July 2025 Mailbag: Spiffy-Rocket-Pop

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0:49One scam can cost you everything. Protect yourself now. The first 100 users get 20 % off with code RULE20. That's RULE20 at coveron.com slash RULE20. One month, one inbox, a whole lot of popcorn. July's mailbag brings one listener their first ever spiffy pop rocket ship stock. We're going to talk about that. July also saw a brand new Wimbledon champion join our foolish family and calls for more Rule Breaker analysts on air. Also, the mindset shift behind holding winners instead of trimming them. July's mailbag proves our foolish listeners never take a summer vacation from big ideas. Only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.

1:39It's the Rule Breaker Investing Podcast with Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner.

1:47welcome back to rule breaker investing happy top of the summer to those northern hemisphere fellow fools tuning in and i guess bottom of the winter ish for those in the southern hemisphere a delight to have you with me this week this was a five wednesday month so looking back over as we start our mailbag episode this week looking back over what we've accomplished together here in july We kicked it off with what you've done to create financial freedom, volume three. That was around the week of the 4th of July here in the US. That was, well, in a month of, I would say, several great podcasts. That's top three anyway.

2:25And I didn't really get any mail back about it this week. And I was thinking, why would that be the case until I realized, oh my gosh, that whole thing is basically a mailbag. It's what you've done to create financial freedom. So many great write-ins and thoughts. And thank you for that. Week number two was Review-O-Palooza 2025, something we've done about once a year, which is look back at the 35 stock samplers and see how they're doing. Keep tabs on the 150 stocks picked on this podcast over six to seven years and see how they're doing years later. And also announce that we're reinvigorating Review-O-Palooza as the first ever five stock sampler was picked in September of 2015.

3:04Starting this September, we're going to start some 10-year reviews. see some big numbers both ways, and learn some of the lessons that you're usually not going to find in popular financial media because most people aren't thinking in terms of 10-year increments or learning over 10 years or scoring themselves over 10 years. That's what we're going to start doing in the year ahead for Rule Breaker Investing. Week number three, five idle thoughts of a summer's day, volume two, something I do about once a year, somewhere in this month, just five Motley thoughts for you. And then last week, of course, 2025 Wilmington champion and Fool, Sem Verbeek.

3:44A true delight to have Sem with me at Fool HQ Studios. All right. Well, before we start with our TwitterX hot takes, as I shared at the start of the year, my 2025 book Rule Breaker Investing is available for pre-order right now, today. It's just some weeks hence now. It comes out on September 16th. 30 years of stock picking leads to this, my magnum opus. It's a lifetime of lessons distilled into one definitive guide. And each week until the book launches on September 16th, I'm sharing a random excerpt. We break open the book to a random page and I read a few sentences. So let's do it. Here's this week's page breaker preview somewhere near the book's end.

4:27And I quote, There were so many people. Wasn't this place governed by fire code regulations? So many people, elbow to elbow, it felt comic. I half expected a clown car to pull up and unload a few more. I began to realize, okay, I'm not going to be getting to Bezos tonight. End quote. That's this week's Page Breaker preview to pre-order my final word on stock picking, shaped by three decades of market-crushing success, just type Rule Breaker Investing into Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, or wherever you shop for great books. I'm really pleased to have had this endorsement for my upcoming book from Arthur Brooks, the Harvard professor and number one New York Times bestselling author.

5:14Arthur has said about Rule Breaker Investing this, and I quote, does investing stress you out? The solution is here. David Gardner's Rule Breaker Investing takes the mystery out of the market, giving you time-tested habits to make wise, safe investments. Decades from now, you will be glad you read this book. End quote. And thank you to Arthur Brooks for that. And in fact, this is an opportunity for me to preview our Authors in August series. So for an eighth consecutive year, coming up next month, I will be talking to authors of books. And my lead-off author is Arthur Brooks. Delighted to have him back as the number one New York Times bestselling author, Build the Life You Want, the Art and Science of Getting Happier.

