Summary

00:01:20 – Jacob’s early career and influences
Jacob recounts starting under value investor Peter Pedley and later working with Kerr Nielsen at Platinum, learning the importance of industry structure, competitive advantage, and macro awareness. 

00:05:40 – What “pragmatic value” means
He explains Antipodes’ approach: combining value with growth and quality, avoiding pure mean reversion traps, and anchoring decisions in deep industry research. 

00:11:00 – Avoiding value traps (and recognising growth traps)
Jacob highlights sectors like media and department stores where structural disruption overwhelms cyclicality — and warns about emerging “growth traps” in over-hyped areas. 

00:15:30 – How Antipodes uses industry modelling
Their team builds 100+ industry models to identify long-term winners and act quickly when mispricing emerges. 

00:18:40 – Passive investing and benchmark risk
Jacob discusses how index concentration — especially in US mega-caps — creates hidden risks and why active management may be poised for a resurgence. 

00:22:40 – AI: enablers vs adopters
He argues the market is focused on the wrong part of the AI value chain and outlines why adopters (banks, cloud users) may outperform enablers (chips, infrastructure) in the next phase. 

00:27:50 – Mega-cap tech positioning
Jacob explains why Alphabet and Amazon have been attractive at different times, and how Antipodes rotates within this group when valuations dislocate. 

00:29:50 – Europe’s comeback
From industrials to banks, Jacob shares how structural tailwinds and low expectations are creating opportunities across Europe. 

00:32:00 – Emerging markets outlook
He outlines four EM buckets — China, India, EM-China-linked, and EM-US-linked — and where Antipodes sees the most compelling value. 

00:35:00 – Gold’s resurgence
Jacob explains why Antipodes invested early in gold miners, how global reserve diversification is driving demand, and where value remains.

Paul O'Connor: Good morning and welcome to another installment of the Netwealth Portfolio Construction Podcast series. I'm Paul O'Connor and my role at Netwealth is as head of investments, which really includes responsibility for the investment menus and the products Netwealth issues as a responsible entity.

We're fortunate to have Jacob Mitchell for Antipodes join us on today's podcast where we'll discuss Antipodes value style, Jacob's view on equity markets and where he sees value and is currently positioning the portfolios. Jacob is the chief investment officer of the global equities team with responsibility for the firm's investment philosophy and process. Good morning, Jacob, and thanks for joining us.

Jacob Mitchell: Yeah, morning, Paul. Great to be here.

Paul O'Connor: Antipodes Partners, or Antipodes, is a boutique firm that offers global equity products to retail, wholesale, and institutional investors. Antipodes was established in March 2015 by Jacob and Pinnacle Investment Management. The investment team and the key executives at Antipodes hold a majority ownership in the business with Pinnacle holding the balance of the equity. As at the 30th of September 2025, Antipodes managed approximately AUD 21 billion firm-wide. Antipodes have offices in Sydney, Melbourne, and London, and employ an investment team of 31 specialists, primarily based in Sydney who are led by Jacob.

 Antipodes also recently purchased the Maple-Brown Abbott's fund management business earlier this year and post the purchase and now managing global equities, emerging markets, global listed infrastructure, Australian large and small cap equity strategies. Jacob founded Antipodes in 2015, which has grown from a dedicated global value equity manager into a multi-specialist investment firm. Prior to Antipodes, Jacob spent 14 years at Platinum Asset Management, where he was the deputy chief investment officer jointly responsible for the firm-wide investment process, and a portfolio manager of the flagship Platinum International Fund.

 During his time there, he also served as a portfolio manager for the Platinum Unhedged Fund and Japan Fund. Before joining Platinum, Jacob was head of technology and emerging industrials research at UBS Warburg. He commenced his investment career in 1994 at the high conviction value-oriented Australian equities' manager, Tyndall, Australia, where he was trained as an analyst by industry doyen Peter Pedley. Jacob holds a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Western Sydney. We have seven Antipodes funds on the Netwealth Super and IDPS investment menus covering global equities, emerging markets, and Asian equity strategies.

