Cam and Tony dive deep into the performance of the QAV USA portfolio, which beat the S&P 500 handsomely with a 28.5% return over the last 12 months. The highlight of the episode is a rich and surprisingly wild pulled pork on Korean steel giant POSCO (PKX), including its transformation from a state-owned dinosaur into a cash-gushing, lithium-investing modern behemoth. Cam throws in a history lesson on South Korea’s postwar dictatorship, self-coups, and assassinations, making this one of the more cinematic episodes yet. They also discuss the removal of the Z-score from the checklist, U.S. tariffs, Trump’s fluctuating relationship with Elon Musk, and why lithium is flashing a buy signal.

### **🕒 Timestamps & Key Topics**

– **[00:00 ] Portfolio Update** – QAV USA beats S&P 500: 28.5% vs. 13.6%.

– **[01:50 ] Z-score Removal** – Why the bankruptcy Z-score is out of the checklist.

– **[04:00 ] U.S. News Roundup** – 90-day tariff pause, Elon’s political party, Trump’s Neuralink drama.

– **[08:00 ] Currency Talk** – USD’s worst start to a year since 1973.

– **[09:00 ] Pulled Pork: POSCO (PKX)**

[00:00:00 ]

Cameron: Welcome back to QAV America tk. This is episode 12 of QAV America. It’s been, uh, it’s been the end of the financial year in Australia. Tony. I know Americans probably won’t appreciate this, but for us it’s the beginning of a new financial year. We’re recording this on the 1st of July, 2025. And, uh, now Australian show that we just finished, I did talk about our US portfolio.

So

Tony Kynaston: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: List, it’s just the last 12 months. You don’t have to think about it as a financial year, but. It closed up about 28.5% for the last 12 months versus the s and p 500, which was up about 13.6%. So good year for our US portfolio. Not as good as it was months ago pre-Trump when we were up about 60% for the year already.

But you know, I’m not gonna [00:01:00 ] turn my nose up at a 28% for the year. So.

Tony Kynaston: Correct. What would Bill, what would baby, what would Baby Billy say about that Cam?

Cameron: say, come on now. now, baby Billy from the Righteous Gemstones. If you haven’t watched that TV show, uh, Danny McBride show. Love it. Just finished. Great show. Um, Tony, uh, also on our Australian show, I mentioned the Z score. And we, we talked a lot about Stockopedia in the Zed score and whether or not we want to keep it in our checklist or not, we decided to rip it out that, uh, it is gonna come up in the pulled pork I’m gonna do today on Korean Steelmaker, or posco. uh, just for any US listeners that are using our checklist. I’ll have a new version up this week where I’m gonna rip out the Zed score. It’s, uh, ZED scores, the ZED scores for manufacturing, the [00:02:00 ] ZED scores for non-manufacturing, and they don’t apply for financials. And it’s very busy and it’s very messy. And we just decided we have enough other financial metrics that we’re using to assess these companies. And we have our sell triggers if they start to go south, both for the commodities and also for the. Business itself, its share price. So we think we’re pretty well protected. We don’t need the extra layer of protection of the Z bankruptcy So we’re gonna be removing that and you can get a new version of our checklist if you’re using it sometime after this episode comes out.

Tony Kynaston: I just, just one thing to add. Um. I mean, you did reconcile the Zed scores to the Australian checklist that we were using from a different source, and they were a bit all over the place, but the F score was a much better match for what we had been used to for the last five years. So I’m, you know, confident that the fco, uh, fine.

And there’s nothing wrong with the Zed score, but we just couldn’t get it to [00:03:00 ] correlate with what we were seeing from the other data sources we’d used before.

Cameron: And partly as we said on the Australian show, partly that’s because the original Z score, which was developed in the sixties was looking at manufacturing companies and we don’t have a lot of manufacturing companies end up on our checklist in Australia.

Tony Kynaston: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: a lot of manufacturing companies ending up in our buy list.

1. In the US that are based in the US either, I mean. I dunno if we could maybe say Ford as a manufacturing business, I guess, but probably not. one I’m gonna do today is based actually in Korea. It’s just got an a DR on the, uh, New York Stock Exchange. So, um. But it is, but there’s just too many messy variations of it for our purposes, and I don’t think it’s worth the effort and trouble it would take to reconcile all of them for all of the different stocks that we have in terms of us, uh, market news, Tony. Um. You know, it’s this [00:04:00 ] sort of the 90 day tariff pause is coming to an end. Supposedly lots of countries are trying to sign deals with the us whether or not those deals are much different to the deals they already had in place before Liberation Day. We’ll find out when we know more, but the big beautiful bill is still yet to pass through the Senate. Our old friend Elon Musk, has become a little bit vocal again in the last few days against the bill. I’m not sure if he had the Neuralink chip taken out or put back in or rebooted or upgraded, I think it was glitching for a few

Tony Kynaston: Right. He walked past a big magnet. Yeah.

Cameron: Yeah. Um, oh, I gotta, so you, this is completely got nothing to do with investing, but, um, do you know who Bob Ezrin [00:05:00 ] is?

Tony Kynaston: I do not.

Cameron: One of the greatest record producers of all time, uh, in the seventies. was the producer behind some of Lou Reed’s best albums. Alice Cooper’s Best albums, Kiss’s Best Albums, uh, was one of the great record producers of the seventies, but he also produced. The wall for Pink Floyd, and I was watching a bit of an interview with him the other day talking about the production value of the wall.

And you still, you put it on E listen today, something like comfortably numb and it’s just magnificent, the sound and the ambiance and everything. And he was going into great detail in this talk, talking about magnetic tape, and he said when they recorded the Drummond bass. Four comfortably numb. He said, we, we, we made one copy of it, which was a mono copy to put in on our 24 track.

He said, we recorded it on a 16 track, we put it in a safe and locked it away [00:06:00 ] for months and months and months and didn’t listen to it. He said, because every time you pass a magnetic tape over a tape head,

Tony Kynaston: All right.

Cameron: It’s deteriorating, it’s pulling atoms, shredding atoms off of the tape, which lessens the quality.

So we had this really dinky mono version of it on our 24 track that we were using as the backing track. then right at the end, they’d used all the other tracks on the 24 track They, and so they had to delete the drum and bass. Backing track and pull this one out of the safe and put it in. So it was had this pristine quality to it, but he was like so deeply passionate about talking about. Magnetic tape and atoms and all of the stuff to get this quality. I really, I dug it. It was really, really cool. Anyway, back to Elon. Yeah. Elon Elon’s, chip Malfunctional, he took more ketamine, less ketamine. I dunno what’s going on. But, uh, anyway, he’s saying, he’s now saying in the New York Times today is covering this, that [00:07:00 ] he is promising a new political party if the G-O-B-G-O-P bill passes his new America party. That will challenge Republicans. Um, so it’s back on Trump 2.0, 3.0, whatever 0.0 this is, I’m not sure how many iterations of their relationship we’ve had in the last year. They hated each other, then they were best friends, then they hated each other. Then they’re okay again, and now they’re gonna war again.

So watch this space.

Tony Kynaston: And meanwhile, the share market just chugs along, doesn’t it?

Cameron: Share market does, but the dollar’s not too great. The dollar’s had its worst start to a year since 1973. Continues to slide. Even as President Trump has backed down from his tariff threats and the US stock market has recovered from its losses. According to the New York’s Times, United States currency is weakened more than 10% over the past six months when compared with a basket of currencies from the country’s major trading partners. [00:08:00 ] The last time the dollar weakened so much at the start of the year was 1973 after the United States had made a seismic shift that had ended the linking of the dollar to the price of gold. So not a g