Old, New, Borrowed & Blue, Vol. 11

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.

0:36Of course, if you want to locate a dime or a quarter and slip it in your shoe for this week's podcast, I won't stop you. It might even give you better luck. But anyway, as September begins to close out, our summer here in the Northern Hemisphere, it's time to crank back up this episodic series, Old, New, Borrowed, and Blue. We're going to talk about a World Series lesson for investors and a new home for an old investing truth. We're going to talk about your most improbable life and the surprisingly rule-breaker-y blueberry. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. Only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.

1:17It's the Rule Breaker Investing Podcast with Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner.

1:27Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. And I'm going to welcome myself back to the United States of America, because for the last 10 days or so, I've been traveling in London, in the UK, and then in Dublin, in Ireland. And I had so much fun with friends, new and old, speaking of something old, something new, at Investicon, the Dublin-based one-day investor conference for, I would say for Capital F, foolish investors, people like me, I hope you too, people playing the long game, people who believe picking stocks is a worthy discipline, you can do better than the averages and sharing information with each other as to where the world's headed and what might be a good stock pick.

2:08So Investicon was so much fun. I want to thank in particular Emmett Savage. I was honored to have him as my interviewer. As we spent 45 minutes together in front of the audience. There was a fun panel. The entire event was exquisite from start to finish. It was at an old pub in Dublin, and I just, I loved it. So thank you again to the Investicon crew, to My Wall Street, which is the company behind Investicon. Thank you for the invitation, and if you're a college football fan, you might know that I went to the University of North Carolina, and they played a football game in Dublin a couple days later, so I hung around to watch that, and wow, my team actually won for once.

2:47So this was a delightful time. 10 days in August spent in the UK and Ireland. And yeah, I'm just back now. I think I got like three hours of sleep last night because yeah, I'm not awesome at adjusting my hours when I take planes over and back long distances. Maybe you are. And if you have a tip, by the way, for me, our mailbag is rbi at fool.com. That's the Rule Breaker Investing mailbag. There are five Wednesdays here in September and the fifth Wednesday will be your mailbag. So if you find yourself moved by anything we talk about, old, new, borrowed blue this episode, if you have a tip on better ways to handle long distance flights, I mean, it wasn't a big problem for me, but I find I never really can get a sound night's sleep the first couple of nights in either direction.

3:33RBI at fool.com. I just mentioned September. Yeah, five Wednesdays. One of them will be the Market Cap Game Show. So I'm certainly excited about the Market Cap Game Show as I always am. in a few weeks. Welcome two more challengers to next year's Final Four. I also want to mention next week's podcast. We'll be looking back 10 years later at five low-risk stocks for the year ahead. So one of those, let's see how StockPix 10 years ago did as of next week. I'll have the updated numbers, stories, and lessons as always. You know, one thing I love about Rule Breaker Investing is I think we're playing like the only game out there.

4:10I'm not sure of any other podcasts that are reviewing live picks made on that podcast 10 years later. In fact, if you know of one, I'd love to meet them. We should have them on this podcast, rbi at fool.com. All right, old, new, borrowed, and blue. And we're going to start, of course, with old. I recently came across this essay, something that I'd shared with Motley Fool Stock Advisor members 17 years ago. And it read like yesterday. And I just thought it makes such a good point. It's a timeless point, one that could be made in any given year. So I'm warming this one back out of cold storage as I bring you the opener to the April 2009 issue of Motley Fool Stock Advisor.

4:56And I wrote the following. On baseball's opening day of 2008, the Philadelphia Phillies opened at home before a sellout crowd, gave up five runs in the ninth inning and lost 11-6. The next game, again before their home fans, they couldn't muster a single run, and they lost 1-0. Those two losses were to none other than the Washington Nationals, the single worst team, as it turned out, in Major League Baseball that year. After dropping two out of three to the Nats, the Phillies went on again to lose two out of three to another 2008 loser, the Cincinnati Reds, six games, four losses, against what was, in retrospect, witheringly inept competition.

