Hi folks,
The All Ordinaries had a rough week but seems to be recovering today.
The S&P 500 hit fresh record highs by week’s end, despite Trump’s recent announcement that the Iran peace deal was on life support. Go figure.
So, let’s get into my weekly updates and see where we are at.
All the Best,
Cam
QAV MYTH KILLERS
“Investing Should Be Gamified”
In a recent interview on CNBC, Warren Buffett compared the markets to a church with a casino attached.
He wasn’t wrong when he stated that “investing is like a church with a casino attached… people can move between the church and the casino…. but the casino’s gotten very attractive to people.”
Since the launch of Robinhood in 2013, whose co-founder Vlad Tenev claimed to be giving the “poor” access to the glamorous domain of rich traders, “democratizing finance for all”, there’s been a Cambrian explosion of investing apps and services trying to capitalise on the idea of the gamification of investing. Dopamine-fuelled behavioural drivers, the kind that have been the engine of social media and educational apps like Duolingo have been leveraged in finance to create stickiness and investing fever.
(Sidenote: I just hit my 2,100-day Duolingo streak this week. The owl owns me. I know exactly what dopamine-driven stickiness feels like – and that’s the point.)
We all remember the GameStop trading frenzy that Robinhood became the focal point of in 2021.
In 2022, the CFA Institute published a report called Fun and Games, Investment Gamification and Implications for Capital Markets.
It says that gamification and the broader use of behavioural techniques can be a powerful tool when used well to drive engagement and positive outcomes – but it can also be leveraged by firms to drive “excessive trading” as well as “induce trading in complex or high-risk products”.
Even Keynes – back in 1936 – called the share market a ‘beauty contest’ where investors don’t try to pick the best company, they try to guess what everyone else will pick. Now we just call it WallStreetBets.
CFA goes on to say:
“With social media, it is easier than ever to infer the average opinion in real time, as evidenced by the success of such groups as WallStreetBets, or to be led by the opinion of the few, as the rise of social influencers attests.”
In the United States, there have been a number of cases that demonstrate the dangers in gamified investing.
In December 2020, Robinhood paid $65M to settle SEC charges of misleading customers about how it made its money (payment for order flow) and the inferior trade prices that resulted. In the same month, the Massachusetts Securities Division became the first US securities regulator to file an enforcement action explicitly citing gamification – confetti animations, push notifications, lists of “100 most popular stocks” – as the actual harm to retail investors.
Six months later, in June 2021, Robinhood paid $70M to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), the largest financial penalty FINRA had ever ordered at the time, for misleading customers, system outages during the GameStop saga, and approving unsuitable customers for options trading.
The most tragic story might be the Alex Kearns case from June 2020. A 20-year-old university student in Illinois took his own life after Robinhood’s UI showed him a $730K negative balance that wasn’t real – it was an options-trading display glitch. His family settled with Robinhood in 2021 for an undisclosed sum.
Closer to home, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission has explicitly named gamification as a regulatory priority, listing ‘leaderboards, gamification, inducements and other behavioural levers’ as practices it is actively reviewing. In 2023, ASIC took its first design-and-distribution-obligations action against a retail broker, suing eToro for selling CFDs to Australians whose “screening test was very difficult to fail.”
Sidenote: A CFD (Contract for Difference) is a derivative. You don’t own the underlying share; you take a leveraged bet on its price movement. If the price moves your way, you collect the difference; if it moves against you, you owe it – often more than you originally deposited. CFDs are legal for Australian retail clients but banned for US retail investors entirely (SEC won’t allow them). And I thought we were the Nanny State?
Across the broader sector, ASIC’s most recent review found that 133,000 Australians – 68% of retail CFD clients – lost more than $458 million in 2023-24 alone. Robinhood itself – the original confetti merchant – hasn’t been let into Australia yet. ASIC has been forcing them to accept strict borrowing limits and dispute-resolution rules first.
To be fair, these apps have got hundreds of thousands of Australians into the market who’d never have walked into a stockbroker’s office. Whether or not that’s ultimately a good thing, remains to be seen.
At QAV HQ we have more of an old school view of investing.
We like our investing to be really boring.
Our style of investing is more like eating broccoli, brushing your teeth, getting eight hours of sleep, or getting your 10,000 steps in.
