Hi QAVVERS,
It’s been another week of war-related gnashing of teeth, but from a portfolio perspective we haven’t had to do anything. Despite everything, I haven’t actually sold anything in weeks and only a few things are currently even close to a sell.
This week on the shows, Tony pulled apart NWH and I had a crack at PBR, so there’s plenty to chew through (although only one of them is a buy – see my myth killer for more about NWH). On the commodities front it is a mixed bag, Crude and Steel are a buy, but Gold, Copper and Zinc are all sitting in Josephine territory for now.
On the personal front, Chrissy & I caught up with my old friend, Australian futurist Peter Ellyard and his partner Robyn last weekend for lunch. They were up from Melbourne. Peter is 89 and still going strong – consulting to UQ and developing a new form of yoga for the elderly. He’s been practising yoga on a daily basis for 50 years and it’s paid off. Over lunch he told me about the time he spent a few hours with a young Paul Keating in the mid 1970s when they were both working for the Whitlam government. And Chrissy and I also just celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary. I’m a lucky man!
AUSTRALIAN MARKET UPDATE
The All Ordinaries barely moved over the week closing Thursday:
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Australia’s June jobs report smashed expectations, with employment rising 76,300 against a forecast of just 15,000 (although more than half of those jobs are part time), though the unemployment rate held steady at 4.4%.
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Interest rate markets moved swiftly on the data, pricing around a 36% chance of an RBA hike at the 11 August board meeting and a full 25 basis points of tightening before year-end, implying a cash rate of 4.60%.
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The jobs surprise cut short an early rally, with the ASX 200 crumbling from a more than 100-point lead after the figures landed, as rate markets tipped another hike before year-end.
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Energy stocks held up amid ongoing Middle East tensions, with Houthi bombing Saudi tankers in the Red Sea and US-Iran friction keeping oil elevated; copper also hit a six-week high during the period.
US MARKET UPDATE
The S&P 500 fell for the week, closing Thursday at approximately 7,408, dragged lower by earnings-driven AI spending concerns and escalating Middle East conflict:
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On Thursday alone the S&P 500 dropped 1.21% to close at 7,408.30, with the Nasdaq Composite declining 2.15%, weighed down by a 7% drop in Alphabet and a 14% loss in Tesla following their earnings reports.
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Brent crude topped $100 a barrel, stoking inflation fears and driving Treasury yields to their highest levels of the year.
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Long-term yields surged as naval blockades for tankers in the Middle East grew tighter and initial jobless claims fell to a 57-year low, pressuring traditional economic sectors.
So, let’s get into my weekly updates and see where we are at.
All the Best,
Cam
QAV MYTH KILLERS
“No One Ever Went Broke Taking A Profit”
You’ve heard it a hundred times. A stock you own has had a good run, you’re sitting on a fat gain, and someone (your broker, your brother-in-law, the voice in your own head) tells you to take some off the table. Lock it in. Bank the win. Nobody ever went broke taking a profit.
And maybe you won’t go broke taking a profit. You just won’t bank as much money as you might have if you’d continued holding. Profits you never see don’t end up on a brokerage statement. They are invisible. It’s the four-bagger you sold when it had doubled. It’s twenty years of compounding you swapped for one good year.
Let me show you what I mean, using a stock Tony pulled apart on the show this week.
NRW Holdings. Ticker NWH (which always confuses me). An engineering and contract mining outfit out of Perth. I bought it in my super portfolio in May last year and it’s up about 150%. I also hold it in one of the Light portfolios from a few weeks earlier, where it’s up 158%. Its neighbour in the sector, MacMahon Holdings (MAH), is up 101% in the Light portfolio since November. Over the last twelve months NRW has run 123% and McMahon 201%. Materials was the best-performing sector on the ASX, up 41%.
NRW’s QAV score today is 0.04, well below our 0.10 cut-off, so it isn’t on our buy list today. Not because it isn’t a great company but because it is no longer a great BUY. It was when a great buy when we bought it. The score fell BECAUSE it worked.
QAV is quality at value. The quality half of NWH hasn’t gone anywhere. The business is running hot, revenue up 19.5%, EBITDA up 36.5%, underlying profit up 42%, an order book north of seven and a half billion dollars. What changed is the price. We bought it cheap. It isn’t cheap anymore. As the price climbed the value half of the equation collapsed, and the score came down with it. A falling score on a stock you already own doesn’t mean sell. It means the stock did exactly what you bought it to do.
