Good morning, all. It's 11:16, so we're already running one minute late. That's fine. Good. A very warm welcome to everyone to the Plato Income Maximiser Limited 2025 Annual General Meeting. Thank you very much for joining us, particularly shareholders in person and online. We've just had another AGM where we didn't have such a stellar turnout of shareholders, so it's very much appreciated that you're here in person. I'm Jonathan Trollip, I'm Chair of the company, and I'm chairing today's meeting. My fellow board directors need no introduction, but I'll give you one anyway. Don Hamson on my left, Don is the Managing Director of Plato Investment Management Limited, the investment manager of the company. Next to Don, we have Lorraine Berends and Katrina Onishi, who, like me, are independent non-executive directors. On the far left, we have Chris Meyer, who's associated with the Pinnacle Group.
The Company Secretary, Terence Wong, is also here. He's at the back running the online aspect of the meeting. Terence is a relatively recent appointment, taking over from Calvin Kwok, who stepped down earlier this month. I would like to acknowledge Calvin's role in the company since it was established in May 2017. I also welcome the auditors, Chris Chandran and Aidan Evans from Pitcher Partners, who are sitting over here, and they're able to answer any questions you might have on the financial statements. We also have Todd Kirby from Pinnacle Group, who is responsible for the financial statements of the group and provides a wonderful service to us at Plato. I've been informed by the Company Secretary that we have a quorum, and I therefore declare the meeting open. I'm advised that we've heard no apologies for the meeting.
The agenda for the meeting is pretty familiar to all of you who've been here before. I will give the chair's address, which is also listed on the ASX, so you don't have to pay close attention or take any notes. We'll then move to the formal business of the meeting, which is the items to consider and the resolutions. The part of the AGM, which I find the best part anyway, is listening to Don give the investment manager's report. After that, there'll be an opportunity to ask questions of Don, particularly the investment performance, but you're also welcome to ask questions of the directors and the board. Okay, I will now start with the chairman's address if we could move to the relevant slide.
I'll cover in my address briefly a review of the performance to date, that's since inception, a dividend update, an overview of the share price, and a high-level summary of PL8, as the ASX ticker is known, in comparison to how it looked when we listed in May 2017, so eight years ago. The company overview is really to provide a reminder to existing shareholders and also to familiarise new shareholders with what the company is doing. Plato Income Maximiser Limited was established in 2017 as the first Australian-listed company to pay monthly fully-franked dividends. It was a novel concept at that time. In recent months this year, there have been some copycat LICs which have also been paying monthly dividends. As Don commented in the paper, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
I'll not continue with the rest of the quote, but you might want to look at what it says after that. Listing in May 2017, we've now got approximately AUD 891 million of pre-tax net assets. On a market cap basis, we're more than AUD 1 billion. It's quite an achievement to have gone from the initial listing of AUD 326 million up to AUD 891 million. As we mentioned, the objective is to pay monthly dividends with the usual caveat to provide sufficient profit reserves and sufficient franking credits. As I'm sure shareholders know, the investment portfolio is managed by Plato Investment Management Limited. The only asset that the company holds is shares in Plato Australian Shares Income Fund.
If we can have a look at the performance to date, the annualized portfolio performance from inception in May 2017 to 30 June 2025 was 10.3% total return, including franking credits. If we update that to 31 October 2025, the total return is 10.7% per annum, including franking credits. The annualized distributed dividends, including franking credits for that period since inception, was 7.6%, and it remains at 7.6% to 31 October 2025. The same annualized distributed dividend at 30 June 2025 and 31 October 2025 on an annualized basis. We also measure TSR, which is total shareholder return, and that measures the change in share price and dividends paid. You'll recall that initially we listed at AUD 10, and it's now trading in excess of AUD 40. Measuring it from the inception to 30 June 2025, the TSR total shareholder return was 8.5%.