In addition, the investment menus also offer poor Maple-Brown Abbott funds covering Australian equities and global listed infrastructure strategies. While equity markets have generated strong returns in recent years, active managers have been challenged due to issues such as the US IT mega caps deriving the S&P 500 index returns and closer to home, the Australian major banks, and namely CBA, driving returns on the ASX 200 index. The magnificent seven stocks seem to have also benefited again recently from the increasing AI mania and the rush to commercialize AI tools and systems.

So it seems that equity market source of returns is increasingly due to a small number of stocks that do appear to be trading on very high valuations. So I'll be interested to understand Jacob's views on the sustainability of such a concentrated group of stocks continuing to drive market returns. In addition, markets are still trying to navigate the macro issues that we're experiencing at the moment, including China-US relations, Trump's tariffs, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and an orderly clean energy transition.

So I'm sure Jacob will also touch on a number of these issues in our discussion today. Jacob, maybe for starters, you've had a fairly long and successful career in funds management. You work with some fairly well-known and very successful investors, including Peter Pedley that I mentioned of Tyndall Fund, and also Kerr Neilson of Platinum. Can you provide the listeners with a few comments on the biggest insights people such as Peter and Kerr have taught you along the way?

Jacob Mitchell: Yeah, Paul. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Peter was a classic sort of bottom-up stock picker, but he matched that with a top-down quantamental, let's call it before that label even existed, the mixing of quant and fundamental. In the mid 90s, no one really was thinking that way, but he was using, let's call it, relative valuations to contextualize expected returns from stocks. And that was, I think, really forward-thinking for the time and quite a, as you can imagine, the power of Excel at that point in time and the fact that there were no real preloaded data sets.

When I started as a trainee, it took me a week to set up one company in Peter's framework. And so it was very labor-intensive and we've come a long way since then. But that framing of valuations relative to the market after you've done all your bottom up work, that's really stuck with me. And we certainly still use that approach at Antipodes today. I think with Kerr, it was very different. Platinum, at that point, I'd been working on an Australian equity environment for roughly six years when I joined Platinum in 2000. And it was a good time to join because the tech bubble was starting to unwind and Platinum experienced a remarkable period of out-performance and the funds grew rapidly.

And I learned much more, broadened out my industry experience and also I think learnt just how important Kerr used to refer to understanding the DNA of a company. And he used to hate sort of using shortcut methods to explain why a company was high quality, observations around return on capital being high didn't really cut it with Kerr. He wanted to understand what was a competitive advantage, what drove that, what about the company built those barriers to entry or built that superior business. So that was number one. And then number two, Kerr also was very respectful of the macro environment.

So certainly understanding where excesses may be building up over time and making sure we protected portfolios when markets became very, very risky, when those left tails started to fatten. And Platinum did that very well and variable beta, the Platinum international fund was a variable beta fund. So we had lots of different tools we could use. And certainly that was one of the reasons why when we started Antipodes in 2015, we launched a similar strategy, the Antipodes Global Fund as our variable beta expression and certainly delivering that downside protection when markets are starting to look very, looking sketchy.

Paul O'Connor: Yeah. Interesting there, Jacob, particularly your comments around that macro oversight and management that you mentioned Kerr Neilson or used to run portfolios of Platinum there. And I do find it, I guess, rarer that equity, active equity managers have a lot of macro oversight. Most are more purely bottom up.

 So but I guess if you're going to run a variable beta strategy, you have to have a macro view of the environment as to how much risk, I guess, you wish to take on in the portfolio. But certainly a couple of very, very well known and successful people that you worked under, which would have stood you in good stead as a young Jacob cutting your way in the industry.

