Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - Finding Rule Breakers, IRL Investing, and Making Mistakes

Episode Date: October 9, 2026

Travis Hoium, Lou Whiteman, and Rick Munarriz explore what separates exceptional long-term investments from the rest, from classic Rule Breaker traits to the enormous upside of finding a rare 10x or 100x winner. They examine how the AI era could favor deep-pocketed incumbents, while still leaving room for surprising challengers. The team also looks at Disney and the growing value of real-world experiences, tests their knowledge of investing history, and shares some painful investing mistakes. Plus, Rick and Lou put AMC Entertainment and C.H. Robinson on the radar.Travis Hoium, Lou Whiteman, and Rick Munarriz discuss: What Makes a Rule Breaker AI’s Disruption Story IRL Value Disney’s Parks Value Investing Game Stocks On Our Radar Companies discussed: Amazon (AMZN), Tesla (TSLA), Netflix (NFLX), Nvidia (NVDA), Alphabet (GOOGL), Meta Platforms (META), CoreWeave (CRWV), Walt Disney (DIS), TKO Group Holdings (TKO), Comcast (CMCSA), Live Nation Entertainment (LYV), Costco Wholesale (COST), Nintendo (NTDOY), Sony Group (SONY), Toyota Motor (TM), Altria Group (MO), Philip Morris International (PM), Coca-Cola (KO), Corning (GLW), Mattel (MAT), Hasbro (HAS), AT&T (T), Spire (SR), GE Aerospace (GE), 3M (MMM), Home Depot (HD), Boeing (BA), AMC Entertainment Holdings (AMC), C.H. Robinson Worldwide (CHRW), RXO (RXO) Host: Travis HoiumGuests: Lou Whiteman, Rick MunarrizEngineer: Bart Shannon Disclosure: Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. The Motley Fool and its affiliates (collectively, “TMF”) do not endorse, recommend, or verify the accuracy or completeness of the statements made within advertisements. TMF is not involved in the offer, sale, or solicitation of any securities advertised herein and makes no representations regarding the suitability, or risks associated with any investment opportunity presented. Investors should conduct their own due diligence and consult with legal, tax, and financial advisors before making any investment decisions. TMF assumes no responsibility for any losses or damages arising from this advertisement. We’re committed to transparency: All personal opinions in advertisements from Fools are their own. The product advertised in this episode was loaned to TMF and was returned after a test period or the product advertised in this episode was purchased by TMF. Advertiser has paid for the sponsorship of this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What makes a foolish stock? Montly Fool, Hidden Gems, investing starts now. Welcome to Motley Fool, Hidden Gems Investing. I'm Travis Holim, joined today by Lou Whiteman and Rick Minierrez. Rick, you are our resident for this week. Foolish rule breaker. Motley Fool has Hidden Gems, which Lou works on, and Rick works on rule breakers. So I wanted to talk about kind of the investing philosophy of a lot of the foolish investments

that have done extremely well over time, companies like Amazon, Tesla, Netflix, I think you're involved with. Let's go back in our time machine. And I wanted to ask you, what makes a foolish stock? What makes a rule breaker stock in your eyes? Because it does seem very different than a lot of the things that we talk about as investors, you know, price to earnings multiples, what are margins doing? What did a company beat or miss expectations? How do you think about finding rule breakers long term? Yeah, I mean, David Gardner has these six traits of a rule breaker and I won't dive into all of them, but there are a lot of the stuff you'd expect from David's kind of thinking, which is, you know, an emerging company in an emerging industry,

you want momentum, you want strong leadership, you want all these things. But then again, there's also the overvalued. The kind of thing you wouldn't expect someone to say, wait, the stock's overvalued. That's one of the six traits. But yeah, so there's some conventional and some rather non-conventional traits to a rule breaker. But it's basically finding a company that's either a disruptor or eventually will become a disruptor or so dominant that it can't be disrupted. So it's a lot of the same quality stocks that you find over to the Hidgapside, of course. It's just different ways to get there.

When you look back on those companies, what are the things that are kind of consistent between them? Is it that disruption angle? Is it, you know, that these were, this was a completely new industry and you were kind of defining what the future is going to look like and you're just riding that wave? What do you think about when you kind of think back on those big hits? Yeah, I think obviously being first is great, but again, history shows us that that's not.