If we update that from end of June this year to 31 October, that's 8.7%. The company's share price on 31 October was AUD 42. As I mentioned, the issue price was AUD 10, so that's 32 cents increase. We've paid dividends of AUD 523 since inception. The total shareholder return excludes the benefit of franking credits. That explains why the TSR is less than the annualized portfolio performance, because the annualized portfolio performance does include the benefit of franking. The dividends paid since inception, plus if you add to those the benefit of the franking credits to 31 October 2025, equates to AUD 74.6 cents per share. If we could have a look at the slide with the dividend updates. Obviously, one of the key objectives of the company was to pay monthly dividends.
We're pleased if you look at this chart here, you'll see the level of dividends that we've paid. You'll see that if you look sort of around about in the middle of the chart since April 2022, so a period of about three and a half years, the monthly fully-franked dividend has remained stable at AUD 0.0055 per share per month. That's just over half a cent per month. That's obviously the highest level that we've had since we started. We have had a stable dividend stream, but it's fair to say that overall yields and aggregate amounts of dividends paid on the ASX have been in decline for the best part of three years.
The fact that PL8's dividend has remained consistent over the period, despite the decline in yields and aggregate amounts of dividends paid on the ASX, I guess is a tribute to the manager, Don and his team, being able to outperform the market's level of dividends. You will hear a bit more from Don on that in his investor presentation. As a board, we do keep a close eye on the direction of market yields and the amounts of dividend paid. These will be duly considered when determining the level of future dividends and associated franking credits. The dividends you see there exclude a special dividend that we paid in May 2022, and that was AUD 0.03 a share. That was in anticipation of a possible change of government, the election at that time, when they might have removed one of the policy measures.
Mooted at the time was the removal of some of the franking credits. We thought they're better to ensure they're in the hands of shareholders. We paid a AUD 0.03 special dividend, which is not shown here. When we had our fifth birthday in 2022, we also paid a special dividend of just over AUD 0.005 for our fifth birthday. I'm not sure what we'll do for our tenth birthday. If we can just move ahead to look at the return of what the components are that have gone up to make up the return which shareholders have received. You'll see that there are three colors on the chart. They're all the same, blue, but different shades. The dark blue is the change in NTA. The mid-range blue is the level of dividends, and the light blue is the level of franking credits.
You'll see that the three factors which go into the shareholder return are the change in the NTA, the dividend paid, and the franking credits which shareholders have been able to receive. If we can move along, just doing a sort of historical view to the share price compared to NTA. If you're close to LIC World, you'll know that there is a lot of discussion and analysis of listed investment companies trading at a premium or a discount to their net tangible assets. As you'll see from this chart, PL8 has, apart from some very brief periods in the initial years, traded at a significant premium to its net tangible assets. That's a pretty unusual position for a listed investment company to be in. There are not many; most of them trade at a discount to NTA.
Recently, the premium's been at about 15%-20%. If we can just wrap up the overview, if we just look at a few high-level metrics on the company, we started at net assets of AUD 326 million. We've now got AUD 891 million as at the end of October, and a market cap, as I mentioned, of more than AUD 1 billion. We started with just over 5,500 shareholders, and we've now got comfortably over 13,000 shareholders. The running costs, that's at board papers and presentations, the MER management expense ratio, which does exclude the management fee, which is 80 basis points, 0.80%, has gone down from 0.18% to 0.11%. That's just economies of scale, as a lot of fixed costs are spread out over a higher capital base. That concludes the formal, sorry, the chairman's address.
I'll now move on to the formal section of the business. There will be an opportunity to ask questions on the company's performance, and maybe the best time to do it is after we've had Don's presentation, unless anybody has a burning question now which they have to ask. Okay, thank you very much. The formal business of the meeting is the usual items. That's laying before the shareholders the 2025 financial statements, then adoption of the remuneration report, and then re-election of two directors. Just a bit of housekeeping. If you are a shareholder to vote, you should have your yellow voting card. Does anybody think that they should be voting and doesn't have a yellow voting card? Excellent. Okay. You might also have a blue non-voting card, and a red card is if you're a visitor to the meeting. I think everybody hopefully has the right card.