Jacob Mitchell: Yeah, absolutely. And that sort of macro, let's call it the popularity of macro comes in long cycles. I think if you remember just after the years, just the few years after the global financial crisis, every stock picker became a macro investor.

 And then obviously since then, it's become less popular because we've been in this trending bull market and we've only had very, very shallow drawdowns that we haven't really had. There's a whole generation of investors who haven't really experienced a 50% drawdown such that we experienced in 2000, 2001, and then again in 2008.

Paul O'Connor: Moving into the questions for today, traditional value investment style has had a challenging decade. And I guess we could debate for hours what's driven this, but I'll perhaps leave it to a separate podcast, but I know Antipodes describes its approach as pragmatic value. So can you explain what this means and potentially how it helps you to avoid value trap stocks and maybe focus on the traditional mean reversion stocks?

Jacob Mitchell: It's not really rocket science, Paul. It's actually just that Buffett observation that growth and value are joined at the hip, right? You can't separate them. So we're very comfortable investing across that, the spectrum of growth, and we're also comfortable investing across the spectrum of quality in terms of business resilience. We just want to pay the right multiple relative to those characteristics. So obviously something that's more of a GDP, more cyclical grower, you're paying a lower multiple versus say something that's a higher growth business that's got more of a structural tailwind.

 And so we're not just solely dependent, like I suppose, deep value or conventional value investors. They end up ultimately relying just solely on cyclicality mean reversion. If you anchor just to that, you're going to miss the value traps, right? Those opportunities that where the structural headwinds are too great, the business is being fundamentally disrupted.

 And you certainly want to screen those out because they're not going to mean revert. You can also benefit from those. If it's misunderstood, it's not priced efficiently. There's no reason why you shouldn't benefit from structural tailwinds as a value investor. We believe our pragmatic approach leads to a much more all weather value outcome, and that's certainly been proven by our results where we've outperformed the broad global equity benchmark and we've also outperformed, significantly outperformed the value factor.

Paul O'Connor: Yeah. It strikes me that the pragmatic value approach you take certainly has been influenced by Peter Pedley there. And I guess he's that relative value approach you mentioned earlier there. So it certainly makes sense. And I guess that sort of style has stood you in a lot better stead than, as you mentioned, being a traditional value or very deep value investor, which would've given you a lot of challenges over the last decade or so. Can you provide some examples where mean reversion has not worked and what lessons should investors draw from that, Jacob?

Jacob Mitchell: There's definitely been, if you think about traditional media, yeah, it's been a struggle to make money in those areas. Look, there's always an exception, but broadly speaking, if you think about the US and those businesses like Disney that have been very much exposed to the distribution of content via cable subscriptions, obviously they found it very challenging to compete with the Netflix of the world, the streaming offerings.

 You always have that, let's call it, innovators dilemma or how ultimately to compete against the new entrant, you've got to disrupt your own business. Sometimes that's very hard. The short term cost of that is too high. I think another example is just department stores. I mean, department stores in the US just have not come back. They've often looked like value, but they've really struggled.

 They're getting squeezed between Amazon at one end and Shein, and then at the other end, they get a lot of pressure from the off price stores. They're just getting squeezed and we think there's just a structural problem there that makes them a value trap. We also observe, and today, we're actually more worried about growth traps in portfolios. I think investors don't spend enough time focusing on the companies, which arguably, whilst they may have grown fast recently, aren't going to grow sustainably at a rapid rate and/or are in relatively weak businesses that where the risks aren't being reflected in the multiples.

Paul O'Connor: Yeah. Interesting. I hadn't thought about that from a growth stock perspective, almost the opposite to the value trap there, as you mentioned. Maybe further on the theme there, you employ a team of 35 professionals all analyzing global equity stocks. So you're very well resourced and you're certainly aiming to avoid the value traps. But for the benefit of the listeners, can you explain how you distinguish between a stock's cyclical cheapness versus one that is in structural decline? So maybe further elaborating on your comments around retail.