6:00Arthur co-wrote that with Oprah Winfrey. We had him on just a couple of years to discuss that, and we're going to have him back for his new book, which comes out in August. It's called The Happiness Files. I've so enjoyed reading through it. It's a compilation of his essays from The Atlantic, where he writes his column on happiness. and it is so well put together. I'm excited to have Arthur join with us next week. The week after, I'm going to be welcoming Sam Horn. She wrote a wonderful book called Talking on Eggshells and Sam Horn is author number two in August. Excited to have her in a couple of weeks.

6:35And then the third and final author in August, well, you might've guessed, but it's me. It is I this particular August because I'm an author for the first time in 15 years and I'll be delighted in a few weeks to be joined by longtime fool Chris Hill, who will be interviewing me about Rule Breaker Investing. Obviously, that's going to be a fun week for this podcast as well. So that's our authors in August announcement starting with Arthur Brooks coming next week. Let's now go to Twitter X and some hot takes. This one from Martin at Triggs One Martin writing in from the other side of the world. Martin, I know you live in Japan, but here I learn you're actually Canadian.

7:13This was Martin's tweet, reacting to my five idle thoughts of a summer's day. Martin, you wrote, thank you for your defense of free trade. Tariffs are a tax. More trade makes us richer and leads to peace versus trade wars, antagonism, and broken trust. As a Canadian, Martin writes, we are deeply hurt by the betrayal of the US government. The loss of trade, commerce, and goodwill is regrettable. And now another angle from a different direction. This one from at Gordon's Gecko reacting to last week's podcast with Sam Verbeek. Loved the entire conversation you wrote. Gordon's Gecko listened twice while hiking in the woods of Maine yesterday.

7:57Thank you for that. I'm not sure I'm worth listening twice to, but I'm pretty sure Sam Verbeek was. Thank you for that. similarly gaurav kumar at gaurav k investor gaurav you wrote i enjoyed the conversation especially the part where you compared that tennis is a zero-sum game versus investing where there can be multiple winners good luck for the north american run that's to sem we fools will be cheering for you thank you for that and many other tweets this relatively quiet month of july but we've got four solid mailbag items for this week's mailbag. Let's get started with mailbag item number one, this one from Andrew Gibson.

8:36Andrew, you're at Andrew Gibbs 53446 on Twitter X. I've really been enjoying some of what you've been posting, especially going back and listening to some of the older podcasts and resharing those lessons on Twitter. You are a fun follow at Andrew Gibbs. That's just with one B, G-I-B-S 53446. Andrew wrote this. David, this podcast, and Andrew's reacting to my Review of Palooza 2025 a few weeks back, this podcast was a bombshell of fresh color. Thank you for the transparent lessons learned. I loved how you drove home the point about how decades can really protect capital invested. We're going to have losers short term, Andrew calls out Airbnb.

9:20It's interesting to see how mainstream media often mixes trading and investing together. when they're very different. Andrew goes on, the truth is we just can't always predict when a great investment will take off. And sometimes it happens a few years later than we think. And he references a classic story that I've told on this podcast before when my brother Tom and I were on ABC's The View. This was in the late 1990s and we put forward a stock to the ladies of The View and the stock did very poorly initially. And we were invited back briefly once on the show in order to talk about why Starbucks was down 33%.

10:00We haven't been back on the show since, but the stock is up something like 33 times in value from our first pick on The View. So you're right, Andrew, a lot of it comes down to what are the timeframes we're actually looking at. And of course, the timeframe we're not just looking at on this podcast, but we're playing the game of is the long game. And so The View and Starbucks is one of my favorite stories. Andrew goes on, however, if we take a patient, delayed gratification long-term approach, as you've proven year over year, we can catch the next big success story like Axon or Amazon. Accepting along the way, Andrew adds, you must lose to win.

10:40Really enjoyed the snap test and the Marvel reference. How many people would notice if your company was gone and would anyone care? and I'm glad you were calling that out because that is one of my favorite tests. It's very rule-breaker-y and it was a delight to talk to that one once again on the Review of Palooza 2025 episode. The snap test is one of my favorite ways to help discern what's a rule-breaker and what's a faker-breaker. And Andrew closed by reacting to my reference to a great poem by John Keats, which I studied in undergrad at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and that's on first looking into Chapman's Homer.