Great. There is also voting online, and to do so, shareholders must be lodged on the Automic Investor Portal, and detailed instructions of those were contained in the notice of meeting. If you want to ask a question online, you can type it in the Q&A box. Alternatively, if you'd like to ask it verbally, please comment in the Q&A box that you'd like to ask it verbally, provide your shareholder reference number or holder identification number, and then you'll receive a prompt on the screen to unmute yourself. As I mentioned, Don will be answering questions afterwards, as will the board be available to answer any questions you have. If you have any questions when the formal part of the meeting, please restrict them to that particular item being considered.
As noted in the notice of meetings, resolutions will be decided by poll, which I now declare as open. I'll put the three resolutions to the meeting shortly. As I'm sure you're very familiar, you either vote for, against, or abstain. All valid proxies received will be displayed on the screen up there for you before the voting of each resolution. Moving to the first item, that's the 30 June 2025 annual report. That's the director's report and auditor's report. Doesn't need a vote, but does anybody have any questions or comments on that? I'm sure Chris would be delighted to answer them. Make his trip here all worthwhile. Anybody got any questions on the financials? Everybody happy with them? Anything online, Terence? Okay. Very good. We will move now to the items which require a vote.
The first item is the adoption of the remuneration report. And again, that's contained in the 2025 annual report. Does anybody have any questions on the remuneration report of the company? Okay. No questions online. We might have a look at the proxies and see if we're going to get a strike against us and that. They're running strongly in favor, so the chances are that resolution will be passed. The next item we might move to is the resolution two, which is voting for directors. As you're probably familiar, in accordance with the listing rules and the constitution, at each AGM, one third of directors are required to retire and be re-elected or be up for re-election. And we've currently got five directors eligible for rotation, and two directors are required to retire from office at this year's AGM.
When we drew the short straws, Chris Meyer and Lorraine Berends are the directors retiring from office and offer themselves for re-election. The first one is the re-election of Chris, and the notice of meeting provides some background on Chris, but I might let him say a few words on why he would like to be re-elected.
Okay, thanks, Jonathan, and welcome everyone. Thanks for attending in person and online. My name is Chris Meyer. As Jonathan said, I've been a director of PL8 since three years ago, I guess, which is why I'm up for election today. Some of you may have seen me online on some of the webinars, hosting the webinars with the strange South African accent. Maybe not as it's not a takeover by South Africans of PL8, I promise. The Chairman has insisted. I run Pinnacle's listed funds business, which includes PL8.
We now have five listed investment companies. We also have ten actively managed ETFs. In fact, we have one also for Plato, the manager in their global equity strategy. That is relevant, I think, for PL8 because Pinnacle essentially fulfills two roles with regards to PL8. The first one is really market feedback from all of you. We take on board that feedback from the shareholders of PL8, and we feed it back into the board so that the board can make informed decisions about what the market wants or what shareholders want out of the company. The second one is adequately providing resources to the company. It could be finance, it is legal, it is company secretary, it is a whole bunch of things.
It's the service providers like the ASX, Automic, the registry is also here today, making sure that the company is adequately resourced in terms of its daily operations. I suppose you could see me as the point person on those two things with regards to Pinnacle. Other than that, like you, I'm a shareholder in PL8. I'm not a retiree, but I do enjoy the metronomic AUD 0.055 monthly sense of dividends every month. I've also enjoyed being part of this community, which includes the board, but also all of you as shareholders. If you're willing to have me again, I'm happy to serve again. Thank you.
Thank you, Chris. I'd say from the independent directors' perspective, the service which Pinnacle does provide, as Chris mentioned, is really first rate, makes our job a lot easier.
Are there any questions for Chris or any comments on this resolution? If not, I'll ask if we can please look and see the proxies. Okay. Chris, you're looking good. All right. I'll put the resolution to the meeting, and please cast your vote on that. The next item is resolution three, and that's the re-election of Lorraine Berends. Again, her details are in the notice of meeting, but I might ask Lorraine to say a few comments as well. Thank you, Lorraine.
Yep. Very narrow stairs. Welcome from me as well to those here in the room and those online. I echo what Jonathan said. It's nice to see a room full of people. I've been on the PL8 board since the IPO, and I say it's been a total delight. Two particular reasons why it's been a delight. One is Don and his team.
