Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - Amazon's Surprising Rise to the Top

Episode Date: July 24, 2015

Amazon.com soars after big earnings. And Chipotle, Starbucks, and UnderArmour get in on the party as well. Our analysts tackle those stories and debate the future of McDonald's. Plus, behavioral econo...mist Dan Ariely talks about his new book, Irrationally Yours: On Missing Socks, Pickup Lines, and Other Existential Puzzles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:49 It's the Motley Fool Money radio show. I'm Chris Hill and joining me in studio this week from Million Dollar Portfolio, Jason Moser and Matt Argesinger. and from Motley Fool Deep Value, Ron Gross. Good to see you, as always, gentlemen. Ron Gross. Hey! Thank you, too. Earningspalooza rolls on this week. Bestselling author Dan Ariely is our guest. And as always, we will give you an inside look at the stocks on our radar. But we begin with the new king of retail, and that is Amazon. Second quarter
Starting point is 00:01:13 sales rose 20%, and the company surprised everyone by delivering a profit when Wall Street was expecting a loss. And, Matty, the stock was up big on Friday, and it is now bigger than Walmart. Story of the year so far for me in 2015, that Amazon's market cap is now bigger than Walmart's. I think a lot of us around the table probably predicted that would happen eventually. I bet we didn't predict it would happen this fast. I mean, it's been remarkable. And the quarter was great. Sales were up 20%, really beating the street estimates and Amazon's own ranges. And I know they had a surprise profit, but for me, it's really about the operating cash flow. Up 69% to $9 billion over the last 12 months.
Starting point is 00:01:53 So, anyone who says Amazon's not really a profitable company, just wait. Look at the operating cash flow. Wait until they really stop spending in the years to come. It's going to be massive. And of course, another big story was Amazon Web Services. $1.8 billion in revenue there, up 81%, with a 21% operating margin. Huge business there as well. O' They took guidance at all? Did they ever talk about the future? Did they give you anything to go by? They've given a range for the third quarter that's higher than the consensus estimate, but it's not anything out of the Historically, a tight-lipped company.
Starting point is 00:02:24 Yeah, that was on the call. They had more and more questions about AWS, because just last quarter they started breaking those numbers out. And they're still very tight-lipped. They don't go too into the weeds there. It's just like, yep, it's doing well, we're cutting prices. I think it was 49 price cuts now. And what that does, it just brings more customers in the door. It teaches them what their customers need, so they can make the product better. And they also, talking about the efficiencies they're realizing with Amazon Web Services, Amazon is one of Amazon Web Services' biggest customers, so it's its own customer. So that's just a pretty unique perspective there.
Starting point is 00:02:57 Yeah, and still no data on Prime members, but most estimates out there have, it's over $40 million. We know those Prime members were spending more on average. But gosh, it's been a remarkable two decades for Amazon. I'm happy to say we own it in a million dollar portfolio, thanks Ron and the prior team. But also, it's owned in all five missions in our SuperNova service, including my Odyssey One portfolio, where it's always been helpful. O' Even I own it, Mr. Value Guy. Oh, look at this! O' As you said, they don't really break out a lot of information on Prime memberships.
Starting point is 00:03:27 We had Prime Day recently, and we're going to see those results more in the next quarter. They did tip their hand just a little bit. The CFO was saying on the call, we're thrilled. He used the word thrilled with the results of Prime Day. Yeah, and I think the estimate was that it was three times the average sales that they did for Prime on a day like that. I wasn't impressed, personally. I went in to try to get some bargains, and I wasn't thrilled with what they were offering. So, I think what really was the key for them was, when they were selling Kindles
Starting point is 00:03:54 and Fire TV sticks and the Fire TV boxes, those things got sucked up so fast, and then you had waiting lists. So, there were a lot of items that people wanted that they couldn't get. And then from there, you're seeing all these obscure third-party sales. And to their credit, their third-party partners were really, really happy with the results, too. I've seen some estimates ranging around $1.5 billion pulled in that day. And Amazon, as they always do, they try things like this, they'll get it right eventually. There's no reason they can't roll something like this out once a quarter or once a month. It's so easy for them to do. I think it's a great new thing for the business.