11:18And what I was saying about that poem in the podcast a few weeks ago is just as Keats was deeply moved by his first sight of that translation of Homer, and he compared it to when Europeans first saw the Pacific Ocean. Similarly, I was trying to make a smaller comparison, but one toward when you first realize that you can really win big with Rule Breaker Investing. It really takes the doing rather than just the reading or the seeing. And Andrew, you closed with, well, you went and used an AI platform to yoke together John Keats. I was referencing his wonderful poem on first looking into Chapman's Homer a few weeks ago, and you started wondering, what if the famous British poet John Keats had encountered rule breaker investing in the same way that his Europeans in his poem encountered the Pacific Ocean for the first time.

12:13And so I had a lot of fun thinking about this and you did too. And here's the AI Platform's translation of John Keats as a rule breaker investor. Like the Grecian urn in his ode to beauty, Keats's investment gaze was once fixed on the timeless truths of numbers and charts. But upon discovering Chapman's rule breaker companies, he felt the thrill of the new, a wild surmise that awakened his imagination to a world of innovative titans and market disruptors. As he gazed upon this new landscape, he saw the beauty of growth, the truth of disruption, and the sublime power of visionary leaders who defied convention.

12:53His investment world, once bound by traditional metrics, was now alive with the promise of negative capability, where uncertainty and risk gave rise to unprecedented opportunities. Andrew, you closed out your mailbag note by saying, as I learned to harness the creative potential of my right brain, I'm excited to see the results for your 10-year update podcast. Meanwhile, my analytical left brain is projecting that the returns will be mighty. What fools these mortals be, referencing Shakespeare at the end. Andrew, well done. Fool on and fool on to you, Andrew Gibson. Thank you for that. All right, on to mailbag item number two, Vicki Huffman writing in from Montello, Wisconsin.

13:35Vicki, you wrote, hi, David. Now that you've read my one and only email to you on air, which is, yeah, I think we did that last month. Vicki, you said you've been around The Motley Fool, listened to a lot of podcasts for a long time, but had never written in until last month. I love sharing your note. And now you're back one month later. I feel you need to know that when Sam and Katarina won the Wimbledon mixed doubles match that I was watching, I really did wonder if he was the doubles tennis player that you had on the show previously. I love tennis, Vicky writes, particularly doubles. And to my knowledge, had never seen him play on the tennis channel nor in person at Indian Wells.

14:13I enjoyed listening to his interviews and his speech given on the tennis channel after winning Wimbledon. And thanks for mentioning it on your podcast, confirming my guess was correct. Signed, Vicky. Well, Vicky, you were right. That was Sam Verbeek, our foolish friend and now Wimbledon champion. I'm just so excited and pleased for him to achieve that pinnacle in his career. And I love that we could share it out with fools everywhere. Let's move on to mailbag item number three. This is maybe my favorite mailbag item this month and the reasons will become obvious as we go into it. So this is written by PSNORB.

14:52That might be PSNORB. I'm not really sure. We're just going to go with PSNORB. That's how it's signed. Thank you for all that you've taught me over the years about investing. Today is a special day for me because I achieved a spiffy pop with the first stock that I independently selected based on the principles discussed in your podcast, in your books, and on the fool.com website. Well, let me pause it right there first, because thereby hangs a tale. So PSNORB, you actually wrote, mistakenly, you wrote Jiffy Pop. I think you meant to write my phrase Spiffy Pop, but I get it. And popcorn comes back into this mailbag item in a sec.

15:32But I wanted to tell the tale of Spiffy Pop told here again. I've done it a few times over the years, but we're now in our 11th year as a podcast, and I don't think I've talked about this for years now. So let me tell the abridged version of how Spiffy Pop came to be. These days when I speak to a room, I ask people to raise their hands. If it's a room of Motley Fool members at one of our events, I'm going to say maybe 70 % or more of you raise your hand when I ask, do you know what a Spiffy Pop is? But every other room in the world not filled up with Motley Fool members, I'd be lucky if even 5 % of the hands will go up.

