrastructure, isn’t he? In government? Government departments?
Cameron Reilly: Well,
TK: think I’ll be relying on Elon, but I mean, they might do something like put it on rail, for example, rather than ship it in in big tankers, which should be, again, costlier, but less risk.
So I think that’s gonna be the, there’s gonna be solutions like that until more permanent ones are found, but they’re gonna be costly.
Cameron Reilly: Hmm. Well, speaking of government departments dealing with money, uh, New York Times today, uh, Trump administration takes steps to refund $166 billion in tariffs. [00:11:00] The government debuted a system to repay importers. Two months after the Supreme Court struck down tariffs at the heart of the President’s trade policy. Uh, but guess who’s not getting any money back is the people who paid their money. Um, the consumers,
American consumers. They’re not getting refunds.
TK: Yet, you gotta expect there to be class actions, wouldn’t you?
Cameron Reilly: wow. Yeah. I mean, lawyers have gotta make a buck, somehow. Gotta feel sad for the lawyers. Um,
TK: of the American economy. The lawyer?
Cameron Reilly: Um, yes. Like just what, what a debacle like, uh, complete, complete and utter debacle.
TK: Yeah.
Cameron Reilly: guy has done
TK: Yeah.
Cameron Reilly: and utter mess any who [00:12:00] in a sign of the expected demand. More than 3000 businesses, including FedEx and Costco, have already sued the Trump administration in a bid to secure their refunds before the application website launched, with some cases filed even predating the Supreme Court’s ruling, but only the entities that officially paid the tariffs are eligible to recover that money.
That means that the fuller universe of people affected by Mr. Trump’s policies, including millions of Americans who paid higher prices for the products they bought, are not able to apply for direct relief. You’re tired of the winning yet America.
TK: Well, it’s, that’s an interesting point as well. ’cause if, if, uh, there is a precedent set that the end user gets to pay for a, a government acting illegally, in this case it’s tariffs, then it must apply to oil as well. So it’s like governments acted illegally, Congress hasn’t approved this incursion to the Straits of war, whatever you wanna call it, and it’s pushed up all the prices for Americans.
[00:13:00] There’s another set of. Legal actions pending, I would’ve thought,
Cameron Reilly: Yeah. Yeah, you’re probably right. Well, moving closer to home. Um, big article in the financial review about Hamish Douglass, formerly of
TK: sorry. Be, can I make one more point? I was gonna,
Cameron Reilly: Hmm.
TK: in my notes talk a little bit about the fact that in the earning season that’s happening in the US I saw an article reporting on that for the banking sector. And the headline was something like, volatility is our friend. And so the banks have been making huge money out of buys and sell during this period of volatility.
Um, so someone’s winning out of it, and if someone’s winning out of it, it’s probably not gonna stop soon.
Cameron Reilly: Yeah, well, not to mention the people that, playing arbitrage with the
TK: Yeah.
Cameron Reilly: uh, you know, who obviously have a bit of an inside track, I imagine.
TK: Mm-hmm.
Cameron Reilly: Yeah. It’s just a, like, it’s just such a huge grift. [00:14:00] Um, I was talking to one of my American, uh, TPN listeners, uh, on chat there, actually. You, you, you, you met him, uh, Tim in the, uh, Vegas days.
I think you were there years ago. Tim Henning, back when Markum and Ray and all of us were in Vegas, Tim was there. He was checking in and he was saying like, the whole thing is just a pyramid scheme. Like it’s just the guys at the top making all the money from the people down the bottom. And yeah, it’s
just, he’s disgusted with the whole thing.
TK: Well, but we’ve seen this before with the US elections. They put a useful idiot in, they make lots of money. The useful idiot can make a bit of money as well themselves, and
Cameron Reilly: Hmm,
TK: the machine just keeps grinding on.
Cameron Reilly: . Uh, one of the stocks that we’ve talked about, uh, Cal-Maine Foods are in a bit of hot water. The US Justice Department is preparing an antitrust suit against a few major egg producers, including Cal-Maine Foods and Versova. Over [00:15:00] alleged price coordination.
The Wall Street Journal said on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter matter shares of Cal-Maine Foods, were down nearly 5% in extended trading. Following the news. Now call me crazy, call me stupid. But, uh, I, I do think there’s a little bit of a political angle in this because you remember when Donald Trump was campaigning.
He was very big on talking about the price of eggs and how the price of eggs were gonna plummet. Immediately he became president and then they didn’t. And, uh, so I think the Justice Department is going after the egg companies for making the president, uh, look bad. Would, what do you think would he, would he be that petty?
TK: Who can say I’m, I’m just, I’m just struggling to think of a promise he made that’s been kept [00:16:00] after two years or nearly two years. Uh, no foreign wars.
Cameron Reilly: Yeah,
TK: a war. It’s gonna finish soon.
Cameron Reilly: the tariffs are gonna be great for America. Oh, we’re gonna pay them all back. It was actually illegal, uh, doing that. Yeah. Um, I’m just asking, uh, Gemini, what’s happened to the price of eggs? The price of eggs in the United States over the last two years, April, 2024 to April, 2026, has been a study in extreme volatility.
As of March, 2026, the average retail price for a dozen grade, a large eggs is approximately $2 35. This represents a dramatic decline from the historic highs. Seen exactly one year ago.
TK: Well done, Donald.
Cameron Reilly: So,
TK: Does that mean the case has dropped?