It's not whoever plants the flag first, whoever plants it the firmest. I mean, before Mark Zuckerberg did Facebook, or I guess the Facebook, you know, you obviously had Friendster and MySpace, and again, eventually they just faded away. So you don't necessarily have to be the first one to think of this great idea that's never come up before. you just have to be timing also helps. Instead of standing on the shoulder of giants, sometimes you have to stand on the shoulders of failed companies, and you just happen to be lucky at the right time, but execute it well enough to the point where it takes off.

And then once that momentum is going, once it's so hard to catch up to you, that is the quintessential rule baker. If you can catch it early, great. If you wait a little while, you didn't miss too much because the ceiling's always far higher than the floor sometimes with some of these stocks early in their defined sections. Yeah, Lou, that is the thing that over 16 years or so working with the Motelik Bull seems to stand out to me, is that it's more about slugging percentage and hitting those massive, massive home runs. The 10x stock, the 100x stock, you know, hopefully we all have an Nvidia in our lifetime. But those are going to overwhelm any sort of mistakes if you're building a portfolio in this kind of way. Hopefully. Right. And yeah, you do have to find them. But if you find them, I mean, the old, um,

saw, but it's true. If you would have picked Amazon and four other dot coms in 1999, you might have gone for bankruptcies and a market success. So you can do that. I mean, the thing is, though, and the hard thing about it is, is that there are only so many Amazon's out there. It's very rare to find a company that has the ability to outgrow its own market. Most companies are confined to the world that they live in. Amazon's especially. breed. Amazon has just created new worlds and expanded into new worlds, and there's others like that. I'm not saying it's unique. But look, you can find great investments in more traditional categories that can work for a long, long time, but just kind of hits the critical mass of their industry.

And I don't know, if I find a really undervalued aerospace company, I can get a great return on that, but I don't necessarily want to hold it forever because they're unlikely to launch a cloud business. Yeah, there's not the optionality of getting into something else. So, so yeah, so it, yeah, I mean, there is no one set, one size fits all in any of this. But it's a great way to think about it is at the end of the day, I want my pile to be bigger than it was. And it really doesn't matter if that means five things went up or one thing went up a whole lot. Rick, as you look at the world today in the potential disruption that's coming from artificial intelligence, you use the word disruption. and I think looking back on, you know, what I've learned over the last 15 to 20 years,

that is really the thing that is consistent. What is so interesting with the AI build out all the AI technology that we see today is it seems very different than it did 20 years ago when the internet was growing up, when mobile came along. And the big difference is that the big companies are winning. It's almost like everybody read the innovator's dilemma and said, We're not going to let that happen again. This is a famous business book about why companies get out innovated and beaten by smaller competitors.

I kind of went through some historical examples. But you know, you look at alphabet, you look at meta, Amazon, all these companies are going, hey, if we need to bludgeon the competition with cash on our balance sheets, we're happy to do that. But we're not going to let somebody disrupt our massive cash flow business. But how do you think about this AI moment in the potential opportunities investing versus what they looked like in the Internet age? or in the smartphone age. It's definitely very different, obviously, because it takes a lot of money. Back in the old days, you know, Jeff Bezos had like a million dollars in seed money,

a quarter that came from his parents, and boom, you have the world's biggest bookstore in the mid-1990s. These things, it takes a lot of money to have this AI is an arms race, and it does require financing, which is why the largest companies are there, why the largest companies are even making chips like Amazon and Amazon and alphabet are. So it is a kind of situation where it's definitely this environment that, you know, you may think, oh, the bluest of the blue chips are the way to go for the AI play. But I think the strongest growth will come from the smaller companies that you didn't see coming.

And again, not that I have a handful of them right now. I'm just saying that based on that question, what you're asking, I think that's the way it goes. And I think especially with the disruption process, disruptors, the history of disruptors is written by the history that the companies have successfully disrupted. Most companies that try to append an industry will not. And this is a case where these are companies, the, the, largest companies, the Mac 7, all the leaders right now of AI, they were disruptors at one point. They were 20, 30 years ago, the companies that we bought in as all rule breakers and hidden gems

stocks as like, these are the stocks that some generations don't get it, but we get it back in the 90s. And now they just emerged to the point where they are this dominant force and so rich that they can fund this AI revolution. It's definitely real. It's definitely making life convenient. And while there's certainly a lot of noise and panic for some people, I don't know. think it will all work out. It's such a thing about because, yeah, the defining trait of the late 90s, in hindsight, I don't know if we really realized the time, was that distribution went to zero. Yeah.