Being involved with Plato is just such a pleasure, and they do a fantastic job for all of their clients, including the shareholders of PL8. Secondly, as a director, it's fabulous when you see your company doing a really good job. That good job in terms of PL8 is providing the monthly stream of dividends. Again, like Chris, I get pretty excited at the end of each month to see our dividends landing in my bank account and look forward to seeing that happen going forward. I'm very keen to keep serving on the board of PL8. Over to you.
Thank you very much, Lorraine. Any questions or comments for Lorraine? Nothing online, Terence? Nope. Okay. There are the votes. You and Chris are neck and neck there, Lorraine. Well done. Okay.
The next item, that is the completion of the items on the agenda for resolutions. I'd ask all shareholders to please ensure that you've cast your votes on each of the three resolutions. If you're voting online on the Automic portal, please select Confirm to complete your vote once you've cast your vote. For shareholders in person, I think Amanda from Automic will wander around with her ballot box and please put your yellow pieces of paper into the ballot box. I will do the same if I can find mine, which I have done.
Okay. You need to fold it in half, one way or the other. Thank you. There are some people behind there. Thank you. Thanks, Amanda. Okay. Have you got an Atlio that needs voting? Sure. Is that okay? I don't want to declare the poll closed too early. Okay. Everybody put their foot.
Amanda, that's everybody. Okay. I'll declare the poll closed. The results of the poll will be announced to the ASX as soon as they're available, which will be later today. That concludes the formal business of the meeting. Now the part which I enjoy best is handing over to Don.
Thank you, Jonathan. Yeah, welcome, fellow shareholders, both in person here and online. I do like updating the market, but it's going to be a bit of a broken record because for the last couple of years, things have been pretty much the same.
This is awesome.
Yeah. We'll just move on to the first slide.
Probably the challenge at the moment running an income fund is on the left-hand side there that if you look at the yield of the Australian market, the cash yield of the ASX 200 is currently 3.3%, which apart from the pandemic year is basically the lowest cash yield I've seen in the market. The franking yield, which is normally something around 1.5%, is only 1% in the last 12 months. The problem is share prices have risen a lot. As we'll show on the next slide, and it has been a story that's been similar for the last couple of years, the actual amount of dollar value of dividends has been lower for the last three years, three years in a row, or if you like, dividends peaked three years ago.
We have got a lower dividend yield, and we have got a higher—we might go back to the first slide, but I will show that one. A lower dividend yield, lower franking yield. It is still the case, though, that PL8 on the right-hand side is yielding substantially more than if you were invested into the market. A 5% cash yield, 2.2% franking yield. Right now, 7.2%. A little bit lower than the since inception numbers that Jonathan talked about. The other thing to note is that if you look at that 2.2% franking, the amount of franking that we have been able to generate is around that two or a bit over two mark. That is the difference really between the portfolio performance from the very first slide that Jonathan showed and the total shareholder return, which for some reason does not include franking.
We know retirees, such as many of the people in this room and many of the people online, love those franking credits. Even if you are in a superannuation fund or a low-tax investor, you love getting those franking credits. The next slide just shows the longer-term performance of the underlying investments. As Jonathan mentioned, PL8 actually invests, or Plato Income Maximiser, or it is called PL8, invests into an existing Plato fund, which is now 14 years old, started in September 2011. Longer-term performance of that, the two top lines, the dark line and the dark blue line, is the performance of that fund after fees, which are slightly higher than the management fee that we have in PL8. The gray line is if you are in an index fund with no fees. We have slowly but surely outperformed the market over those 14 years.
It's a longer-term history of PL8's investment portfolio. PL8 only started in sort of May 2017. It's now just ticked over eight years old, so you can look at that as representative. The two lower lines really provide the cumulative distributed income from that fund. Again, the fund in blue after fees versus the market. Yes, it's generated substantially more income. It's just proving that the investments of PL8 have outperformed the market on the top two lines in total return terms, but we've been able to deliver much higher income along the way from the bottom two lines. We are meeting, I suppose, our longer-term objectives from that point of view, which I think is important because there are other income funds out there, and they might generate large levels of income.
