Buy Hold Sell, by Livewire Markets

Inflation, shifting rates, and volatile oil prices have served up a "vicious cocktail" for investors. While many of 2025’s high-flyers have come back to earth, the dynamic small and mid-cap market remains a breeding ground for opportunity.

In this episode of Buy Hold Sell, Chris Prunty (QVG Capital) and Chris Stott (1851 Capital) go head-to-head on five stocks from the growth engine of the ASX. 

They run the ruler over three "fallen angels" ripe for a rebound, two names testing 52-week highs, and reveal the "steady compounders" they’re backing for the year ahead.

Plus, we break down the must-know takeaways from the Macquarie Conference.

For years, the ASX healthcare sector was the picture of health itself - a compounding growth story that investors treated as a set-and-forget holding. Then came a brutal twelve months. The sector has shed nearly 40%, with former darlings and long-standing heavyweights hitting lows not seen in a decade. The causes aren't simple, and perhaps most disorienting is the ‘defensiveness’ that investors paid a premium for has simply stopped working. As one of our guests in this week's episode says, to quote The Castle - "The vibe is off." To work through the prognosis, Livewire's Anna Dadic is joined by Julia Weng of Paradice Investment Management and Hamish FitzSimons of AllianceBernstein. In this episode, five sector stocks are put under the microscope. Our guests unpack the sell-off, make the case for where the stock-picking opportunities lie, and as always, share a high-conviction pick of their own. This episode was filmed Wednesday 6th May 2026.

This episode was filmed Wednesday 22nd April, 2026.

Human nature pulls us toward the bargain, the beaten-up, the overlooked. Who doesn't love a sale? Buying a stock that's already doubled feels wrong. Dangerous, even. But some of the best money made has come from backing winners that just kept winning.

The first half of 2026 has been a wild ride. The broader market has been middling at best. But beneath the surface, a handful of small and mid-cap stocks have defied the macro gloom entirely - Codan and Cuscal are just two names that have more than doubled in the past year, leaving investors on the sidelines wondering whether they've missed the boat altogether. 

So have they? Or is the rally just beginning?

To help make sense of the top performers of the year so far, Anna Dadic is joined by two fund managers who know this space better than most. Lucas Goode from IML and Ben Rundle from Hayborough Investment Partners. Between them, they run the ruler over five of the ASX's biggest high flyers of the year so far and we ask the question every investor is thinking: is there still fuel in the tank to keep flying?

Let's find out!

When Archimedes had that famous bath and watched the water rise, he didn't just solve a problem - he had one of history's great moments of innovation. A completely new way of seeing something that had always been there.

Investors are on a similar hunt. Figuring out the pure gold in the market, the companies that are genuinely reimagining their industries, the true innovators that have the potential to become the market leaders of tomorrow.  The trouble is, telling real innovation from a good story is hard at the best of times. And right now, with small and mid-caps taking a beating since the onset of the war in Iran, the market is anything but straightforward.

Do you chase macro tailwinds? Hunt for quality growth names that have been unfairly sold off? Or play it safe and wait for the dust to settle?

To help work through those questions and to find where the genuine "eureka!" moments might be, Anna Dadic is joined by Lucas Goode from IML and Ben Rundle from Hayborough Investment Partners to run the ruler over some stocks and share one high conviction pick for the year ahead.

Let's go find some gold! 

This episode was filmed Wednesday 22nd April, 2026. 

In the first two episodes of this commodities-focused Buy Hold Sell series, we zeroed in on the obvious plays – gold, and oil and gas – the parts of the market dominating headlines and investor attention.

But as is often the case in commodities, the real opportunity set runs much deeper. Lithium has staged a sharp comeback, tin and manganese prices have surged over the past year, and key industrial metals like copper and even iron ore continue to trade at elevated levels.

So in this episode, we flipped the format. Rather than focus on a single commodity, we asked our guests – Rick Squire from Acorn Capital and Emanuel Datt from Datt Capital – to each bring three of their highest-conviction commodity stock ideas.

No themes, no hypotheticals – just six big buys and the reasoning behind them, from two of the country’s most respected resource investors.

This episode was recorded on Wednesday, 8th April 2026.

The world is meant to be moving away from oil and gas, yet we are consuming more of it than ever.

Global oil demand is now running at more than 102 million barrels per day, above pre-pandemic levels, and expected to continue growing according to the International Energy Agency. At the same time, oil and gas still account for roughly 55% of global energy consumption, underscoring just how far the transition still has to run.

