Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - Stock Picks > Economic Forecasts

Episode Date: January 2, 2024

Institutional investors make headlines with sweeping predictions about the economy, but there’s not much of a consequence if they’re wrong. (00:21) Ricky Mulvey and Jason Moser discuss:  - Apple resuming watch sales, and long battle against Masimo.  - Why it’s difficult to make accurate economic predictions.  - Understanding a business’s valuation and its story.  - A stock and an ETF we plan on holding through 2024. Plus, (17:42) Robert Brokamp and Alison Southwick provide some tips to be more productive in the new year. Stocks/ETFs mentioned: AAPL, MASI, TDOC, AXON, SCHD Link to receive a complimentary report on dividend stocks: www.fool.com/2024dividends Learn more about your ad choices at megaphone.fm/adchoices Hosts: Ricky Mulvey Guests: Jason Moser, Alison Southwick, Robert Brokamp Producer: Mary Long Engineers: Dan Boyd, Rick Engdahl Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Whatever lies ahead, don't change your morning. Let your morning change you. Discover Coffee Plus on Nespresso.com. We're not going to guess what the stock market's going to do this year, but we will put our money where our mouth is. Motley Fool Money starts now. I'm Ricky Mulvey, joined today by Jason Moser. Jason, how are you doing? Hey, Ricky. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. You have a good holiday break?

It was a very good break, yeah. Busy, a lot of stuff going on, but we made it through, got through to the other side, which is always nice. How about you? Yeah, it was pretty good. Went to Cincinnati, went home for a little bit back in Colorado, and going through some unread emails today. How lovely.

Yeah. You know who was busy over the holidays? Were some big tech lawyers. As Apple resumed sales of its Watch series in the Watch Ultra 2 just before Christmas, they had halted sales due to a patent dispute. It lost a case against Massimo. The medical technology company accused Apple of hiring away employees and stealing their tech, which basically measures blood oxygen levels. And the tech is allegedly used in the new Apple watches. So to set the table, J-Mo, what does this temporary win mean for Apple?

It gives them the opportunity to keep selling the two watches in question here that utilize the technology that Massimo is questioning. Now, this is temporary. I think that's worth noting. This is something where there's going to be an appeals court. They review this case again here at some point this month. Don't know when that's necessarily going to be. This has been such a long drawn-out story. This is not something that just came up. Massimo and Apple have a very fascinating history. And I know we've talked about it on these shows before, but this is just one more step in the journey. It is one of those things. It's not something that's going to resolve itself easily. I would say, with the appeals court looking at something

here later this month, I don't think that means that'll bring everything to a conclusion. But when you look at what Massimo does, why the company was founded, what it was founded on, ultimately technology for pulse oximetry, which is the technology in question here, it starts to make you wonder exactly what Apple may or may not have done. There are plenty of court cases here along the way that have ruled in Massimo's favor. It looks at least, from the layperson outside looking in, it does look like Apple probably lifted this technology in some capacity. Now, I'm just saying that it's what it looks like.

I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a judge. I have no say-so here. Ultimately, what we also see is that with founder and CEO of Massimo, Joe Chiani, he is just digging his heels in for what is likely going to be a long and drawn-out battle. That comes with its puts and takes. But ultimately, Massimo built the business on pulse oximetry technology. It's a medical device companies. They're looking to expand their portfolio and do more things. A company like this, at this size, they need to protect their technology. That is one of the keys to this company's success, making sure they protect their technology. So, I absolutely don't blame him for taking this the distance. By the same token, it is

something that investors need to keep in mind. This is a big risk for Massimo. Whereas, for Apple, I don't want to say they can take it or leave it. I understand Apple, they want to do everything they can do to try to make that watch as good as it can be. But there's no question that the result of this, it's far more important for Massimo, I think, than it is for Apple. Yeah, Massimo is spending about $100 million so far on this case, which is a literal drop in the bucket for a company the size of Apple. As you said to digging one's heels in, CEO Joe Chiani told the Wall Street Journal, quote, if I can change the most powerful company in the world from continuing to act badly, that'll have more impact on the world than anything else I'm

