Review-a-Palooza: How Did Our Chief Rule Breaker Do?

It’s one year since David Gardner picked Five Stocks For America, two years since he picked Five Stocks That Pass The Snap Test, and three years since he picked Five Stocks Celebrating the 2018 World Cup. In this episode of Rule Breaker Investing, it’s time to check the score and see how the games-in-progress are going!

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool’s free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our quick-start guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.

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This video was recorded on July 7, 2021.

David Gardner: 30 separate times, about every 10 weeks on this podcast, over six years, I picked five stocks. I chose a theme that made sense to me at the time, sometimes sublime, sometimes silly, and then I thought to myself, what are the five best recommendations I can come up with for stocks that fit my theme, aiming to beat the market. Of course, always to beat the market, the S&P 500, otherwise why are we bothering? Then one year later we review the picks. What was the theme again? How are the stocks done and also versus the market? More important for our learning, why is our way of thinking, have the stocks done what they’ve done? A one year review, and then another year passes the two-year review and then we never forget. We hope you wouldn’t also, we score everything transparently and accountably, because we’re Fools. You should expect that of us, then the three-year review, which is often the most telling. First, because three years have passed since I picked the five stocks, so we really can be smarter about what has happened and why, and what we can learn smarter. If I’ve done my job well then we’ll also be happier and richer as well. Second, that three-year review is telling because most of the time we end the game right there. We’ll keep holding those stocks, mind and you should too, if you own them. But if I kept reviewing all 30 of my samplers in years four, five, six etc. We wouldn’t have time to do much else on this podcast. 30 separate times I have picked five stocks, what I’ve always called my five-stock samplers, and we’re going to review three of those samplers today. Five Stocks For America, Five Stocks That Pass The Snap Test, and Five Stocks For The 2018 World Cup. Review them we will with my three analysts guest stars, Alicia Alfiere, Yasser El-Shimy, and Sanmeet Deo, only on this week’s Rule Breaker Investing.

Gardner: Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. Hey, it’s summer. Thanks for taking the time to listen. A lot of people are at the beach or if you’re an American, I hope you had a great time celebrating our nation’s independence over this past weekend, but darn it, if you’re here listening to me, that means you are committed, you are true-blue Rule Breaker. Thank you for joining me. I hope not just this week but all month because we’ve got some excitement, in fact I’m going to hype it up here. Why not? Let’s do it. It’s my show, I can do whatever I want. I’m going to hype it up and mention it to you, next week’s show. Because I’m going to welcome for the first-time an external guest and use the Telling Their Stories format, which I hope a lot of you have gotten to know as we’ve done it several times this year. But rather than ask one of my fellow Fool employees to tell his or her story, I’m going to ask a longtime Fool member to tell his story next week. The reason, for some of you anyway, this will be particularly compelling is because this is a present day National Football League head coach who also happens to have been for the past 10 years or so, a Motley Fool member and a very avid investor himself. I’m really excited. I’m not going to mention which of the 32 NFL teams this gentleman is the head coach of, but rest assured, he has a great story and I’m excited for this man to tell his story on next week’s show. That will be next week, but let’s peel it back here to the here and now.

This week, we get to do what we’ve often called a review-a-palooza podcast. This is going to be a review, not just of one past five-stock sampler, but three different ones, and as I mentioned at the top, they are Five Stocks For America, Five Stocks That Passed The Snap Test, and Five Stocks For The 2018 World Cup. For each of them, I’m delighted to be joined by a Motley Fool analyst and in fact, a number of new voices. Some Rule Breaker Investing podcasts debuts are in store this week. I’m really looking forward to either reintroducing you or introducing you to my friends Alicia, Yasser, and Sanmeet, and we’re going to talk through these samplers and without further ado, I say, let’s get started. First up, as we usually do with these review-a-paloozas, I’m going to go with the most recent one first, so it was one year ago. In fact, the date was June 10th of 2020, Five Stocks For America. I’ll say a little bit more about that in a sec, but first let me welcome Alicia Alfiere. Alicia a delight to have you back to Rule Breaker Investing.

Alicia Alfiere: Thank you, I’m so glad to be here.

Gardner: Thanks a lot for putting in some time over a busy weekend, no doubt. [laughs] I hope you were still able to enjoy the festivities. I know you spent most of your weekend, no doubt, looking over these five stocks and unearthing your best insight around them but thank you for that.

Alfiere: Of course, and it was the perfect stock sampler to be thinking about over the 4th of July weekend since it is the sampler for America.

Gardner: It is very true, and we’ll talk about the stocks in a sec. But before we do Alicia, how about one, two minutes, just a little of where you come from before you were at The Motley Fool, and how are you spending your time so far in your first year or so at The Fool?

Alfiere: Sure, of course. I first discovered the joys of investing when I was in high school. A high school Math teacher came into the room one day and told us, money doesn’t grow on trees, but you can grow money, and I [laughs] loved this concept. I was hooked on investing and might have annoyed my dad about it a little too much. I spent a lot of time in the airline industry actually on the labor side, and then I was lucky enough to have an opening at The Fool. I thought to myself why not go back to that original passion that I have of finding compelling companies, researching companies and investing.

Gardner: Wonderful. Alicia, I know in particular you’ve focused on the airline industry for understandable reasons given your background, but we don’t actually have you spending much time with airlines stocks, do we?

Alfiere: No, no. Right now I’m working with Rule Breakers as well as The Ownership Portfolio and I do some work for Stock Advisor as well.

Gardner: Wonderful. It’s a reminder that truly, we’re probably more a company of generalists rather than specialists. We certainly have some amazing specialists at The Fool. But I think you’re going to hear in each of my fellow Fool stories today as you get to know them a little bit through these samplers, that they’re really coming from all different walks of life. They weren’t raised by a father or mother who said stock market, and you must be an analyst one day at The Motley Fool. I think most of us had no idea, including me in our early 20s, where the heck we’d be working or that we’d be here today. Anyway Alicia, thank you very much and welcome. Five Stocks For America was picked June 10th of last year, and at the time I was thinking about it coming up on independence day back then. But I was also thinking about how our nation was hurting. A lot of the publicity around America was that we have done a very poor job with coronavirus. The numbers we’re starting to spike again. We all hoped that we could get out a little bit in the summer, and then of course the fall came back and got worse. But America looked behind. I’m really actually in a way happy to say, Alicia, that I feel as if a year later we’ve done a pretty good job as a nation, getting vaccines in the first place, which we didn’t have a year ago this month. But when actually getting vaccinated, I feel like we’re almost the vanguard of the world now in terms of having done it, as well as anybody else I think at this point. There’s a little bit of a patriotic note as we start July of 2021. Any thoughts back on that before we hit the stocks?