5:48Imagine the fan who, after watching his first six Philadelphia Phillies baseball games that year, canceled his season tickets. They're not getting it done. I've had enough of this. I quit. The Philadelphia Phillies went on to win 92 games, won the National League East, coasted through both of their postseason playoff series, and then took the World Series championship rather easily, four out of five, from the Tampa Bay Rays. But back to the fickle fan. His mistake? From too small a sample size of results, he arrived too quickly and firmly at a thoroughly wrong judgment. To the many new Motley Fool Stock Advisor members joining us here in 2009, I want to make sure at the outset that you approach our service properly in both mind and deed.

6:41You've joined our service in order to make a long-term commitment to buying superior stocks. The best way to use this tool is therefore frequently and often. If you only dip your toe in a little bit here and there, you risk making the same mistake of the Phillies' so-called fan. And here's why. Stock Advisor member Spurly Jinx, that was his screen name, Jason, is a bioinformatics scientist keenly interested in investing who claims, in his own words, and I quote, a habit of overanalyzing things. He recently posted a statistical study of this service on our discussion boards. He drew sets of stocks at random from our scorecard in different portfolio sizes ranging from 5 stocks to 70 stocks and simulated each increment 10 ,000 times.

7:37He discovered that if you buy 5 random stocks off our scorecard, you will beat the market 71 % of the time. If you buy 10 random scorecard stocks, you will beat the market 83 % of the time. And if you buy 20 completely random Motley Fool Stock Advisor stocks, you beat the market 92 % of the time. And those who've bought 50? I know you're out there. You beat the market using this service in excess of 99 % of the time. This issue kicks off our eighth year of Motley Fool Stock Advisor. At 24 picks per year over seven years, we've now selected more stocks, 168, than a Major League Baseball team plays games in its regular season, 162.

8:31We're certainly not claiming any world championships, but we will point out that each of those 168 picks averages beating the market by 30.3 percentage points. And who's going to get more from Motley Fool's stock advisor? The dabbler who only attends a few ballgames or the true season ticket holder? Both in terms of prosperity and peace of mind, it is the latter. 10 ,000 times over. Welcome to our ballgame, play ball. Now, what I still like about that piece, it's now 17 years later, is the reminder that a good process deserves a sufficient sample size. Stock Advisor was already seven years old when I wrote that.

9:21We'd made, as I mentioned, 168 recommendations. And yet, any individual member could still turn a large body of evidence into a tiny personal experiment by just buying two or three of the stocks and deciding whether in their minds this whole motley fool thing works or not. Six games don't make a baseball season. A handful of stocks don't make an investing career. Give a proven process enough at-bats to let your own experience of it become statistically meaningful. And before we move on to something new, I do hasten to point out, when was that written exactly, that essay? It was the spring of 2009.

10:06So just to give a full context for you now here in 2026, it was written and published to Stock Advisor members in April 2009. The stock market had peaked in October 2007. At the time this piece was published, investors and our members had experienced the worst bear market of my investing lifetime. This piece was written at the bottom. So I wasn't writing, you know, give the process enough at bats during an easy bull market. I was welcoming Stock Advisor members after they just watched one of the most brutal collapses in modern market history. And I was telling them in effect, don't judge the whole season by the terrible stretch you've just lived through.

10:54something old. All right, well, on to something new. Something new. Well, I'm thinking right now about RuleBreakerInvesting.com. That was the website launched in conjunction with my book a year ago. So that site, which I'm going to mention a little bit about in a sec, is still new in my mind since it was released less than a year ago as my book came out. I want to tell you about a few things on that site, including what I'll be sharing with you briefly. First of all, in support of Rule Breaker Investing, there is a free downloadable bonus chapter to the book, which you can obtain at that site, rulebreakerinvesting.com.

