Old, New, Borrowed & Blue, Vol. 10

0:00Every once in a blue moon, or a new moon, or an old moon, or a borrowed moon, I queue up a hodgepodge of points that I want to share. They're not really related to each other They're a hodgepodge, but I force them to fit into this mold Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue You probably know the expression, don't you? It's what brides traditionally are supposed to wear on their wedding day For good luck Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue And while I won't be providing this on this podcast You're also supposed to have a silver sixpence in your shoe Now, if you want to locate a dime or a quarter and slip it into your shoe for this week's podcast, I think you might have even better luck.

0:48Anyway, as the winter here in the Northern Hemisphere begins to crank itself up, I'm cranking back up this recurring episodic series for Rule Breaker Investing. Once again, our 10th volume. We're going to talk about life hacks I still swear by and a brand new holiday idea for America. We'll borrow an answer to the question, won't artificial intelligence do all our investing for us, and take a look through a blue lens at a fallen star stock, a meme stock no less, that was actually the first short in Motley Fool history. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.

1:32it's the rule breaker investing podcast with motley fool co-founder david gardner

1:40welcome back to rule breaker investing if you are a gamer i sure hope you were with me last week my once a year games games games podcast this time volume seven was really fun to do and as i went through more than a dozen games for that podcast i was thinking about all the games i didn't get to speak to. For example, Splendor. I was just looking at my game shelves, seeing the game Splendor today, and I was thinking about Splendor, a fast, elegant strategy game. You're collecting colorful gemstone tokens, you use them to buy cards that, well, each card you purchase makes it easier to buy better cards later, so you're growing kind of an economic engine that grows stronger as you play.

2:22And the goal is to build the most valuable collection of cards, earn prestige points, like a lot of games, victory points. Turns are quick, simple. You just take gems or buy a card. Some of you will have played Splendor, but it's a game that I think just about everybody would enjoy. 30 minutes long, two to four players, one of the quickest, easiest strategy games to learn. If I didn't actually give you good ideas last week, you could just try Splendor this week. And if you enjoy it, by the way, there's also Marvel Splendor, which keeps the same addictive gameplay, but it adds, of course, Marvel superheroes, villains, and Infinity Stones.

2:57So that one might even be more alluring to the kids than just plain old vanilla splendor, of course, to Marvel fans as well. Well, there I am going back to games again, still with one foot in last week's podcast. Speaking of the weeks as they go by, let's talk briefly about next week. Very excited. It's our annual Besties. So all the stars are coming back out and joining back with you and me next week. It's our besties cameos aplenty as we count down the year's top 10 podcasts for Rule Breaker Investing. Morgan Housel and Randy Zuckerberg will be rejoining. Shirzad Shamin, Sam Horn, the list goes on.

3:35I'm really excited. I hope you will be too for one of our best, ironically, one of our bestie podcasts every year. Next week's besties. All right. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. As I thought about how I wanted to kick off this week's podcast with something old, I was just thinking back to some of my favorite series and podcasts I've done over the years. One of them is Mental Tips, Tricks, and Life Hacks. Done a bunch of those. Another is Pet Peeves. Done a bunch of those. And then Pet Perks, which was suggested to me by a visionary listener who appreciated all my pet peeves, but thought, hey, there's some good things out in this world as well.

4:13What about Pet Perks? We've done those too. So I thought for something old, I'd just revisit one of each of those three. These are some of my favorite past life hacks, peeves, and perks. I picked one of each, so let's get started something old. The first one, I'm going to lead off with a life hack. This one came from March 1st of 2017, which was Mental Tips, Tricks, and Life Hacks, Volume 3 for those keeping score at home. I call this one Two Things Each Time You Walk Into Your Room. So here we go, an old life hack that I hope still feels good. You know, this one I'm thinking about because one of our Motley Fool members, somebody very admirable, one of those really good people in the world, good at business, came up to me as an investor at one of our Motley Fool Fool Fest meetings with members.