That was what held it all together, is that, and I've used this before, but can you imagine if that guy in the Harvard dorm had, after he wrote the Facebook, had to make copies on floppy discs, put them in a cardboard box, shrink wrap it, and send them to a circuit city. Which, by the way, is how AOL grew up. Right, right, which is how everything grew up. But just the magic of just you build it once and it's almost free to just send it out all over the world. That was the core change. That's what allowed Amazon to do what they do, everyone to do what they do.

I don't know yet because it's always easier in hindsight, but in AI it does feel like that The core advantage, the core breakthrough is just having the sheer muscle to build the data center, you know, to build the compute. And if so, yeah, I don't necessarily think that it's weird that the incumbents are winning because it might just be that while there was a, the 1990s was a way to go around the system or bypass the system, really what AI is doing is kind of upending the system. from within. And so I think it's more dangerous to just say, okay, if this happened before, we have to find it again. Every one of these is different. And it could be that just the core advantage this time around plays better to the incumbents. Yeah. And you're going to find, some success stories, even in the space that you think is dominated by large players, I mean, Corweave a decade ago, it's just a bunch of, you know, traders, friends in the Northeast. They just

got together, oh, we want to crypt Ethereum. We want to mine Ethereum. That's what we're going to do. and then get in the crypto market, that market falls apart. They go, hey, we have all these, you know, Nvidia DPUs. What can we do with them? Oh, we can do movie effects or we can get on AI early. And here we are, again, a company with one of these like 1990 origin stories still making waves today. Obviously not as big as the biggest players,

but definitely some good gains if you've got CoreWeave CRWV at the right price. When we come back, I want to talk about how this translates into the real world. You're listening to Motley Cool, Hidden Jems, Investing. You just found out that your sales team is at risk of missing quota. Don't panic. Just ask Rippling AI. Since it's built on your real-time people and business data, Rippling AI can pull metrics from Rippling and Salesforce

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Choose the coffee you love with added B vitamins, like coffee plus B-12 to help support immune function, and coffee plus B-6 to keep your day moving. Or go with the flow and do. choose ginseng delight. Our new double espresso with ginseng extract. Whatever lies ahead, don't change your morning. Let your morning change you. Discover coffee plus on espresso.com. Welcome back to Motley Fool and Jim's investing. Rick, when we were prepping for this, you talked about a recent trip that you took to Central Florida and got a kind of a pulse of

what's going on in the real world. And I thought it was interesting because we talk a lot on the show about what's going on with artificial intelligence and the AI build out, a company, what companies are introducing. That's what the market cares about today. But if we're looking for opportunities over the next five to ten years, it might actually be the real world that's going to be more important. So what's stuck out to you looking at how busy theme parks are, you know, what people are doing for entertainment and what they're spending?

Yeah, so, I mean, I was here for three weeks, got back over the week, this past weekend. So, yeah, late September, early October. this is a time of year just about two decades ago, maybe even a decade ago, where it was basically schools are back in, so the parks are empty, and it's just conventions. A lot of conventions come down in the October area to the Great Orlando area, and that's pretty much it. Very different now. It seems like sometimes the crowds are busy now in the fall than in the summer, possibly heat-induced in the summer, but specifically to the fall here in the early fall, it has been, I mean, Disney World was wall to wall most of the days I was there.

And again, this was not, there was not a school holiday or anything. It was just a lot of people there now. And it's not that Disney's gotten cheap. It was also at Universal Studios, Legoland, SeaWorld. So I patronize all the area of parks. And while the other parks, small parks are doing as well, Disney's clearly doing well. And again, this is October.

They have these great Halloween events where they close the park at 6 p.m. So you go into the Magic Kingdom and you have to lead by 6 p.m. and in comes a new crowd. So you're basically doubling up on the tickets, just as Universal Studios has done in Orlando and Hollywood for 35 years. They have this Halloween horror nights where it's more of a very different hardcore experience

where there's 8, 10, haunted houses that are not for the squeamish that you go and you walk through and stuff like that. And they become these massive crowd magnets that you wouldn't expect in October, but great for the businesses. There is a lot of people still out there, even in this economy that is, you know, topsy-turvy, spending big money to experience these in real-life

situations, real-life experiences. Yeah, Lou, it does seem like the IRL events have done extremely well. And it's, it's almost like that is what's constrained at this point. There's only so many people that can get into Disney World as the example here or a concert, another stock that I've been looking at with, you know, a little bit of intrigue as a company like TKO group. You know, so holding events the power that you have with selling rights and things like that. So that seems like something, you know, maybe there's opportunities here for these companies that, by the way, there's also a physical infrastructure piece that you're not just going to go out and build a new Disney world in the next two years.