Cameron Reilly: uh, December, 2024. They were $4 15, March, 2025, $6 23. August 25, $3 59. March [00:17:00] 26, $2 35, so
TK: Oh, I must see a reelection campaign right there. Cam. Winning the War against Eggs
Cameron Reilly: yeah.
TK: winning
Cameron Reilly: Yeah.
TK: the war against
Cameron Reilly: Yeah,
so, uh, what drove up the prices before that was the, uh, avian flu, apparently, the HPAI highly pathogenic avian influenza began in 2022. An outbreak, particularly lethal wave hit in late 2024. Then the greed, deflation debate. Anyway, I don’t know what the prices have come down. No.
TK: What drove the prices up was Sleepy Joe.
Cameron Reilly: Sleepy Joe. Yeah, he
TK: Joe.
Cameron Reilly: loved his eggs.
Um, also in the news, American Airlines rejects United CEO’s merger proposition. Apparently, according to the Wall Street Journal, the CEO of United Airlines, uh, suggested to President Trump that, uh, [00:18:00] would be a really great idea if they merged the two largest US carriers. Industry officials have said such a merger would create significant antitrust concerns and likely face pushback from consumers, lawmakers, and state attorneys general. United and American overlap on hundreds of routes, including at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, where they’ve been locked in a fierce battle for terminal gates and passengers.
Analysts said any merger would likely require significant divestitures. And apparently, uh, American Airlines not all about this idea. They’ve said no. We did, um, cover American Airlines on the show a while ago, the share price. We, we talked about them in October last year. Share prices down 11% since then.
TK: Yeah, of course. Mainly due to oil prices,
Cameron Reilly: Uh, I would imagine there’s, there was also some [00:19:00] problem with, uh, engines I seem to recall, and, you know, problems with, uh, some engines. Somebody who’s done much better since we talked about them. Uh, is Topgolf, Tony. Callaway, one of your favorite stocks that we’ve talked about? I had mentioned in recent shows that since we talked about them, their share price had gone bonkers.
We, we covered them on the 12th of November, 2025. Share price is up 43% since then, and I didn’t really look into it. They did pop up yesterday and something else I was looking at, um, there was an article that came out six days after we did our show, Topgolf, to be acquired by private equity firm, Leonard Green and Partners, the long awaited spinoff deal has finally been announced.
Parent Topgolf Callaway Brands plans to drop Topgolf from its name when the $1.1 billion deal is completed in early 2026. And remember, they did. [00:20:00] Change their, uh, ticker code to CALY from TOPG, I think it was.
TK: Mm-hmm.
Cameron Reilly: And that’s why. And the share price. The
TK: well.
Cameron Reilly: market loved it. So the share price has done well, not as well as easement. Code Act 70, 60.
So 66%. Remember Pitney Bowes we talked about at the, uh. Uh, it says 30th of April here. That’s not right. It’s the 30th of March. We talked about Pitney Bowes. They’re up 21%, uh, commercial vehicle groups up 16% since we talked about ’em on the 16th of April. PagSeguro we talked about last week, is up 6% since then.
Just we can’t do anything wrong. Tony, apart from American Airlines, apparently everything’s going bonkers.
TK: if you’re a CEO out there, send us a brown paper bag and we’ll talk about you on the stock on the.
Cameron Reilly: Either I’m a complete genius when I pick these stocks or, uh, the [00:21:00] US market. It makes absolutely no sense. Right now. You decide. I report the facts, people you decide. So my stock this week, Tony, is an interesting one. I think you’re gonna like this one. Um, Oportun Financial Corp, OPRT is the ticker code. They’re on the, uh, NASDAQ.
Look ’em up. OPRT. I’m gonna do this quickly ’cause I need to go jumpstart a car with a dead battery, uh, and then go to kung fu. But Oportun is a financial services company according to Stockopedia, the company offers access to a suite of financial products offered either directly or through partners, including lending and savings, powered by artificial intelligence.
TK: Important to say that these days
Cameron Reilly: You know, it’s good.
TK: it’s worth a
Cameron Reilly: it’s good.
TK: in your stock
Cameron Reilly: Yeah. Maybe that’s what Kodak did. Maybe they turned themselves into an AI company, code ai. Put [00:22:00] an I in the brand name. The company’s credit products include unsecured and secured personal loans. Its unsecured personal loan is a fully amortizing installment loan with fixed payments throughout the life of the loan.
Its secured personal loan is a personal installment loan product secured by an automobile. It also offers automated savings through its set and save platform. Its set and save product is designed to understand a member’s cash flows and save the right amount on a regular basis, quote unquote. Using AI, it reaches incremental members through its lending as a service lead generation program, it allows consumers to become members and access its products through the Oportun mobile app and the oportun.com website.
Which serves as its primary platforms for onboarding and providing member services. So, uh, interesting business that’s had a bit of a rough run as [00:23:00] most of the companies that we talk about here have for one reason or another. Not a lot of dead people, but, uh, a lot of, a lot of sued people. Um.
TK: Oh.
Cameron Reilly: There’s the story here.
Company goes back 20 years. Co-founded in 2005 in California by James Gutierrez. He was a student at Stanford Graduate School of Business and his co-founder, Gabrielle Manez, the original name of the business was Progreso Financiero. Financial progress, I guess, in Spanish, rebranded to Oportun in 2015.
It, it basically started off as a, a social enterprise to try and provide credit to people in America that didn’t have access to credit. Basically, unbanked and underbanked Latino population, primarily in California and Texas. These are people that couldn’t get credit under the. [00:24:00] Typical banking system in the us, undocumented immigrants or people that just struggled to get enough of a credit score, high enough credit score for the traditional banks to look at them.
