Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the third annual general meeting for Cadence Opportunities Fund. Thank you for your attendance, and I'd like to welcome all of our shareholders, and especially our new shareholders, to the meeting. We begin today's presentation with the successful IPO and listing of Cadence Opportunities Fund. We listed on the November 19th, earlier this month, after three years of trading as an unlisted fund. We listed with a market cap of AUD 45 million and 832 shareholders in total. The IPO share price was AUD 2.77 per share, and I'm pleased to say that we closed on our first day of trading at a premium to the issue price, and we are currently trading at a premium to the issue price as we prepare this presentation. There will be opportunities for CDO investors to grow their investments over time through the dividend reinvestment program and also potentially through share purchase plans. In our most recent dividend reinvestment program for the final year dividend, 52% of the investor base participated in the DRP. The following slide shows our year-to-date performance and is an October month-end performance number. We were up 2.8% for the month. Year- to- date, we're up 25.7%, and our one-year numbers are 78.8%. Since inception, CDO is up 62.2% per annum, or a cumulative return of nearly 300% to date. Our NTA at the moment is AUD 2.89 pre-tax, AUD 2.66 post-tax, and you can see the final dividend there of AUD 0.15 produces a 5.6% fully franked yield. Our biggest contributors for the period are Upstart, Life360, Tuas, TMC, The Metals Company, Asana, DigitalOcean, BlueBet, Swoop and Lovisa. Stocks that detracted from our performance were Bed Bath & Beyond, Pinterest, and MAAS. Specifically, in relation to the dividends, we paid a AUD 0.12 fully franked dividend as well as a AUD 0.03 special dividend for a total dividend of AUD 0.15 per share. This equated to a 5.6% fully franked yield or a grossed-up yield including franking of 8.1% based on the NTA at the end of October. CDO has a healthy profits reserve balance from which we can pay future dividends of around AUD 0.60 per share. Based on the dividends that we paid in 2021, this is around five years worth of future dividends before any future profits that we may make. CDO currently has AUD 0.11 per share of franking, which would enable us to pay AUD 0.25 of future dividends. The company will obviously continue to realize franking from both its tax payments on realizable taxable income and franking on dividends that we receive. The following slide you see in our monthly newsletter and shows a big spread of investments at the end of October, both domestically and overseas, and across many, many different sectors, which of course leads to good diversification and good risk-adjusted returns. This following slide shows in the relatively short life of CDO compared to our original fund, CDM, our portfolio exposure over the last nearly three years. Importantly, during that period, we have had a period with an exogenous shock called the COVID pandemic, and you can see pleasingly here that the company was able to move to a nearly all cash during that period, and then very quickly again, when the market recovered, to move to fully invested and actually slightly borrowed five cents on the dollar to be once again fully invested to benefit from the recovery. These portfolio exposure slides are important over long periods of time because they show the process in action and what the process is capable of doing in terms of getting invested into stocks, out of stocks, and in holding high levels of cash or being fully invested, depending on the state of market. I'd like to now turn to Jackson and Charlie to take you through more specific attributes of the CDO fund, as well as examples of trading and core positions within the portfolio. Thanks, Karl. My name is Jackson Aldridge, Portfolio Manager at Cadence Capital. I'll touch on some of the trading statistics. For new shareholders, we've been doing this at each kind of incremental webcast, kind of assessing, you know, this is what the fund was designed to do, to trade. We wanted to analyze the statistics and show you how we've delivered the returns over the past nearly three years now. As you can see, the returns are on the top kind of column there. You know, I think a key with this fund is the number of positions, you know, through FY 2021, 268. For this kind of first three-four months of the year, you know, we've had nearly 120 different positions in the fund. I think a key here is, you know, in the next couple of points is we're only actually getting 40% right of our picks, which sounds a bit odd, given that the fund is up nearly 26% for the period. I think what's really driving returns and what we mentioned in previous webcasts is, although we may not get every pick right, in fact, we normally get half in a good year, it's the win-loss ratio, and that's effectively the scaling process. It makes us or forces us into our winning positions and adding to our winning positions that are going up and cutting our losers quite quickly. I think, you know, just these, you know, 40% of picks and, you know, 5x larger than winners larger than losers is quite key to the market at the moment. You're seeing the indexes continue higher, but actually under the surface, the breadth of stocks that are going down is much more significant. There's a narrow band of stocks that are winning and effectively driving the indexes higher, specifically overseas. I think, you know, our statistics here, that 5x win-loss ratio proves that we're getting on to some of those winners, and we mentioned a few earlier in the top performers. That's that fact in action, I guess. Another point, the next row down is the turnover, and that's a key point to this fund. You know, last year we turned it over nearly 9x, roughly on track to turn over a little more this year. That's kind of what the fund is doing. Taking a large number of positions and trying to add to our winners and cut our losers really quickly. You can see our average exposure kind of gross is 89%. Average net is 82. No leverage is being used at this current point in time and quite a significant amount of short positions