But we believe it's just as important, probably more important, that the total return you get is better than that of the market after fees. Next slide, please. Now, as I said, the story of the market for the last three years has been similar to this, and I've shown similar slides for the last couple of years. This looks at the reporting season from this year, so August. It's a couple of months ago, but August of 2025. Similar pattern to the last two completed financial years. The average dividend yield, if you look at the chart there, has been quite strong. In fact, the average dividends grew by about 26%. And you might say that sounds really good, 26% average increase in dividends across the market. But I would say there's a quote about statistics and damn lies, etc.
The problem with averages is that a few outliers can actually skew that number up. Beach Energy and Evolution had rises of more than 100%, and that pulls the average up. That is why it is as large as it is. I think a better sort of number that captures sort of the typical company, as I call it, or we call it the median company, which is if you rank companies from best to worst in terms of the changes in dividends, take the one in the middle, its dividend rose by about 5.6%. Not a lot, but it is better than inflation and means that the typical company is paying a little more dividends than they did the same time last year.
For the third year in a row, the gray line, the right-hand number there, which is the dollar value of dividends paid at the market level, which was AUD 34 billion in August, or declared in August of this year, was actually about 2% lower than the same time last year. It was about 2-3% lower than the same time the previous year as well. Dividends have fallen at the market level. The reason why the dollar value is lower is because a few very big companies, BHP, Rio , Fortescue, and Woodside, have cut their dividends for three years in a row. The resources boom peaked three years ago, and dividends have fallen. Energy prices peaked when the Ukraine crisis started three years ago, and we've subsequently seen falls in the level of profits and the level of dividends.
That has contributed to the lower market yield. Prices have gone up. Dollar value of dividends has gone down a little bit. The net result is we have got virtually an all-time low in dividend yields, which makes it a bit challenging for an income fund like ourselves because we love those chunky dividends from resource stocks and energy stocks, and they are not as chunky as they used to be. At the same time, we have seen stocks like, and the bellwether, I suppose, non-resource stock in Australia, in fact, the biggest stock in Australia is Common Bank.
The Common Bank is actually now trading on a yield which is basically identical to the market, about a 4.3% gross yield because its price has gone up a lot, although having said that, it has come back quite a lot in the last few months, AUD 150 level where it peaked around AUD 190, but it is still trading on quite a low yield for a bank. We normally think of banks as being high-yield stocks, but it is actually generating the same yield as the ASX 300. That is another stock that we typically have generated a lot of income from, but it is not trading on a high yield. It has been a bit challenging for us to get a lot of income. We have been able to maintain the dividends out of PL8 from our retained earnings and our retained franking account balance.
Unless companies can start to increase dividends, I mean, if they keep cutting dividends, it's going to be harder and harder for us to do that. There were some good, actually a few bright spots in resources. It was not all bad. It was iron ore and lithium, and energy prices were down, hurting a lot of the mining stocks. The one bright light was gold. Gold prices have hit $4,000 an ounce recently, highest level ever. That's approximately AUD 6,000 an ounce. I can tell you most Australian gold companies are very profitable if they can sell gold for AUD 6,000 an ounce or $4,000. In fact, if they can't make money now, they'll never make money. We've seen some pretty good dividends, and Evolution is a classic example there.
It was able to increase its dividend by 160%. It is really because just the gold price keeps going up from central bank buying. I have talked about Fortescue and BHP and Rio cutting dividends and 33%, 16%, and 15% respectively. Woodside was down 20%. AmPol, which is a stock we loved a few years ago, had some poor refining margins and cut its dividend another 33%. One of the relatively, you would think, safe stocks in the Australian Marketplace, Woolworths, is losing out to Coles and Aldi. Normally you would think of a grocery store somewhere in consumer staples that you have to go and buy your goods all the time. You would not expect them to cut their dividends, but they did cut their dividend. It was one of the stocks that we actually expected to cut its dividend from our process.