TK: Mm-hmm.
Cameron Reilly: The company’s original mission was to help its customers build credit in the United States, and gain access to better lives and mainstream financial services. And over the years it grew and grew and developed a reputation for being one of the most litigious debt collectors targeting Latinos,
TK: that’s, um.
Cameron Reilly: particularly during COVID
TK: it doesn’t matter how much marketing you do, you do, it’s going
Cameron Reilly: one.
TK: negate it pretty quickly.
Cameron Reilly: Yeah. Well, um, and yesterday they got a new CEO. ’cause the CEO that they’ve had for the last 14 years got rolled by an activist investor.
TK: was repossessed? No. Oh.
Cameron Reilly: Yeah. He was [00:25:00] evicted from the premises by the sheriff, uh, which is the interesting part of the story. We’ll get to Fin. They’re an activist investor group that basically took a 10% stake in the business and then.
Sort of got rid of the board, uh, and, uh, or some of the board anyway, and the CEO. So they went, uh, Oportun, went public on the NASDAQ in 2019 at $15 a share. Currently trading around $5.88. So big decline. And, uh, the outgoing CEO has been blamed for a lot of that, not only by this activist investor, Mr.
Finn, but also by the founder or the co-founder I mentioned before, Mr. Uh, Gutierrez. I read a letter that he wrote basically saying, yeah, the, these, the current management has screwed the business, screwed the pooch, and we need to get back to basics. So, um, first thing to know [00:26:00] in terms of their core business is they’re what you would call a subprime and near prime consumer lender.
They lend small amounts of money, typically two to $10,000, to people who can’t easily get a personal loan from a mainstream bank because they have a thin credit file, no credit file or damaged credit history. They pay the loan back in fixed monthly installments over two to four years at a fixed interest rate.
For those people who dunno what subprime means, it means borrowers whose credit scores are below the threshold that you would, uh, normally. Need for mainstream banks, which is called prime credit. Near prime, you sit one tier above subprime. Their typical borrower’s a Latino working age income, roughly 45 to $55,000 a year in a service sector job.
Um, and quite often a first time formal credit user. And they’ve got a number of products, as I said, but the main [00:27:00] one is this fully amortizing personal loan. Now in July, 2020, they publicly committed to capping their annual percentage rate APR at 36%, which seems high.
TK: That’s generous of them. They capped it at 36%.
Cameron Reilly: Yeah. Now, uh, I did some sort of analysis between that and what the caps are in Australia, the caps in Australia are, uh, a bit higher, but in the US it’s kind of crazy. Uh, it, in Australia, our rates are capped federally
TK: Mm-hmm.
Cameron Reilly: the US they do it state by state. And some states, I think about 16, have got caps in place, others don’t, and you could be paying six, 700%
TK: mm.
Cameron Reilly: APR, uh, in some places.
So it’s. Kind of typically [00:28:00] American outrageous. Yeah. I was mentioned in the last show our, um, the guy that was with us in Vegas, I don’t know, 10 years ago, whenever it was, Tim told me that he just had a, an ultra, he’s 74. He just had an ultrasound done on his heart. Cost him $19,000.
TK: For an ultrasound,
Cameron Reilly: Yeah, I said I had my stress test and ultrasound and echo done a few months ago.
TK: equipment?
Cameron Reilly: I had mine done a few months ago and it cost me, I think six or 700, maybe $800, and I was kind of pissed that it cost me that much.
TK: I was gonna say,
Cameron Reilly: Yeah,
TK: yeah, I have a
Cameron Reilly: I
TK: CT scan done recently on my sinuses, and it was free. It was bulk billed.
Cameron Reilly: right.
TK: Yeah.
Cameron Reilly: Yeah. So anyway, that’s America for you. Um, now the 36% is apparently what the Military Lending Act, which is a federal law in [00:29:00] 2006, uh, that’s the limit that they set for interest rates for the military. It’s considered the, the good rate, 36%. Um, so anyway, and they did that. They voluntarily did that.
Because they got outed by ProPublica and the Guardian as being one of the most litigious,
TK: Oh dear.
Cameron Reilly: uh, lenders to Latinos. And then a few days later came out and said that they were dismissing a lot of their lawsuits and capping it at 36%. So they got shamed into it. Basically, the CEO at the time said, I had no idea that, I’m shocked, shocked to hear that there’s gambling going on in this establishment officer.
So, yeah. So how they make money, uh, breaking it down.
TK: I think it’s pretty obvious how they
Cameron Reilly: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re gonna break down the business,
TK: don’t
Cameron Reilly: divisions.
TK: you’re talking about [00:30:00] this.
Cameron Reilly: Uh, they’re what’s called a monoline lender. So they have a single product line as opposed, as opposed to a diversified bank. So personal loans, unsecured, as I said, that’s, that’s the historic core of the business and the bulk of their loan book secured personal loans, which is a relatively new product, which is where you pledge your car as collateral.
You get lower loss rates, or they get lower loss rates as part of that. Uh, credit cards. They have a smaller card product. It’s pretty modest, but they do offer a card and then they got the saving. App, but this is kind of a bit of a dud. In 2021, they acquired a company called Digit. It was a FinTech app that automatically took money from your bank account and saved it for you, but that’s largely been wound down.
It was a bit of a disaster.
TK: Mm.
Cameron Reilly: But the way that they raise money, and this is part of the risk of businesses like this, is they raise money via what’s known as [00:31:00] warehouse lines and securitization. Tony’s nodding sagely because he knows what that is. I didn’t, I had to look it up
TK: Uh.