at the moment too. I'll just touch on a couple of specific stocks, and then Charlie will touch on a few more. On this first slide or my slide of stocks, I think, you know, you can see three telcos on there. We continue to believe in the value of telco infrastructure assets, and given the low rates, given the high cash generative nature of these kinds of assets, they've become really attractive to not only public investors but some private investors as well. You've seen Vocus being bid for, and then I guess more physical infrastructure assets now more recently as well, such as Sydney Airport are becoming very popular targets. But that's not why we're investing in these businesses. It's a nice kicker. But you know, we see a number of tailwinds for these businesses. I think the three that I'll mention, the key between them is really highly driven and proven management teams in Uniti, TPG Singapore and then Swoop Holdings, which has a few guys from Opticomm in there as well. The first stock is Uniti Wireless. We've talked about a number of times. We continue to like the business. The forward order book is growing quicker than the back book, so effectively the business is growing quicker than they can build. We see that as really supportive. The company's just implemented a buyback, which they could buy it back to up to 10% of the business, and the wholesale infrastructure business continues to grow really strongly. We see ARPU ticking up and that could drive revenue in the coming years. The next stock is Swoop. It's a recent listing through a backdoor merger. It's a regional fixed wireless provider with a recent capital raise at AUD 1.85. They've kind of got the firepower to do a number of acquisitions. It's kind of like an early stage telco roll-up strategy that they'll use the public markets to kind of buy private businesses on much lower EBITDA multiples than they're trading on and kind of rip out the cost to gain a number of synergies across the business. We're backing management to execute on this strategy to create a high-speed wireless business and telco into regional Australia. Specifically, right now in Western Australia and Adelaide, and they'll expand. The last telco that I'll talk about is Tuas. Tuas is the Singapore assets that were spun out of TPG. This has now become David Teoh's pet project. He's no longer kind of focused on TPG. This is his focus now. Between him and associates, they own roughly 60% of the assets. You know, for a number of times, we spoke about the stock in our last webcast, around AUD 0.65 I think the stock was trading at. It was trading well below NTA. You know, typically, telco assets that are profitable or break-even trade on 1.5x-2x NTA. To us that equates to somewhere near AUD 2. We think the business is tracking really well. We think it, you know, management has told us it's EBITDA positive, and we'll get an update soon at the AGM as to how profitable the business is. I've got two more stocks. Just quickly, Nitro we've spoken about is a PDF productivity platform and more recently an eSign business. They've just made an acquisition in Europe, which will expand their footprint over into Europe. We think the market's missing the conversion from upfront licensing to a kind of SaaS conversion. The revenue probably looks muted on the top line just looking at it from that perspective. Underlying the business is actually growing at, you know, 35%-40% with 91% gross margin. We think that the stock headed into FY 2022 into a year that they'll turn on the eSign business as a live revenue product and we see significant upside, and we think the market is potentially underestimating that. The last stock, just quickly, DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean is effectively the fourth competitor in the cloud computing universe. Everyone's probably familiar with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, et cetera. These guys are effectively targeting the SMBs and are significantly lower cost than the AWSs of the world and kind of helping the SMBs through the process of onboarding through the use of a freemium model. Then, you know, as they require more compute power, they'll start charging and the revenue kind of grows with the customer as the SMB grows. You know, you've seen a significant business, different industry, but in e-commerce with Shopify supporting the SMBs throughout the world with their transition to e-commerce. We believe that DigitalOcean could be a little bit similar in the sense of converting small to medium businesses into much more affordable and simple cloud computing throughout the world. You can see all the metrics accelerating across the board, ARPU, ARR, et cetera. It's all trending in the right direction. I'll now pass on to Charlie to talk about a few more stocks and then Karl to do an outlook. Thanks, Jackson. My name's Charlie Gray, Portfolio Manager here at Cadence Asset Management. If we're turning to the next slide, you can see four other companies currently in the portfolio that I'll touch on briefly. The first is Step One. Now, there's been quite a number of IPOs that we've seen come to market recently, and in our opinion, a lot of them haven't really been of the sufficient quality for us to make an investment. But one that we have participated in is Step One that we're quite constructive about. Step One, you may have heard, it owns the brand of its own name. It's a men's underwear brand. The business operates a very efficient direct consumer model, and this model's delivered significant growth in sales and profitability in recent years. A big calling card for the business has been its focus on ESG with its products made of organically sourced bamboo fiber. The business is founder-led with Greg Taylor, the CEO, retaining 66% of the business post-IPO, which we liked as a key feature of the investment case. Market cap now for the business is around AUD 500 million after a strong debut. The growth opportunity for this company is very significant with the global growth rollout underway and the main markets it's targeting are the U.S. and the U.K. For the U.K., it launched there, you know, only a year and a half ago, and already in its first full year of operation, it's gotten