11:32There's also a free PDF guide if you're part of an investment club and you want to bring a little bit of Rule Breaker religion to the rest of your investment club members. Well, we've got you covered with the Rule Breaker Investing Club Guide for club discussions around the book. of particular interest to podcast listeners. That would mean you if you're hearing me. We've taken some pains to pull back many of the episodic series and order them one after another. For example, this podcast, as you know, is Old New Borrowed Blue, Volume 11. So an easy way to find Volumes 1 through 10 is at rulebreakerinvesting.com under the podcast tab.

12:11And whether we're talking about my authors in August interviews or pet peeves or pet perks or mental tips, tricks, and life hacks, or yeah, sure, old, new, borrowed, and blue. They are all arranged and curated right at that site. And while my regular listeners may have already heard some of those and you feel like you don't need to go back and revisit, although it's an easy way to find something you'd like to revisit, I think it's very effective for recommending to new people in your life, people who are starting to show interest in the stock market, people who want to know what investing actually means, where the word comes from, and how to break the rules.

12:46And so I want to thank at The Motley Fool, Brian Richards, my captain of all things Rule Breaker, for the effort that he and our team have made to take this podcast and out of the regular flow of just one after another that dropped below the fold after a certain number of episodes, whether on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, etc., to instead have them sitting there living, breathing a library of some of our best episodes. I'll also mention that we just added a section there called Signature Episodes, which you'll see at RuleBreakerInvesting.com under the podcast tab. And those would be like six or seven of my very favorite episodes of all.

13:22So if there's a greatest hits now in our 12th year of this podcast, well, those are conveniently arranged under the Signature Episodes. So a little bit then about RuleBreakerInvesting.com. Now, something else that's there for you are 11 blogs. blogs I decided in advance of my book being published that I would blog and I made a point of making every one of the blogs short I remember my editor Craig Pierce at Harriman House my publisher for the book when I first got to know Craig he said David he's British said David you know what you know what people like and I said Craig what do people like and he said they like short books and I said I also like short books Craig many people like short books he's like Exactly.

14:06So let's write a short book, which is what I tried to do for my final stock market book, Rule Breaker Investing. And in support of that, I decided I'd write some short blogs, 350 words each. In fact, exactly 350 words because I have fun sometimes with math and words. But each of those blogs is right there for you. And I'm going to share one right now with you. Again, a short blog for something new. It's one of my cardinal points. In fact, I dedicated a portion of chapter five in my book, Habit No. 5, 5 % Max Initial Position, one of our six habits for the Rule Breaker Investor. And in the book itself, I dedicated a short section to this very point, although these words are original for this blog.

14:50Let's get started without further ado. Stocks always go down faster, dot, dot, dot. Stocks always go down faster than they go up. but they always go up more than they go down. Today's thought, too long for a gravestone, is one of my epitaph prospects. It starts, stocks always go down faster than they go up. Whether in a day, like October 19th, 1987, or a month, the COVID crash of March 2020, market drops happen fast with our instincts toward loss avoidance we tend to panic out of things by contrast bullishness or the persistent willingness of lots of people to propel a stock upward isn't triggered by single events we need evidence to build over time and so stocks go down faster than they go up.

15:51But then there's the second part. They always go up more than they go down. Look at any graph of the American or global markets over time, and the line runs lower left to upper right. The longer your view, the bigger the mountain. And that is the stock market's truth. Not over the last year, perhaps, or the next, or some era, cherry-picked by a market bear. That is the market's truth over the period that matters, the long term. Your lifetime. Yes, stocks go down. The average bear market studies show lasts about 18 months, usually a very unfun 18 months. But two years in three, the market rises.

16:38One year in three, it declines. you do the math and play it forward. That's why the average bull market lasts for years. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, and I quote, if you can keep two opposed truths in your mind at the same time, that's genius. End quote. Today's food for thought bolded in my first two lines at the top asks each of us with Fitzgerald to show some genius. The best way most of us are going to make the most money in our lives is to invest in the stock market, leave it in the market, and add more as we save going forward. That's just as true today as 50 or 100 years ago. Stocks always go down faster than they go up, but they always go up more than they go down.