Cameron Reilly: and I’ll get into it in a minute.
For people who don’t know how that works, so they borrow, it costs ’em about three to 7%, uh, to access the funds, and then they loan it out for. 36% or more as we said. Uh, and the difference is the net interest margin or the NIM, the NIM, and that’s what they live on. Obviously risky for a bunch of reasons, as we discovered in 2008 with the subprime mortgage disaster, which I’ll talk about more in a second.
But the thing that these people call their moat is their, their, uh, machine learning model, their proprietary machine learning underwriting model is what they call it. They’re currently on V 12 of that. And that’s the credit decision system, which they say is their [00:32:00] magic. And I’ll get into, you know, how realistically much of a moat that is.
A little bit later on. But lemme talk about the subprime thing. ’cause that was my first reaction. I was, oh, subprime, um, alarm bells went off. So subprime is obviously risky for obvious reasons. These people, um, are doing it tough and when things go tits up, the, these people that have subprime mortgages are probably gonna be the first people that can’t pay back their loans.
In 2008, uh, we had subprime mortgages that were layered into collateralized debt structures. That were sold then to other parties and they didn’t have a lot of visibility in what was inside of those. I remember in the, um, whatever that film was, Big Short, I remember, um,
TK: Margot
Cameron Reilly: no, I was thinking about, um, uh, [00:33:00] the chef whose books I’ve read and now I can’t remember his name.
TK: Bourdain.
Cameron Reilly: Bourdain. Thank you. Talking about. Like weak old fish heads that you then put into a bouillabaisse stew or something.
TK: Yeah.
Cameron Reilly: it all up as the analogy.
TK: I just, can I pull you up there? I just ask the question, is Oportun actually offering mortgages or is it just loans?
Cameron Reilly: No, no mortgages. Just personal loans. Yeah. Um, so back in 2008, what happened was these mortgages were, you know, people were buying mortgages on. Speculating on price appreciation for the property, and they were being loaned out on that basis. Then the real estate market collapsed and the mortgages collapsed and they, they had been funneled up and off on, sold to other banks, and then all that collapsed and it was this systemic.
Contagion that spread through the financial system. Oportun makes small [00:34:00] personal loans, as I said before, two and a half to $10,000. They get paid back over two to four years. So no securitization daisy chain really, although they do securitize them, which I’ll get into. But it’s a, it’s, it’s very different.
Um, I think to the, the mortgage level risk that we saw in 2008. Although you would expect that when things go tits up, and as we said earlier, all of the economists who, and in Australia we were talking about the fact that the banks here are starting to prepare for,
TK: Yeah.
Cameron Reilly: higher losses. They’re upping their bad debt buffers, the bad debt, Warren Buffer, as you said.
Um. So big businesses and economists and the banks here are all assuming that it’s gonna be a rough trot thanks to, uh, President Trump’s, uh, adventures in Iran, among other things.
TK: Well,
certainly in Australia and there’s, there’s been two rate cuts here. I don’t think there has been in [00:35:00] the US so it might be a little bit different or delayed in the us but uh, yeah, it’s not gonna be as sunny as it was before the war.
Cameron Reilly: yeah, not according to the articles we read earlier. I mean, you know. I think every, all, all of the economists in the US are thinking that this is not gonna end well.
TK: The thing about subprime no camp, from my experience and I had a bit of experience running store cards or not running store cards, being involved with the running of store cards past careers, which are unsecured, and a line of credit to allow someone to shop in a department store, for example. as long as it’s all transparent and it’s priced properly, it doesn’t matter if things go tits up. Right. You’ve baked that into the price, the high interest rate you’re charging, and also into the provisions for losses that you’re, you’re making. if you are warehousing and getting funding from someone else, as long as they’ve got transparency of the who’s who the borrower is, then they can price it appropriately as well. The difference with the, with the GFC was that that [00:36:00] stuff was rolled up into,
Cameron Reilly: Yeah.
TK: CDOs and then rated as if it was all Prime Plus when it wasn’t
Cameron Reilly: Yeah.
TK: heads? Yeah.
Cameron Reilly: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. So I mean, it, it, it’s not going to lead hopefully to, uh, a huge market disaster. But it could be bad for the business. I mean, they could lose money in the, in the process. Right. So from an investor’s perspective, yeah.
TK: yeah.
Cameron Reilly: So the, the flip side, the contrarian angle to that is when you look at the share price for this, the market is already overpricing tail risk into their business model and at their current prices.
And as you’ll see, when we get to the, uh, price to book and the price to operating cash flow, it’s, it’s insanely cheap. Um, so there’s, there’s potential upside here as well as potential risk as there always is. Also this borrower base, the, um, Latino immigrants without credit [00:37:00] scores is underserved by FinTech and banks in the US as far as I can tell.
And it’s a pretty large total addressable market. Although once ICE is finished, it is shrinking. Yeah.
TK: Is it literally going south?
Cameron Reilly: Yeah. What happens when your customers get, uh, picked up and deported? I’m not exactly sure what your out is for that. Let me quickly talk about warehousing and securitization. So let’s say Oportun wants to lend out a billion dollars to borrowers and they don’t have a billion dollars sitting in the vault.
They have to borrow the money. So they go to a big bank and they borrow money and they get it short term. So. Citi or Goldman might say, listen, we’ll lend you $200 million short term. Go make loans with it. Use those loans as collateral. So Oportun goes and makes 80,000 small loans to borrowers. Those loans are now sitting in a metaphorical warehouse.