Starting point is 00:04:26 Shares of Apple down this week, because all Apple did in the third quarter was sell 47.5 million iPhones. Jason, nearly $11 billion in profit in just three months. I guess it's time to fire Tim Cook. Well, the analysts were expecting $48.8 million. They missed estimates there. It's all an expectations game. To their credit, the reason why the market reacted the way the market reacted is because Apple is still primarily a phone story. 65-70% of their sales come from those phones. The watch was garnering all these headlines over the past quarter. We really didn't get much data in regard to how many watches they sold. You can extrapolate
Starting point is 00:05:10 some data from the other devices segment. Maybe they sold somewhere between two and three million. I think the concern is, there's certainly some doubt that that's going to be the next big product. And that's going to be something they need to come up with at some point, is that next big product. Because as it stands, right now this is a phone company, and they are going to have to continue really nailing it on that phone. It is a phone company with $200 billion in cash, man. Yes. Look, Apple's in a great position. By all accounts, the stock price is cheap based on the phenomenal growth. I think with Apple, it's going to become a perception story.
Starting point is 00:05:46 If the watch is a failure, and if the perception out there is that they can come up with another killer product, then you have to start saying, it is a phone company, and eventually, replacement cycles get longer, cheaper competition comes in. How much of a driver can that be for growth in the future? I do expect Apple's growth to slow down. There's also the question as far as how well the music product will do. That's going to be really interesting to see over the course of the next year, how many people really adopt it. There are a lot of streaming players out there already. Spotify, Pandora, to name a couple. I think people are very used to those apps that they're using. From
Starting point is 00:06:20 what I've seen, Apple's music app looked really noisy and pretty confusing. Yeah. I agree with what Matty said. You'll see growth slowing. But I think the The good thing about the stock is that you really don't need to see high growth here to make this stock look attractive. And if the stock continues to be weak, I think investors really need to ... I think that's a nice core holding for years to come. I'd love to see them raise that dividend. I mean, double it. Just keep people in. Sure, I'll take it. You'll take that? You'll take a double? I'll take it.
Starting point is 00:06:47 That's big of you. Second quarter profits for Comcast rose 7%. It is America's largest cable provider, Ron, but Universal Pictures really does seem to be getting a lot of credit for these results. I must be living under a rock. Do you know Jurassic World is the third on the list of the biggest box office hits behind Avatar and Titanic? I did, but I'm kind of a geek about those things. I had no idea. I like what I saw here. For the first time ever, they have more high-speed internet customers than they do cable TV subscribers, only by a small margin. Obviously
Starting point is 00:07:18 very important in this new world we're moving toward, too. They have this new $15 a month service called Stream, a broadband video service, trying to get into the new world, trying to attract the customer segment that no longer wants traditional cable, wants streaming video over the internet. They realize they have to move more and more to that, and I think they are doing so. As you said, the movies continue to do well. Theme parks continue to do well. Business services had a strong quarter. The TV networks, I guess, a little bit of softness there. NBC, CNBC, USA, those folks. Not as strong as the rest of the business, but overall I think the quarter looked nice. But they seem to be taking a page
Starting point is 00:07:59 from the Disney playbook where it's, we've got the movies that we can turn into rides at the theme parks and sell more Minion products. And let's not forget Pitch Perfect 2. Oh my God, good stuff. So, the first one, we bought the movie for our daughters and I had not seen it, I watched it with them the other night. They've watched it, I think, 80 times a week. O' A million times, yeah. You purchased the movie, though. We did. We bought it from Amazon. O' Wow.