17:33And there you have it. As I mentioned, exactly 350 words. Doesn't take too long to read them something new this week. Even if the central thought, well, isn't really new at all. In fact, maybe that's part of what I like about writing these blogs. I'm not necessarily trying to invent a new investing principle every 350 words. Some ideas deserve to be encountered again in a different form at a different moment in our lives. So stocks always go down faster than they go up, but they always go up more than they go down, is one of those for me. The first half helps us understand why investing can feel so bad sometimes.

18:13And the second reminds us why we keep doing it anyway. Well, that is one of 11 blogs at rulebreakerinvesting.com. If you'd like to read one to 10 of the others, they're all there for you. You know, I've never been a blogger per se, but I've sometimes thought it might be fun to write short pieces recurringly here and again. In a lot of ways, this podcast is my opportunity to create on a weekly basis, and I have, in fact, done it every week going back to July 2015, so it's a regular rhythm for me, but I always think of myself as a writer first, and so it's a pleasure to share those 11 blogs with you if you find yourself interested in them.

18:54And before we move on to something borrowed, There's a fun connection to new and old here, since we've just covered something old and new. Your new says, basically, what we just talked about, give the market enough time. But something old, a few minutes ago, said, in effect, give your strategy enough attempts, shots on goal, if you will, swings at the batter's plate. So both of them are warnings against allowing a small sample, whether a frighteningly short period of market history or just your first handful of stock picks. I'm warning you against dictating a long term conclusion from smaller sample sizes.

19:41Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade Electrolytes.

19:59Let's move on now to something borrowed. It's never hard for me to borrow from Wired co-founder, futurist, writer, genuinely good human being, all the above, Kevin Kelly, who, by the way, most recently appeared on this podcast just earlier this year, and I totally recommend you go back and listen to that. But in that podcast, I mentioned that Kevin does blog. He blogs, I'd say, every seven or 10 days. There's not a regular date or time, but every one of his essays I find extremely compelling. And while I'm not going to share one of his essays here, it's his work after all, I'm definitely going to quote liberally from some of the passages that really have helped me think about how to live a better life.

20:42And that's why I want to share something borrowed with you through his essay, Your Most Improbable Life. Now, this is a free essay. If you go on Substack or just Google Your Most Improbable Life, Kevin Kelly, you can read the essay in full. It's a little bit longer than 350 words, but it's not a long essay. It made a huge impression on me when I first read it some months ago, and that's why I want to borrow it and share it with you this week. The first paragraph goes like this. Your life's goal should be to become the most improbable person you can be. Your path, your character, your life should be the most unlikely, the most unexpected, the least predictable version you can make.

21:27Improbable lives have fewer competitors, more unique rewards, and are harder to replace with AIs since AIs run on the predictable. This is true whether you favor traditional humanist directions or work on a frontier. So he goes on to talk more about that. In fact, he addresses entropy, and physicists generally understand entropy as the final state of all things. Everything tends toward entropy, and that would be some combination of disorder, but also inertia, stasis. Everything is slowing down and wanting not to be organized. And as Kevin says in the essay, that is predictable. Entropy is predictable.

22:12He then goes on and I quote, every single individual creature alive on this planet is highly unlikely compared to the empty vastness of the universe. As humans, we have added yet more complexity into the environment by inventing technology, opening up immense new regions of possibilities and countless new ways to surprise the past. Every year, we collectively make it easier and easier to make something new that the universe has never seen before, not just on Earth, but in the universe. We are complex enough that our life will never be repeated nor anticipated on any planet, in any galaxy, in any part of the universe.