Alfiere: Yeah, I agree. I was just going to say, I’m so excited to see the economy continue to reopen and have people continue to go back to their lives. It’s going to be amazing.

Gardner: Thank you very much. Well said, and I agree and we’re feeling it today. Speaking of feeling at the market, I have been feeling it since June 10th of last year. Now, every one of our stocks we compare against the market averages, and the market is up 35.4% since this sampler debuted a year or so ago. That is the bogey, that is what we’re trying to hit or beat, is to beat the market average, and that’s a pretty great year, Alicia. Not every year does the S&P 500 go up about 35% or so, but that’s what happened over the last year. Let’s start as we traditionally do with the worst performer. The ticker symbol is ZNGA, this is the mobile entertainment software company. Zynga (NASDAQ: ZNGA), certainly a stock that I have favorite pick for Stock Advisor a couple of different times. It’s done OK, it’s up 19.4%. But when the market’s up 35.4%, that means we start -16% in the whole. What do you see when you look at Zynga, Alicia?

Alfiere: When you first talked about Zynga last year, you mentioned the core value of resilience, and they’re still resilient though maybe this cake takes a little longer to bake, or outperformed the S&P. What I really want to highlight here for Zynga is a single word, acquisition. There are two sides to the acquisition coin. One side is that cost from acquisition causes Zynga to report net losses in 2020. The other side is that these acquisitions really helped to fuel growth, and we saw this with growth and revenues, with their highest ever revenue for a quarter in the first quarter of 2021. Pretty impressive, they had impressive growth and active users. Some of this was driven by the new games from the acquisitions of Rollic, which added hyper casual games to Zynga’s portfolio, which are easy to play and expected to be one of the fastest-growing segments for Zynga.

Gardner: Hyper casual as a lifetime game, where I [laughs] have to admit myself, I’ve never actually heard that phrase. I’m glad that they’re making acquisitions in that area. Thank you by the way, Alicia, for reminding me that for each of the five stocks that I picked, I was tagging it to what I consider to be one of America’s five core values. Which just for the fun of it, I think of, this is just my own take as liberty, justice, enterprise, resilience, and kindness. This fourth stock, Zynga was the resilient company, and indeed it has been a very resilient company since its IPO, which was very hot and then troubled some years later, changing over management, etc. Still a young company but pretty resilient. It is up about 19%, which most years I’ll take for most stocks. If we could do that every year with every stock, we’d be awfully happy 10 or 100 years later. But as it turns out, this is an underperformer, 16%. Let’s swing now from Zynga, which was my resilient stock to the best performer, and that happens to have been the enterprise stock, and that’s Etsy (NASDAQ: ETSY), ticker symbol ETSY, which is also the name of the company. On June 10th of 2020, Etsy closed at $79.81. I’m really happy to say, it’s just over $196 today, so this stock is up about 146%. That’s way ahead of the S&P’s 35.4% gain. Alicia, have you bought anything yourself on Etsy in the last year and helped out the cost?

Alfiere: Oh my gosh, so much, I’m actually one of their habitual, which is the most frequent class of buyers.

Gardner: That’s wonderful. I have to admit, I’ve used Etsy once or twice. I pick the stock more than I’ve used it. I deeply admire the company, I love what it does for suppliers, and for buyers. You are classed as a buyer here like frequent buyer club or silver level or something.

Alfiere: No, I just know that based on looking at their earnings and what they deem to be a frequent buyer.

Gardner: Yes. Tell us a little bit more.

Alfiere: Yeah, definitely. Etsy is the e-commerce platform for the unique, handmade, and vintage, and it’s a powerhouse brand. If we were to look back at their performance over last year, you’d be forgiven if you thought masks were the main reason behind Etsy’s rise since they did make up about 4% of the marketplace’s gross merchandise sales in 2020. But there’s so much more to Etsy than masks like their massive growth. Etsy outpaced e-commerce growth by more than 2.5 times in 2020. This massive growth is driven by their growing network of buyers and those that had high-frequency for purchases like me. Active buyers increased almost 90% year-over-year and even more impressive is the growth in habitual buyers like me, which is up 205% year-over-year, so pretty impressive growth here.

Gardner: What I’ve always loved about this business is I’ve described it as Amazon-proof for a long period of time. What I love about Amazon is you could buy almost anything there. But almost anything you bought on Amazon which I celebrate, you could buy other places too. A lot of the things that you buy on Etsy, you really can only find on Etsy, and that even includes the very niche world of geeky board gamers like me. Because a lot of people bling-out components or make better storage for the box, like you bought the board game but the components don’t fit that well back into the box, and so people create all kinds of solutions. Again, within this very niche world of board games. That’s an example of Etsy’s relevance and you really can only find those things on Etsy, which is what I love about Etsy too. That goes for me as the investor, delighted to know that this has been a long standing Rule Breakers stock. In fact, we first brought it to Rule Breakers, the month was, wow, it wasn’t even that long ago, November 2016. The stock was at 13 that day so seeing it around 196, makes me and a lot of Rule Breaker members pretty happy. Less than five years later, to see the stock a 14-bagger and counting, a company still with a $25 billion market cap, Alicia, seems like it has some room to run.

Alfiere: Oh, definitely and in fact there’s so much more growth to come. They’ve recently purchased Depop, which is going to allow them to expand their network size, increase their reach within Generation-Z, and expand their footprint within the resale fashion industry, so very exciting stuff.

Gardner: That’s great, so that’s been the best performer. Now, let’s just briefly cover anything you’d like to say about the other three somewhere in the middle and to state them and their performances really quickly. Worst to first in the middle three, Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX), the worst of the middle three, up 46%, that’s good. Axon Enterprise (NASDAQ: AXON), up 70%, that’s even better, again, against the market’s 35% gain doubling the market. Then the second best performer in this group of five, The Boston Beer Company (NYSE: SAM), which of course I made my liberty stock, the liberty core value freedom thinking of Sam Adams, up 78%. I just threw three completely different businesses at you there, Alicia. Starbucks, Axon Enterprise, which by the way, I picked a couple of weeks ago in my 30th five-Stock Sampler. This is one of those I go back to from time-to-time. Starbucks, Axon Enterprise, and The Boston Beer Company, what do you got for us on any of those?