Starting point is 00:08:22 I mean, the digital copies. O' Got it, got it. We can stream it whenever we want. O' Starbucks' third quarter results were arguably the best in company history. Nearly $5 billion in revenue, Matty. Customer traffic was up. I mean, this was a pretty stellar quarter. I know. The one thing about Starbucks is, we always keep thinking about Starbucks as a pretty mature concept, especially in North America. But look at this. Same-store
Starting point is 00:08:45 sales in the Americas, which is roughly 90% U.S., up 8%. Customer traffic, you said, up 4%. Average ticket size, up 4%. A lot of this is people saying that it's people buying a beverage, but then also buying food, because they've got a lot of great new food options. But growth was great elsewhere, too. China and Asia-Pacific, up 11%, up 3% in Europe. If the dollar wasn't as strong, those numbers would have been a lot higher. They're going to raise prices on some drinks in the future quarter. I mean, we know Starbucks has tremendous pricing power, I don't expect that to hurt the traffic at all. And they just signed a new distribution agreement with PepsiCo to sell some of their prepared beverages in Latin
Starting point is 00:09:22 America. The Starbucks brand continues to go across the rest of the world at a tremendous pace and I don't expect it to flag anytime soon. For me, Starbucks represents the classic value investor blunder, which is not understanding how many years and for how long a wonderful company can continue to grow and compound results. And if you fail to understand that, you'll never think a stock like Starbucks looks cheap. But those people that can look out further and look a little bit outside the box, not even a lot, just a bit, can own a wonderful company like Starbucks for years. O' So well said, Ron. So well said.
Starting point is 00:09:57 Visa's third quarter profit rose 25%. Shares hit a new all-time high this week. Same sort of thing, Ron. Any way you look at it, this is a really big quarter for Visa. Yeah. Beat expectations. Profits up 25%. There's a little bit of noise in there with some adjustments. If you strip those out, I was looking at it, maybe 17% increase in profits on the operating line. Still really strong. Revenue is up 12% about. Payment volume is up 11%. That's the big number you look at with Visa. That's a nice number. They raised guidance. A lot of people are now buzzing about that they may acquire Visa Europe, which in 2007, split off from the company before Visa went public, Europe actually has a put
Starting point is 00:10:41 option to compel Visa to acquire the company, and that would be quite a big transaction. We're looking at perhaps $20 billion, and they say by the end of October, we should have some resolution on that. Do you think that's a good move, if only for what we've seen out of the EU's economy over the last couple of years? From everything I'm hearing about what they're saying, they would love to bring them back into the fold, and it would be really strong for the business. I've seen just some preliminary numbers of what it would look like. I think it would be definitely a good move, although expensive. Five years ago, some on Wall Street laughed when Under Armour announced it was getting
Starting point is 00:11:18 into the footwear business. Up next, we'll check in and see who's laughing now. You're listening to Motley Fool Money. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. Chris Hill here in studio with Jason Moser, Matt Argesinger and Ron Gross. Under Armour's second quarter profits came in higher than expected. The company also raised guidance for the full fiscal year. Jason, that is the one-two punch you love to see when you own a company. I'd actually throw maybe a third punch in there. Who knows? I think you keyed in on something there five years ago, people laughing about Under Armour becoming the next great brand. I want to read you a quote that
Starting point is 00:11:57 Kevin Plank rattled off here during the earnings call. He says, and I quote, the mission here is to be the next great global brand, and you're going to see us fight, crawl, and scratch, and do everything we can to make that happen, end quote. That's all you need to know. That's all you need to know about this company. I mean, they are going to do whatever it takes to become the next great global brand, and all signs point toward success. I mean, five years ago, people were laughing about I'm going to get into footwear. Well, footwear just brought in 40% growth this quarter. Brought in, I think, about $154 million. They went from a laughing stock to actually a leader
Starting point is 00:12:34 in that space in a very short amount of time. I'm excited to see how they pursued the Connected Fitness initiative there, the purchases they made of Endomundo and MyFitnessApp and all that. That, I think, they're going to garner a lot of data over time, which will help them in learning more about what their customers want, what they need. They'll develop new product lines. I think we'll see them become more and more of a lifestyle brand. I've said it a million times, I see all of the kids at my kids' school wearing Under Armour. This is like the Nike for the next generation. I can't be more excited about holding this company and having it as a recommendation in a million-dollar portfolio.