doing, end quote. What should Massimo shareholders, though, hope for in this case? This is, as you mentioned, a company that's won patent disputes before, but not against a multi-trillion dollar company that can call the president of the United States and say, you know, Christmas is coming up and we'd like to sell our watches. Yeah. As a Massimo shareholder myself, I think shareholders, investors, you're rooting ultimately for a win. You want Massimo, you want this to be reaffirmed. They've won a lot of cases along the way. This is an appeal. It feels like this is something that should go in Massimo's favor, given the track record up to this point. But again, it's a legal issue. We just don't know. That's going to

be something the courts ultimately decide. If it's something that doesn't go Massimo's way, It's not something that's fatal to the company. The company's going to continue to do what it does. It's got plenty of installed equipment and technology in hospitals and doctor's offices all over the world. What it does do, if Massimo loses this case, it gives Apple a lot more leeway in what they can do with their watches. But if Massimo ends up winning this case, it's going to force Apple to do one of two things.

Either rethink the technology that they implement in their watches, or they're going to need to try to figure out some way to work with Massimo. Now, on the latter, I think that's going to be a little bit of a tougher road to hoe now. It's not to say that it can't be done, but given the track record with these two companies, I don't think it's something where Apple can just say, oh, we're just going to buy Massimo. Massimo's a $6 billion plus market cap. And if Apple just all of a sudden one day said, hey, you know what, we're just going to end this now, we want to buy Massimo. I mean, Keanu is not going to give this thing away for a song, right? He's going to make Apple pay for it. Again, it'll be very fascinating to see how

that turns out. Such is the way with this type of stuff. It just goes to show why companies that come up with tremendous intellectual property early on, it's a good sign when you find companies that fight hard to protect that technology all along the way, as both companies really have done. But I will say, in Massimo's case, they have fought tooth the nail all along the way to protect their technology. And if this works out in their favor, I think that just goes to show why, and ultimately speaks more to the longer-term opportunity for them. And if you look at Apple's stock price today, you'll notice that it has dipped. I don't think it has to do with this case, though, Jason. It is also because Barclays pointed to weaker consumer

demand for the iPhone sales, trouble selling in China, and gave the mega-cap tech company a downgrade. Yeah, a downgrade in a substantial price target reduction from $161 per share to $160 per share. Don't get too excited. Yeah, I know. It always amuses me to see that. Just because we all know, valuation is as much art as it is science. Coming up with those types of price targets just depends on so many different things. I'm not necessarily saying that Barclays is right here, but I do understand the rationale. I think it's a reasonable take. It's a reasonable concern. As these phones get older, as we move to the 15, the 16, and ultimately 17, 18, 19, whatever,

you don't need to refresh that phone as often. You can keep that phone for longer. That impacts Apple sales. There's just no question there. When you think about how much of a role the iPhone, the smartphone, has played in Apple's success to this point, it really is still a phone company for the most part. They do a lot of things well, but the phone is the lion's share of the company's profits. They're still trying to come up with that next great thing, and what they've got to this point is a lot of really good things that are making up one more great thing. We've talked a lot about Apple being a services company, making that pivot away from hardware

more into becoming a lifestyle of services and stuff that we use. Some concerns there in regard to antitrust, as far as how big Apple is going to get, the App Store lawsuits and whatnot make you wonder exactly how much farther the services stuff can go, at least on the pricing side. That is a very profitable side of the business. I absolutely understand the take. I'm not saying it's necessarily the right one or the wrong one, that time will tell there. It does make sense to start expressing a little bit of concern here because they just have yet to really find that next lightning in a bottle solution that the iPhone has been. It's hard to fill the other pocket when you already have something in

everybody's pocket. Yeah. The other headlines coming out today, it's slow. People are still getting back to work from the holiday break. So it means that we're publishing a lot of large macro predictions, what the investment houses think that the stock market is going to do last year. I think it's worth remembering that last year, we had the 100% chance of a recession that never came. Could happen this year, could not. But investors are going to be seeing a lot of these large-scale predictions about interest rates the year ahead in investing. How do you recommend that they read into this? I think it's interesting you brought up the recession point there. We've been talking about recession for probably a better part of the last

couple of years. And while technically we never ran into a recession, remember, in 2022, we did have two consecutive quarters of economic contraction, which technically is how a recession was defined. Now, I understand not calling the recession because of other economic indicators, but maybe that's semantics. When you look at a recent bank rate survey, they found that 60% of adults actually feel like the economy is in a recession right now. Maybe perception is reality in this case. I don't know. We'll have to wait and see how that shakes out. But when you look at how the market performed last year, tremendous recovery from the previous year, we saw the S&P up around 25%. It's worth mentioning,