4:59And he told me years after I did this in 2017, he was still using my two things each time you walk into your room approach. This has really nothing to do with investing, but I just love that that particular member grabbed onto this one, held it and had still used it years later, maybe you will too. So this one comes from my own experience and I just kind of learned it over the course of time. One of my poor habits is the tendency just to take whatever I wore yesterday and just toss it onto a chair nearby and then let that happen the day after that. And maybe the day after that as well. I don't know if you do this too, but you end up with clothes piled up and you can't find the belt that you're looking for because it was worn three days ago.

5:40And maybe I'm speaking to you. Maybe you understand where I'm coming from. So what I developed was a very simple mental approach to getting better at this. I simply call it my two things approach. Two things. Think of it as not necessarily about your garments. I mean, it could be anything. It could be as you walk into your office or in any common area for you. Let's say a place you spend a lot of time in, in your house or your place of work. If you find that it's not as kempt as it should be, here's the two things approach. Every single time you walk into that room, you train yourself. You're going to pick two things up and you're going to put them back where they should be living.

6:25Maybe the clothes hamper or maybe a book back on a shelf, whatever it is, it's always got to be two things. And don't start faking yourself out. Don't make it four or five things. Because if you start thinking it's five, then you're going to start cheating and not doing it because you'd be like, I don't want to have to find five things again this time. So it creates a self-defeating loop. And so it's only ever two things. You just put them back in place. And over the course of time, you're going to find that areas that were once almost inaccessible to you, the person who was living in it, become not only functional, but actually sometimes quite lovely because you've taken the time to put a process in place in your life that is going to create better solutions than if you hadn't done it in the first place.

7:15So that's the two things approach. You know, it reminds me, there's a book called Integrity by Henry Cloud, which I love. I read it more than 20 years ago. He has a chapter in there about act like an ant. And this, this is an act like an ant mentality, right? Ants can't build those anthills right away. What they do is they just pick up a crumb, drop it, keep moving another crumb. We build things incrementally. And just to tie this back briefly to an investment thought on a largely non-investment focused podcast this week, often people don't realize they can do the exact same thing with buying into a stock or selling off a stock.

7:59Too often, I think we train our minds to think all or nothing, buy or sell, but acting like an ant and moving incrementally can often be a more effective way to invest. Dollar cost averaging, if you will. Anyway, there's my two things approach. That's a mental tip, even a trick, if you will, a life hack, feel free to swipe it. All right. From that mental tip, trick, or life hack, we now go to an old pet peeve. One of my favorites, this one from September 15th of 2021, it led off Pet Peeves Volume 6. This was Pet Peeve Number 1, and it's the phrase, retail investor. Now, I've heard this phrase a lot over the course of my life.

8:43Perhaps you have too. I don't think I've ever used the phrase myself. I wouldn't describe myself as a retail investor. And I don't walk around saying, you know, the Motley Fool membership, we've got some retail investors. Or to you, my dear listener, I wouldn't refer to you as a retail investor. It's not a term that I would adopt for myself. I would say I'm an individual investor, maybe a private investor. But that phrase, retail investors, has always bothered me a little bit. And the bother has grown over the course of time. So let's start, first of all, speaking of defining terms by defining our term.

9:22Because why are people using the phrase retail investor? Where did that come from? Well, I went to another excellent website on the internet. That would be dictionary.com, which has lots of definitions. I thought, let me just look up retail, just to remind myself of what this word means. Of course, it's a noun. Retail is the sale of goods to ultimate consumers, usually in small quantities. It's also an adjective, retail, as in, say, retail investor. As an adjective, retail is pertaining to or connected with or engaged in sale at retail. All of a sudden, I realized the reason we're being called retail investors is because we were the ones who were sold to.

10:12Back in the old days, especially when the world was pretty much down to just brokers and clients, we were the client. And the broker was put in the position by his or her firm to sell their ideas to us. Therefore, you and I are retail investors. Never mind that the quality of the merchandise being sold to us at different points may have been good or particularly bad, like penny stocks. Largely, it comes down to the motivations, of course, of those financial professionals in our lives. And there are many good ones. There are also many bad ones. But anyway, yeah, we, you and I were being sold to.