No, you're not. I think this sort of relates to what we've seen since the pandemic with just kind of experiences versus stuff. I mean, it's what has carried the bookings of the world. The airlines have done really well. Everybody, people are just going out and doing things. To me, and look, I don't know this as well, but to me, I can't believe that this is new. When you have so many assets that are just so much fixed costs, I mean, even my dumb airlines

knew that, you know, the only way to make money is to run them as hard as you can and as much as you can. So I think good that they're doing this and good, like all of these things that, yes, I think there is demand for non-virtual events, experiences. But, yeah, shame on them for not doing this soon. Yeah, Rick, the other thing that always strikes me, especially with a company like Disney, I think they're a great example here is, you know, if you look back through their history, they did not monetize particularly well up until I think it was Eisner came in, right, in the early 80s, maybe late 70s. He really started to increase those ticket prices. But, you know, I was there in the spring. And it's so interesting to see how they're able to monetize extremely well. And then somehow not make you feel all that terrible. about it, even though something that you're buying maybe an extra $300, $400 for your family, you know, well, time and money. I'm willing to pay that to get, you know, extra rides and stuff. But they do seem like they have perfected that, like Lou said, with the airlines and the same thing, right?

It stinks that you have to pay extra money to sit with your kids on an airplane, but it is a cost that people are willing to pay. Yeah, absolutely. You see this happen. Even, I mean, again, if you walk into Disney World, just about every attraction has two lines. There's what they call the standby, which is just everybody. And then there's the lightning lane. It used to be called the FastPass back in the day. And like, you know, 15 years ago, Fast Fast was free. You just would go and you'd show up at a ride, you'd grab a ticket. And then you'd have to, once you used it up and get another one. Now it's a paid experience, which makes the lightning lane shorter, which makes a standby line move faster. But again, while people can complain to the standby line, their trip is sort

of being subsidized in part by the people paying a premium for it. And it's sort of an understood thing. And again, Disney World, based on the last several quarters of reports, they are not having a decline in attendance in turnstout clicks and revenue. And more importantly, all this is working for Disney and the shareholds is the operating profits are growing even faster for their experiences division. So they're doing things right without angering a lot of people. And obviously I say a lot of people, because if you go online,

there'll be people saying, no, I mean, it's just Disney world's too crowded, but it's like the whole Yogi Berra thing. Maybe it's a good thing to be crowded because people are going there. Disney figured out how to monetize time, right? How to get to pay for time, yeah, which is kind of genius. And it makes all this sense of the world to kind of just be that guy. This is why I just don't understand why they don't just double down on experiences and figure out how to do it without all of the streaming and all of even those headaches.

But, you know, as a business, as an investor, because like a lot of this has been true for a while on what's Disney's stock been doing for the last decade? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. So I think we need to acknowledge that for all that they're doing, right in these parks, it doesn't seem to have paid off for investors. I mean, I want creative destruction and radical destruction. Maybe, maybe, though, figuring out how to fill the parks in October and November along with, are they going to do hay rides, Rick? Can we do like, you know,

can we go all the way through? Like, I don't know. They did. They did in the 70s. We went to Fort Wilderness. You can get on a hay ride and had a campfire with Chippendale and you do smores out there. But yeah, and I think that's still there at that campground. But yeah, those days of, I mean, you can still ride horses out in the campground too in Disney World. But yeah, you can't go back. You can't go back, Lou, as much as your retro heart desires that. I wish they could figure out how to make the business completely center around all of this great work they're doing at parks and with the cruises and all that and still somehow retain the IP. Because to me, the only reason to be in the studio or streaming business is just the ability to use.