That’s not to say the shift isn’t happening. Renewables now generate close to 30% of global electricity, and clean energy investment has surged past US$2 trillion annually, well ahead of fossil fuels. But here’s the catch: existing oil fields decline at around 5–7% per year, meaning fresh supply is constantly needed just to stand still.

Recent events have made that juxtaposition impossible to ignore - just ask anyone who has filled up their car at $2.50+ per litre in recent weeks.

The conflict in the Middle East has provided a sharp reminder that, for all the progress, the global economy remains deeply reliant on hydrocarbons. Australia remains one of the world’s largest LNG exporters and is home to globally competitive oil and gas producers across the market cap spectrum.

In this episode, Acorn Capital’s Rick Squire and Datt Capital’s Emanuel Datt discuss the energy market and run the ruler over four ASX oil and gas stocks.

This episode was recorded on Wednesday, 8th April 2026.

Gold has had a remarkable 12 months. 

From the low in May-June last year, around US$ 3,500 an ounce, to the high of the January 2026 spike, around US$5,400 an ounce, the precious metals rallied almost 70%. 

It was during this period that lines formed in Martin Place outside ABC Bullion. 

Then, gold got the wobbles - particularly as war broke out in the Middle East. Whilst it didn't fall in a straight line, the precious metal fell from US$5,400 to a low of US$3,800 by late March - a 20% wipeout. 

With a tentative ceasefire in place and normal programming (i.e. US dollar weakness, inflation expectations easing, lower rates) potentially resuming, gold could be experiencing a reboot, where investors pile back in at a significant discount to where we were just a couple of months ago. 

Regardless of what the gold price does, there are a handful of ASX-listed miners that should be able to generate significant cash flow given their low costs, operational efficiency, and healthy margins. 

In this episode, Acorn Capital's Rick Squire and Datt Capital's Emanuel Datt run the ruler over four such names for your consideration. 

This episode was filmed on Wednesday, 8th April 2026. 

 

Sometimes, you get tired of the chicken parmy and start looking for a truffle pasta instead - you know that feeling?

While there are plenty of advantages to investing on home turf, and many Australians do exactly that, for investors chasing genuine long-term growth, the local menu can feel increasingly narrow. 

With the ASX still heavily anchored to ex-growth banks and miners, and a tech sector that has been hit hard by the AI shake-up, the case for looking offshore in search of growth opportunities has perhaps never felt stronger. 

In this episode of Buy Hold Sell, we put five global growth stocks in the spotlight, spanning big tech, semiconductors, e-commerce, aerospace and streaming. Livewire’s Tom Stelzer is joined by Vihari Ross from Antipodes and Casey McLean from Magellan Investment Partners for a look at the big global growth names - some household names, some less familiar - worth watching now.

This episode was filmed Wednesday 11th March 2026. 

AI, energy, infrastructure and defence might look like separate mega trends, but like a giant flywheel, they’re increasingly feeding into one another, creating a feedback loop that is reshaping industries, investment opportunities and the global economy.

The AI boom isn’t just driving demand for semiconductors and cloud computing, it's also triggering a surge in electricity demand, forcing utilities and governments to invest heavily in power generation and grid infrastructure.

On top of that, war and rising geopolitical tensions is driving a structural increase in defence spending, with technology, semiconductors and strategic infrastructure playing a bigger role in modern defence systems.

In markets, this means that the biggest opportunities can often sit not in a single theme, but in the spaces where these trends overlap each other.

In this episode of Buy Hold Sell, we ask Vihari Ross of Antipodes and Casey McLean of Magellan where they see the best value across the biggest trends shaping markets today and which megatrend could drive the next wave of opportunity.

The Magnificent 7 are starting to look a bit like a boy band past its peak. (Think the Beatles, NSYNC, BTS...pick your era.) At their height, the hype is intoxicating. The name up in lights, the style, the choreography of the market moving to their beat. For a while, everyone agrees -  they’re untouchable.

But nothing stays loved in the limelight forever, and sentiment can turn quickly.

Doubts around AI leadership and an overcrowded trade have made investors pause on tech, while sectors like energy, materials and industrials have started outperforming. And when the gloss fades, as we saw in the pullback earlier this year, the next question that naturally gets asked is - what else is out there?

Well friends, here at Livewire, we’re here to tell you - quite a lot!

In this episode, we’re casting our eyes past the Magnificent 7 and instead focusing on the global megacaps that have been stuck in the Mag 7's shadow. 

And we’ve brought in two of the best in global equities - Vihari Ross of Antipodes, and Casey McLean of Magellan - to talk through the other members of the trillion-dollar club (and the ones knocking on the door.) 

This epsiode was filmed Wednesday 11th March, 2026.