Here’s what you need to know today

• Two headline-grabbing stocks lead the coverage of Reporting Season today. Guzman y Gomez shared its first report as a public company, revenue up 32% but a loss of $13.7 million. Zip reported revenue up 28% and its first ever annual profit. Coles reported revenue up 3.2% and profit up 2.1% to $1.1 billion.
  
  

• Tens of thousands of CFMEU members stopped work around Australia to protest the forced administration of the construction arm of the union by the Federal government. At protests in Sydney, speakers claimed “we’re going to campaign for the absolute destruction of the Australian Labor Party”.
  
  

• The Albanese government has announced new caps on overseas students. Total student numbers will be capped at 270,000 and public universities will have an aggregate target of 145,000 in 2025, down from 210,000 in 2023. Education is one of Australia’s largest exports and the university sector has been outraged at these changes.
  
  

• The electric vehicle trade wars are heating up. In May, the US added a 100% tariff on Chinese-made EVs, then in July the European Union added a tariff of up to 36%, and now Canada has announced a 100% tariff as well. Canada has also added a 25% tariff on Chinese steel and aluminium and have said they may extend tariffs to Chinese semiconductors, solar cells, batteries and critical minerals.
  
  

• The Pacific Islands Forum in Tonga has got off to a rocky start. Day 1 was affected by a 6.9-magnitude earthquake. And while climate change it top of the agenda, New Zealand has just reversed a 2018 ban on offshore oil and gas exploration.

What the…?

If you’ve ever thought video games aren’t good for your mental health, then a study out of Japan disagrees. Published in Nature Human Behaviour, the study found that those that played video games had a greater sense of life satisfaction than those that did not.

We’d suggest that this one could use some further study, and may end up an example in the great replication crisis of academic articles.

Investing is a lifelong journey

Here’s what you can learn today.

This is an excerpt from our interview with Chris Judd, former AFL champion and current portfolio manager at Cerutty Macro Fund.

Question: What characteristics do you consider to determine whether a theme is a long-term macro trend versus a short-term fad?

I think the difference between a fad that's a bubble and something that's meaningful is how much value that product or service is creating for the people using it.

In terms of macro trends, they're generally long-term secular trends that are going to last longer than a couple of economic cycles, not in a straight line obviously, but things that are going to be around five, 10, potentially 15 years.

And the last thing, and probably the most important thing is if it's already on page one of the newspaper, it's too late. We'd like to be early or on time. We don't want to be late. So copper's a bit of an example. We've got a small amount of copper exposure. We quite like copper. I haven't met a fund manager in years that doesn't like copper. So we don't want that to be one of our biggest positions. Everyone loves it. Everyone can see, not only is it used for EVs, but it's used for renewable energy. It's used for data centres, used for electrification of everything and supply appears to be constrained. Everyone's there. So we're happy to still play there a bit.

But the positions we're most excited about are ones where we think there's a long-term secular trend that I think Kevin Mule puts it is ‘on page 17 today and on its way to page one tomorrow’.

You can listen to the full interview with Chris on the Equity Mates Investing podcast (Apple | Spotify) or watch on YouTube

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