One Theme That Can Make You Rich
Back in 2005, I had a client who became quite famous at Bell Securities because he was very good at investing. He was a fairly young guy who had inherited $500,000, and he lived in Bali. He had no stock market experience, but he had a lot of time in Bali.
He turned his hand to the stock market, found me as a broker (I think I was in the media at the time), and used me for information. He didn’t really want advice. If I rang him up with my lame morning meeting ideas — that he should buy Leighton Holdings because our analysts thought it was cheap — he would say, “Look Marcus, what’s the drive? Are its fundamentals changing for the better?” And I would say, “I don’t know.”
He ended up not asking for advice, just using me for execution. But he was so good at what he was doing, despite a low level of knowledge, that everybody at Bell started following him in the back office admin system. You would hear people talking over lunchtime and in the lift — “What’s Bali Boy doing?” (as we used to call him). People would track his trades, and he was very successful.
2005 was the resources boom era — it ran from around 2002 to 2008. What he was doing was investing on thematics rather than stock picking. He parked most of that money in BHP and also bought Fortescue, which at the time was pretty much an explorer turning into a producer. He was terribly successful. He had other iron ore stocks too, and also bought into uranium. I think he had Paladin when it was still below 50 cents, and it went to $10. He was playing themes.
If you play themes, the stocks pick themselves. He had read one line about China building “a Brisbane every three months.” So they were going to need a lot of iron ore and steel, and that was going to come from Australia. All the iron ore stocks had fundamentals changing for the better. That was the key driver — fundamentals changing for the better. The catalyst was China building Brisbane every three months.
We kept seeing things happening in the iron ore stocks. The smaller ones were getting taken over. They were declaring special dividends. They were having share buybacks. They were reporting better than expected results. We thought, what does he know? Has he got inside information? Truth is, he knew nothing more than us — but he did know there was a catalyst. China was driving the iron ore price, which was feeding into the fundamentals of every iron ore stock. And when companies are making money, they announce special dividends, they have better results, they take over other companies. That’s what was happening in iron ore.
The lesson from dealing with him was simple: you need fundamentals changing for the better. That takes a catalyst. You have to find something changing in the world, and good things will happen to stocks in good sectors.
Another thing he was particularly good at was being in Bali, looking at Australia from a distance. We were too close. He was like the man in the moon, looking down and saying, “All that iron ore is going to come from Australia.” We were looking at the fundamentals of BHP, the PEs and yields. He was looking conceptually, saying Australia was in the perfect spot to exploit China’s economic revolution. Objectivity was his edge.
So: objectivity, playing themes, and making sure fundamentals are changing for the better.
Take that to today. One of the strongest themes in the world right now is AI. Companies are doing deals, taking each other over, announcing contracts, reporting better than expected results — all driven by the investment in cloud infrastructure to facilitate AI, and the demand for computing power.
Objectively, Australians can look at the US and say: yep, that’s happening. Objectively, we can also see it’s all getting overvalued. Objectively, we can see that at some point it’s sentiment-driven and that might change. But for now, that is the theme.
It’s a great template for any investing: ask, what’s the catalyst? Are the fundamentals changing for the better? If you get that right, the stocks pretty much pick themselves. And the events that surprise on the upside will just happen.
Good things happen to stocks in good sectors.