16:09So in my experience, most people have no idea what the heck we're talking about, which is why I want to share this with you again this week, the tale of Spiffy Pops. So years ago, I decided I wanted to invent a word for an awesome concept that I come up with. I said there should be a thing that we can celebrate as investors, those investors, those who by definition are playing the long game as long-term players, a thing. So how about this? What if we celebrate the day when you make more money that day with a given stock than you paid for that stock way back when? And we went to our Rule Breakers members.

16:48This was the early days of the Rule Breakers service. The year was 2007. And we asked them to write into us, kind of like a mailbag, write into us what that term should be. We got more than 200 submissions from our Rule Breakers community. the winner was carol binion she was the one who said well how about spiffy pop and i just kind of looked at it and i thought i thought that's great it's not just just a pop i mean it's pretty spiffy right and it kind of sounds by the way like popcorn too a spiffy pop when you make more money in a single day than you initially paid for it than your cost basis on that stock so for example Let's pretend that you bought a stock for$7 a share.

17:35Over the years, it goes to$100. And then it has a good earnings report after hours one day. And the next morning, the stock opens up$8 a share at$108. Well, you've just achieved, boom, a spiffy pop because your cost basis is$7. And that day, the stock went from$100 to$108. it went up$8 a share, eight exceeds seven spiffy pop. Now, when I Googled who Carol Binion was some years later to get into contact with her to thank her again, I noticed she's on the internet movie database because she seems like a very accomplished costumer, a wardrobe designer. So for example, if you saw the movie Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2, which came out in 2017, I sure did.

18:24she's credited as a specialty costumer so too for those of you who are fans of the show loki the disney plus marvel streaming series she's a specialty costumer for loki as well so that is the woman who came up with the phrase spiffy pop that caught my eye and i decided yeah we're going to call it that support for the show comes from fundrise investing in companies already in the S &P 500 can sometimes feel like you're being served someone else's leftovers. It's still a great meal, but it's hard not to imagine what the food tasted like when it was fresh out of the oven. But with venture capital by Fundrise, you can finally get in early and take a seat at the table alongside the biggest names in tech investing.

19:07Fundrise's mission is to give investors the access required to invest in the best tech and AI companies before they go public. Visit fundrise.com slash fool to check out Fundrise's venture portfolio and start investing in minutes. All investments involve risk, including the potential loss of principal. Past performance is not indicative of future results. This is a paid advertisement. As long as we're telling the tale of spiffy pop this week, I want to give a little bit more lore to this before going back to PSN Orb's letter. The publication of the Motley Fool Rule Breakers issue that year, 2007 in May, for the fun of it, happened to be on my birthday, which is May 16th.

19:45That's when we revealed what the phrase would be to describe when you make more money, in a single day, then you paid for that stock. So the concept and the name came out on May 16th of 2007. And then literally two days later, Aquantive, which was an ad measuring firm, got bought out by Microsoft. It was a rule breaker pick. It rose$38 on that Friday, May 18th, 2007. It went up$38. Our cost had been$25. So yeah, it was amazing. Two days after we revealed spiffy pop to the world, we actually scored our very first one. We've gone on to have literally thousands of spiffy pops in our services ever since.

20:29You know, when people, wherever they are on Twitter, in this example, say, I got my first spiffy pop. That is probably what gives me my greatest professional joy. So a note like yours, PSN orb, let me get back to it. You went on, the stock is Rocket Lab, ticker symbol RKLB. I purchased the stock in 2022 and my initial cost basis was$4 a share. I held the stock despite numerous reports in the mainstream telling me it was not a good investment. I continued to add to my holdings when money was available to invest. Recently, the stock price approached$40 a share. I was looking at a 10x return on my initial investment.

21:15And today the stock price went up over 10%. I am celebrating my first independent stock pick that achieved a spiffy pop by roasting popcorn on the stovetop. Never did the popcorn taste as sweet as today. You go on closing your note with this. Thank you for giving me the skill set to investigate a stock myself. Thank you for giving me the confidence to not only invest but hold onto the stock when the mainstream media led me to believe I was making a mistake. And finally, thanks for helping me let go of my personal belief that I needed to sell winners when they were up to preserve capital. Instead, I now add to my winners, water my flowers, in quotes, as they continue to grow.

