The Last Straw

Strawman Premium is now OPEN!

We first launched Strawman Premium in August of 2021 with the goal of building a community of the very best and brightest investors in Australia. Today, we have almost 500 private members that share and discuss actionable investment ideas on ASX-listed companies. We also meet with company CEOs regularly, and have built a formidable knowledge base of high-signal insights. Importantly, […]

Strawman Club Rules

This week we reopened the doors to new members and are delighted to welcome some fresh new faces to our little community. If you’re new to the team, welcome aboard! We’re excited to work together and uncover more opportunities in the lesser-known corners of the ASX. We’ll schedule an induction session for new members once we finalise things, but we did receive […]

Tariff Twaddle

“We need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.” — Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes A great irony of economics is that the simplest, most fundamental of principles are often the hardest to accept. Probably because they can rub against our intuitions or, more often, our ideologies. Such impediments are common in many domains, but at least in […]

Doing The Hard Thing

Extraordinary returns come from extraordinary mis-pricings. And those only happen when most people hold a deeply flawed vision of the future. The trouble is, the dominant view never feels unreasonable at the time. It usually seems obvious — self-evident, even. That’s precisely why so many people, including the seasoned pros, buy into it. And let’s be honest: it takes a […]

Write-downs & Letdowns

I’ve had a tough time of late with my home broadband provider, Optus. The details are too painful (and boring) to recount, but let’s just say that after 10 days without internet, I’ve learned the true meaning of “on hold.” Rather than scream into the void, I decided to channel my rage productively: digging into Optus’s financials. If it sucks […]

2025 Market Outlook

This time last year, the big names in finance were practically shrugging at the Aussie market’s prospects for 2024. AMP predicted a modest 4% gain, with the RBA supposedly cutting rates from 4.35% to 3.6% to keep things afloat. UBS said the ASX200 would end the year right where it started. ANZ forecasted “mid-single-digit returns with risks skewed to the downside.” […]

2024 in Review

With a little over a week before the end of the year, I think our little investment community can safely declare success for 2024. The Strawman Index, which tracks the most widely held stocks across member portfolios, smashed it out of the park with a 23.5% return for the 12 months through to December 19. Handily outpacing what was a very […]

“Long-Term” Is Just An Intention

Everyone loves to talk about being a “long-term investor.” It almost sounds noble, and certainly a far wiser pursuit than the degeneracies of trading. Not without good reason, either. When your focus is beyond the immediate future you allow time for compounding to do it’s thing, and you’re less likely to be shaken out by volatility. When you find a great […]

Narrative Arbitrage

Two of the best books I’ve read in recent years are Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari, and The Beginning of Infinity, by David Deutsch. Neither is related to investing, but they’ve been incredibly valuable in shaping how I think about it. Specifically in regard to the importance of narrative and the nature of knowledge. Harari argues that much of human interaction — […]