Illiquidity is an advantage for small-cap investors
“I love illiquidity. Everyone hates illiquidity. I love very thinly traded stocks. It means that they're very, very volatile, but when you've got something that doesn't have a huge amount of free float and the company starts delivering, it's just supply and demand. When demand overwhelms supply, there's only one direction that that price can go.”
“The cure for high prices is high prices. That is taking money out of the economy, because now, rather than the extra spare money you might have had to buy a Pavlova, you are putting it into the fuel tank. This is what's so nonsensical—the government wants you to use less petrol but then cuts the tax on it to make sure you don't have to use less.”
“This is a technology that's very horizontal in the sense that it will be integrated into every layer of everything. The internet was another great horizontal technology where it gets embedded into everything. It's just another layer to the internet, and it will be ubiquitous, and it'll be just use it or get left behind.”
Baristas should be classified as manufacturing workers
“Isn't manufacturing defined as taking raw materials and processing them into a new product? So baristas take coffee, beans, milk, water and a smattering of components, put through industrial process and produce a product. Therefore, the barista industry is actually a manufacturing industry. So we really have more manufacturing businesses than ever before in Australia.”
Capital raising discounts often signal company weakness
“I always think it's a really strong sign, or it's a sign of strength when there isn't much of a discount. Because what the company is saying is just like, we don't need to... we're going to do it at the highest, rationally, because they want the lowest cost of capital. When you see very, very, very steep discounts, it's a tell. Why do you have to make it so cheap?”
“Woolies, daily trading, 0.22% of shares are traded on any given day. So 99.68% of shareholders don't do anything. Yes, a very small number of people chose to participate on a given day, but anyone could have if they wanted to do it, if the circumstances were different or if their circumstances changed.”
“I just can't be sold on small-cap ETFs as a filter in and of itself. Over the last decade, the All Ords is up 72%, while the small-cap one is up 61%. So you've got more volatility and underperformance by design. It feels like a funny thing to base an investment strategy onsize alone, because most small caps are actually small for a reason: they are ordinary.”