Starting point is 00:13:13 Well, and sort of like a couple of other companies we've talked about already so far in the show, you look across every division. This is still, first and foremost, an apparel company, apparel up 23%. Yeah, and direct-to-consumer growth, 33%, and that now represented 32% of overall sales, so they're doing really well on the e-commerce front as well. So, just tackling it from every direction. Shares of ProtoLabs up more than 15% this week after second quarter profits came in higher than expected. Help me out, Matty, I thought 3D printing companies were having a rough go of it. They certainly are, but I think we've
Starting point is 00:13:47 said in the past, that ProLabs is a great way, if you like the 3D printing space, it's a great way to play it, because they're really on the service side. They're not in the business of making printers and selling printers, which a lot of the other companies are. But I love this company. It's a small-cap company that we also own a million-dollar portfolio. The numbers I like to look at, they served about 11,800 product developers in the quarter. That's 28% growth year-over-year. Each of those product developers is spending more each quarter with the company. That's huge. Their revenue in Europe was up 12%. If it wasn't for a stronger dollar, revenue there would have been up 33%. Although this is a
Starting point is 00:14:22 small company based in Minnesota and North Carolina, they have a really significant presence overseas and in Europe. I just love what Vickie Holt is doing with this company. They're investing in a lot of new areas, always offering more services to product developers, including 3D printing. It's an exciting space. Do you think it's an acquisition candidate five years from now? Is it still a stand-alone I think it's standalone, because I have trouble fitting them inside any business. There are large manufacturing companies that do what ProLabs does, but not at the level ... ProLabs is small enough where they can still serve the mom-and-pop shop, or the individual
Starting point is 00:14:54 product developer, versus Hewlett Packard, or other companies, or IBM, or design companies that are doing big manufacturing projects, 3M. So, I do think they're standalone. Shares of McDonald's down a bit this week, after global same-store sales fell 0.7% in the second quarter. But, Ron, fear not, because CEO Steve Easterbrook said they're going to bounce back in Q3. Yeah, I've heard that. You're giving them benefit? Well, I think it's a bold call when you consider how sales, particularly here in the U.S., have been dropping quarter after quarter for nearly two years.
Starting point is 00:15:27 What's the alternative there? Just to come out and say, yep, it's hopeless calls, just move along, nothing to see here. This is the same company that revamped the Hamburglar in an attempt to revive business. So the quarter, not great. Revenue down 9.5%. U.S. AIM store sales down 2%. Seven quarters of U.S. AIM store sales declined in a row. But as you say, the guidance from CEO Steve Easterbrook is somewhat more rosy. He's got a reorg plan. There's management shuffles. There's cutting costs. There's returning cash to shareholders. There's changing its menu time and time again, trying to get it right. They now have that lovely artisan chicken
Starting point is 00:16:04 sandwich. I know you can't wait to sink your teeth into maybe a premium sirloin burger. What could be better? We'll have to keep an eye on this. This is a stock that I wouldn't go near until I saw the turn. I wouldn't invest in it prior to. I'm not interested in those food items, but the all-day breakfast that they've been testing in a few locations. One of the things this week we saw, an internal memo leaking out that they're going to be rolling that out nationwide in October. We were saying this before the show, Jason, I feel like this is kind of a low bar they've got to clear here. So, if that's a hit, if they can figure out a way to up their throughput just a little
Starting point is 00:16:41 bit ... So, do I want a McGriddle at like two in the afternoon? Is that what I'm going for? It depends on what time you wake up. They're taking a cue from The Jangler. The Jangler's had a lot of success with breakfast all day. People want it. Alright. Sticking in the food industry, Chipotle's second quarter profits came in higher than expected, but same-store sales came in low. Pretty interesting what happened with this stock, Jason. Walk me through it. It was. We knew from management's guidance last quarter that comp sales were going
Starting point is 00:17:09 to be low to mid-single digits. That's what we're expecting, that's what management's expecting. They bring in comps of 4.3%. We promptly saw the stock tank, like 5% after hours. Now, this only lasted for a short while, because then during the earnings call, something was said that really turned the tide, and Chipotle just had a phenomenal following day on the market. Now, what was said was a couple of things, really, but I think the thing that really attracted a lot of attention is the fact that they are rolling out additional price increases on their steak and barbacoa items. They've rolled them out, and there are still about 40% of the stores left to go. And as Matty was referring to earlier