Like sex after you’ve been married 20 years, it might be a little predictable, but it works. (Don’t tell Chrissy I wrote that or I’ll be in all sorts of trouble….)
QAV’s dummy portfolio – publicly tracked and verifiable on the website – has returned roughly 14% CAGR over the past five years against the ASX 200’s 8.6%. Tony’s been running the method for over 30 years and his personal returns track similarly.
Boring investing delivers long-term results, but it requires a small amount of regular discipline. Part of that discipline is ignoring the dopamine. Tony built the checklist precisely because intuition and emotions are unreliable.
QAV isn’t a quick solution. It’s the opposite of Ozempic.
We prefer the excitement of long-term, reliable double market returns to the short-term, quick-fix pleasures of leaderboards and checking an app every 15 minutes.
Oliver Stone is probably not going to make a movie about QAV in a hurry. But if he did… who do you think should play Tony?
STOCK ANALYSIS OF THE WEEK
I added a couple of stocks to the Light portfolios this week and you can see my Light posts here.
I also added something to the U.S. Light portfolio this week. U.S. Light and Club members can read about it here.
On the full Australian podcast this week, Tony did a deep dive on SPZ. See the podcast link down below if you want to listen to his analysis.
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.
QAV Value Investing Buy List (AU) 2026-05-09
Below is a link to the US list for this week (available exclusively to our U.S. Club members):
QAV Value Investing Buy List 2026-05-10
PORTFOLIOS
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”.
AUSTRALIAN
QAV DUMMY
Five Year Report: Over the last 5 years, the QAV AU portfolio delivered a return of approximately 14.10%, while the ASX 200 benchmark returned around 8.35%.
Monthly Report: Over the past 30 days, the QAV AU portfolio delivered a return of approximately -1.8%, while the ASX 200 benchmark fell around -3.5%.
No changes to our portfolio this week.
For FY26: Over the financial year to date, the QAV AU portfolio delivered a return of approximately 17%, while the ASX 200 benchmark returned around 5%.
QAV LIGHT
All Time
Over the all-time period, the QAV AU Light portfolio delivered a return of approximately 19.7%, while the ASX 200 benchmark returned around 8.9%.
Financial Year to Date
Over the financial year to date, the QAV AU Light portfolio delivered a return of approximately 28.85%, while the ASX 200 benchmark gained around 5.07%.
Last 30 Days
Over the past 30 days, the QAV AU Light portfolio delivered a return of approximately 1.9%, while the ASX 200 benchmark declined around -3.5%.
Last 12 Months
Over the last 12 months, the QAV AU Light portfolio delivered a return of approximately 32%, while the ASX 200 benchmark returned around 8.8%.
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: We know where to drop your line.
(Note: Americans interested in joining QAV Light or Club please go here instead.)
AMERICAN
QAV DUMMY
Since inception (Sep 2023), our portfolio is +107% vs the S&P 500 +69%.
Over the last 30 days our portfolio is -2.98% vs the S&P 500 +8.98%.
I did have to sell KEP from the portfolio today.
QAV LIGHT
Since inception (Dec 2025), our portfolio is +6.65% vs the S&P 500 +9.10%. Over the last 30 days our portfolio is +1.34% vs the S&P 500 +8.98%.
THIS WEEK’S EPISODES
PUMP AND DUMP – QAV America #52
STOCK NEWS AND UPDATES
COMMODITIES
This week the big changes to commodities were the following:
| Commodity | Status |
|---|---|
| Iron Ore | JOSEPHINE |
| Gold (USD) | BUY |
| Crude Oil | JOSEPHINE |
| Platinum | BUY |
| Manganese | SELL |
| Nickel | JOSEPHINE |
| WTI Crude | JOSEPHINE |
DISCLOSURE
Please review our trading and disclosure policy.
SIGNING OFF
Hope you all have a bloody ripper weekend (I’ll be doing 7 hours of kung fu) and get a chance to step away from the charts for a bit! Remember, the real wealth gets built by sticking to our process and staying patient when the market gets noisy. Don’t let FOMO drive your decisions – there’ll always be another opportunity around the corner if you keep your powder dry and your discipline intact. Keep doing the work, trust the system, and let compound interest do its magic over time.
SSDD!
- Cam
Got a question? info@qavamerica.com