This is where the take-a-profit brigade get to work. The score’s gone. The PE looks terrifying (53 times, though that’s warped by a one-off write-down I’ll spare you). It’s had a monster run. Surely you sell and give yourself a pat on the back?
The academic data is unkind to that instinct. Terrance Odean went through 10,000 brokerage accounts from 1987 to 1993 and found the winners people sold went on to beat the losers they held onto, by 3.4% over the following year. Investors are brilliant at watering their weeds and cutting their flowers. Peter Lynch said it best: “Selling your winners and holding your losers is like cutting the flowers and watering the weeds.” Warren Buffett liked that line so much he rang Lynch up to ask if he could borrow it. Tony never asked, but he borrows it constantly.
Jesse Livermore worked it out the hard way a century ago. “It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting.”
So do we just hold everything forever and hope for the best? No. This is the part that separates QAV from a hunch.
We sell. We sell all the time. We just don’t sell because a number got big, or a chart looks toppy, or our palms are sweaty. We sell when the rules tell us to. NWH has a three-point sell trend line, and right now the stock is sitting a long way above it. As Tony said on the show, it would have to fall a long way from here before that line breaks. Until it does, we hold. If it does, we’re out. No debate, no attachment. Just rules.
That is the whole trick. The decision to sell is made by the method, not by me, and definitely not by someone on TikTok telling me you can’t go broke taking a profit.
And if you’re worried about how much you’d lose while the price drops down through that sell line, I get it. But we’ve done backtesting of our rules and found that, more often than not, they make us money. Sure – sometimes things would have worked out better if we’d sold earlier, or not sold at all. But statistically, it goes well for us more often than it doesn’t. They only need to work for us 51% of the time to pay off.
One thing worth being clear about, because it matters. Holding NRW and buying NRW are two completely different decisions. At these levels it’s a Josephine, it’s well above our valuation, and it is absolutely not a buy today. If you don’t own it, this is not me telling you to go and get some. Tony’s pulled pork was a look at a stock that has already done its job. But if you got in early, back when it was boring and cheap and nobody was writing it up, then the question was never “how much profit should I grab.” The question is “has my sell rule triggered.” It hasn’t.
The financial press now running glowing profiles of NRW and MacMahon had nothing positive to say about these stocks when they were cheap and we were buying them. They tend to discover a winner right about the time we’ve already made our money on it.
The discipline in this game isn’t in the buying. Anyone can buy. The hard part, the part that actually compounds, is the sitting. Holding a good stock through the noise, past the point where cashing out feels clever, until the rules and only the rules tell you the run is done. To paraphrase Jerry – anyone can TAKE a position, but do you know how to HOLD a position?
Okay so…. maybe no one ever went broke taking a profit. But “not going broke” is not the goal. Maximising returns – that’s the name of the game.
STOCK ANALYSIS OF THE WEEK
Tony did a Pulled Pork on NRW Holdings (NWH) this week, the Perth-based engineering and mining services contractor that has surged 123% in the past year but has since moved off the buy list. Find the full scorecard walkthrough in the podcast link below.
This week on the American show I did a deep dive on Petrobras (PBR), the Brazilian oil giant that scored a perfect 100% QAV score and got added to the Light portfolio. We covered everything from Brazilian dictatorships to Operation Car Wash along the way, so check out the full episode at the link below.
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) 2026-07-19
U.S. BUY LIST
QAV Value Investing Buy List 2026-07-20
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: He already knows where they are.
(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
From Value to Growth: NWH — QAV AU #929
The Oil Is Ours: Petrobras (PBR): QAV America #62
STOCK NEWS AND UPDATES
COMMODITIES
This week the big changes to commodities were the following:
| Commodity | Status |
|---|---|
| Gold (USD) | JOSEPHINE |
| Crude Oil | BUY |
| Copper | JOSEPHINE |
| Zinc | JOSEPHINE |
| Magnesium | SELL |
| Steel | BUY |
| LNG | SELL |
DISCLOSURE
Please review our trading and disclosure policy.
SIGNING OFF
That’s the week done. I’ll be doing more kung fu. What about you?
Have a good weekend.
SSDD!
- Cam
That’s it for the week!
QAV A GOOD SHAREMARKET!
Got a question? info@qavamerica.com