Hi QAVVERS,
Well the Australian financial year is done and dusted and it was a great year for QAV. I hope you all did as well, if not better, than we did. I’ve already heard from a few members who had even better performance than we did, which isn’t uncommon, and is what QAV is all about. Systematic outperformance. Feel free to share your numbers with me so we can use it as testimonials.
AUSTRALIAN MARKET UPDATE
- The ASX 200 dropped ~56 pts (0.6%) to 8,723 Wednesday (first day of the new financial year), a 20-day low, roughly flat YTD.
- Weakness followed Wall Street’s soft open and profit-taking in chip/tech names; all four big banks fell, dragging financials down 1.7%.
- Coles slid ~4.2% on news it’s weighing a purchase of Petbarn owner Greencross from TPG.
- South32 jumped ~9.7% after agreeing to sell most of its aluminium assets to Alcoa.
- The RBA is on hold at 4.35% (June decision), no July meeting; next call is Aug 11.
US MARKET UPDATE
- June jobs report (released Thu Jul 2) came in soft: +57,000 payrolls vs. ~113–115k expected, breaking a three-month hot streak.
- Unemployment ticked down to 4.2%, but largely because labour-force participation fell to ~61.5% (lowest since 2021), not from strength.
- The weak jobs print reinforced expectations the Fed holds rates steady at 3.50–3.75% (it last held on June 17, its fourth straight hold).
- The Dow hit a fresh record, up ~1.1% (~600 pts) Thursday, led by financials and comms.
- Chip stocks had their worst two-day skid in weeks, the PHLX Semiconductor Index fell ~6% Thursday, after reports Anthropic is exploring its own AI chip with Samsung.
- Tesla fell as much as ~8.3% intraday despite beating Q2 delivery estimates (480,126 vehicles), a “sell the news” reaction.
- Context: US indices closed out their best quarter since 2020; S&P 500 up ~9.4% and Nasdaq ~12.5% for the first half of 2026.
So, let’s get into my weekly updates and see where we are at.
All the Best,
Cam
QAV MYTH KILLERS
Misery Loves Company
“Misery loves company, so in light of the latest Bitcoin dump and our return to the 50% drawdown mark, I thought I’d reach out to the other sufferers.” That’s from a post this week by Andrew Page, CEO of Strawman (who was our guest on QAV #355). He wanted to “pour one out for the poor fools among us holding stuff well below recent levels.”
His list: WiseTech down 75%. Pro Medicus down 45%. ARB down 54%. CSL down 58%. Xero down 63%. Cochlear down 60%. Catapult down 50%. Even gold is down 25% from its peak.
Andrew’s point, fair enough, is that these aren’t meme stocks or joke coins. They’re good companies. Real earnings, real products, real market leaders. And he’s not wrong about that.
What makes the list sting more is the timing. This isn’t a crash. The index as a whole is still up for the year and only around 5% off record highs. So while the market parties on, a graveyard of blue-chip growth darlings is quietly getting carried out the back door.
Meanwhile, over on our side of the fence, it’s been the best financial year in QAV’s history. The model portfolio finished FY26 up 28.95%, against 6.61% for the SPDR 200 accumulation index. Better than quadruple the market. Every single one of our four Light portfolios beat the market too, one of them by almost ten times. The stocks doing the damage have names most punters have probably never heard of: Southern Cross Electrical up 508%, GenusPlus up 330%, Duratec up 267%, SHAPE Australia up 134%, and Korvest up 460% since we bought it years ago. Boring, forgettable, cash-generating businesses that most of our own listeners couldn’t tell you what they actually do.
Two portfolios of ASX-listed companies. One full of household names hyped up on every investing forum over the last few years. One full of names even we forget. Guess which one just had its worst year and which one just had its best.
This isn’t really a story about bad companies. It’s the same old story about price.
When Tony talked through the WiseTech-and-friends list on the show this week, he made the distinction plainly: “I don’t disagree with his thesis that they’re good companies… but be a little bit more self-reflective and realise you’re paying way too much for them.” Then the line that’s really the whole article in a sentence: “As it always does, always, every single time, if you overpay for something, it comes back to bite you in the end.”
We wrote about this exact mechanic back in May with Microsoft. Buy the greatest software company on Earth in December 1999 and you’d have waited seventeen years just to get your money back, while the business itself quadrupled its revenue underneath you the whole time. Same law of gravity. Different decade, different postcode, different set of tickers. WiseTech, Pro Medicus, CSL, Cochlear and the rest are this cycle’s Microsoft: businesses that didn’t need to do anything wrong to hand their shareholders a horror stretch, because the price already had years of flawless performance baked into it before a single thing went wrong. A stock priced for perfection doesn’t need bad news to fall. It just needs normal news.
This is the whole reason the QAV checklist puts a hard ceiling on what you’re allowed to pay, regardless of how good the story is. We don’t care how great the business is if the price to operating cash flow is 20 times. It’s off our list well before that. It means we miss the euphoric run-up on the way past. It also means we’re not the ones explaining a 60-75% drawdown to our spouses while the index sits near all-time highs.
Tony made the same point another way a few minutes later, talking about our own good year: “I don’t want to get too hubristic either, because we’ll have a bad year at some stage, and we’ll be in the same boat. But it’ll be for a different reason.” When QAV has a rough year, it’ll be because the whole market fell over… Ukraine, the Strait of Hormuz, whatever the next thing is. It won’t be because we paid 200 times earnings for something we were convinced was going to take over the world.
Our 2019-2026 performance table tells the story about how QAV achieves long-term double market performance. One terrific year, followed by a handful of average years (some a little above, some a little below the benchmark)… and then another terrific year. Rinse and repeat. Stick with the discipline of buying good businesses and obeying the sell triggers.
Good businesses can still be bad investments. It has nothing to do with the quality of the company and everything to do with what you handed over for a piece of it. Andrew’s list isn’t a list of bad companies having a bad run. It’s a list of good companies that got bought at prices that assumed nothing would ever go wrong again.
Something always does.
STOCK ANALYSIS OF THE WEEK
I only had to sell one stock from the Light portfolios this week and I added a few stocks, too. Members can see my Light posts here.
I didn’t see anything from the U.S. Light portfolios this week but I did add a stock. U.S. members can read about them here.
Tony did a Pulled Pork on EVZ, a small engineering fabricator that has gone from 16 cents to 65 cents in the past 12 months and just landed on the buy list. Find the full deep dive in the podcast link below.
On the American podcast this week, I did a pulled pork on KSS. The podcast link is down below if you want the full 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.
AUSTRALIAN BUY LIST
QAV Value Investing Buy List (AU) 2026-06-28
U.S. BUY LIST
QAV Value Investing Buy List 2026-06-28
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.
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: Someone already cleared the way.
(Note: Americans interested in joining QAV Light or Club please go here instead.)
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.
THIS WEEK’S EPISODES
Boring Stocks, Bonkers Returns: QAV AU #926
KSS Me, Darling – QAV America #59
STOCK NEWS AND UPDATES
COMMODITIES
This week the big changes to commodities were the following:
| Commodity | Status |
|---|---|
| Zinc | JOSEPHINE |
DISCLOSURE
Please review our trading and disclosure policy.
SIGNING OFF
That’s it from me for this week. Here’s to another great year for QAV. Happy hunting in FY27!
SSDD!
- Cam
That’s it for the week!
QAV A GOOD SHAREMARKET!
Got a question? info@qavamerica.com