22:05Fool on, P-S-N-O-R-B. Well, of course, I've already conveyed how much I love your note and why. I've told the story of Spiffy Pop, but a few other things I want to just highlight before we move on to our final mailbag item number four. You found a great stock. Rocket Lab is indeed a true blue rule breaker. I don't pick stocks anymore professionally, but I do so personally from time to time still, of course, because I will always love investing. And Rocket Lab is one of those I picked up just a few months ago. It's already been a spectacular performer for me. You well scooped me though with your low cost basis.

22:44And I do want to give a shout out to Yasser Elshimi here at The Motley Fool because in our trends service, Yasser picked the stock in March of 2023 at$4.29 a share. So many Motley Fool members have benefited along with you thanks to Yasser. I also wanted to underline how you felt a little bit lonely as an individual investor holding that stock, hearing media feedback, probably financial media, maybe on social media or maybe on financial television in print saying this is not a good stock. This stock is likely you're hearing it's overvalued. It's not one you should buy. And yet you've used our rule breaker traits in order to identify it as not just a stock not to buy, but a stock absolutely to buy.

23:31And I would say it's just as true today as it was a few years ago. Yes, we won't be getting the same low, low cost basis buying the stock here in the summer of 2025. But one of the key rule breaker habits is to add up, not double down, which is what much of the world does. You know, in my upcoming book, I think chapter 12, which is simply entitled Overvalued, might be the central chapter of the whole book. But what you've done with your note is wonderful because you've basically mirrored a lot of what I try to convey in rule breaker investing, the traits that enable us to find the stocks, but even more the habits that enable us to hold them and add to them.

24:12And then some portfolio principles too. I started to say earlier, I'll just underline it now. I really think it takes doing rule breaker investing. And I would say winning once, really winning in the way that you have with a 10 bagger and your first ever spiffy pop. That's really what opens our eyes with that wild surmise that John Keats talked about in the poem on first looking into Chapman's Homer. So I want to thank you for a wonderful mailbag item. And if you want to thank me, buy Rule Breaker Investing, buy the book that's helped you find Rocket Lab. And I would say even more so, make the world smarter, happier, and richer.

24:52Many of you already have pre-ordered or already know Rule Breaker Investing, But what about your friends and family around you? As I've sometimes said in recent months, a truly good investing book literally pays for itself when you think about it and then some. And before I move on to our closing mailbag item number four, I'm thinking about these full celebs, people like Sam Verbeek who go on to win Wimbledon or Carol Binion who comes up with Spiffy Pop and then years later is doing movie costumes for popular Marvel hits. Or I I even was thinking of somebody I spoke to the last week, Frank Reich, former NFL head football coach, now the interim coach at Stanford University.

25:34I'm wishing Frank, I know many of you are as well, great fortune for his success as a head coach interim at Stanford, an ACC football school this coming fall. But each of these people has been a Rule Breaker investor and has been on this podcast and has gone on to greatness. All right, Rule Breaker mailbag item number four. This one from Frank Iriami. Thank you, Frank. Hi, David. This is along the lines of a suggestion from a listener slash subscriber. I first became a subscriber, a member of The Motley Fool, a few months before you stepped down from picking stocks. I'm still here and still participating.

26:09One of the main aspects as to why I am still plugged in is because the team you built from the beginning is largely there. Tim Byers, Rick Munarez, and Carl Thiel. That longevity is key from a customer's point of view. It gives me confidence that the ingredients you put in place are still there and the success of the past has the potential to be here in the future as well. My suggestion, Frank writes, is that it may be a good idea to incorporate members of the rule-breaking team that are picking stocks to be more frequent guests on your pod. Your interaction with them, talking about the lessons of the past and how they may be playing out with new recs and even re-recs I would find invaluable.

26:54That's it. Fool on, Frank. Well, first of all, Frank, I've always been delighted to share with you the many wonderful analysts at The Motley Fool. Some of them work directly on Rule Breaker services. Some of them work on adjacent services. Some of them, like Robert Brokamp, don't even really pick stocks, but they're longtime Motley Fool personalities that I love to show off. I take great pride. This is maybe my greatest entrepreneurial pride in the people that we've hired to help the world invest better, to make the world smarter, happier, and richer. There have been many of them now in our 32nd year of business.