the IP they have and create new for the parks. I would love to try and sit down with some bankers and figure out a way to get the best of both worlds and to kind of free them from all of those costs while holding them to the IP. I think that is the plot twist that gets the stock pack, but it's hard. What do you think, Rick? I mean, you were early in Netflix. Do you think that's a compelling argument for Disney? I think it is, I mean, if content creation could be your loss leader, wow. I mean, it would be amazing if it gets to that point. But again, you sort of need it. Again, the people, you're, the reason that you pay premium for Disney Cruise, and I've done plenty of times, I love my Disney Cruise, is you're paying for the experience where you're

getting all these characters, you know, the experiences you know, in an environment that you know. So I think it all has to happen. And while you may not be happy with every part of Disney's business, it works not as an investor the last decade, as Lou points out, but the business itself does work that way. You say it works. And again, I mean, I don't know, like 10 years begins to feel relevant. So I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Does it work? It is one of those stocks where if the stock goes up 200 percent, everybody's going to have a completely different story and say, I told you so. Even if the numbers are exactly the same, and I will say on the streaming side, I have gotten

my notices from Disney that prices are going up at the end of October. So they are going to have a little bit better margins on the streaming side in the future. When we come back, we're going look back to some history of investing. If you're listening to Motley Pool Hidden Jems Investing. New from Nespresso. Blend wellness into your coffee routine with a coffee plus range, infused with functional benefits.

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Discover Coffee Plus on Nispresso.com. Every Sunday, we cover the week's tech news on this week in tech. Hi, this is Leo Leport from the Twitter Podcasting Network, inviting you to join me with Jacob Ward, Molly White, and Harry McCracken, as we talk about the end of the big lawsuit against Meta and what it means for us, Nvidia spending lots of money trying to get into the AI software game and real details on that hugging face attack.

What you hear will shock you. You'll find it at twit.TV and wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Motley Fool and Jem's Investing. We'd like to have a little bit of fun with investing in this segment. And I want to test Rick and Loo's knowledge and memory of markets. So I have a series of questions for you that I want you to answer. Give your best guess. And we'll hopefully teach a little people a little bit about investing history.

All right. I'm going to start easy here. Rick, I think you know this one. Costco's CEO threatened to off the incoming CEO when he took over for him. If you raise the price of the hot dog combo, what is the price of that combo to this day? Yeah, so I do know it is $1.50. It's been that way from the beginning. You get a hot dog and a soda.

And the key trick, again, for fellow Costco members, get it before you start shopping. Then you just take the soda with you and then come back and fill it in on the way out. So just, you know, use that refill option. I like eating as you come into the store too. I mean like because then you're a little less hungry. You're shopping less hungry and that's good. That's a good way to shop. You don't want to shop hungry.

You're probably saving yourself a lot of money by spending $1.50 on a hot dog. Oh, yeah. All right. Nintendo's first product. Lou, you seem like a gamer. What was Nintendo's first product out the door? It was not gaming systems. They were a, um, okay.

So this is where it was like a dungeon as a dragon. type thing. Wasn't it? It was, yeah, I don't, I honestly don't know exactly, but it wasn't, yeah, it wasn't electric. It was like a role-playing game or something like that. Rick, you got this? Yeah, and it's, I mean, when I was like in the 70s, I got like the game and watch things, like when I went to China and Japan, my parents took me out there. But obviously that's not it. Yeah, the company's been around for more than 100 years playing cards. So I guess Lou is sort of right. I know it's playing, I don't even know what the cards were about, what even this game was, but I know covering Nintendo, I know that they first got into cards,

So they've always been about games. It just evolved over time. In the late 1800s, that is what's wild as this company goes back to the late 1800s. Okay. They struggled to source memory back then, too, by the way. Very true. This is the fun one. Rick, this is up here, Alley.

What successful partnership related to those products eventually led to the company's IPO. I believe that was in 1962. There was a company that they licensed their IP and made cards out of it. What was that company? Oh, wow. So I have no idea. And you said the playing cards, 1962. I mean, I could just say-

Video games. Yep. Huh? This is pre-video games. So we're not talking about the Atari era. This is before that. I would have to think maybe a Hasbro or a Mattel. I mean, these are the toy companies I know were around back then.

But I may be off. Lou? I have no idea. Disney. Disney. Disney. This was back when Disney figured out that it was free money to basically license their stuff to sell t-shirts and playing cards.

So in Japan, Nintendo said, hey, we can, we can make some stuff for you. That's what eventually led to the IPO. So, yeah, fascinating company history. Another one, somewhat related, because it's also a Japanese company, Sony's first major product was what? I mean, there had to be something before the TV. I mean, but I know TV was part of it.