Jacob Mitchell: Look, I think ultimately the way we seek to generate an edge in the market and what we would see as our competitive advantage as an investment team is really starting at the industry layer. And as you'd appreciate, it's a vast universe. Even just in the benchmark, it's about two and a half thousand companies. But we sort of break that down into what we think are the hundred or so relevant industries.

And in our team, we're really building industry models and making sure we understand what drives competitive advantage in that industry and who the longer term winners and losers are. And then when that industry becomes interesting because of maybe there's a cyclical downturn or there's some structural concerns and the stocks are becoming cheaper and because of our industry research, we know which ones aren't the value traps, if you like, or we know which ones where these concerns by the market are misplaced, then we're really ready to act and we can go deep into the investment case, have a stock meeting, and we can allocate capital in a proactive manner.

Look, I don't think there's any shortcuts. You can only determine that situation of where a business is in terms of its cycle, whether it's a cyclical cycle or a structural cycle, by getting the industry layer research roughly, roughly right. But if we do that well, we should avoid the growth traps, we should avoid the value traps in building final portfolios.

Paul O'Connor: And it sort of makes sense, I guess, to me why you have such a large investment team there of analysts trying to understand not only the company, but each different industry and sub-industries to what are the changes going on. So I guess at the end of the day, it's just a lot of intensive research that's required.

Jacob Mitchell: Yeah, that's right. But we also organize that process. We put a lot of structure around it, so such that the best ideas to find end up in the final portfolios. And we organize that team of, let's call it team of 30 where roughly two thirds are analysts. So let's say 20 analysts. We structure that into five sector teams led by a sector PM.

And so each of those teams are covering that universe, so... And within the team, the team is building a best ideas portfolio, a model portfolio. And those model portfolios, they're long short portfolios, they're the building blocks for... They're the common building blocks to all the portfolios that we, or the strategies that we offer to our investors. That's how we sort of run the process. We think it's very... It means that we get the benefits of collaboration, but we also get the benefits of ranking the universe and aligning the team very tightly with end investors.

Paul O'Connor: The increasing use of passive investing in diversified portfolios, whether it's via the adoption of a core satellite or a pure passive portfolio construction approach continues to grow. But is this shift towards passive investment, investing and benchmark hugging, I should add, changing the way that investors like yourself treat markets and look at stocks?

Jacob Mitchell: There's probably two ways of thinking about that. The fact that the benchmark, the bigger is being driven by some of these mega caps, concentration 10 years ago at the top 10 stocks in the S&P, I think were roughly 12% of the benchmark and now they're about 30%. We've had this period of US exceptionalism where the US has had a bit more productivity growth than the rest of the world. It's had these mega caps that have done well where their profits have grown much faster than the economy, which has driven that concentration.

It's not just concentration. There has been some re-rating, but the re-rating in some ways has been earned by the fact that the companies have grown faster and they tend to be the cloud, digital ad and now AI related stocks. Now, I suppose what that we would argue though, that the valuation exceptionalism in the US is... Well, there's also been a level of fiscal exceptionalism in the US. And so it's hard to separate the fiscal looseness that the US has had and how much of that has driven that outcome.

We think quite a lot of it has been driven by just very irresponsible fiscal policy in the States relative to the rest of the world. And then also outside the mega caps, there's been a re-rating of the market, and arguably that hasn't really been deserved, i.e. it hasn't been backed by higher growth. We think the benchmark is becoming risky, just and investors are being forced to hug the benchmark tracking error and let's call it core portfolios with low tracking error are seen as less risky.

But I think the problem there is that you're measuring against a benchmark that is becoming risky. There's a lot of value, old-fashioned VAR, value at risk in the benchmark. So that may be happening just at the wrong time. I think active management can make a comeback and that is really, it will only happen if active managers deliver diversified sources of alpha and beat the benchmark when the benchmark itself starts to, let's call it, not generate absolute returns. When the returns from the benchmarks start to sort of wane, arguably that's when active managers need to come into their own.