Alfiere: Yeah, definitely. Let’s try to do a lightning round here. For Starbucks, I would say, the original third place did struggle a bit last year with declines in revenue and profitability due to COVID and closures. Actually, they were a bit behind the S&P until around September and their turnaround was a result of the company’s adjusting and adapting to consumer trends during COVID. They saw that transactions were moving from city center to the suburbs, from cafes to drive-throughs, and they took action by rolling out curbside pickup, expanding drive-through presence, and making improvements to their mobile app.

Gardner: I remember how low morale felt, not just at Starbucks, but around our country, last June. There are a lot of Starbucks’ that were closed or trying and struggling to reopen. To think that the stock has actually up 46% from a year-ago, talk about resilience. Although, I made this, of course, my kindness company. I really do think that kindness is one of America’s five core values. I never want us to forget that. For me anyway, Starbucks is going to put some of its baristas through college, that is a place where you can meet a friend and has been for a long time a brand that equally attracts females and males. There’s so many things that I appreciate about Starbucks, including the many hours and many dollars spent myself. I’ve done a little bit more business with Starbucks than Etsy, I don’t know about you Alicia.

Alfiere: Same.

Gardner: Okay, good. Great recounting of Starbucks. What would you like to say about Axon Enterprise?

Alfiere: Back in the original sampling, you mentioned Axon as the core value of justice and I agree. I want to modify that a bit to be transparent justice. Because of the growing need for transparency and public safety and transformation and policing is what has really driven the demand for Axon products here.

Gardner: Well said. Again, because we’ve talked about this quite a lot in the last few weeks, let’s move onto the final one. Because if you’d like to learn more about Axon Enterprise and that I picked it for my 30th five-stock sampler just a couple of weeks ago, please go back dear listener and listen again. The last one then, The Boston Beer Company, I understand people were drinking alcohol over the last year, is that accurate?

Alfiere: It is. Boston Beer, I really think they should maybe think about rebranding to Boston Beer and seltzer. Because here’s the thing, the growth wasn’t from beer, it was all from those hard seltzers you’ve been seeing in grocery stores and Target.

Gardner: Which really says a lot to me. I think they’re healthier because there’s less sugar, at least, in them. But really what I mean to say is it says a lot to me about the company’s ability to adapt and evolve. We have seen not just Boston Beer, but many brands, all of a sudden with their new brands that have their hard seltzer brands. It’s been a big and growing market so I’m always glad to know management doesn’t have it’s head in the sand.

Alfiere: Agreed, and it’s always good to see these flexible, adaptable companies.

Gardner: Thank you. Well, Alicia, a beautiful job just looking over these five companies which performed beautifully and let’s just go ahead and summarize. The market rose 35.4% on average. Well, these five stocks went from 146% gain for Etsy down to the 19% gain for Zynga. These five stocks have averaged 71.8%, which means we’re ahead 36.4% per stock, just about a year later. It’s been a spectacular year for America, I’m going to say that and for Five Stocks for America as well. Now a reminder, like most of these games we play it for three years, so we’re not going to pound our chest or celebrate too early or too loudly because a lot can happen over the next couple of years, but at least for the first year of Five Stocks for America, Alicia, does this get a passing grade from you?

Alfiere: I think so, definitely passing and I can’t wait to see what they do in the future.

Gardner: Thank you. I agree. They literally have just about doubled up on the market again. The market is up 35.4%, my school boy math tells me if you double 35.4%, that’s 70.8%. These stocks averaged 71.8% so it’s really been a great year for these five stocks. Alicia, I hope it’s been a great year for you, your first year or so at the Motley Fool and we’re looking forward to working together and seeing you in Rule Breakers in the year ahead.

Alfiere: Thanks, and it has been wonderful. I’m so glad to be here.

Gardner: All right. Well, from Five Stocks for America from June of 2020, we go back one year in the calendar and let’s go with the way back music machine. Please, Rick Engdahl.

We’ve settled now on June 5th of 2019 and the five-stock sampler from June 2019 was entitled Five Stocks That Pass The Snap Test. Now, my next friend and I will discuss what we mean by the snap test in a second, but let me first welcome Yasser El-Shimy. Yasser, I’m delighted to have you on Rule Breaker Investing.

Yasser El-Shimy: Always happy to be here, David.

Gardner: Is this your debut on this podcast, Yasser? You and I have worked together. We actually haven’t seen each other in our offices yet, but you’ve been at the Fool for, I’m going to say the better part of a year now. But is this your debut on Rule Breaker Investing?

El-Shimy: This is my first appearance on Rule Breaker Investing and I’m happy to be here. I have to say I’ve been a longtime listener of the show and of the podcast. I’ve learned a great deal, and as you well know, David, it has persuaded me, convinced me, maybe help me see, if there’s, any that maybe I should change what I was doing for a living and do something that is actually a little closer to my heart and which I’m hoping also I’m good at.

Gardner: Yes, and you are. Because you’re somebody who picks up things and you’re good at them, Yasser, that’s what I’ve learned about you and you certainly have been a fast study. I would love for you briefly in a minute or two to give a little bit of a back story. Where did you come from before you got to The Motley Fool?

El-Shimy: Oh, well, it’s a very long story, but I’ll try and just reduce it to two minutes here. I started back in Cairo, Egypt, born and raised. I immigrated to the U.S. around 2007 where I started an academic program doing a PhD in Political Science and had a brief career in academia as well as dabbling into the policy world and working on foreign policy issues here in DC think tanks for a number of years until I decided that this was not really for me. What I really cared about was investing and in particular stock-picking, owning individual companies has completely changed my life for the better. That is a mission that I will take with me to my grave, if you will, hopefully helping people become richer, happier, and smarter as they come to learn more about the potential of picking long-term winners that can create wealth against all odds and really helping change people’s lives for the better.

Gardner: Thank you very much for that, Yasser. I do want to mention that I first got to know you because you, as a graduate student in business school, that career change you mentioned had you all of a sudden at Georgetown University Business school in the executive MBA program, I believe, but I was meeting you through conscious capitalism events around the greater DC area as we started our chapter so I appreciate that you have a heart for that and knowledge about that and that’s your perspective as well. Perhaps as we go through these five stocks, Yasser, we might recognize one that might be a conscious capitalism company, although that was not the theme. The theme was Five Stocks That Pass The Snap Test. Would you briefly summarize the snap tests for our listeners?

El-Shimy: The snap test is where you have companies, if you were to snap your fingers and they go absent, this absence will be felt and possibly mourned in my opinion. We want to make sure that those companies are companies that leave a mark, if you will, that they have a strong presence in our society and in our lives, and if they were to disappear, that absence would really be felt.