They’re real assets. People owe them money. The problem is that those [00:38:00] warehouse lines are expensive and short term. They can’t just sit there, so they then roll those up. Once they have a big enough pool of them, they bundle them together into a package and sell bonds. As a package to investors, typically pension funds, hedge funds, et cetera, and they buy the bonds because they’re gonna receive the monthly loan repayments from Oportun borrowers.
So they, the Oportun then gets a lump sum of cash from selling the bonds. They use it to pay back the warehouse line and the cycle resets. So it’s a, it’s a interesting business model. Uh, it’s, you know, particularly risky during hard economic times because it depends on the banks being willing to give them warehouse lines and investors being willing to buy the bonds that, uh, they’re trying to package up and sell that.
Hit a wall, obviously not only just in 2008, but also during COVID 2020.
TK: Right.
Cameron Reilly: And if you can’t make new [00:39:00] loans, you can’t borrow money, you know it, your, your whole business model can go up in smoke pretty quickly for an unknown period of time. So anyway, that is how that side of it works. Now, the, the other, the dirty part of the story is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that was created by the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010 in response to the 2008 financial crisis.
And based on a proposition, I think made by Elizabeth Montgomery when she was in Bewitched, um, no, Elizabeth Warren, the other Elizabeth, when she was, uh, at Harvard.
TK: Bail witch.
Cameron Reilly: Regulates consumer financial products and they open an investigation into Oportun in March, 2021, focused on their collection practices over 2019 and 2021. In March of [00:40:00] 2023, though the CFPB notified Oportun that its enforcement staff had concluded they would not recommend any enforcement action. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re innocent.
It just, it could mean all sorts of things. Like, we don’t have any money to do this. We don’t have enough staff, we’re too busy. Um, you know, we’re just, for whatever reason, it’s not being cleared of wrongdoing. It’s just that we’re not enforcing this for whatever reason.
TK: Elon saving money in.
Cameron Reilly: I think DOGE was around in 2023, but yeah, could have been all sorts of reasons. Then in August of 2020, as I mentioned, ProPublica, uh, and the Texas Tribune and the Guardian, uh, published an investigation showing that Oportun had filed nearly 10,000 debt collection lawsuits year to date. Against lower income Texans and Latino concentrated geographies during the COVID-19 pandemic.[00:41:00]
Uh, instead of going, Hey, listen, it’s, you know, this is a tough time for everybody. Yeah. Yeah. And whilst governments were handing out money hand over fist to businesses, I’m not exactly sure if Oportun got any government handouts. As part of that, I know a lot of American businesses did, and Australian businesses, many of whom did not pay it back when things recovered six months later.
Uh, but within days of this article coming out, these articles coming out, Oportun suspended new collection lawsuits, pledged the 36% all in APR cap, filed an application for a national bank charter with the OCC, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Which they ultimately withdrew in 2022, and then they were the subject of the CFPB investigation, which went nowhere.
But, uh, the Center for Responsible [00:42:00] Lending, which is another US consumer advocacy nonprofit, published a follow up report of March, 2021, titled Suing to Intimidate That Explain their Practices. So. You know, reputational risk that these guys have. Also, the failed Digit acquisition that I mentioned before, they paid roughly $213 million, a mix of cash and stock for Digit.
Supposed to get them into the neobank territory, couldn’t cross sell it. Integration was difficult. Uh, they took a large impairment charge on it, effectively wrote the whole thing off. And, you know, this was also when they were suing their customer base. It’s like, Hey, we’re suing you, but, uh, let us help you save money.
So I mentioned earlier on too that the CEO from the last 14 years, Raul Vasquez had just got rolled. He’d been around since I think [00:43:00] 2012, something like that. It was kind of a big deal. He fought for his life for six months, um, uh, but didn’t survive, and he copped a lot of the blame for a lot of the mishaps that they’ve had over the last.
Five or six years. He actually announced his departure on January 21st. Stepped down April 4th and the new CEO was named on April 16th, and he took over effective April 20th, literally today in the US. We’re recording this in April 20th American time. His name is Doug Bland. You know, if you have a flashy CEO you wanna get rid of, you know, you bring in Doug Bland.
Doug Bland has 30 years in consumer finance, senior roles at PayPal. Speaking of Elon, Bank of America, Swift Financial, [00:44:00] they’ve also had three CFOs in five months,
TK: Wow, that’s caught my attention.
Cameron Reilly: Yeah, but this is when everyone’s being rolled and, uh, you know, largely the work of Fin Capital Management.
TK: Mm-hmm.
Cameron Reilly: them earlier on, but as I said, even the founder, James Gutierrez, or the co-founder weighed in against Vasquez in an open letter that he posted on LinkedIn saying, yeah, this guy needs to go.
We need to get back to. Our core business anyway, so this guy, Brian Finn, runs Fin Capital Management. They’re an activist hedge fund, watched a podcast interview that he did with an Aussie, actually, uh, who runs an investing podcast. It was interesting, and, and he was pretty straight up saying, listen, this is a good business.
It, it should be doing much better than it is. It’s a great market, great opportunity, great upside, but it’s being run very poorly. They’ve trashed shareholder value. [00:45:00] Um, management. He basically accused Vasquez of running it like an imperial court. Had a whole bunch of directors that have independent directors that have been there a long time, and, uh, so replaced a couple of those, replaced the CEO, CFO’s been replaced as well.