Paul O'Connor: Interesting comments there, Jacob. Just as you were talking there, I was just thinking to myself about the, I guess, the changing dynamic of the indexes. And I guess whilst, as you made the comment that a lot of passive investors view the index as the lowest risk option, but that changes ongoing in shape and concentration and what have you. So I guess it's a pertinent point for investors to be seriously considering ongoing the nature of the benchmark.

And then also, I guess, why they're using and considering using active managers, because not only can active managers outperform, they can provide better risk management as well at certain significant inflection times. So when we're seeing those changes going on in indexes, and I don't find enough, in my opinion, enough people think deeply about that index exposure and the way it changes ongoing there. So you tapped into a couple of themes that have been on my mind for a number of years, Jacob.

Paul O'Connor: Equity markets are at or near all time highs in terms of valuations and growth in recent years has been dominated by the concentrated group of stocks, namely AI related. So what are your views on the sustainability of the current valuations and if the AI theme is overdone or is it really still in its early stages and is part of a long-term structural trend?

Jacob Mitchell: There's a lot of focus on AI and the sustainability of AI. I think it's probably distracting investors a little bit away from some of the other risks in the market, like the buildup of in the US of private credit, very low, the bottom 20% of corporate credit looks very, very unsustainable to us against an economy that is becoming quite narrow and where the employment market is much more finely balanced. Our biggest concern is more the interplay of macro and the fragility of the macro today versus extended valuations broadly across the market.

I just want to make that clear. That's where we think the conversation should be. In terms of AI, definitely we're early in the adoption phase. We're not early though in the build out of that sort of, let's call it the training of foundational models and the raising of capital and the sort of... We'd argue it's sort of unhealthy dynamic whereby NVIDIA is sort of sponsoring startups that compete against its own... The hyperscalers who are supporting, benefiting from the general growth and demand for compute. But those hyperscalers like Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet... yeah, and look, Alphabet's a good example, it doesn't even use NVIDIA GPUs.

And the other two are looking for ways to avoid, yeah, to get away from NVIDIA because of how much the GPUs cost. So the hyperscalers are trying to diversify their sources away from NVIDIA, and NVIDIA is trying to sponsor competition for the hyperscalers. And I think that dynamic is ultimately going to lead to an overshoot in CapEx. And so we're more mindful of being, we don't really want to be too exposed to the CapEx beneficiaries of the AI build out. Where we want to be exposed is the companies that are going to benefit from the adoption of all that capacity in their core businesses. And that's a much broader group of companies.

And it could be a bank like in the US Capital One Financial is a good example of a very dominant credit card business that's going to drive, I think, a lot of benefits in its IT stack because it has a very modern IT stack and it can reduce, use AI models to reduce its credit cost and improve its cost of customer acquisition. And that's a stock on a sub 10 PE. So you don't have to pay up for the benefits of AI adoption. So I think it's time to move forward towards the adopters rather than the enablers.

And that will lead to a broadening in the market, which we think has already started to happen by the way. And then avoiding the really speculative expressions of AI adoption, of which there's no shortage. Just like we had coming out of in COVID, we had stocks like Zoom who were put on really, really high multiples, which they ended up being great examples of growth traps because they weren't strong businesses and their growth wasn't sustainable. I think there's many examples of those today in AI, and we certainly are short some of those in our long, short strategy.

Paul O'Connor: Are you holding any of the mega cap tech stocks in long positions in your portfolios at the moment, or are there other areas of the market? You made the comment there about the enablers and you're now starting to focus from an AI perspective more on companies that can really benefit from the use of AI. So any of these still mega cap stocks showing value to you?