Gardner: That is very well stated and that is indeed the snap tests. I think I first wrote about it in the Rule Breakers, Rule Makers book in the late 1990s. I’ve used it for years. I think it guides all of us. If you snapped your fingers and that company disappeared, I love that word mourned, not just noticed, but if it comes to truly be mourned by those, not just the employees who just lost their job overnight, but how about all of the customers, most of all, all of the stakeholders. We’re going to do better as investors if we are guided by snap test thinking as we think about what’s our next pick. Five Stocks That Pass The Snap Test. Well, obviously for me anyway, and this is an individual decision, for me, these five companies, at least back in June of 2019, felt like that kind of a company. Before we talk about the worst performer, which is how we start these, let’s go over how the market has done since June 5th of 2019. The market is up 52.7%. Wow, that is a spectacular two-year performance just for the market averages. Let’s hope we can beat that with Five Stocks That Pass The Snap Test. But let’s be clear right now, that is a high bar over which to leap with any stock picks because there are not as many two-year periods where you see the S&P 500 get more than 50%, but this happens to be one of them. With that said Yasser, let’s start with the worst performer. The ticker symbol is LYV, the company is Live Nation (NYSE: LYV). Boy, you talked about a business that got shutdown by coronavirus. Live Nation has been deeply affected. Yasser, can you remind us what Live Nation does and what is your take on the stocks movement over the last couple of years?

El-Shimy: First of all, I want to say that the return on S&P 500 over the past two years is a very high bar to clear and we should not expect those returns to continue in perpetuity, if you will. But having said that, the bar for this sampler has been fairly high, and even so, Live Nation has fallen just below the bar not very much. What is Live Nation? Live Nation is a company that works in the events bookings space. If you want to go to a concert, you want to have an event, you can either organize it or you can purchase the tickets through Live Nation or through Ticketmaster.com, which is also owned by the company. This company has definitely suffered as you said, David, due to COVID. I’m glad to say that Live Nation as a company has not really done poorly through management decisions, bad acquisitions, or anything as such, it was really the victim of an external exogenous shock to the system, something nobody anticipated COVID-19, a highly contagious life threatening virus spread throughout the world like wildfire. We have had lockdowns, mask and social distancing mandates, and people basically just started avoiding congregations of any kind. If you’re in the business of getting people together in one indoor location, your business is really bound to suffer as a result.

Gardner: That is very true. The stock, which I picked at $61.95 back in June of 2019, moved up to around $70. Then, as coronavirus hit and it became evident in March of 2020 last year, that this was for real, Live Nation dropped basically from $70 to $20 in just a matter of a few months. To think that it’s now back over $84 as we speak, I see it at $84.87 basically up 37% during two years where well for about one of those years, it was barely doing business. That is, talk about resilience, a remarkable performance. Certainly the company seems well-positioned to me, Yasser. As things open up, I think a lot of people want to go back to venues and buy tickets. Sometimes I feel like I have to pay Ticketmaster a little bit more for that service fee than I should expect. There are aspects where I don’t even quite love this company, but at the same time, I’m very persuaded that if you snap your fingers and overnight things like Ticketmaster and some of the venues that Live Nation owns and some of the acts that it works with, if those disappeared, there would be mourning.

El-Shimy: You’re absolutely right, David. We’re talking about the previous two years here. We have seen revenues for Live Nation decline from around $11.5 billion in 2019 to $1.8 billion in 2020. That’s down almost 84%. They basically made as much in all of 2020 as they would have done in a month plus in 2019. The fact that they have survived 2020 and now coming back strong is really a testament to the resilience of the business and to the demand for the product. However, as we move forward, I know there’s a lot of optimism for, what Wall Street calls, the reopening trade. We have to keep in mind a couple of counter trends that might also put a lid on just how successful Live Nation could be moving forward. One of those is that we were talking about, the thesis for Live Nation for so long is that the millennial generation, younger people in general, prefer experiences over buying stuff. Well now, thanks to COVID, people have become, especially younger people and millennials, much more likely to form households, to buy houses, or they have to pay that mortgage, they have to pay those auto loans. There are a lot of things that are now competing for their dollars, not just experiences anymore. The other counter trend is that you have some heavy hitters like Zoom, like Roblox, which are trying to offer virtual concerts, virtual events, that will become a compelling alternative to live attendance. Therefore, I think this is one I’m going to watch definitely to see how they’re going to do over the next year or two.

Gardner: Very well said. Those are important insights. I appreciate that because while we spend a lot of time with the sample like this looking backward, Yasser, you’re helping us think forward about this company and really the culture that it’s tied to. Thank you for those insights. Well, that was the worst performer for these five stocks. Now, we always get to move from worst to best. The best performer, well this will be a company that should be already very familiar to my listeners this week because indeed Axon Enterprise, ticker symbol AXON, is the best performer for five stocks that passed the snap test, well, through its first two years anyway. We just talked about it with Alicia. My golly, I just picked it a couple of weeks ago for Five Stocks Pursued By The Bear. There must be something about June, it’s not like I pick Axon that often, but for some reason June samplers, apparently I love this company. Happy to say, Yasser that we picked it at $68 a share even on June 5th of 2019. These days it’s closer to $175, so the stock is up about 157% against the market’s 52.7%. This is beating the market by more than 100% in these two years. I realize Alicia covered this a little bit, but what have you unearthed or what do you think about Axon Enterprise today, Yasser?

El-Shimy: Sure. Let me first say congratulations on a very good call on Axon, when you did pick it. This company has returned an impressive 26% revenue CAGR over the past five years. CloudUnit, which has higher gross margins, has grown at double that rate. Those are very impressive statistics. What I do appreciate personally about this company, and you spoke earlier about my attendance of conscious capitalism events around DC, is that this is a very ESG focused company. This is a company that cares about stakeholders, but also has a very noble mission of protecting lives. Our society does have a critical need for more transparency in our law enforcement as well as the, perhaps, use of non-lethal means to deescalate certain situations. This company is really delivering, it’s really meeting that need in very impressive ways. I’d also like to add here that Axon Enterprise has proven to be a very agile business. When you have a company like TASER International, that’s the old name for the company, they were making a pretty good product, they were selling. There was nothing wrong with the business, yet they decided to go way beyond that. They have evolved as a company to fill every possible need. From smart devices to workflow management, to evidence and data management, and intelligent software. They have continued to innovate. They’ve continued to create that flywheel effect, if you will, where they are able to integrate the hardware with the software and really create a compelling value proposition for law enforcement and other entities around the country and beyond.