22:58No matter what you do, the sum of your life is unique and unrepeatable. End quote. And he talks more about the improbability of it all. He reminds us that when the Big Bang banged its way forward about 14 billion years ago, you just think about all of those atoms shooting off of the Big Bang, and a lot of them are hydrogen atoms just in big clouds. And if you just think somehow all of that conspired 14 billion years later, for you to be who you are, standing, sitting, jogging, whatever you're doing during this podcast, those atoms found their way into you and to me and into this world that we've helped create together it is so incredibly improbable to think about where those atoms started and how they've ended up where they are today and improbable of course in the most beautiful sense of the word and then in his essay kelly goes on to say but it can be even more improbable he writes quote the authentic you.

24:05Your particular mix of talents, native abilities, personal inclinations, genetic limits, life experiences, and ambitious desires points to a mixture that is distinctly unique, if it is allowed to blossom. The further you move in that direction, the more you like you become. And he closes with three implications of, again, your most improbable life, the title of the essay, three implications if you want to embrace this thinking and become the most amazing you. First, and I'll quote him directly here to close, quote, the more you-ish you become, the less competition you have because you're occupying your own niche.

24:59Less competition means you don't have to be in a race. You can relax and focus on your strengths. You have the space to become even more you and even less likely. Second, the more you occupy a category of one, the easiest it is for you to appreciate this trait in others. It becomes easier to see past the conventional, to identify authenticity, and to encourage the improbable in others. For some people that makes them great friends and mentors. For others, this makes them good in backing and investing in the work of others on their way to being improbable. Finally, third, the less predictable you are, the less likely you are to be replaced by AIs.

25:53Machines are efficient, and they are powered by the predictable. Current LLMs are trained to generate the most predictable solution. So far, they're not very good at duplicating what a creative, one-of-a-kind improbable human can produce. To distance yourself from the machines, aim to be as improbable as you can be. And that's where your most improbable life leaves off. I'm going to mention our mailbag again because I really feel like this is something to think more deeply about. So if you have a story, a reflection, a challenge, anything about your most improbable life, hey, maybe you have something about something old or something new too.

26:39I encourage you to remember rbi at fool.com. The date was February 4th of this year. The title of the podcast, Let's Talk About the Future in 2026 with Kevin Kelly. That was Kevin joining us seven months ago, most recently his third appearance on this podcast. And before we move on to something blue, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that I pay for Kevin's essays over Substack. I don't think I pay any other blogger anywhere, and I'm generally somebody who looks for free content on the internet. I bet I'm not the only one, but with joy and with no elbow twisting, I freely choose to pay Kevin for his wonderful, thoughtful, amazing, futuristic, heartfelt, and authentic, honest words that pop up every seven or ten days in my inbox.

27:27And I completely recommend the same to you. Almost every one of those essays I've saved and put somewhere in my second brain, finding a place somewhere in my digital life where I want to store it. so I can come back and see it again later when it matters again to me. I am a huge fanboy of Kevin Kelly. I think you already know that if you're a regular listener. If you're just hearing all this for the first time, take a look. All right, something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. And we're going to keep this simple this time. Blueberries. Yeah, blueberries. Blueberries are awesome.

28:04I just want to state a few things, facts, about blueberries for something blue. First of all, yeah, they're genuinely blue. And that's rarer in nature than you may think. So blueberries are actually blue. Number two, everybody knows this, I think, but they're nutritional overachievers. Did the math here. A cup is only about 84 calories with roughly 3.6 grams of fiber and a meaningful dose. of both vitamin C and vitamin K. They're also rich in anthocyanins and other polyphenols. You don't need to overindulge in them, but I try to have a little cup of them every morning. They are a true superfood.

28:52They're simply a very nutritious whole fruit. So reason number two for something blue, of course, the superfood status here. Number three, this one to my fellow North Americans. They're deeply North American. While blueberries grew here, long before any Europeans arrived, indigenous peoples, the original Americans ate, preserved, and used them extensively. So, murica. Number four, they're one of the few foods that work almost everywhere. Think about it. Fresh? Sure, but frozen. Pancakes? Yeah, but also muffins. Oh, and let's not forget pie and yogurt, smoothies, of course, salad, jam, or just straight out of your hand.