By and large, it was an okay dividend period, but we would like to see commodity prices stabilize and hopefully go up. We've started to see lithium prices bounce and move up, which is good, although lithium is still a fairly small part of the mining sector. What we really need, which would be good, would be to see Iron ore prices increase. They seem to have stabilized around AUD 100 a ton, but it would be very good if they could increase from here. It was an okay season, but yeah, it's very similar to the last couple of years with the dollar value of dividends falling, which makes it a little challenging for us. Next slide, please. I'm going to show a couple of highlights. This one's more recently. We've seen three of the big four banks report in the last couple of weeks.
One of them was Westpac. Again, it highlights that things are going okay, but it's not stellar. Their earnings were actually down 1%, but the market thought they might be down a bit more. It increased its dividend by around 1%. Even though despite its earnings coming down, it actually was able to increase dividends because it has excess franking and is paying out about 75% of its profits each year in dividends. That's probably about all it can do. Common Bank is a similar sort of number. It was an okay result. We saw similar results from the NAB and the CBA result in August were all pretty much the same. We're not seeing huge earnings growth, at least things are positive. We've seen very low bad debts.
The three rate cuts that we've seen, I think, have been helpful in terms of spending. In fact, the next slide talks of, I think, highlights that, if I'm correct. Next slide, shall I? Yeah. This comes from the Common Bank data. Common Bank is the biggest stock in Australia. It's also the biggest bank in Australia. Each year of the last number of years, they've looked at the spending patterns of their clients. Many of you probably bank at CBA. They have the biggest credit card book and debit card book. They cut their spending into essential items, which is in yellow, and discretionary items.
This year, the middle columns there, looking at discretionary items, the darker sort of orange color, we've seen a pickup in discretionary spending in the last six months, according to the Common Bank data, compared to the same time last year. I think those interest rate cuts that we've seen this year are starting to come through. Particularly younger people, because they cut it by age as well, you're seeing people from 20 to 24 and 25 to 34 who last year, this same time last year, were actually spending less than the previous year. They've actually now opened up their purse strings. Probably they've had some relief from the interest rate cuts, and they're starting to spend a little more, which I think is good for the general economy. The economy is getting by. We haven't had a recession from the rate rises.
It's not a bullish economy, but it's an okay economy. I showed you before that the typical Australian companies increase in their dividends, but we're still very resource-heavy. If we move to the next slide, another highlight, I think, of last year, one of the stocks we've liked for a number of years has been JB Hi-Fi. I suppose it highlights the increase in consumer discretionary spending. It had a pretty good result. Sales were up 10%. Earnings per share up over 5%, which is more than inflation. Paid an AUD 1.05 fully franked final dividend, but we also love those special dividends, AUD 1 fully franked dividend. More companies, I think, will be paying special dividends because companies can no longer do buybacks, tax-effective buybacks, which we've participated quite heavily in in the past.
Now that that is not an avenue of companies to distribute franking credits to their shareholders, then either they'll do two things. They'll do like the Common Bank and Westpac. They'll increase their payout ratio to maybe 75%, or they'll do the lead of JB Hi-Fi and pay the odd special dividend to flush out their franking. We have liked JB Hi-Fi for a number of years. That's probably the only examples. I'll just move to the next slide, which I've been showing for a while, and it comes actually out of our process. We actively buy and sell stocks to get dividends. We actively buy stocks and might only own them for two or three months to get their dividend. If we'd really like the stock, we might own it for the whole year.
If we just want it for the dividend, we'll go in for a couple of months, get the dividend. Once it goes ex, we can trade out and move on to something else. It is very important if you're buying stocks for income that you want to get the dividend. We have developed a process to try and forecast the likelihood. In fact, an example for this year is that Woolworths, we calculate the likelihood that Woolworths might cut its next dividend. This year it was flashing red, saying there's a high risk that Woolworths will cut their dividend. That is a warning for us to maybe have a smaller position or even no position in that stock and maybe prefer Coles. Obviously, we can't prefer Aldi because it's an unlisted company.