Gardner: Well said. […] Anybody who heard last week’s mailbag knows the scuttlebutt out there that this company may not just be thinking about law enforcement, perhaps management is thinking bigger, starting to look at adjacent industries where, as you said Yasser, more transparency could be helpful. The example from last week was the mining industry, which should be, I don’t know if it’s as big as law enforcement, but certainly a whole new industry for this company to take its products. A really interesting, compelling situation. Glad we were compelled by it two years ago, but it’s just as compelling today. Optionality being very evident in this company’s management and its approach, starting with the TASER moving to law enforcement cameras. Boy, I love what you said about transparency. This is a very American week for those of us here in the United States of America celebrating our independence. I like to think that we are among the most transparent economies and nations in the world. I still think we have a lot of improvement we can do in that regard. Boy, what I love is to take that overseas and abroad. I would love to see as much transparency across all societies as possible. I’m not talking about Big Brother transparency, often Big Brother obfuscates. I’m talking about open air transactions and being evident, being trustworthy because at the heart of transparency is trust building. I really like that Axon Enterprise has imbued that and so many of the law enforcement agencies which by the way, have needed it and a lot of people have called for it. Here we are with a for-profit answer that I think is pretty well-positioned.

Anyway, a little bit of a patriotic comment here in this week of patriotism for the United States of America. Well, Yasser, thank you. We’ve covered Live Nation, the worst performer, and Axon Enterprise, the best. Mathematically oriented listeners might start to sense that this five-stock sampler has beaten the market. I’ll do the numbers in a sec. But the other three companies we haven’t talked about yet are from worst to first, the middle three. Nintendo, which is up 68%, that’s not bad. Fair Isaac Corporation (NYSE: FICO), up 70%, also ahead of the market. Then Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) up 92%, a market beater as well. Four of these five companies beat the market. Pick and choose, what do you want to say about any of those three companies?

El-Shimy: Sure. It’s hard for me to look at those three other companies there and specially look at Twitter and feel that there was not a missed opportunity here to have gone probably for Snapchat (NYSE: SNAP), take a simple snap. It would’ve been perfect for this five-stock sampler. That stock outperformed the S&P 500 by nearly 350% over that time period.

Gardner: Wow.

El-Shimy: But Twitter probably would pass the snap test a lot easier than Snapchat would.

Gardner: I’m going to say maybe I didn’t pass this snap test here with these five stocks. I’ve never recommended Snapchat but now I’m wishing I did. That performance has smoked all five of these companies maybe combined.

El-Shimy: Exactly. But Twitter did beat the S&P 500 over that period of time and it was actually the second best performer. There is a lot of controversy surrounding that company. There were probably a lot of reasons why people were hesitant to endorse Twitter as a stock initially, but then came around to it. But I think this company has continued to show that it was really a tool for people to communicate, especially related to political news, business news, everything that’s happening in the here and now, and it’s a more of a global phenomenon, not just an American social media company. Everyone throughout the world uses Twitter. Everyone at least I know of uses Twitter including in Egypt. It has just been a very impressive company. The other company I would really like to talk about here is Nintendo, which to me is a very impressive, vertically integrated Japanese video gaming company that develops their own games in-house as well as make the platform on which these games are played in-house as well. This company is to me the international equivalent of Disney and I think you once called it the Disney of the East, I believe it. It creates lovable characters, fantastical realms that capture our imagination, and like Disney also, both kids and adults enjoy their products. The only surprise I had with Nintendo was that it had not outperformed by even more. That perhaps shows that there is still room for upside, there is room for optionality in that business. They have a wealth of IP that can be utilized to create theme parks, to create entertainment of all sorts like Disney and perhaps they’re just only now getting started.

Gardner: That’s a really good insight and indeed as we picked Nintendo for Motley Fool Stock Advisor, you’re remembering the thinking and reminding us of the write-up and thank you for that, Yasser and I do think there is an opportunity. Now, the theme park business hasn’t been a great business to be in last year or two for very obvious reasons. But boy, if it doesn’t seem like Nintendo has created universally recognized and beloved characters. When you said you also want to talk about Nintendo, I find myself just smiling. Nintendo just makes me smile, I’m a gamer, I raised my kids a little bit on some of the Nintendo characters and we’re halfway across the world from Japan. So, I really do think that there is more optionality there and we’ll see how well management handles that. Let me mention by the way, just in lieu of news just this week, we were talking earlier about transparency and I was reading in the Economist Espresso app, a one paragraph summary this morning, I haven’t gone deep on it, but it’s worth noting that, “Twitter,” I read, “lost liability protection against user-generated content in India this week following a court ruling. The government repeatedly criticized the company for failing to comply with rules introduced in May that require social media firms to appoint compliance officers and swiftly respond to legal requests to remove user’s posts. The company has previously said it was making all efforts to comply.”

Well, I don’t know enough to say who is right in that situation, but I do know enough to say that’s one of the reason Twitter is a snap test company, because when you start making worldwide headlines for how important what you’re doing or not doing is, that’s actually a pretty good indicator I think for us as stock market investors and indeed Twitter, as just about double over these last two years, has been a great stock to be in. Well take it all-in-all, the stock market as I mentioned was up 52.7% from June 5th of 2019, these five stocks from the worst performer Live Nation up about 37% to the best Axon up about 157%. These five stocks have an average of 84.9% gain, that is 32.2% per stock ahead of the market averages. That’s been a really good sampler. I’m glad Yasser that these ones worked up because I’ve put myself out there with the snap test. If you’re going to write about it a few decades ago and then use it to guide you and then you’re going to brand just almost a random group of five stocks two years ago with this brand that it’s carrying a brand here, so I’m glad to know we’re beating the market handily at least after the first two years. Any final thoughts from you, Yasser El-Shimy, on the snap tests or life in general?

El-Shimy: Yes. I believe the snap test is a strong methodology that many investors should actually use when evaluating companies that they’re about to recommend or about to buy personally. As an analyst, I have developed my own checklist of items that I look for when I evaluate companies. However, having read and studied and listened to you talking about the snap test over the years, I realized that I need to also compile my own snap list and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. So, every year I write five companies that I think should stand the snap test in five to 10 years and I keep track. So thank you David for introducing this concept to us and really appreciate it.

Gardner: Thank you, Yasser, and thank you for pointing out that Snapchat greater than signs snap test at least over the last two years because what a comeback for the team over there at Snap. But thank you for that insight as well and for all that work and Fool on.

El-Shimy: Fool on!