Jacob Mitchell: We don't buy into the view that the mega caps are all in a bubble. We certainly don't buy into that. Even as recently as say four months ago, Alphabet, as you know, traded on a PE of 16 times post liberation day because investors were really, really concerned about disruption in its search business by OpenAI. And we were very high conviction that those concerns were misplaced and that became one of our largest holdings in the portfolio. Now we've reduced the holding because it's gone from 16 times to, let's call it 24 times. It's been a great stock.

You need to be very selective in the group and find the stocks at any point in time that are out of favor for the wrong reasons. We also think probably today we're more constructive on... We've recycled some of that Alphabet capital into Amazon. Because once again, investors I think have thought that Amazon is missing is somehow not playing AI hard enough because they don't invest in a foundational model or they don't have a... The Switzerland, I think of AI would be the way we would describe their strategy.

And we think that's a smart strategy, by the way. We think that's in a market where investors will start to question the longer term... Whether or not foundational models will actually... Whether they're becoming very capital intensive and ultimately they may not drive sufficient returns on that capital to the extent that it ends up being Alphabet will be very hard to displace because it has such a great business model because it's monetized by ad spend. We don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that they're not doing that, but they will benefit from just general...

Already you can see that their cloud business where investors had the biggest concerns because their growth in cloud had matured and they were lagging Microsoft and Alphabet. As we expected, it has re-accelerated. And that's, I think, a positive sign. And that stock really got down to the lowest relative valuation in 10 years. Right? Like in a very long period of time. And that for us was a signal that we should be building a bigger position. So I think you can be selectively... You want to be rotating relatively aggressively in that group into the ones that are out of favor for the wrong reason, and that's what we've done. And that's why, one of the reasons why we've more than kept up in this market.

Paul O'Connor: I note in recent commentary, you've highlighted Europe as a region where patience is finally paying off. So can you elaborate a bit further on this? And I'm assuming European equities remain undervalued relative to the US as most markets would be undervalued relative to the US based on earlier comments there, Jacob.

Jacob Mitchell: Yeah. Look, Europe for us has always been a bottom up story. Our sort of wins there have tended to be either in sort of industry leading industrial companies like Siemens, Siemens Energy, Talos, and sort of Airbus more recently, multinationals that were just at discounts relative to global peers in industries that we thought were interesting from a longer term perspective and companies well positioned in industries that are, whether it's exposure to the energy transition, which is Siemens Energy or Talos, which is European defense spend, or in the case of Airbus, just a great duopoly where they dominate Boeing and then Siemens, the parent company, which ties into automation, digitization of manufacturing, just onshoring infrastructure spend, longer term interesting structural trends.

And that's proven that's paid off. Right? Those companies have re-rated towards where they should have always traded. The second element has been European banks where we've been pretty high conviction that they, whilst they were much slower coming out of the global financials crisis to rebuild capital, investors completely missed the fact that they had and they were therefore starting to do the right thing in terms of buybacks and dividends. And at the same time that they've had generally decent margin expansion.

So we've rotated within European banks to the ones that have had the most. As the margin story has matured in one country, we've rotated into the next country in terms of where we're seeing that dynamic. Because that's the interesting thing. In Europe whilst they have one monetary policy, it doesn't lead to the same dynamic in every country. So we played that quite well in companies like UniCredit more recently in SocGen. They've really been bottom up driven stories. Now, is there a free option on European macro getting better? Absolutely, because there's no expectation that it will. And they have spent roughly since 2016, their fiscal deficits to GDP have been roughly half of what the US has spent. So they do have more policy flexibility.

Paul O'Connor: And given you guys also offer emerging market strategies, what are your thoughts on emerging markets? And I guess after promising so much to investors, I guess over the, since probably 2000, they finally now appear to be back in favor and returns have been quite strong over the last 12 to 18 months. So how are you managing your exposure to EM stocks and how do you assess the macro and the governance risk in this region?

