📈 Australian housing slows | Keir Starmer resigns as UK Prime Minister

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The Big Picture

• Australia’s housing market slows. Auction clearance rates over the weekend fell below 50% for the first time since April 2020. What’s more, 24% of auctions were withdrawn, with sellers unwilling to test the market. This slowdown started before the Budget, with 3 interest rate rises to start the year, but has been exacerbated by the proposed tax changes. (ABC)
  
  

• Keir Starmer resigns as UK Prime Minister. Days after Andy Burnham was elected to Parliament, Keir Starmer has resigned before he could be challenged. The Labour Party will choose a new leader and new Prime Minister by 16 July. It will be Britain’s seventh Prime Minister since 2016. (BBC)
  
  

• US-Iran talks begin in Switzerland. JD Vance, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner led the US delegation in talks with Iran. While Vance hailed “great progress”, Donald Trump threatened to restart strikes on Iran if it did not stop Hezbollah from “causing trouble” in Lebanon. (The Guardian)
  
  

• Coalition primary vote continues falling. Latest polling from Capital Brief/DemosAU shows the Coalition primary vote down 5 points in one month to just 18%. This is their lowest level under either Angus Taylor or Sussan Ley and extends One Nation’s lead over the Coalition. (Capital Brief)
  
  

• Australia-Canada reach $2.5 billion defence deal. Australia has just struck its largest ever defence export deal, agreeing to sell Canada ‘over-the-horizon’ radar systems. Canada is looking to use the systems to better monitor its Arctic territories. (ABC)
  
  

• Australia set to have new Teal political party. Plans to formalise the loose coalition of community independents, known as ‘The Teals’, are reportedly one step closer to being realised. Allegra Spender and Zali Steggall are said to be pushing the plan amongst their Parliamentary colleagues. (AFR)

Companies in the news

• WiseTech drops 16% on Richard White’s latest scandal. The Australian Federal Police’s human exploitation taskforce are investigating whether the billionaire founder of WiseTech exploited a woman’s immigration status for sex and provided false information on a visa application. (AFR)
  
  

• Ingham’s puts farms into lockdown over bird flu risk. The poultry giant was down 4% after a second case of H5N1 bird flu was detected in southern WA. Ingham’s locked down all its WA locations to protect its operations. (ABC)
  
  

• KPMG shares documents with the Senate. After weeks of back-and-forth the troubled auditor has shared the first tranche of documents around its audit leaks scandal. The scandal has already seen several senior executives depart. (Capital Brief)
  
  

• Disney sees great opening to Toy Story 5. The Disney-Pixar movie was estimated to bring in $312 million in ticket sales worldwide over its opening weekend. In the US alone, it brought in $160 million. The US Box Office has had its best start to a summer since 2019. (NY Times)

Japanese ice cream cartel raided by police

Japanese police raided the offices of 6 ice cream companies over allegations the companies had colluded to raise prices. The 6 companies - Meiji, Morinaga Milk Industry, Lotte, Morinaga, Ezaki Glico and Akagi Nyugyo - are accused of all raising prices by 5-10% several times over the years.

It is inauspicious timing for these ice cream companies, as they enter their busiest time of year. Last summer, Japan experienced its hottest summer on record and ice cream sales hit a record high. (BBC)

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$225 million → $9 billion in two years!

In the latest Equity Mates Explains video, Bryce has looked into Leopold Aschenbrenner, the 22-year old German who was fired from OpenAI in 2024 and has been investing in AI stocks ever since.

Bryce: Here's the idea that makes him different. Stop thinking about AI as software.

Think about it as a physical thing that has to exist in the real world.

A frontier AI model doesn't float in the cloud. It runs on hundreds of thousands of chips, in buildings the size of small towns, that get so hot they need their own water systems, pulling enough electricity to power a city.

So his thesis runs as a sequence. Watch where the money goes, in order.

First, everyone piles into chips. Nvidia. The obvious winner. But once that trade is crowded, the bottleneck moves. You can buy all the chips you want and still not run them, because there isn't enough power.

So the next squeeze is electricity. The generators. The grid. The cooling. The land. Whoever owns the physical guts of the build-out. He's not chasing the smartest model. He's chasing whoever keeps the lights on.

And his filings prove he did exactly that.

Every big fund has to tell the public what it owns each quarter, in a filing called a 13F. His are public, and watching them shift over five quarters tells the whole story.

Go back to the first one, the end of 2024. It was small. About 255 million dollars, spread across barely a handful of names. Chips and power. Marvell. Vistra. Vertiv. Talen Energy. Obvious, sensible AI infrastructure.

Want to know where Leopold is investing today? Bryce took a look at his latest 13F Filing. Check out the full video exclusively on the Equity Mates Explains YouTube channel. 

• We’re discussing the Budget on Equity Mates Investing as financial adviser Alex Luck joins us with 4 case studies to unpack what has changed and what hasn’t with the latest tax changes. (Spotify | Apple | YouTube)

• Jess has reached the first episode of her 12-part journey on Get Started Investing. Hear what she’s learned, what she’s invested in and what you can expect next on Get Started Investing. (Spotify | Apple | YouTube)