Starting point is 00:17:46 with Starbucks, Chipotle does have that pricing power where consumers are still going to keep on going in. The numbers bear that out. It's not like sales are falling off a cliff. So, they're rolling that price increase out, they're going to have the carnitas back in all of the stores hopefully by the early fourth quarter. When you see that, along with the fact that they're coming off such a tough comp year from last year. Think about this, 4.3% comps this year. The same quarter last year, that number was 17.3%. O' Wowza. So, at some point, you become a victim of your own success. But I think even the
Starting point is 00:18:19 market was smart to look through this and see this is a business that's still run, fired on all cylinders. O' To the point about the carnitas, someone had tweeted out a map of the United States earlier this week. I knew that this was going on in some states. There's more than 20 states where Chipotle does not have any sort of pork products going on. They don't have it at the two restaurants closest to my house, so I'll be excited when they get those back. O' I think that's, yeah, as we were talking about earlier, they're doing this
Starting point is 00:18:49 with one carnitas tied behind their back. O' Any guidance on shophouse rollouts, potential growth? All they do, they mention they'll open up an additional one, they've opened up an additional pizzeria locale, but they continue to stand on the message that the foreseeable future driver of profits will be the Chipotle namesake store, so we're just going to have to be patient, I guess. O' Alright, guys, we'll see you a little bit later in the show. Up next, a conversation with best-selling author Dan Ariely. Stay right here, you're listening to Motley Fool
Starting point is 00:19:17 Money. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Hill. How can we control our emotions when investing in the stock market? Are financial advisors a wise investment? And why do socks always get lost in the laundry? Those are just a few of the questions that bestselling author Dan Ariely tackles in his latest book, Irrationally Yours, on missing socks, pickup lines, and other existential puzzles. He is a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. Dan, welcome back. Always good to talk to you. My pleasure. Great to be back. Let's start with obviously the most important question, which is why do socks always get lost in the laundry? Okay. So of course, leaving the metaphysical reality and aliens and so on,
Starting point is 00:20:08 a big part of it ends up being a memory problem. So think about what happens with a shirt. You have a shirt when do you think about the shirt when you see it what happened with socks is we have two of them so what happened when you see one of them and not the other you think to yourself where is the other one all of a sudden it comes to mind and then you don't see the other one you say to yourself oh the the partner of this sock must have gotten lost somehow but you don't exactly remember which color socks it was or what shape and so on and then later on you find the partner And you ask yourself again, where is the other part of this pair? And you don't remember where it is, and you don't see it.
Starting point is 00:20:49 So we basically double count. So we see one representation of the sock, not the other one, and we double count the socks. By the way, as somebody who travels a lot, I started using mismatched socks. So I also discovered that if your socks just slightly mismatch, people think it's a mistake and it's somehow wrong. But if they're drastically mismatched, then it's kind of a fashion statement. So I now have just this bunch of socks. They're all colorful and different shapes and so on. I throw them into the washing machine.
Starting point is 00:21:23 Some of them I don't know where exactly they are. And then I just throw a bunch to the suitcase and it works perfectly. Warren Buffett has said one of the best things he ever sort of mastered in his journey as an investor was when he was able to master his temperament when it came to investing. How do we control our emotions, particularly when the stock market, more often than probably we would like, is a little bit of an emotional roller coaster? Yeah, so first of all, something about Warren Buffett. So in his biography, he wrote that he has a problem with eating donuts and pizzas.
Starting point is 00:22:04 So he said that he gave his kids checks for $10,000, but he didn't sign them. And he said to his kids, if you see me eating a donut or pizza, catch me in the act and I'll sign the check for you. And of course, as a consequence, they were trying to tempt him a little bit more with pizzas and donuts. But he didn't like giving money to his kids so much that this trick worked for him. And if you think about it, this is basically about setting up the conditions, the consequences, long-term consequences, so that we will not act in a way that we don't want to act. So you can sit there and you could say to yourself, I don't want to act like this. I don't want to get into emotional turmoil. I don't want to eat too much pizza and donuts.
Starting point is 00:22:48 How do I restructure the environment where I live to make it less likely that I will fall for temptation? Do I want to re-engineer the consequences? Do I want to eliminate temptation? What do I want to do? Now, in the case of investing, what baffles me is that many people go into the office. And the first thing they do is they open their browser and they look at how the stocks are doing. Now, in what world is this useful information? You could say, well, if you're a particular type of a day trader, maybe you want to know where the stocks is right now.