Gardner: It’s time to make the way-back music machine hum one more time. Here we are, it’s July 4th of 2018. Now, while that was a holiday here in the United States, it was worldwide the time of the World Cup, it was the 2018 World Cup. So I had the World Cup on my mind as I thought about five stocks to celebrate the 2018 World Cup, which I was really enjoying at the time. I’m one of those people who really only tunes into soccer or football, if you will, about once every four years. For the men’s and the women’s World Cup, I tend to get compelled by the World Cup. I admittedly don’t spend a lot of time watching soccer outside of that. But it was fun to pick this five-stock sampler and here with me to review these five stocks, my friend, Sanmeet Deo. Sanmeet, so good to be with you.

Sanmeet Deo: Hi, David. How are you? Great to be here.

Gardner: I’m doing really well, and I knew which three samplers we would be covering this week because I have it in this spreadsheet, but I didn’t know which would be assigned to which of you, so I just randomized. So, Alicia got Five Stocks for America and Yasser got Five Stocks that Pass the Snap Test. When I randomly sent you these five stocks to cover, Sanmeet, you told me you’re a soccer fan.

Deo: Yeah, mostly football and basketball, but I love soccer. I studied abroad in Italy actually and so that’s where my love of soccer grew from on the world stage. So I try to watch the World Cup as often as I can and it’s exciting and now I’m watching the Euro Cup as it’s playing out.

Gardner: I’ve watched some of it too and it is. So, maybe it’s that I just don’t like the regular season, like, just give me the post season or the tournaments and I’ll watch your sport, almost whatever your sport is. Well, Sanmeet, let’s talk a little bit before we get to these five stocks about your background. We heard some from Alicia where she had come from, some from Yasser where he had. Where were you, I’m just going to ask you arbitrarily, 10 years ago? I know you’re at The Motley Fool today where you’ve worked for us maybe for six or eight months, I’m making that up. But tell us a little bit about where you came from.

Deo: Yes. 10 years ago I was actually working at an investment firm, this was 2011. I was working at a growth stock investment firm and then after that I worked at a value investment firm. So I’ve been on both sides of the spectrum in terms of investing. But I have always been a Motley Fool member, fan. I’ve been reading since the AOL days to date myself.

Gardner: Wow.

Deo: I remember logging on there just learning about mutual funds, and just personal finance, and that’s where my level of finance grew actually. I was a pre-med student in college, and I switched to pre-med and business, and then eventually I just dropped the pre-med and decided to stick with business.

Gardner: It’s a little bit of an easier route through school. Can we agree?

Deo: Yeah. Absolutely. I did it before taking the MCAT or going too hard in, although I had two pre-med classes left to go to finish.

Gardner: Wow.

Deo: It was a little late, but it’s OK.

Gardner: I guess to make up for it, Sanmeet, you married a physician.

Deo: Yeah, and I took the better route.

Gardner: Marry the person who goes all the way through pre-med, and then just keeps going. Not a bad approach to life. Now, I know you’re a sports fan because I’m pretty sure you’re a University of Texas grad or at least fan, but probably a grad too. Is that right?

Deo: Oh, yeah, I’m a grad University of Texas and I’m a huge Texas Longhorn fan. In fact, my TMF name is TMFHorns.

Gardner: Okay. Good. Hook them Horns. I’m with you on the burnt orange. I’ve always been a fan of Texas. It’s fun.

Deo: Yes.

Gardner: We got your football coach back Mack Brown.

Deo: We did.

Gardner: You stole him from us and then we got him back, and we’re now a top 20 team again. I wonder why.

Deo: He’s great.

Gardner: Yes, it’s been fun. Two big state universities that we both hail from, although based on your name Sanmeet, I’m assuming you’re of Indian descent, and/or do you have some family still back in India?

Deo: Yes, I do. Actually, my parents were born, brought up in India, and pretty much all my family is in India. I have a couple of cousins here in the United States, but all my family is in India.

Gardner: Do you get back from time to time, and would you like to identify where they are? Big city somewhere?

Deo: It’s actually a big city now, it’s called Pune, which is just like a couple of hours away from Mumbai which is the big city that everyone knows about. Haven’t been in a long, long time. Obviously, it’s been hard to travel the past couple of years, and also my wife and I had kids so it’s a little difficult to travel when they’re very young. But I used to go when I was younger, saw my grandparents, my aunts, and uncles, and just enjoyed spending time there when I was younger as well.

Gardner: Excellent. Before we get into these five stocks celebrating sports, would you like to share your greatest personal moment in sports? Were you a high school football player, did you hit that big home run in little league? When did you peak Sanmeet?

Deo: In sports I will say, I hate to sound like Al Bundy here, but I did play [laughs] high school football in Texas. I think our peak was when we beat our rival school. I went to Taylor High School and we played Katy High School, which is a perennial state contender, and my senior year we beat them. I didn’t play, but we beat them. It was awesome. It was just a great feeling.

Gardner: I bet. Wonderful. Well, thank you for sharing that. Let’s get into these stocks now. Five Stocks Celebrating The 2018 World Cup, well, we’ve already heard the market has done pretty well the last few years. Hope you didn’t need to hear from this podcast, hope you were already aware of that dear listener. But yeah, the market has been strong. Three years ago, July 4th, 2018, the market since then measured as of course the S&P 500 up 59.7%, so 60%, let’s just round it and keep things simple. Pretty great three years for stocks. Happy to say these stocks might have done even better, but no spoilers yet. Let’s start, Sanmeet, with the worst of the Five Stocks Celebrating The 2018 World Cup. It happens to be the company that helps me get in the game, the company that makes the FIFA video games, among others, Electronic Arts (NASDAQ: EA), ticker symbol EA. EA is up 1.2%. We’ve held it for three years now, it’s up 1%, markets up 60%. Sanmeet, what’s going on?

Deo: Well, I mean, it’s great to have a sample where the worst performers are still up and absolute terms. That’s pretty awesome. Electronic Arts is known for its sports games, that’s a staple of their business with titles like Madden, FIFA, some others in the sporting area. One of the things that they’ve, I don’t want to say stumbled, but some concerns were in terms of their creation of action-adventure games, and they had some early on in the stock picks life throughout the sampler period. It had some lackluster results in the live services business, it had some cancellations and delays in some of their games. One was Battlefield V, one was a Star Wars game. But I have to say one of the biggest challenges I think from this time is a game that we all probably have heard of is Fortnite. That is a hugely popular game with massive appeal, and is able to generate tons of revenue without even the need for a lot of costly development. That shift in gaming did hurt Electronic Arts in the sense that they didn’t have a strong action-adventure business. That did hurt them a little early on, but then they are starting to get in gear, the pandemic was a tailwind in terms of game-play. They released a popular game called Apex Legends, which surpassed 10 million players in its first 72 hours. They’ve continued their state performance in the sports games. Now it’s aggressively pursuing acquisitions in the mobile game space with the purchase of Glu Mobile and Playdemic. Even with the challenges and the fact that the stocks underperform, it still has gaming as a favorable tailwind, has a high-quality game portfolio, and solid game development plans. I still think it can do pretty well given where it’s at.

