Cameron: [00:00:00 ] Welcome back to QAV America, Tony, episode 23. We’re recording this on the 30th of September, Australian time, 2025. Been a couple of weeks since we’ve talked about the United States. Tony, uh, I know that you’re an avid follower of the Wall Street Journal. Anything going on?

Anything go happen in the United States in the last couple of weeks? I haven’t seen anything about the United States for a couple of weeks in the news. Nothing going on.

Tony Kynaston: The contractor to service the UN elevators or escalators is up for That’s a bad end. I think

Cameron: Well, the story there is that it was, uh, did you see that? Why the escalator stopped?

Tony Kynaston: number of reasons why the escalators stopped, including a photographer pressed the stop button.

Cameron: I read it was Trump’s photographer who was going backwards up at whose foot got caught in it and it jammed and stopped, and then the teleprompter was apparently run by the White House who screwed up the teleprompter. So it was, uh, [00:01:00 ] his own fails from his own team apparently, is what I read in the New York Times.

The failing New York Times. Well, Tony, I thought I would, uh, that’s what he calls it, doesn’t he? I dunno if they’re failing or not. Um, probably large media. I wanted to, before we get into my Paul Pork this week, I just wanted to do a quick recap of how our US portfolio is doing and talk about what’s going on with some of the other companies that.

We’ve covered over the last few months on this show how they’re doing. So let me bring up our US portfolio. As I’ve said many times before, it’s been an interesting year for our portfolio in the US It was. Doing three times the market by the end of last year, but then after Trump got elected, it has not had a good year.[00:02:00 ]

So all time, our portfolio in the US has been running for just over two years now. I started at 20th of September, 2023. Over that period of time, it’s up 65% versus the s and p 500, which is up slightly less than. 50%, so it’s doing reasonably better than the s and p 500, but not double like we’re doing in the US and certainly not like triple like.

By the end of 2024, a US portfolio was doing three times as good as the s and p 500. So it hasn’t had as good a year. 20, 25 year to date, it’s actually down 12% versus the s and p 500, up 13%. As we know, that’s how it goes. We go up, we go down, but generally we go up more than we go down over the long haul.

Tony Kynaston: Great. just.

Cameron: of the, uh.

Tony Kynaston: can I jump in here? There was a, um, I know the show was [00:03:00 ] released in the US last week, which was a discussion of the QAV Bible and it mentioned that, um, long-term returns were 19.5% cagr, and that’s certainly the case back when we started QAV, but uh, it’s not the case now. So I just wanted to highlight that for people don’t wanna mislead them. That’s why we use the term double market. ’cause my returns are the markets or roughly twice the market still. Um, but the market’s moved since then, so, um, it’s, I just don’t wanna mislead people by putting, posting a number out there. Um, it’s more instructive to look at the long term, um, and to expect to get something like twice the index if you, um, successfully according to what I’ve been doing for a long time.

Cameron: So I’m just, uh, looking up my list of Paul Porks that I’ve done over the last six months. Can’t remember who I did in episode 21. I. [00:04:00 ] Um, oh, MEOH. Yeah, right. I don’t have an update on MEOH, but for the rest, uh, like I was saying to you on our last Australian show, um, when I’m on the, some of the value investing forums in the us like the subreddits, that kinda stuff, a lot of people talking about how.

They can’t find anything to buy. Value investing is dead. Uh, I saw, we saw an article from some guy saying that, uh, people saying they can’t find anything, all the value’s gone. And I’m like. What is your problem? Because I did a buy list, a US buy list at the end of last week, and there was like a 200 companies that were on the buy list, which means that, you know, they’re, that’s what our, our buy list is showing us as being undervalued at the moment.

Well performing, well performing businesses that are undervalued, but just the list of companies that I’ve talked about on this show since March. Zim was the first one that I did on the 13th of March. It is [00:05:00 ] down 26% since I talked about it. Uh, but then in order of shows that we’ve done, so the next one was CX Chemex.

It’s up 68%. Dan Aos, DAC is up 16% since we talked about it. Canadian Imperial Bank is up 23%. Chile is down 10%. Ford Motor Company is up. Eight IHS is up 37. JXN is up 16. Oryx Corporation is up 27. Precision Drilling is up 18. Costco’s up five Zep. Corporation, Zep Health is up 1511% since we talked about it on the 11th of July.

Sasol is up 43%. Bausch Health Companies up 16 Seneca up 9% Gray media up 40%, and we talked about that on the 7th of August. There’s up 40% in less than eight weeks in seven weeks. An old television station, Titan [00:06:00 ] machinery’s up 11%. Kimball Electronics is up seven. Sno is down two since we talked about it at the beginning of this month.

And then, um, M-E-O-H-I, I’m, oh, I can have a quick look on Yahoo Finance. Let’s see, how’s MEOH doing?

Tony Kynaston: post out. to this Reddit sub value sub investors club, or whatever it’s

Cameron: I do, I do, I do. And every I get just get abused for being an idiot. Um, em, me, O-M-E-O-H, um.

Tony Kynaston: rich idiot, though, isn’t it A successful idiot.

Cameron: MEOH uh, is up a couple of points since we talked about it. Um, actually it’s about the same, it was about $39 when we talked about, it’s still about $39 Methodex Corporation Co. So anyway, so there’s, I, I dunno what people’s problem is. I dunno what kind of value investing they’re doing that where they can’t find [00:07:00 ] value when we are finding value all over the place.

So speaking of that, I thought I’d, um.

Tony Kynaston: to interrupt, is that, um, you’re not even picking the top stock in the buy list. You are just picking out stocks, which are interesting that we don’t have

Cameron: Yeah.

Tony Kynaston: or just look worthy of a bit of investigation. So it’s kind of a random selection from the buyers that you’re picking.

Cameron: Yeah. Yeah. I’m looking for something that’s, you know, different to what we, because as we keep saying every episode, there’s a lot of shipping companies, a lot of financial services companies, and I just don’t wanna talk about the same thing every week. Well. We’ve talked about a lot of dirty businesses, um, in this epi in this show over the last six months, Tony, and this time I’m gonna do dirty healthcare, not because I wanna highlight the company we’re talking about as dirty.

Although they have had a very long list of scandals and fines and things like that, but just because the healthcare system [00:08:00 ] in the US is just a mess. Now, you know, obviously we’re Australian and we have a very different healthcare system, but I would not want to be a patient in the US for for-profit healthcare system.

And that’s what I’m gonna talk about today is one of the companies ov