10:52And now that we've established the why of the phrase, I then went on to Google retail investor and I started to learn more. I like this definition, this difference between institutional investor and retail investors to often opposed crowds. This one comes from Investopedia. And they say, and I quote, a retail investor is an individual or non-professional investor who buys and sells securities through brokerage firms or savings accounts like 401ks. And I like that. I like that definition. I agree with that. Institutional investors, Investopedia goes on, do not use their own money, but rather invest other people's money on their behalf.

11:42That's a very lovely and elegant way, I guess, of creating two buckets here. You've got the retail investors and you've got the institutional investors. And what jumps out to me from Investopedia is the phrase institutional investors do not use their own money. Sometimes I think while retail investors, I guess, are looked down upon, sometimes belittled, as we'll hear in just a sec, it's worth remembering that we're investing our own money, not just getting paid to invest somebody else's money. So I think there's a lot to be said for being a retail investor in that way. Anyway, there's Investopedia.

12:24But as I look down the Google search results for the phrase retail investor, you know, Google search results has a section entitled People Also Ask. And some of the people also ask results on Google for retail investor have phrases like, why do retail investors lose money? Do retail investors make money? What is the role of retail investors? So here again, I found something in these search results that I like. This one comes from a site I've never used, wallstreetmojo.com, but this is how they write about the role of retail investors. And I quote, the retail investor provides capital to corporations when other sources of financing seem difficult.

13:08Since they tend to invest for a longer period than institutional investors, they play a crucial role in building the stock market and thereby the economy of a country. End quote. And I really agree with that. And I like that a lot. That makes me smile and willing to call myself a retail investor. But then I keep clicking around further on the internet. I hit an article like this one from Oxford University. That's right, that Oxford, that one. And it's Saeed Business School, where one of its professors is liberally quoted in an article entitled, Retail Investors Are Amateurs in a High Stakes Market They Cannot Win.

13:55Now, Now, according to this professor, I'll just quote from the article here, and I quote, academic experts consistently advise private investors not to invest in individual shares. Retail investors will always lose money because they lack the education, whereas financial professionals are well informed. That's what they do. Period. End quote. Quote, now we start seeing why the phrase retail investor, for me anyway, is a pet peeve, because it implies that you and I, who are actually investing our own money and doing quite well at that, thank you very much. I think I'm speaking for a lot of listeners right now, a lot of Motley Fool members over the years, and it's that we're second-class citizens as retail investors.

14:45We're rubes, yokels, bumpkins, the list goes on. And we will always lose money, in the words of this Saeed business school professor, because we lack the education. Financial professionals are well informed. Well, I beg to differ. I think it's very clear that there are good investors and bad investors in all different contexts. But to group everybody who's not an institutional investor and call them retail investors, apparently these people who are associated with meme stocks, the meme stock craze. Yeah, that would be retail investors. Well, I submit to you, by the way, that a tiny, tiny percentage of individual investors are even paying attention to the GameStops of the world or the so-called meme stocks.

15:31Realize it gets a lot of headlines. It's certainly something paid some attention in the past several years, but a really tiny percentage. This is all a side note, but a really tiny percentage of mom and pop individual investors are taking big risks in companies that I don't think have particularly good prospects and is being called a retail investor revolution. Again, I will beg to differ. In conclusion, this pet peeve is not just the phrase retail investor, which I never use, and I don't think in those terms, but really so much of the baggage surrounding being an investor who's not a professional.

16:09And therefore, I guess, according to Professor K at Oxford, we are doomed to lose money always because we lack the education. There's something old, a past pet peeve And I don't want to end something old on a peeve note So let's just share a brief pet perk Before we move on to something new And here it is, this one comes from June 12, 2024 My first pet perk episode This was pet perk number 7 on it And it's paying for someone in the line behind you Again, pet perks of course The little things that make life better The opposite of pet peeve So back again to this pet perk, paying for someone in the line behind you.