We forecast the likelihood of all companies in the market that pay dividends, the chance that they might cut the next dividend. This comes up as a percentage. The percentage can be from 0%. If you've got 0% chance of cutting your dividend, that means you've got no chance of cutting your dividend. That's a very stable, strong stock. 100%, you probably don't want to be there because 100% chance of cutting their dividends means they're definitely going to cut their dividends. On this chart, high is bad and low is good. There are two high positions on this chart. The first one was in the GFC, which is now a distant memory. Back in 2008, 2009, that got to levels of like at the market level. This is an aggregate of all stocks that we track.
Got to about 40%, which is pretty high. Normally, it's around that, like, the long-term average is just over 20%. So 40% is like twice as likely to cut dividends. You saw that very high peak, which is now, again, hopefully a distant memory, but it was only like five and a half years ago that we were enveloped in that Pandemic. Companies cut dividends left, right, and center because APRA told them, the banks and insurers, pretty much not to pay dividends. This thing peaked at 45%, which is the highest ever. A lot of companies did cut their dividends in 2020, but then they rebounded in 2021 and 2022. In fact, when the number is below, when the squiggly line is below the blue line, the average, that's good. That means that the likelihood of cutting dividends is below average.
Hence, they're probably going to increase dividends. You can see for the last three years, that squiggly line has generally been above average. It has been a slightly disappointing or worse period for dividends. We've seen that with the big miners. The last reading of that, though, is right spot on that long-term average. Things look pretty average to me. Not fantastic, but also not doom and gloom. We'd like it to be better, but we're beholden to the Australian Economy. We're beholden to commodity prices and what's happening in the rest of the world. To me, the outlook looks okay. I don't want to be too bullish. I want to tell you what it is. That's what the numbers tell us. That's pretty much all I'm going to say. I'm very happy.
People can have questions on the Investment side or any other part of Plato Income Maximiser. Jonathan, you are—
Any questions for Don?
Are you thinking of creating a global share fund on a monthly base and to have dividends on a monthly basis? I know there will not be any franking credits.
We already have a global share fund. We have a Plato Global Shares Income Fund. It has been around for nearly 10 years. Performance was a bit soft in the first few years, but the last five have been very good. It generates around 6%, just under 6% income after fees. It is a fund, though. It is not a listed entity at the moment. We are considering whether we may have a listed version of that. We have the fund and we are potentially doing it.
That fund actually pays monthly dividends too, or distributions, I should say, because it's a fund, not a company. Global shares do not have any franking, so you do not get those franking credit benefits. The world is your oyster, so to speak. There are like 2,000—well, actually, we track about 10,000 stocks globally. There are a lot more dividends to choose from. A lot of companies pay low yields, but it is interesting. In fact, I think we are about to write a—maybe you have read our minds, but we were about to publish a paper, probably on Livewire, talking about this. It just highlights that Common Bank, on a gross yield, including franking 4.3%, is a lower yield than some of the leading global banks. They do not have franking. If you took the franking out of Common Bank, it is like a 3% yield.
There are some attractive opportunities globally. That would be a different vehicle to this. We are not looking to put in global shares into PL8.
Thank you. Any other questions for Don for the floor here today?
My question is related to looking over the next two to three years, looking forward, if you see dividends being paid by the companies you are investing in currently, which are really good with franking credits, if you see those diminishing, would you consider investing in something like bank-subordinated debt instead in order to get that higher dividend return?
Yeah, good question. Typically not, actually, because this is essentially, has always been set up to invest in listed equities. Its benchmark is the ASX 200, which are listed equities, not debt.
Whilst we might get a higher yield out of some of those things, they usually do not have franking credits, but they might have quite a high sort of nominal yield. They are not going to give you any capital growth because they are debt, not equity. One of our objectives is to beat the equity market. We tend to shy away from, well, we do not invest in debt. We have tended not to also invest in, well, hybrids. I know hybrids are sort of going out of fashion because APRA basically said, do not—or APRA , but have basically said, do not do them. They are going to fade away into history. We have not ever invested in those either for the same reason that they are more debt-like in their number and they do not have that capital growth component.
Do you be looking instead at trading more to get capital gain instead?