So, uh, yeah, uh, that’s gone on. So basically you’re in a situation now with new management, activist investor. That could be a good thing, could be a bad thing, but, uh, you know, I guess we won’t know until the dust settles. But if you look at how the markets responded to the. News, its share price at the end of March was $4.37.
It’s now $5.82. Share price’s gone up 70, 80% in the last, uh, [00:46:00] month, three weeks really as a result of these things going on, as far as I can tell. So the market has responded to it, uh, very positively. It was responding to the situation very positively anyway. I’m gonna quickly run through the numbers, Tony, and, um, couple of things I wanna highlight.
First of all, QAV score is 1.09. One of the highest I’ve ever seen. The price to operating cash flow is 0.65,
TK: Less than one
Cameron Reilly: less than one. Six months payback on
TK: Wow.
Cameron Reilly: this. Yeah. So it’s pretty good. And the price to book is 0.67. So they’re the key numbers that you need to know. Now, interesting thing though, if you look at Stockopedia revenue, um, it,
TK: Edia.
Cameron Reilly: sorry, Stockopedia’s, uh, numbers, [00:47:00] the first thing I noticed is, um. The revenue 2020 335 million 2021, 530 2022.
641. Then 2023 281, 2024, 295, 2025, 406. That was their most recent reporting season 2026. Estimate Stockopedia has as 944. I was like, oh my God, it’s gonna more than double what? How no. So it turns out that there’s a couple of different ways of reporting this with all the GAAP and all of this kind of business over there.
So with, without getting into the weeds, um, Stockopedia is. Number for 2025. The 406 million is normalized revenue. It strips out non-cash fair value decrease on the loan book. [00:48:00] The 944 million for 2026 is the raw GAAP number, which Oportun use, which has all of this fair value, decrease, blah, blah, blah.
Stuff factored in so. Yeah, I mean, both numbers are legitimate in their own way, but, and it makes little difference to us and price to operating cash flow and that kind of stuff. But just if you’re looking at those raw numbers and you go, what the hell’s going on? It’s not an apples to oranges. Uh, well it is an apples to oranges, uh, display glitch, not real growth.
So, um, their revenue is. Actually probably gonna decrease a little bit next year based on reading through the financials and the, the. Um, analyst forecasts, but they have had a turnaround. This is real. They swung from a $78.7 million loss in 2024 to a 25.2 [00:49:00] million net income in 2025. Uh, so they were bleeding badly for, uh, a long time, but they’ve managed to turn around for the last five consecutive quarters.
And this apparently is in connection with. Replacement of some of the directors on the board, new independent directors coming in. Bit of a change in their focus, writing off the bad FinTech purchase, et cetera, et cetera. The.
TK: though. It could also be just better credit policies because if you are writing less loans and your revenue’s going down, but your profit’s going up, you, you might be just getting rid of bad business.
Cameron Reilly: Could be. Could be, yeah. Um, I did see delinquencies ticking up though. Um, 4.9% on 30 plus days. They’re up, um, up 13 basis points. So they have tightened their opex costs. Opex is down 12%. Customer acquisition [00:50:00] costs fell from $125 to $117. Debt to equity ratio improved from 7.9 times to 7.2 times. So they’ve been tightening up different parts of the business.
Delinquencies are going in the wrong way. Not necessarily completely alarming, but not a, not a good direction for it to head in. Um. But that’s basically it. That’s sort of my bottom line. It’s, uh, a business that’s generating good cash now. Big sort of a turnaround story, but, um, the future, who knows what holds.
TK: A couple couple of things I’d like to highlight. So they did have a credit card business, which they sold recently, so that could also be helping their bottom line. Um, the repayment plan for this company is typically biweekly every two weeks rather than monthly, so that, that may be helping them. [00:51:00] I, when I went to the website for this company, it reminded me a heck of a lot of companies we have in Australia. If you look at the website, MoneyMe, Harmoney,
Cameron Reilly: Mm-hmm.
TK: um, yeah, basically, payday to payday lenders or unsecured lenders, that kind of thing. Credit Corp, I guess, falls into that category as well. And, and I had some slightly different numbers to you, but I compared those companies with, their delinquency rates compared to Oportun and it seemed like they were lower in Australia. So I dunno if we’re doing an apples to apples comparison or not. But, Harmoney, which is probably the best comparator is at 6.4%. And I know you mentioned. I think six at the moment. But when I asked Gemini, I was getting 11.9% for 2026 as the charge off rate. So I’m not sure what we’re comparing there, but I just wondered whether, um, there was the, [00:52:00] which number was right and whether they were, um, writing off more than what they do in Australia and what that meant.
Cameron Reilly: Well, Australian banks are probably not loaning to, um, undocumented, illegal
TK: workers.
Cameron Reilly: Mexican immigrants.
TK: Yeah. And again, not a big issue. As long as the pricing of the loans reflects the higher delinquency rate, that’s fine.
Cameron Reilly: Yeah. Charge off rate 12.65% for Q1 2026. Hmm.
TK: And, and again, going back to my experience with um, you know, I was partner with GE to issue the Shell MasterCard, for example. Um.
Cameron Reilly: Hmm.
TK: A long time ago, but you know, the sort of provisions were no more than 4% for unsecured credit at that stage in Australia. So it’s different and a different customer base, but that’s a big difference between 4% and 12%.
Cameron Reilly: Yeah, but it’s their business model, right? So as long as they know how to make money with that business model, then [00:53:00] that’s on them.
TK: Yeah.
No, I, accept that.