to over $20 million in sales. The next catalyst we think for the stock is the launch into the U.S., and that's happening as we speak. We believe the company's success here will surprise on the upside as we've seen management build up quite significant stock levels on the West Coast to support a strong rollout. They've done a lot of research into what the consumer over there is really looking for. The key though is this business has around 80% gross margins and a very efficient, you know, operating model with little fixed costs below that. Incremental sales that it makes in the business can make a big impact on the bottom line. Given the size of these markets, whether it's the U.K. or the U.S., you'd only need, you know, some reasonable level of success before you could see the profit potentially doubling or tripling, you know, over several years. It could be quite significant profit growth. We think it's a good opportunity. The next stock I'll touch on is Data#3. Data#3 is one of Australia's largest IT product and services companies. It's now got a market capitalization of around AUD 900 million. The stock's evolved in recent years to become much higher quality and more predictable, with over 60% of the business now considered recurring, which is a lot different to how it was back in, you know, a number of years ago. Despite being listed on ASX since the 1990s, the company's still under the radar, with only two brokers covering the stock, which we think leads to good opportunities to get alpha from this position. This is despite the company having achieved double-digit earnings growth for many, many years and a very experienced and capable management team running the business that's been together since the listing in the 1990s. The company recently provided profit before tax guidance of AUD 15 million-AUD 18 million for the first half of this year, which we think is conservative given their typical conservative nature providing guidance. If we use the normal level of seasonality that the business has, we see this means that there'll be growth of over 20% for the full year. We think the key differentiator for the year ahead for this stock is that it's emerging from a period where it still performed well. Businesses really put a hold on a lot of the more significant transformation or digital transformation projects that were undergoing before COVID. Now that we're emerging from the pandemic, you know, feedback from the company and other people in the industry indicates a lot of these projects are now resuming. This can be quite significantly profitable work for companies such as Data#3. They've secured, you know, quite a number of these projects with large corporates in Australia and the government bodies, including the federal government. We think that the combination of these projects with the ongoing underlying business momentum related to the migration of the cloud and cybersecurity themes, among other strong demand drivers, for Australian businesses, we believe that this will lead to upgrades to consensus earnings forecast over the next 12 months. The next stock I'll touch on briefly is Mineral Resources. This is a well-known diversified mining and mining services business listed on the ASX with an AUD 8 billion market cap. This is a good example of a stock that we've been both long and short. More recently, we've moved back to a long position in the company as we saw the stock potentially turn, technically, and importantly, we saw volume confirmation, you know, just in the recent weeks on the turn, which has coincided with the emergence of some key fundamental factors. First, we've seen a stabilization in the beginning of a potential recovery in iron ore prices. This was a key factor to the stock's weakness in recent months. The move in, you know, the stabilization here has coincided with more supportive stimulatory measures announced by the Chinese government. This is obviously a key factor for seaborne iron ore demand. This is important for MIN in particular as their iron ore assets are very high cost, so their profitability is highly leveraged to any move in the iron ore price. Secondly, and more importantly really, we believe, is the potential spin-off of the company's lithium assets, which management alluded to at the recent AGM. We've seen lithium stocks perform very, very well over the last year, and MIN's got some of the best quality assets, you know, globally. You know, the valuation here can be obscured by its mining services and iron ore assets. We believe a spin-off of the lithium assets or even just the perceived event of such should lead to a good re-rating of the stock in the near term. If we look at the standalone valuation of Pilbara, which is probably the closest peer, you know, arguably, though it's lower quality operation, it implies a significant uplift to the group valuation for MIN. The last company I'll touch on briefly here you can see is Fortinet. Fortinet's a global leader in cybersecurity. It's listed on the NASDAQ and has a $50 billion U.S. valuation. The company's seen its growth accelerate in the recent six to 12 months as its firewall products and its IP around this gain traction in the market. More specifically, cybersecurity services as a priority for enterprises. We've seen that gone right to the top of the list for businesses. The threat of attack has increased, and this is really also on the back of everybody moving to the cloud. That migration to the cloud, that event really means that you open up a number of different points of vulnerability where hackers can get in. So it really increases the priority and the need for having strong cybersecurity and firewall solution for networks. Importantly, the company's gaining significant share from competitors, which we see it accelerating. We believe the drivers behind this are sustainable over the medium term. From our discussions with IT professionals within the industry, Fortinet's products offer a similar or better level of functionality than competitors, but at less than half the cost. It means that it's a very easy sell to recommend to clients. You know, they call it a free win. Transfer to Fortinet's products, they get a fee, you know, on providing that service, but