Given the low yields in the market, we have tweaked our process to try and trade a little more to try and boost our yield, even though the market yields very low. There is only so much you can do. We do have this dual objective. It is capital gain plus dividends and income. Yeah, we are always trying to improve our process. I think it has stood us well in the last 14 years, but you can never rest on your laurels.
Thank you.
If I can just add, in terms of looking at subordinated debts and so on. Sorry, Jonathan. I would just add that we would need to go back to the investment management agreement and the prospectus to see what we said to shareholders because I suspect we probably could not do that.
We probably wouldn't do that without getting shareholder approval because it would be quite a major change in what the company's invested in and authorized to invest in at the moment.
Okay.
Back to Don. Any other questions? Woodside. I thought you said the dividends went down. The dividend return's pretty good.
Look, yeah, I mean, we have to balance that. I mean, I'm just saying that the dividends have fallen. They're still on a pretty good yield, right? We still like that company. It's still a pretty good company. If the dollar value dividends are down, then it makes it a bit tougher to generate the same level of income. Look, I think Woodside's a pretty good company. People can have their issues on emissions and other things. We still need gas no matter what we do in the next 20 years. Yes, that's right.
Just before the meeting, we were discussing whether or not it would be beneficial to actually reduce, rather to increase the frequency, sorry, reduce the frequency from monthly to quarterly. Would that make any difference to the payout at all?
No. None whatsoever. Not significant. No. Look, feedback I get from traveling around the country is that certainly some shareholders value getting monthly income. When you're working like myself, I get a monthly salary. When you retire, you think a lot of companies only pay two dividends a year in Australia, and it's a long time between drinks. Feedback I get is that some shareholders love getting that cash every month. If you're good at budgeting, you can probably get by having it once every six months if you're okay at budgeting every quarter.
To be honest, I do not think it would make any difference to the amount we pay out. It is actually because we only do direct debits to bank accounts. It is actually very efficient to do it monthly. I think we are not looking at it at all. I have never thought about changing that and would not change it. Look, at the end of the year, you would have the same amount of dividends.
It does not cost any more, does it?
Yep.
I was just interested in a comment that you made that you have traded in and out of some shares and you hold others over the 12 months. I am just wondering how you make that decision because one of the things about the yield is that if you have had a share for a couple of years, your personal returns can become quite a bit greater than the current return.
Yeah.
The decision is based really on what we think the capital return or the total return of the stock will be. If we think that's going to be very strong, we'll probably stay in it. Now, if a stock might be more, if I call it this way, a cash cow that really the share price might not do anything for the next 10 years, but it pays a good dividend, we don't need to own that stock for the whole year to get the dividend. We only need to own it for like, 45 days plus the day we buy it plus the day we sell it.
Those sorts of stocks where they might pay a decent dividend, but we do not expect any capital growth, we will probably just grab them for a couple of months, make sure we get the franking credit entitlement by satisfying the 45-day rule. Other stock where we see high likely capital growth, but I would say it is likely, we do not always get it right, then we are more likely to hold them for the longer term.
Yeah, I imagine it is a very hard judgment to make. To use as an example, the banks, it was often stated that they had not moved in their share price over 10 years. In a short period, they surged 50%. If you had a long-term holding in them, you would have got a bigger yield.
Yeah. It ain't easy.
That's for sure because not many people predicted Common Bank would have that surge in its share price. Didn't get to an expensive level, and we've been largely underweight that stock this year. We still did rotate in February to get, in fact, overweight. We sort of boosted our position a bit from an underweight position, but we were still underweight this year in Common Bank in August. Yeah, you're only good as your last return in this game.
What sort of a percentage would you be holding for 12 months compared to the trailing ones?
Probably 50-60% of the portfolio would be fairly permanent. Although our views change from time to time, about 50-60% is permanent. The other part can be rotated up to four times a year.
Yeah, I'm very much in awe of what you do. So you get good results.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Got any online questions?
We might call that a day. Don will be outside available to answer any questions you have. Please come and have some refreshments. Thank you very much for coming, everybody.
Thank you.