Cameron Reilly: I think the real. You know, the reason it scores so well for us is low price to operating cash flow, right? Low price to book, uh, as well, and just running through the scoring.
Um. The price is higher than IV1, but lower than IV2. Lower than book value, lower than book value plus 30. PropCaf is lower than seven. Um, no yield, uh, yield. Uh, so we couldn’t score ’em for PE. Yes. And the yield greater than the benchmark rate. Don’t have positive book value growth. Don’t have a new three point upturn. Did score for Piotroski F-score.
They get a five and we score for over four and a half. Couldn’t score them for quality rank, stock rank or growth over PE being greater than 1.5. But so they’re cheap,
TK: You’re right.
Cameron Reilly: basically.
TK: Yeah. Yeah.
Cameron Reilly: They’re cheap and they seem to be turning around
TK: Yeah.
Cameron Reilly: the, share price has nearly doubled, as I said in the last three or four weeks.[00:54:00]
So the market’s responding well to the management changes, I assume. Um, and the fact that they’re turning around and making money after a period of not making money. So. I added them to the portfolio this week and we will, uh, see how they go. Tony, OPRT.
TK: Yeah, no, very good. And these kind of companies often do come onto a value buy list. I mean, there’s four or five we’ve had on our list in Australia the years. Um, so can be seen. I think people get blinded by. The fact it’s subprime and, and don’t really pay attention to, if subprime is priced properly, you can make a lot of money. Um, so they can be good investments, these types of companies.
Cameron Reilly: Well, time will tell.
Alright, after hours. Tony, what you got?
TK: Uh, a couple of things. So, uh, Jenny and I started watching a new, I think it’s a new, it’s actually season two, so it’s not new, um, a new season of, uh, Patience. [00:55:00] So we’re actually going back to the first season, which is on the iView platform. I think it’s actually dropping season two on the ABC on Sunday nights as well, which we’re enjoying.
Another twist on the, um, the Sherlock Holmes theme. This time it’s a autistic lady from the, um, criminal records division of the York Police that keeps finding patterns in the data and helping the police solve crimes. And it’s kind of fun ’cause they, they’re basically ransacking all the Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes stories and dressing them up in modern guise and they’re dropping little, uh, you know, um, Easter eggs so you can work out what it is, uh, according to characters’ names or whatever, or, so the, the database that this lady works on is called the HOLMES Database, which is the name, the acronym for the criminal records database in the UK.
So yeah, it’s fun, it’s pretty light, but we’re enjoying it.
Cameron Reilly: Nice.
TK: that was [00:56:00] good. Jenny was away for part of last week and I happened to rewatch the Entourage movie. I think it’s from 2015. Have you ever seen that? You probably have.
Cameron Reilly: I did when it came out. I remember it not being great.
TK: I, I, I did too. But the rewatch was fantastic. I really enjoyed it. ’cause it, um, it’s just wall to wall cameo basically.
Cameron Reilly: Yeah.
TK: um, which is probably my criticism at the time, but now it’s just fun,
Cameron Reilly: Right.
TK: you know, watching, watching Kelsey Grammer coming out of a family, uh, marriage counseling session as Ari’s going in and just ranting and raving.
It’s, it’s kind of fun. Warren Buffett makes a cameo in it at one stage, um, which is good. And what I hadn’t noticed from last time, um, was, uh, the quote at the end of the movie when, uh, when Ari. I mean, spoiler alert Ari was a studio head. Ari Gold, who was the agent for Vincent Chase, became the studio head, um, left the studio head.
It [00:57:00] looks like he resigned before he was fired and took his severance pay and put it into Vince’s movie that was running over budget, which got him fired in the first place. And then at the end, it, it turns out to be a fantastic hit and he makes lots of money out of the investment. And Ari Gold’s quote is, Warren Buffett’s going to be blowing us for investment advice in the future, which I thought was a great quote.
Another title for the show.
And lastly, after hours, um, I’m wearing my Harbour Town golf shirt ’cause the PGA Tour was in Hilton Head this weekend. And it brings back happy memories from me from three years ago when I was over there. As part of my 60th birthday travels, and one of my mates rung up and said, Hey, we were standing there three years ago on that day, and coincidentally the same person won the tournament.
Um, that was one when we were there, so, uh, brought back some happy memories.
Cameron Reilly: from last week’s show.
TK: That [00:58:00] was Rory McIlroy. That was from the Masters. So Hilton Head follows a week after the Masters.
Cameron Reilly: Uh,
TK: It’s only about a three or four hour drive from Augusta down to Hilton Head, an Englishman called Matt Fitzpatrick,
Cameron Reilly: Right?
TK: which is kind of good because they’ve got this tradition, like in, in Augusta, they give you a green jacket.
When you win Hilton Head give you a, what they call a plaid jacket. It’s a red tartan jacket. So looks better on Matt Fitzpatrick than it does on one of the US recipients. Normally it’s very loud and I, I couldn’t, I’m wearing my QAV hat today, but I actually have a, um, a, a cap from Hilton Head, which is in red plaid.
I was trying to find it, but it’s in storage in Sydney.
Cameron Reilly: Right. Very good. Well, I’ve watched a few good things. Uh, this week, the Gauntlet, 1977, Clint Eastwood
directed, uh, starring him and Sondra Locke,
TK: His, his partner? Yeah.
Cameron Reilly: his [00:59:00] partner, and I think they had been together on Outlaw Josey Wales before this. And then it looks like he directed this basically as a vehicle for her, I think.
TK: Correct. Yeah.