Starting point is 00:23:24 But for most people, what happened to the stock in the past is water under the bridge. What you care about is what's going to happen looking forward. Is this stock going to increase? Is it decrease? you might want to do some research, you might want to think about what is the future potential. But rather than starting the day by saying, okay, let me now do some research on Amazon and figure out if I think the stock is going up and down, instead people look at what happened in the past. And if good things happen, they become slightly happy.
Starting point is 00:23:54 And if bad things happen, they become extra depressed. And now they're in no capacity to go ahead and do their research in the appropriate way. So I think that the first trick is to basically say, knowing that when we look at our portfolio, we would be more unhappy than happy, and it will kind of cloud our thinking and our emotional state. Why look at it before we need this information? So that would be the first part. And then the second part, which I think Buffett has also mentioned a lot, is to think about how not to fall into the trap that everybody else is falling to. So one of the easiest things to do experiments on is bubbles. You put people in the room and you let them trade on something
Starting point is 00:24:40 and people start buying a particular option or stock or commodity and all of a sudden it goes up and up and up. And of course, at some point it fails. But getting into a situation which to get bubble is incredibly common. It happens all the time. So how do we get ourselves not to do it? How do we get ourselves to think carefully and not just be reactive, emotionally reactive to what's happening in the market, I think it is about discipline.
Starting point is 00:25:08 It's about being specific about why we're taking particular actions, why shouldn't we take particular actions, coming both with hypotheses for and hypotheses again. And this way we can tame a little bit, maybe not 100%, our irrational nature. You're listening to Motley Fool Money, talking with bestselling author Dan Ariely. His latest book is Irrationally Yours on missing socks, pickup lines, and other existential puzzles. Hearing you talk about how we should essentially focus much more on the future prospects of a business rather than let's just start looking at our stock portfolio prices on a given moment, my assumption is that that's how you manage your own money. That whether you're working with a financial advisor or you're doing it on your
Starting point is 00:25:56 own or some combination of the both, that you're someone who really tries to limit the amount of exposure he has to, say, the stock market on a given day. Is that correct? Absolutely. I think that information is useful only for making decisions. You know, this is not gossip that I'm just kind of curious about. You know, some stocks might be interesting in a gossip sense, like some football teams might be interesting in just what's going on with them. But even on the gossip sense, it's usually not the stock value, but what's happening with the company that might be interesting. But the stock value should only be used,
Starting point is 00:26:40 and you should only look at it when you want to make a decision. And different people, of course, live differently with the stock market and revise your portfolio at a different frequency. And I try to do two things. The first thing I try to do is I try to eliminate what is called the anchoring bias. And the anchoring bias is the idea that you're tied too much to your past decision, that your current decision are too much based on what you've done before. So imagine, for example, that I went into your portfolio and I sold everything you have
Starting point is 00:27:12 without any cost to you. And tomorrow you had all the cash. And then I ask you, how do you want to allocate your cash between all the things you could potentially buy? If what you're going to buy tomorrow is going to be exactly what you had yesterday, then I would say, okay, you've had a good portfolio. But if what you'll buy tomorrow is very different than what you had yesterday, I would ask you, why have you stuck with what you had yesterday? Why didn't you do it by yourself beforehand? And it's because we don't like change. We stick too much to our past behavior.
Starting point is 00:27:44 So I try to sit maybe twice a year, not more frequently than that, and say, how would I like to engineer my portfolio if I was going to do it from scratch? What would it look like? And then after I think about what I want it to look like, then I go ahead and I look at what I actually have and decide where are the gaps. And sometimes you would say, well, there's some capital gains here. I don't want them and so on. but that's that's the first good good step is just not to be a prisoner to your own past decisions and then the second thing is i almost never look if i get some new information and i think hey i know something that somebody else might not know or i have some other opinion about what will
Starting point is 00:28:28 happen in in greece that i don't think other people are thinking about it the right way you have to think that you know more than other people right in the market but but if i have something like this. And then I go in with a decision. But it's almost never the case that these decisions about what I think will happen in the future are informed by what happened to that stock in the last year. Let's stick with investing for one more question, and that is the one about the financial advisors. Because it does seem like that there are some financial advisors out there who are worth their weight in gold, but are they worth the investment? So I think there's kind of two aspects to it. So let me tell you a story. I sat next to a very
Starting point is 00:29:14 successful financial advisor, and successful, I mean, somebody who is making lots of money. And I asked him, I said, look, if you took one of your clients and you spend another hour on them a week, by how much do you think you could increase their wealth? And they said, basically nothing, right? There's no marginal contribution to increase their wealth. And then I asked him, and what would happen if you spend an hour a week with them, not to talk about their investment strategy, but to talk to them about their spending strategy, what they're spending on and what they could be spending less and how much money they could be sending to saving an investment. He said that will probably be in the 10% range, increased saving a year. Now, this I think is right.