Gardner: It crested to about $150. Again, this is a stock picked for this sampler when it was three years ago, it was at about $141, so it crests briefly after we picked it up to about $150, and then nose-dived for the second half of 2018. As Fortnite really started to heat up, nose-dived from about $150 to about $75, it got cut in half in six months. It’s been coming back ever since a little bit slowly. This is a bigger company. This is not like Zynga, which can acquire apparently a hyper-casual game. Have you hyper-casual games, by the way, Sanmeet?

Deo: No, I have not. My kids may have.

Gardner: It probably can get expensive. Even though it’s merely casual, but hyper-casual. But this is a company that can’t make a small acquisition like that, and all of a sudden start to zing up or down. This is a bigger, steadier, slower mover, but certainly a long-term outperformer, a company I’m very grateful that it exists. I’ve enjoyed the FIFA game even though I’m not that good at it, or much of a soccer fan, so we’ll hope for better things for Electronic Arts. Again, it’s been pretty solid except for the six months right after I picked it. Here it is, just up 1%, again, the market up about 60%. That puts us at -59% in the hole with this first company. Let’s now go from worst to best. The best performer, really happy to think that I picked this stock in July 2018, Sanmeet. The ticker symbol MELI, the company, of course, MercadoLibre (NASDAQ: MELI), a longtime Rule Breaker winner, one of those that we just keep adding to, even though it’s already done really well, we add some more as it goes up. Back then it was at $297.43 as the market closed on July 3rd, 2018, so $297, today $1,549 and change. It’s been up more than five times the value 421% gain against the market 60%. This has been a good antidote to EA’s underperformance. Sanmeet, what the heck is happening in Latin America?

Deo: Wow. All I have to say is I wish I didn’t miss the boat on this one, but I’m kicking myself if you like to indulge in my pun there. But I saw a fantastic quote by a long-term investor, it sums up the company best. They said MercadoLibre’s greatest virtue over the years was the ability to identify relevant trends early on, adapt to them, to local conditions, and above all implement them at the right time with precision, agility, and scale. I thought that was a great snapshot of what they’ve done. Just over the sampler time period it’s growth can be attributed to COVID tailwinds, accelerating the shift toward online shopping. The company is transformed from a superior third-party marketplace to a leading e-commerce, ecosystem, and digital financial services platform in Latin America. They increased revenue 90% in 2020, and the number of buyers on the marketplace grew 40% to 65 million in the 12 months ended in March. Not only is it changing the way people shop, but it changes the way they pay with Mercado Pago, whose payment volume increased 75% to $50 billion last year. Interestingly, in 2018, it was estimated by Goldman that 40% of the company’s value came from financial services and now that’s up to 60%. While there’s concerns that the growth could slow as the pandemic subsides. They’re committed to plowing back that money to capture market share, double its workforce, and continue to invest in retail and financial services. As more users and merchants join the ecosystem, it’s going to lead to more monetization opportunities and it’s a beast.

Gardner: Very well expressed and very true. I like the quota you pulled as well. I think that’s excellent coverage of what MercadoLibre has done. In a sense it’s a fast follower of Amazon in an area of the world that it dominates. Amazon couldn’t really establish that much of a foothold, eBay owned a good portion of MercadoLibre. Pretty sure they wish they had held onto that. They sold that, they had some positioning there. But wow, what a wonderful performer this has been for just more than a decade for Rule Breaker members. If you’re a Rule Breaker member and Sanmeet, you are, and it sounds like this one got away from you, but I know you’re kicking yourself. Pun intended, thanks to my friend, Sanmeet, you already made the joke. But the good news is none of us has to own any one given winner, and in fact, we’re never going to own them all. One of my better stock picks along with Karl Thiel in Rule Breaker is Shopify (NYSE: SHOP). I’ve never owned any Shopify. I’m so glad so many Motley Fool members own Shopify and have benefited. But I still don’t feel any Shopify envy because I’m really happy about how my money has been invested. We’ve done great with stocks like MercadoLibre for example. I don’t think you can ever have them all, but thank you for sharing that.

Well, Sanmeet, let’s look at the three that are in the middle. There’s a pretty wide middle between a 1% gain EA and a 421% gain Mercado Libre. But we’re looking here at Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG), up 8%, Dassault Systemes up 79%, beating the market. Yandex (NASDAQ: YNDX) up 101%, also beating the market. Again, three different businesses all related in some way, at least in my mind, to the World Cup booking with a dominant position, booking.com, travel in Europe. Dassault Systemes, well, they were French. They’re a great French company and the French won the World Cup. That’s where I was headed with that and of course Yandex, the search engine based company, does other things besides like MercadoLibre, but focused on Russia, even though the company is domiciled outside of Russia. Of course, Russia is hosting the World Cup, as you reminded me just before we came on air Sanmeet. That was some of the reasoning behind these companies. Do you want to pick up any of those stories and make us smarter?

Deo: Yeah, absolutely. Booking you would think, wow, for Booking it is the worst time for a global pandemic. But Booking is so great. Its proposition was competitively lease hotels and alternative accommodations at the same pace offers superior experience for customers as they compete with some of the rival pure-play alternative accommodation companies such as Airbnb (NASDAQ: ABNB), which we know of for sure. Bookings were hit very hard during the pandemic. At its deepest despair, revenues were down over 80%. It has the largest exposure to Europe and various hotspots occurring all over the world and different vaccination trends all over the globe is making the recovery difficult for booking. However, it has a huge and global brand. It’s all over, and has a highly variable cost structure with high exposure to the alternative accommodations that I mentioned. It’s been able to withstand some of the weakness from that, and there’s a huge pent-up demand for travel. I think they’re going to capture that as we go forward. In fact, I was just on Booking the other day looking for my first trip post pandemic.

Gardner: Excellent.

Deo: I think it’s going to be just fine.

Gardner: Glad to hear that. Yeah, you are right. Wow, it is a big dog company and still a worldwide leader at what it does. But what it does as you just mentioned hasn’t been so easy to do business with for an extended period of time. A company up only 8% over these three years. I definitely wasn’t able to predict anything about a coronavirus back as I was enjoying the World Cup in 2018. But I’m happy to say the companies made it through to the other end. I hope we’re near the other end and we should see business pickup again. Any thoughts to share before we closed about Dassault Systemes or Yandex?