Cameron Reilly: And, um, I read up on the story of her and the two of them and all of that kind of stuff, which was interesting. But not a, not a terrific film, but the couple of, have you seen it recently?
TK: No, I have seen him a couple of times, but not recently.
Cameron Reilly: The couple of things that stood out for me, and number one is she’s great. Like, she, like for the people who haven’t seen it, he’s a, he’s a grizzled cop who gets sent by his new police commissioner to, he’s, he’s in Phoenix. He, he’s sent to Vegas to get this hooker and bring her back for some nothing trial.
She’s a nothing witness of a nothing trial. His new uptight police captain or commissioner, whatever it says. Um, he goes to get her Sondra Locke in prison and she starts screaming that she’s gonna get killed. And if he takes her, they’re gonna [01:00:00] kill him too. He, he slaps her back into the corner of a thing.
It’s the usual sort of mid seventies Clint, you know, sort of misogynistic violence against women thing. But as it plays out, he’s sort of a dumb cop who can’t see the plays and she’s the smart college educated. Hooker who sees all the angles and all the plays, and is telling him what’s gonna happen and who’s betraying him.
And, so, and she does a great job. But, um, the other thing that jumps out is the, the shootouts are insane, 80,000 bullets firing into houses that then end up collapsing and buses. And it’s just like over the top
TK: Yeah.
Cameron Reilly: Rambo esque, like late eighties Rambo esque violence. Not First Blood Rambo, but like crazy Rambo. So he kind of went all [01:01:00] out with this level of Sam Peckinpah kind of shootout stuff that’s just insane. And they go on for like seven minutes, these shootouts. But as, um, somebody I read a review pointed out Clint, and this is after Dirty Harry and all of the, the spaghetti westerns. He only fires his gun twice and it’s never to shoot somebody.
He shoots a lock off a door once and shoots something else like a petrol tank or something. But it’s, you know, he’s not the guy, he’s the guy getting fired. Shot at, not the guy shooting in this one. Anyway,
TK: There supposed to be a moral dimension to it. Is there
Cameron Reilly: I, I dunno about that, but I think it was, um, it was just, he sort of did a 180 on it. He’s not, he’s, he is sort of the hard, tough guy in the end, but, um, not really the typical Clint hero [01:02:00] in it. He’s, uh,
TK: He’s the patsy, isn’t he? Yeah.
Cameron Reilly: kind of, yeah, he’s the patsy who’s, uh, bosses, uh, betraying him. Which is obvious for the first time you see the boss, you go, oh yeah, he’s a bad guy. But she was great. I really, really thought she did a, a tremendous job. I also watched the Liam Neeson Naked Gun reboot.
TK: terrible.
Cameron Reilly: Thoroughly
TK: Oh.
Cameron Reilly: it.
TK: Oh, I hated it. I thought it was shocking.
Cameron Reilly: not as good as Leslie Nielsen. No one can ever do Leslie
TK: No,
Cameron Reilly: level good. But I, I thought it was fantastic and I
TK: really
Cameron Reilly: the
TK: hated it.
Cameron Reilly: Liam Neeson, with all of you know, the acting credits and the history he’s got, was prepared to do something
that absolutely ridiculous at his age as Leslie Nielsen, uh, did
before him.
No,
TK: Play against type. Yeah. I thought it was awful.
Cameron Reilly: Uh, we started watching Knight of the Seven Kingdoms after you recommended it, and, uh, we’re only three or four episodes into it. Just got the, I dunno, one of the early spoilers anyway, who the young kid is.
We [01:03:00] saw that, that was the last episode we saw. was great. I’m enjoying that.
Very different pacing to Game of
Thrones, but I’m enjoying it. And I’m reading, um, Galileo, uh, I, uh, I downloaded like a collection of his writings and I’m reading his first one at the moment, the Sidereal Messenger where he’s writing to Cosimo de’ Medici about, oh yeah, I’m the first guy that’s ever seen the moon.
I looked at the moon. How’d you do it? Oh, I built a telescope. You built a telescope? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Built a telescope. Spent a
TK: Wow.
Cameron Reilly: built myself a telescope I think it was 60 times magnification,
TK: Wow.
Cameron Reilly: uh, built his own thing, ground his own lenses, then, uh, the first human being to see the moon. He goes, you know what?
It’s not smooth. Everyone apparently thought the moon was. Smo, they thought all of the spheres were
[01:04:00] smooth like crystals. And he is like, nah, this thing has got mountains and craters and valleys. And I’ve
TK: Wow.
Cameron Reilly: Imagine that.
TK: Yeah.
Cameron Reilly: I was particularly in light of the recent Artemis, uh, mission and the
TK: Just
Cameron Reilly: that we got.
TK: saw a great cartoon of the astronauts bearing the Epstein files in the dark of the moon.
Cameron Reilly: Oh, did you see the video of Trump today? a presser and somebody started asking him about the Epstein files and he just started ranting and raving about we are building the greatest ships, the biggest ships, uh, the greatest ships the world has ever seen. And you know, the Democrats wanna distract you with the Epstein files.
It’s a nothing story. The fact that you campaigned on it and said, and all of your people said that it was the most important thing that we all needed to find out about. Um, anyway. Yeah. [01:05:00] Galileo amazing. I mean, just being the first person to see the moon.
TK: Wow.
Cameron Reilly: Amazing stuff. Anyway. Enjoying it. Uh, well that’s it Tony.
TK: All right.
Cameron Reilly: Thanks Cam. Have a good week.
TK: Have a good week. You too.