Starting point is 00:30:01 I think financial advisors have a very hard time to increase our returns, you know, in the stock market. But what they could do, which is incredibly helpful, is to get us to think about our spending. What are we spending too much on? What are we spending not enough on? Are we actually saving enough? How should we think about the trade-offs between now and later and so on? So I think that financial advisors have been focusing for a very long time about optimizing portfolios, where in fact I think that they should be experts in the psychology of money and how to use money to be happier. And the other thing that they should do is they should be a guard between us and our emotion.
Starting point is 00:30:45 So when things go badly, they could stop us from acting against our long-term best interests. For example, when we panic and we want to sell everything. So I think that the role is people who execute a particular, you know, strategy is not worth that much. But the role in terms of helping us think about how we want to live with our money. I'll give you one kind of very strange example. It turns out that when people give money to charity, it makes them happier than they expect to be. It doesn't have to be a lot. You can buy somebody a cup of coffee.
Starting point is 00:31:24 You can give a little bit of money here and there. And if financial advisors knew that, they will tell people, hey, why don't you give X percent a year to charity, and here's a way to do it to maximize your happiness and the way you educate your kids, and so on. So I think they have a tremendous role in getting us to think about how we want to live and to live more closer to that. And if they do that, I think then they would deserve lots of money. All right.
Starting point is 00:31:51 last question, and then I'll let you go. This is a show about investing. And as you know, one of the big investments that each one of us has to make is our time. So I'm curious if there's a tip that you can offer for how any one of us can be more productive with our time and obviously get a better return on our investment of time. So we can do a whole show on time. Actually, I don't know if you know, but I had a startup that was trying to help people with time. It's a topic that I'm fascinated with, and it's actually very complex. But here's one advice, and this comes from the beautiful word called cancellation. And what cancellation is, is the joyful feeling that you have when a meeting has been canceled or anything has been canceled.
Starting point is 00:32:43 Now, what do you do with this? So imagine that the request is coming on your plate and somebody is asking you to meet them or to help them with something and so on. And the question is, should you do it or not? Well, the advice is to imagine that you've accepted that request and then a day before it was due, it was canceled. And ask yourself on a scale from zero to one, how much cancellation would you feel? And if your answer is that you would feel a very high cancellation, you're very happy that it was canceled not because of you, don't put it on your plate to start with.
Starting point is 00:33:18 You see, we're so tempted to put things on our plate, not to say no to other people, and then we have to deal with the stress of being overworked and not having time to do anything properly. But if you can, in advance, figure out what not to put on your plate, that would reduce a lot of the stress and leave us open to do the things we actually want to do. The book is Irrationally Yours on Missing Socks, Pickup Lines, and Other Existential Puzzles.
Starting point is 00:33:45 It's available everywhere. It's a great read. Dan Ariely, thank you so much for being here. As always, my pleasure. Coming up, we'll give you an inside look at the stocks on our radar. This is Motley Fool Money. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear.
Starting point is 00:34:30 Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Hill, and joining me in studio once again, Jason Moser, Matt Argesinger, and Ron Gross. Steve Broido is our man behind the glass. Also behind the glass this week, guys, a very special guest, Philip Greendyke, stopping by to visit Fool HQ here in L.A. This fall, he's heading down to Charlottesville. He's going to be going to the Darden School of Business, or, Matty, as they say back home, Darden. Darden. One of our dozens of listeners. Greeny's wicked smart. He's going to Darden.
Starting point is 00:34:58 That's right. One more story before we get to the stocks on our radar. We have talked before about how Lululemon Athletica is trying to broaden its appeal to men. The maker of high-end yoga wear unveiled its latest attempt this week, beer. Lululemon has teamed up with Stanley Park Brewing to launch Curiosity Lager, available next month in the Pacific Northwest." That is really trying to stretch the brand appeal. It sounds made up. It sounds like it's a parody. It does seem like an Onion story, doesn't it? Yeah. It's almost as bad as Starbucks' recent partnership with Lyft.