16:55Now, this used to actually be easy, and it was almost impersonal back in the days. Remember these of tollbooths and tollbooth operators? These days, most of us are rocking the easy pass in one form or another. If we're driving long distance or even shorter distances, we maybe just go for the fast lane. We just blast through that easy pass tollbooth. It electronically records that we went through. Ka-ching. And there are very few people who are actually at toll booths these days as operators taking money. I guess it still happens, but many fewer than once were. Well, in an earlier age, that's how we got from one section of a highway to another.

17:32We stopped. We sometimes waited in line for 10 minutes to get up to line in the toll booth. And we would say to the toll booth operator, here's my quarter or here's my buck or whatever. You throw it into a little machine or hand it to a person. but if a person was there you could say by the way here's an extra dollar for my friend behind me say hello and the trick was of course you didn't know who is behind you you probably didn't know who that person was but as they come up you could look in your rearview mirror as you pulled away very briefly you'd see a surprise on their face a smile and wait they'd realize oh my gosh they paid for me and I don't even know that person.

18:14And that's something my parents used to do and taught me when I was a kid and it was fun to watch. But now it's 2025 and this same approach, by the way, works just as well at Chipotle. This works just as well at Starbucks. You can simply, ahead of time, turn to the person behind you and say, you know what? Random act of kindness time, I'm paying for you. I tell you, you will raise both an eyebrow and then a smile whenever you do this. Generosity is contagious. You know, usually when you pay it forward for somebody else, they're probably going to pay it forward for somebody else and the world will get a little bit better paying for someone in the line behind you.

18:56Of course, it's free for them. Sure. What a great benefit for them that they got to be lucky enough to be behind you in the line that day. But But as we all know, and I talked about this on my Gratitude 2025 podcast just a few weeks ago, the personal satisfaction that you and I get making small gifts like that, small random acts of kindness, could be an act of pure selfishness because it's so personally rewarding for you and for me to do that. But of course, it isn't pure selfishness. It's really just pure connection. Paying for someone in the line behind you, try it this week, this month. And if you do, write us.

19:36RBI at fool.com is our email address. Let me know what happened. I'd love to tell a story or two at the end of this month in our closing December mailbag, paying for someone in the line behind you. That too is something old. And next on to something new. With my book, Rule Breaker Investing, coming out this year, it came out in September. I did a lot of podcasts. I continue to do a lot of podcasts. I love talking about this subject and getting as many people in the world invested in the best way as possible. That really gives so much meaning to me and the days I pass on this planet. So I've been doing a lot of podcasts.

20:14And one of my favorites is called Boxes and Lines. And if you want to hear me on that podcast, it was the October 2nd edition just a couple of months ago. On with hosts Ronan Ryan and John Ramsey. They asked this question during the podcast near the end. They said, David, if you had the power to create a new financial holiday, what would it be called and how would people celebrate it? Now, I'm not very good on my toes answering questions like that one. Fortunately, it was part of a pre-interview. They let me know they were going to be asking me that question, which allowed me to premeditate a much better answer than I would otherwise have given.

20:55And here's the thought, a new thought. What if we got companies to donate shares of their companies to the general public? So, you know, hey, Netflix, would you just earmark 100 shares this year for National Share Day, our new holiday? And Microsoft, by the way, you're really big. How about a thousand shares of Microsoft? And how about every other company that's public today? What if National Share Day was basically a national lottery that had every American winning randomly one share, one of those shares donated by all of our public companies? So first of all, to make that happen, everybody's going to have to have an account.

21:44So I think there's a free open account before National Share Day happens. And that's going to get everybody in America included, everybody in America with an open account. It's easier than ever before these days to open up an account with small amounts of money. You can get started. But this would help many Americans, inspire many Americans to open accounts because they're going to be getting a randomized share of some public company. And each year with this one holiday, companies are just sharing, again, a little part, a small percentage of their ownership to all Americans. So you get to wake up.

22:21It's going to be like Christmas morning, but it's not in December. And you're going to find out whether you got a Berkshire Hathaway A share or maybe some rinky dink penny stock because, well, maybe it wasn't your year that year. So everybody wins a share. Everybody gets a single share. There's about 320 million Americans. So we're going to need to have 320 million shares. And I think we can do that each year. Now, I admit I haven't fully thought this out and I haven't further developed this idea since introducing it just a couple of months ago. So it remains very much an untested, raw idea, but I think an inspiring idea, an idea of goodness.