I know Motorola was car radio. Sony. Lou, I'm lost here. So I'm going to guess it's in the kitchen, but I don't know what. It is in the kitchen. Oh, okay. Yes. A refrigerator. A rice cooker. Okay. Okay. So that makes even more sense. Yeah. Again, the history of Japanese companies is absolutely fantastic because they often start completely opposite of what they end up making. The other one I have on here is Toyota is known for building cars, but they made automatic looms and textile machinery early in their history.

Because they still make the rice cooker? I don't believe they do. But if they don't, they should, right? I don't know. Does Hitachi have a video game console? That's what I want to know. I mean, if it gives both ways on the rice makers, I want in on that. Okay, we like to talk about big home run stocks.

One of the top performing stocks in the 2000s over the last 25 years or so, although it hasn't done particularly well lately is Altria, originally known as Philip Morris, maybe now also known as Philip Morris. It's kind of gone through some machinations over the years. Lou, I want you to start here. What was Altria's price to earnings multiple in 2002? I do not follow this closely. Price to earnings. I will give you a hint. They were buying back a significant amount of stock in the early 2000s. 2002 was right after the case was the late 90s, wasn't it? Correct.

So low, I'll say under 10, um, eight. I don't know. Rick? I'll go lower. And again, I'm thinking that that was like post dot com bubble. So there were a lot of stocks at Coca-Cola trading a 50 times. That's true. So batteries were high.

2002 was already, you know, that was the bubble pop. So even I think, again, with all. the legal obligations and back then investors didn't have the vision and to just, you know, the access to the information to know that everything's going to be okay in the future, I would say maybe in three or four times multiple. It was under two in 2002. For that, I look back in 2000 to 2005, it was under five almost that entire period of time. So it's just, this is one of those crazy ones to look back because I always remember, you know, Morgan Housel would write these articles about the best performance stocks or sometimes these, these ones that are kind of hiding in

plain sight and Altria was always an example, but the crazy thing was how low that valuation was, how unloved the company was, and it didn't die. And that was kind of what it was priced for. You know, if you can find those companies that are trading extremely low multiples that actually have a little bit of legs, it can actually do pretty well. All right, this one, I don't know that either of you were around for this, but in 1896, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average launched, there were 12 companies in the industrial average. Can you name between the two of you, can you name three of them? I mean, can we say, I mean, Dow Chemical would have to be one, right?

Dow Chemical? I mean, was that not even a company back then? Well, I mean, Charles, there was a guy named Dow who came up with it, so I don't know if it. Had nothing to do with Dow Chemical? So I do believe one of them is GE because they were an original. I will give you a hint. Three of them start with the word American. Of course.

American tobacco, maybe. Yes, American tobacco. You guys are already doing better than I thought. Would AT&T work for American telephone and? I don't even know what the two T stand for, but I guess not. Telegraph, but I doubt, yeah, maybe. I don't know. So we have the American cotton oil company.

Oh, of course. American sugar refining company, American tobacco, Chicago Gas Company, Distilling and Cattle Feeding Company. I had never heard of that one later called Millennial Chemicals, GE. There's a gas light company, Lacklead, now known to aspire, National Lead, lead, North American Company, which dissolved in the 1940s, Tennessee, coal, iron, and railway, U.S. leather, and U.S. rubber. So. And some of those still exist kind of. Like, I believe U.S. Rubbers. U.S. Yeah, U.S. Rubbers, Unaroyle, U.S. Steel is now the Tennessee coal company. Yeah. American sugar is dominoes, I think. So yeah. Domino sugar, yes. Lasted. I'm just impressed that the names are exactly what they do. I mean, that was back then. There's no imagination. I mean, at least Corning, which I know was back around back in the 1800s, uh, uh, you know,

It had a different name. It was corning glass worked or something. But yeah. Wow. I'd love to see like the 23MU report, the DNA of these companies to see whatever happened to them is. I'm sure they did a break up and put back together of all the telecom companies like AT&T. Or banking is another one to see those infographics.

Yes. But you're right. They hadn't invented branded consultants yet. All right. The final question for you two. goes back to the end of the days of Jack Welsh as CEO of GE. Arguably, one of the better CEOs, when he left, GE, there's a big fight for who was going to take over for him as the CEO and his other predecessors.