Starting point is 00:35:32 That's what it sounds like. O' It just leaves you wondering. I'm scratching my head right now. O' Who uses Lyft? I don't even know how to get ... O' There's an app for that. That's a Lululemon. It's a lager? Not like a light beer? I don't understand. I also don't get how it's, well, I'm going to try this beer. And even if you love
Starting point is 00:35:48 this new Lululemon Athletica beer, what, then you're going to go buy some yogurt? You're walking through the door to the football game, and you guys, I got a 12-pack of Lululemon! O' That's not going to work. It's a one-time thing, though. It's not like a business model, right? Everything's a one-time thing until it's a success, and then they're in the beer business. Alright, let's get to the stocks on our radar this week. Ron Gross, you're up. New stock on my radar actually comes from a Deep Value member who suggested it
Starting point is 00:36:13 to me. It's called Datalink, DTLK, a $164 million market cap company, real small, infrastructure for data centers. They're in the cloud business, nice area to be in right now. They're making acquisitions, little acquisitions because it's such a small company, but they're growing through acquisitions. Profitable, solid balance sheet, only five times EBITDA, less than two times Buck. But, this is such an incredibly crowded space, so competitive, I don't understand yet how a company this small can compete. Maybe it's an acquisition candidate, I got to dig in. O' Steve, question about DataLink? Does the name of a company affect what you think about it?
Starting point is 00:36:48 Absolutely. But that's just at first glance only, and then I come to my senses. O' All right, Matt Argersinger, what are you looking at this week? well, hey, we just saw Amazon become the biggest e-commerce company in the U.S. It already was that, but it's just passing Walmart, such a big deal. So, I always think of MercadoLibre, M-E-L-I, one of my favorite companies. I probably brought it up on the radio show several times at least. But this is the leading e-commerce company in Latin America. They're really following Amazon's playbook.
Starting point is 00:37:14 It's only a $6 billion company. eBay, I know, has it in their acquisition target. So, MercadoLibre, what do you think, Steve? Best opportunity in Latin America right now, if I'm visiting. Let's say I'm a tourist, I'm going there, what do I want to do in Latin America? O' Gosh, let's see. Why don't you take a flight on Copa Holdings, Copa America Airlines, go to Panama, hang out there, I heard it's a beautiful city, you won't get killed.
Starting point is 00:37:37 And while you're down there, do a little shopping. O' Yes. A little online shopping. O' Online shopping. Jason Moser, what are you looking at? Well, Chris, earnings season is a time of opportunism, and so I'm going to be opportunistic here and go back to the well on TripAdvisor, T-R-I-P. Earnings came out this week, and the market really, in my estimation, overreacted to a miss on the revenue side.
Starting point is 00:37:57 But we have to remember that TripAdvisor management doesn't offer quarterly guidance, so it's a bit of a guessing game for the analysts going in there. But their instant booking product is doing very well. We knew they signed a big deal with Marriott over the quarter, and then in a call it was revealed they also are partnered up with Hyatt, a Stock Advisor recommendation on David's side of the card, by the way. Average monthly users up to 375 million from $340 million a quarter ago. Steven Koffer runs this business on two-, three-, and five-year timelines. Very long-term thinker. I like that. They're going to get a new CFO in place here. The CFO there is just resigning. I still like the long-term picture here.
Starting point is 00:38:33 Steve? What is TripAdvisor doing five years from now that they're not doing today? I think you see them continue to pursue that instant booking. I think they have more and more partners, and becoming more like a Priceline, where something like a Priceline is really, they're never going to be able to become a TripAdvisor with all of its content reviews. Three stocks, Steve. You got one you like? I'd have to go with TripAdvisor. Hey-oh!
Starting point is 00:38:53 Fixed. Atta boy! Ron Gross, Jason Moser, Matt Argersinger. Guys, thanks for being here. Thank you, Chris. That's going to do it for this week's show. Our engineer is Steve Broido. Our producer is Matt Greer. I'm Chris Hill. We'll see you next week.

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