23:04It will create a little bit of dilution every year for companies. As you get your share, you're going to get to find out as Americans, you're going to be reminded of what has built this country, which, by the way, is business and capitalism done right. So National Share Day, when you think about it from this angle, it's really part of our national heritage. The private sector is, always has been, and will be much larger than the public sector in our country. What you and I do, most of us every day, is we go to work for companies that are trying to provide a product or service at a competitive price that is worth buying and that improves the lives of customers who, in so doing, enrich the companies that do the best jobs.

23:48So that's really the dynamic that's been in place for this country for a few hundred years. And I think what I also love about National Share Day is it's going to be a charitable act of all of our nation's public companies to earmark a certain number of shares, dilute themselves a little bit. And whoever's organizing and running National Share Day is going to want to make sure we do have 320 million shares. It's going to need to be adjudicated and run well. I'm not saying this is about to start this year, but I truly believe for anybody who feels so motivated, this could be an amazing financial holiday and a reminder that all Americans can be invested in something that goes up over time, the economy and the stock market.

24:31So I think everybody owning something, everybody noticing, yeah, we'll give you eight hours off that day as well. It's a national holiday as well. But it's going to give you a relationship each year with a new company and build a little bit of a portfolio. We're also living during a time now where Michael Dell just set aside a lot of money as a form of match to enable every kid who's born going forward to start with some money in an account. So I feel as if National Share Day works in concert with these kinds of efforts to get everybody included, everybody invested, and to recognize the great benefits that companies every single day provide in our lives and remind every American that you and I can be part owners of those things as well.

25:16just as my dad convinced me of that when we went for more chocolate pudding at the age of five in our local grocery store when dad said, hey, kids, we own some shares of the company that makes that chocolate pudding. We were just off for Saturday groceries that morning. And he said, let's go get more chocolate pudding. And that was a great way dad connected his kids with the idea of being owners within this society and the incredible miracle and gift that there would be an economy and a stock market that we could all participate in. So National Share Day, I'm stumping for it. I won't be running it.

25:51If anybody wants to pick up the ball and run with it a little bit, I'll be happy to play with you here. Let's get it going. Something new. Did archaeologists discover Noah's Ark? Is the rapture coming as soon as the Euphrates River dries up? Does the Bible condemn abortion? Don't you wish you had a trustworthy academic resource to help make sense of all of this? Well, I'm Dan Beecher, and he's award-winning Bible scholar and TikTok sensation, Dr. Dan McClellan. And we want to invite you to the Data Over Dogma podcast. Where our mission is to increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and also to combat the spread of misinformation about the same.

26:32But, you know, in a fun way. Every week we tackle fascinating topics. We go back to source materials in their original languages. And we interview top scholars in the field. So whether you're a devout believer. Or you're just interested in a clear-eyed, deeply informed look at one of the most influential books of all time. We think you're going to love the Data Over Dogma podcast. Wherever you subscribe to awesome shows.

27:00All right, now on to something borrowed. And I mentioned, of course, my book that came out just a couple of months ago. I think a lot of people have noticed that. And I'm really happy to see some fantastic reviews and some great plaudits and comments from longtime fools and brand new people who'd never heard of The Motley Fool before and everybody in between. And I've just so loved having written that book and then seeing it out there in the wilds and bookstores across the country, maybe under some trees this month as well. That's been my highlight of the year 2025. something that not as many people may have noticed is that if you go to rulebreakerinvesting.com there is a free downloadable bonus chapter to rule breaker investing so i thought for something borrowed i would just read a short section of that as a quick reminder that it's out there so if you're a fan of the book and you want to read the additional chapter which by the way is called Rule Breaker Investing Mailbag because I decided to make my bonus chapter shaped right alongside what we've done in this podcast, which is after I've put out podcasts to you, I hear back from you in mailbag, your questions, your thoughts, and I react to those.