Jacob Mitchell: Well, good questions there. Yeah, there's absolutely been a broadening out in the market. You think about all the headlines that the Magnificent Seven or Magnificent 10 and AI in terms of their dominance in all the news flow, the reality is year to date, China has been one of the best performing markets, much better than the S&P or the Magnificent Seven. Even Europe and broader EM have beaten the S&P and that's, I think that's going to continue. We think that broadening out of markets will continue. When we think about EM and the opportunity there, we would break it down into roughly sort of four different buckets.

You got China, which we think is economically on a different cycle to the rest of the world, especially the US. Because they, China tightened policy when the US was very loose. So we expect when the US starts to slow, China can loosen. And yeah, valuations are pretty constructive, especially for quality stocks like the Tencents of the world, the Alibabas, they're nowhere near the top of their valuation ranges. Then you have India. India got expensive. We haven't really been active there. We're waiting for it to de-rate.

There will be a cost of AI to India because India is in a lot of service areas, exports a lot of services and a lot of those service sectors are really in the crosshairs of AI disruption. Then you have, let's call it the rest of EM, because they're relatively small markets, the rest of EM, and you could break them into two buckets. The EMs that are more correlated to China growth like Brazil, Indonesia, we're more constructive on those ones. And then the EMs that are more correlated to the US, which is Mexico, we're overweight, China and Brazil, Indonesia in our country allocation. And we're really just trying to find really interesting idiosyncratic opportunities in those respective markets. But in EM, it's not just about getting the industry right, you do also have to get the country roughly right.

Paul O'Connor: We'll draw the podcast to a conclusion, but I can't let you go without a quick couple of insights I guess on gold. And apart from the Trump daily news feeds in our media, gold's probably been the biggest story of 2025. And I know you guys own Barrick Mining, one of the world's largest gold producers. So why have we've seen such a big run-up in gold and what role is gold playing in your portfolios, Jacob?

Jacob Mitchell: It certainly started three or so years ago as a very much a bottom up story, as in we didn't think there was a lot of risk of downside on the gold price. And we saw a lot of... Yeah, we saw the corporates actually starting to do the right thing in terms of managing, operating costs better in terms of capital discipline and the market wasn't giving them any credit and you had a free option on a higher gold price. And we thought given what happened to Russia and its foreign reserves, we certainly thought there'd be a trend for other bigger holders of US dollar reserves to start diversifying those reserves and start buying gold as an alternative, as a currency.

And that is certainly... We saw that as a free option and that has definitely played out. The stocks are still trading in Barrick in particular at a big discount to their spot gold in AVs. And so we still think Barrick is a very interesting bottom up story. And we do see some catalysts in play that will potentially unlock that value. We certainly think there would be Newmont and Barrick, which are in... they're in a joint venture in Nevada. We think that longer term, there is a case that you could break Barrick up into its portfolio of DM, developed market, mining exposure and emerging market gold mining exposure. And in the process we can release a lot of value. So whilst we've taken some profits, we still maintain it as a relatively large position in the portfolio.

Paul O'Connor: Jacob, thank you very much for joining us on the podcast today. It's been a really interesting discussion and some really good insights I certainly found in the fact of comments you're making, like there still is some value in US mega cap stocks if you undertake the right research.

And also your comments around companies that are, I guess, that are benefiting the most from the adoption of AI are certainly on your radar as I guess the next leg up or the next step forward in the use of AI by corporates. And then obviously also your comments on Europe there and the opportunities on the, I guess, the value that European equities hold relative to US equities there. So it's been a really interesting a discussion with you. So thank you very much for your time and your insights.

Jacob Mitchell: Yeah. No, it's been great. I've enjoyed the conversation and yeah, it's my pleasure.

Paul O'Connor: And to the listeners, thank you again for joining us on the Netwealth Portfolio Construction Podcast Series. I hope you've enjoyed the discussion I've had with Jacob this morning as much as I've had. I hope you have a fantastic day and I look forward to you joining us on the next installment of the podcast series.