There were three people who were potentially vying for that job. But I want to know who those successors were, the companies they took over, and then the returns of each of those companies over the next, let's see, let's do 10 years. So, Lou, I think, so how many names are? I can think of three names. There's three names. Okay. So it's Bob Nardelli, Jim McNerney, and Jeff Emmett, Immelt, obviously. Yes, Imel took over as CEO of GE, yes. Um, uh, McNerney went to Boeing, but no, he was with 3M before Boeing. Yes. So we'll do the. turns for 3M.

Oh, geez. That's where I'm going to get struck. Not great. I don't know. Rick, do you have any idea? 3M's from when? From 2001?

He took over at the beginning of 2001. Yes, he was only there for four or five years. But let's do the whole. He made a big imprint on the company. I actually started at 3M right about the time that he did. And I was there for about seven years. So did Travis ruin the shareholder's value of 3M is the real question here.

Well, it was either me or or McNurney. I don't know. One or the other. I mean, I know 3Mbo is a great stock in the 1900s. I just, yeah. It was an original Dell stock. It would have been a keeper. Okay.

Why don't we just get, which one of those three performed the best over the next 10 years? Gosh. Of the three? Because Nardelli went to Home Depot. Home Depot worked until it. I'm going to sit in our deli with Home Depot, but not, it didn't. Not under his reign, which was very short. Right, right.

It didn't, it didn't really. Uh, but Mr. McNurney ended up at Boeing and that was before Boeing's biggest problems. Maybe it's McNerney. I don't know. I honestly don't know. Yeah, I think it's Home Depot, too, but I mean, GE went through. I mean, I know it's Geet aerospace now, but I mean, didn't it spend stuff off? I mean, Lou, you know GE better just one to know.

I mean, the value of all those parts may have been worth something in the last 20 years. Well, remember, we did have the financial crisis in there. It is now. I'll say Home Depot just because I know at least the first decade of that was probably pretty good. All right. You are both wildly wrong here. The best performance stock. But Lou said but but but, so he was going to change his vote before this.

No, no, no, no. I was just going to say that these three gentlemen get no credit for whatever happened at any of the companies. That's my hot take here. But go ahead. 3M was actually the best performer. Stock was at 45%. Almost all of that happened in the first couple of years. He did a bunch of cost cutting.

measures improve profitability and then growth essentially died. I mean, that was that was that was kind of the legacy of cut it to the bone. And that was that was home depot too. Didn't I'm surprised home depot didn't get a boost from nerdelli. But over time it didn't age well. Yeah. Home Depot did horribly. The stock was down 23% over the next decade. And GE was actually the worst performer down 58%. Part of that was because of the financial crisis. Turns out they were much more of a financial company than they were an industrial company at that point. But just the interesting history of phenomenal leadership, I think, you know, in the late 90s turned into a success of plan that was kind of a disaster for everybody involved, despite the fact

that those CEOs were very, very highly sought after over that period of time. Even I think in hindsight, knowing what we know now, I don't know. Maybe we want to revisit Jack as well. Yeah, I think that's probably fair. When we come back, we're going to get to the Stock Center radar. You're listening to Motley Fool, Hidden Jems Investors. Trade ice skating at Nathan Phillips Square for ice cubes in your umbrella drink. Let Porter Airlines fly you from Toronto Pearson nonstop to 10 top sun destinations in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Costa Rica.

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To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. Well, this week is Fool Fest. So this is where a bunch of fools are getting together and talking about investing, celebrating maybe some of the good investments that we've had over the past decade or so. I wanted to get an idea, though, learn a little bit more about your investing mistakes. Rick, when you look back on your history of investing, a couple, few decades maybe now. What do you think about for your investing mistake? Yeah, I think it's easy.

I mean, all the stocks that you didn't buy, they'll always be regret. But I think always the biggest regret is when you have a stock and you sold too soon. because there you have the receipts. It's not a matter of, was I going to buy it or not. And this happened to me, I was fortunate enough to have bought Netflix in October of 2002 when it was a broken IPO. The stock was like at $5, $6 in change at the point. After a bunch of splits, the cost basis, it would be about 40 cents or so, 40, 50 cents or so

a share. And within three months, I sold 80% of my shares. And this was like a $5,000 investment. like a big investment at the time, but I sold a chunk of it. And then, like, it waited like until about a decade ago from now. So, so, you know, 15 years later. And I said, oh, it's just too large of my part of my portfolio. I cut it down from 80 percent, from 90, I'm sorry, from, 80 percent I sold 90 percent of my total stocks. I sold another 10 percent for my original shares. And just over time, I've whittled it down to now. I'm just down to one percent of my original

stake. And it's my largest holding right now, which is a testament to the fact that I don't like to keep a lot of big positions in my portfolio. But that other 99% would have been millions of dollars. And I worked the math every once in a while and it's always cruel. It was like $8,9 million that it would have left on the table. Yeah, was it 2001 or 2002? 2002. So from November 1st, 2002, I have a $10,000 growth. That would now be $10.5 million. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Rick, I'm sure is done extremely well. But, uh, but, but, you know, yeah, selling your winners, this is what I always go back through too. Lou, you have anything quick for us?