the client also saves a significant amount of money. Technically, this stock trends very nicely. If you look at the chart, it's trended basically all of 2021, you know, in a very tight fashion. We've seen it recently form the first consolidation since the start of this run. We initiated a small position in the stock and, you know, we'll add to this position if the stock breaks out and starts to trend higher once again. Thanks for your time. I'll now hand to Karl to discuss the outlook. Thanks. Thanks, Jackson and Charlie. Now turning to the outlook, certainly as things are now and as we think they might be going a year ahead. Of course, stocks and valuations on those stocks continue just to grind higher. Despite investor concerns over interest rates hikes, inflation, and generally the high valuations that the stock market is experiencing at the moment, we are just grinding higher. Anyone that would've said in previous years or even three, four, five years ago that stocks were expensive and overvalued, well, here we are. The stocks are even more expensive and according to that theory, even more overvalued. Earnings recovery has been strong post-COVID. Really what you need to start thinking about is what were the earnings before COVID, then we had the big effect of the pandemic and what COVID did, and now what are the earnings post-COVID. When we look over that we bridge that gap between and take COVID out of it, where are we tracking in relation to earnings prior to COVID? Some stocks are experiencing, you know, quite good organic earnings growth, and others are experiencing probably not as good organic growth, and that's an important factor for us to be looking at going forward. The consumer remains in very good shape. Obviously, having been in lockdown, we haven't had the opportunity to spend a lot of money. Now what did well were those that were described as the stay-at-home stocks. Now we're back into the get out and about stocks and back to business spending now that we're in a more normalized environment post-COVID or certainly coming into a more normalized environment post-COVID. We're hearing and reading a lot about wage and input cost inflation, supply chain issues, and these are likely to be a continuing feature going forward, and this affects all of us and many businesses in different ways. Good management and pricing power within your industry are obviously a key factor that we're starting to look at for the next phase of the marketplace, and we're spending some considerable time on that. As I've said before, and I'll say it again, interest rates are what we call the X factor at the moment. We've been living in an environment where interest rates have been falling for 30 years. The big question is: Are we in an environment where interest rates could start to go up, or are we even at an inflection point? This is a lot of what the press and financial people are talking about at the moment. Well, you know that if the AGM was live at a venue, I would be asking everyone to put their hands up like I do every year and say, "Look, do you think interest rates are going to fall further this year, or do you think they're going to go up?" For the last five or 10 years that I've been doing that, of course, everyone said, no, interest rates are gonna continue to fall, and they have. It would be interesting if we put our hands up today as to who actually thought interest rates were going to be lower a year from now and who didn't and who thought they were going to be higher. We've been tracking on this trend for 30 years, and I've been harping on about it. At some point, when that trend changes, it's a very important inflection point for all asset classes, not just for equities. Of course, at any inflection point, there's likely to be volatility. There will be the believers, and there'll be the non-believers. The believers will think that interest rates are starting to go up, and that affects all asset prices. The non-believers will think that interest rates are going to go further down. They're gonna stay at zero. Reserve banks and bureaucracies around the world can keep interest rates at zero forever or artificially low forever. You can hear from the way that I've introduced that sentence that I think at some stage interest rates will go up. I've jokingly said before that it'll happen in my lifetime. I think, you know, I'll stand by that prediction. I think in my lifetime, interest rates will go up. Liquidity levels across our portfolio have significantly improved. You've heard Jackson and Charlie talking about very stock-specific things that we're doing inside our portfolio at the moment. Shorting has been working really well for us. The trading part of our portfolio where things don't meet the core criteria that benefit from expanded valuations have done well. Specific situations where a stock gets revalued based on a catalyst have worked well for us. We will continue to do those things that have worked well for us, while at the same time improving liquidity and having a buffer of cash on our balance sheet. I showed you the portfolio exposure before during the presentation. We're holding 25%-30% cash at the moment. If necessary, we can take that to 50% cash, or as we did during the pandemic, we took it to 80% cash. During the global financial crisis, we took our portfolio to 80% cash. We have the capacity to do that. We're already seeing the signs of more cash, which is shorting starting to work for us and scaling out of positions that have come to an end after a profitable period. All of these things are increasing our cash levels. Overall, the environment is mixed. As I've described that COVID period as, in a way, inverted commas, a gift, if you could buy into the market at that stage, we've had tremendous returns in the marketplace. Our funds have done tremendously well during that period. We do not expect those type of returns in this year ahead, but nonetheless, the processes that we employ should be able to deliver us good returns in the year ahead. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your time. Now, we will move into the live audio environment, where we will look to answer any questions that you may have. Thank you.
Loading workspace