Deo: Well, Dassault Systemes is actually interesting, I was looking and I was doing research and I didn’t find too much actually to guide me in what, why it’s done what it has done. But what’s great about it is it’s consistently grown revenues and some of its key metrics in new license sales and revenue from its 3D experience platform over the past few years has just grown at a steady clip over time and it’s acquired metadata solutions, which operates in clinical trial automation space, and some other companies to expand its verticals from aerospace, automotive, and other things that they do. It’s just a nice one to point out because it’s a steady grower that grew over time with not much going on in terms of news, and it’s not one that people might even know about, but it’s performed well as a business over that time.

Gardner: Wonderful. Well, take it all-in-all. Really happy to say that these Five Stocks Celebrating The 2018 World Cup are beating the market and very handily so. The market averages, as I mentioned, 59.7%. Since July 4th of 2018, these stocks averaged 122.1% gain. That puts us about 62.5% per stock ahead of the market averages. Yeah, we’re still celebrating the 2018 World Cup, and speaking of which, this is one of those rare samplers Sanmeet that does not end after three years. No, because we made it a World Cup cycle, so we’re going to keep this one open for four years and revisit it one more time. Perhaps I’ll have you to do it with me a year from now, how these closeout somewhere around July 4th of 2022. But anyway, for now, I’m really happy to say that these five stocks, along with the other two samplers, are all well ahead of the market averages, which I hope is testament not just to what I’ve always believed, which is that you can, whoever you are, you can beat the market averages. I realized not a lot of people even believe that, especially in academia, it still seems you can, and here’s the way to do it, by following our Rule Breaker principles and/or follow right along with what we’re doing at Motley Fool Rule Breakers, whether it’s the samplers here through this podcast as I’ve done over the last six years, or of course, the Rule Breakers service, which many of us work on.

Of course, all the Motley Fool services, most of us are predicated on beating the market averages and have a transparent record of having done just that. Thank you, Sanmeet, for the magic dust that you’ve somehow sprinkled on these stocks even before you got to our company and for the work ahead. Speaking of work, I’m curious, having come from Wall Street, as you mentioned, you were working in New York, you were at a growth firm, you were at a value firm. What are one or two insights that you have having come from Wall Street to us here at Fool Street reflecting on your past life? Maybe a good thing and a bad thing. I’m not asking you to tar and feather Wall Street at all. There’s some very admirable things about Wall Street.

Deo: No, absolutely. I think one of the reasons why I love The Fool and I’ve been a member for so long is I actually learned so much from being a Fool subscriber and the newsletters and services that I’ve subscribed to about companies and stock-picking. I really feel one of the reasons I joined the company, Motley Fool, is because as an individual investor, you don’t need to work on Wall Street. You can use the observations in the world, see what products and services are being used, see what your kids are doing, see what’s happening to really make stock-picks. One of the things that I love about the sampler and all these samplers is that you can pick five things from a theme that you like, like the World Cup, and as MercadoLibre showed, you have a five-bagger almost. That outperformed and helped your broader portfolio do well. You had one pick that did phenomenally and the other pick still did good, but maybe some under performed, but you have that one that did phenomenal and it helped your portfolio overall. I think as a competitive advantage for Fools everywhere is you are a Fool, you are out there, you’re observing what’s happening in the world. I think you can be just as good a stock picker as anyone. That’s a pro.

Gardner: That’s wonderful. One of things I loved about Peter Lynch and the spirit of his books One Up On Wall Street, etc, was, you can do this. That’s what he wrote. He wrote to people, younger people like me, impressionable at the time, you can beat the market. He had just done so over a very successful career with Fidelity and their Magellan fund, and yet he wrote a book about all the disadvantages he suffered from. He had to keep constantly diversifying. That means you have to keep rebalancing away from his winners toward his losers, for example. He could never allow a certain stock to grow beyond a certain percentage of his portfolio. These are principles that make sense, but they’re highly enforced and regulated and that’s something you and I don’t have to do. We can actually let our idiosyncrasies shine and we can take a little bit more risk if that’s appropriate for us, or less risk if that’s appropriate for us. We can make it our own as individual investors. I love that you get that spirit from a long time Fool member yourself, Sanmeet, who’s been practicing that as well. Well, thank you very much for the work you put in this week over a busy weekend helping us understand Five Stocks Celebrating The 2018 World Cup. Fool on, my friend.

Deo: Fool on.

Gardner: All right. Well, as the smoke clears, let me first of all thank my talented analyst Alicia Alfiere again, Yasser El-Shimy, and Sanmeet Deo. A delight to spend that time. I know you had fun with each of them. In order, Five Stocks for America, which Alicia reviewed, up 72% on average versus the market’s 36%. A double of the market averages a nice start for the first year. Five Stocks That Pass The Snap Test, up 86% versus the market’s 53%. We’ll keep our fingers crossed and keep snapping for another 12 months for that one. Then. Five Stocks Celebrating The 2018 World Cup, the market up 60%, those stocks up 122%. That’s another double of the market averages. Really, just outstanding performance with only one duplication Axon popping in a couple of those. But overall, you have a pretty good group of 15 companies that I feel just as good about today. I think as I did back then. Well, a reminder as I say goodbye to you for this week, really, rubbing my hands together for next week, having our first Foolish NFL head coach come on the podcast join me and tell his story. Using our framework, start of your life in a few sentences at least, the stock graph of his life if you were to trace it out on paper speaking of some of the highs and the lows. Of course, the three key moments that have made him the investor that he is today, looking forward to introducing my new friend to you next week. In the meantime, Fool on!

John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Alicia Alfiere has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. David Gardner owns shares of Amazon, Axon Enterprise, Booking Holdings, MercadoLibre, Starbucks, and Yandex. Sanmeet Deo owns shares of Airbnb, Inc., Amazon, and Shopify. Yasser El-Shimy owns shares of Airbnb, Inc., Amazon, Axon Enterprise, Etsy, MercadoLibre, and Shopify. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Airbnb, Inc., Amazon, Axon Enterprise, Booking Holdings, Etsy, MercadoLibre, Shopify, Starbucks, Twitter, and Yandex. The Motley Fool recommends Boston Beer, Electronic Arts, Fair Isaac, Live Nation Entertainment, and eBay and recommends the following options: long January 2022 $1,920 calls on Amazon, long January 2023 $1,140 calls on Shopify, short January 2022 $1,940 calls on Amazon, short January 2023 $1,160 calls on Shopify, short July 2021 $120 calls on Starbucks, and short October 2021 $70 calls on eBay. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.