Real quick, and this was more arrogance than anything else, but I had a different world when I was part of a group. And we thought E Toys back in the 1990s was going to zero, but we thought it would do it after the Christmas season and we thought that we were smarter and everyone else. So, so, so we was like, all right, we'll just get in now and to dump it when everybody else runs in. They didn't even make it that a holiday. So that's, yeah, pure arrogance and it got what we deserved. Ah, humbug. All right, we'd like to end the show with the stock's on our radar.

Dan Boyd is out today. So I'm going to be filling Dan's role as the foil behind the glass. Rick, what do you have for us this week? I'm going to piss off a lot of people by saying AMC entertainment. AMC, yes, the movie theater chain, yes, the meme stock. Yes, the stocks is down 99% over the last five years. Ouch. Ouch is right, but over the last, the first nine months of 2026, it's had more than doubled.

So, and the reason it's doubled is because people are going back to the movie theaters. This year, there'll be at least six movies that globally, taking at least a billion dollars in ticket sales. That's only happened one other year. And again, not only are people coming to the movies theaters again, their AMC and its rivals have gotten better. Peers, I don't want to call rivals, have gotten better about exploiting the fact that they can have different food concessions, have collectibles tied to the movies. So there's a lot of high margin money being made now. AMC has been a mess. It's been mismanaged, which is why the stock's doing poorly and the smaller exhibitors are profitable for years and even paying dividends in some cases.

But I think AMC has this interesting turnaround potential. So I'm going to go with AMC. Talk about turnaround potential. And I kind of like the idea of AMC turning things around. I actually like their subscription, which I don't know what my benefits are. But I ended up paying for that because we go to movies a few times a year. But what's the argument that the CEO who led this downfall and the mismanagement of the company is also the person who should be running the company on the way out? Yeah, I do not like it. Again, he embraced the meme stock status. He had the, I mean, he had the terrible preferred shares that he just said, you know, American preferred equity because ape was the, you know, was the whole group behind it.

I forgot about that. Yeah. Issuing NFTs, buying a stake in a gold mining company, which now looks not so dumb, but still, yeah, I'm not happy without Ameri. I think we're at the point where anyone can run this company right now, the leader with a substantial advantage over the competition. At a time, we'll come back to the theaters. I see it as an opportunity. A risky one, of course. All right, Lib. Normally, I'm angering people just by bringing trucking companies, but here we go, right? Channeling old economy, Ron, I'm looking at freight logistics company, C.H. Robinson, ticker C.R.W.

This is Match.com for truckers, but not what you're thinking, Travis, okay? they are the middleman who connects companies in need of shipping services to the people providing the service. It's a tough time for the industry, tariffs, trade wars, economic uncertainty, high diesel prices. Earlier to summer, the brokerages were hit when the Supreme Court said that they can be held liable if a truck they booked crashes, which kind of just screws up the economics and the insurance of the industry. Everybody in the brokerage fell 25% or more on the news, including Robinson. On Monday, Robinson took advantage of that fall, announcing plans to buy rival RXO for $6 billion in cash in stock.

Huge risk here. The market is uncertain. We don't know what's coming out of this insurance thing. But Robinson is picking up a good tech stack and some specialty lines on the cheap. Reminds me what Warren Buffett said, be greedy when others are fearful. There is risk, but I really like this move. Does autonomous trucking impact Thiet Robinson? Not unless it's all taken in-house.

All right. Well, that's, you make an intriguing case, but in this case, since I get to make the call, I'm not going to go with trucking. I like a good turnaround story. Congratulations, Rick. AMC is going to go on my watch list. I need to dig a little bit more. That's all the time we have for today.

Thanks to Rick, Lou, and Christy Waterworth behind the glass. I'm Travis Hoyum. We'll see you here tomorrow.