A lot of that came from the Magnificent Seven. I think the Magnificent Seven, we've got Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla, Apple, Meta. Those are companies that I think will continue to keep things going forward for us here in 2024. In 2023, the worst performer there was Apple, and it was up almost 50%. You had Nvidia up almost 240%. The Magnificent Seven really are playing a big role, but that's not a bad thing. We encourage investors to own these types of businesses. I think we will likely see, at least in the front half of the year, the Magnificent Seven

continue to perform well. The consumer is a little bit stretched. We've seen credit card debt topping $1 trillion, buy now, pay later, that stuff flies under the radar, so it's not necessarily even accounted for there. Student loan payments starting back up. There are a number of reasons why you could be concerned about the consumer. But then, ultimately, the wildcard comes in November. It's an election year, and there's going to be a lot of headline risk out there one way or the other. I want to move to a mailbag question we got from a listener. We had an event for Motley Fool Money members and listeners in Denver a few weeks back. We got a listener

who wanted to ask a question directly to you, J-Mo. This was his question. My name's Dane. I have a question about Teladoc, an investment I made in 2019. For the first two years I owned it, one of the best investments I ever made. The last two years, one of the worst investments I've made. My question related to this is, how do you juggle the balance of knowing the right valuation of a stock versus also time in the market is important, and over the long haul, good companies are going to perform well? Yeah, great question there. Not an easy answer, because it does depend on a lot of things. We went through a little bit of an interesting stretch there over the last three years, where

valuations in certain companies got really out of hand, and it was difficult to really see exactly how things were going to continue, how things would ultimately resolve themselves. When it comes to investment, Teladoc, I think, is a good example of a business that's still not profitable, still working their way toward profitability. It's very difficult to understand how valuation ultimately works with a business like that. You have a limited amount of data with which to work, you're valuing things on price to sales, and you're really starting to forecast out a lot. For me personally, and I'm still a Teladoc shareholder, I've owned shares in Teladoc

essentially since they IPO-ed, I think something like 2015 or something. It's a business I bought back then based on my general thinking of where healthcare needed to go over the long haul. And when I say long haul, I own this in my retirement portfolio. I have an indefinite holding period. So, for me, the ebbs and flows are just part of the deal, and you have to deal with that. I think, for me, a lot of it really boils down to position sizing. In hindsight, of course, we look at a lot of these companies that went through these last three years, these stay-at-home stocks, for example, where we saw companies like Teladoc, PayPal, Square, Etsy, a lot of these companies that really just took off.

They went to the moon. It felt like the opportunity was unlimited. Now, fast forward to today, and we're back to where we are. It's worth paying attention to investor sentiment psychology headlines that are going on. When you see things that are really abnormal, that's when you can start looking at companies like these and saying, has this position gotten to a point where it's way bigger than I ever wanted it to be? If so, should I consider trimming some? I think a lot of times, you can maybe take a little bit off the table, but still keep that core position. Again, valuation is very difficult when you have companies that just aren't making actual profits yet, because you really are basing that investment

on a case that you're making far in the future. For me, ultimately, a lot of it just boils down to position sizing, making sure that you're not so overly exposed that you can withstand these volatile stretches. Ultimately, if you find that the business is suffering and management's not doing what they say they're going to do, then you have to start looking at it and saying, well, maybe this thesis is broken. And then you can make your decisions from there. So I know you mentioned Teladoc's one that's in your retirement portfolio, but I'm thinking to Dane's question, I'm thinking to the institutional investors who are allowed to make guesses about the economy that they really have no stake in. You can say something, it gets

published. For us, I like putting our money where our mouth is. So what is a stock as we start the year? What's a stock or maybe an exchange-traded fund that you already own, and stories can always change, but that you plan on holding through 2024? Yeah, well, I would say most of them. I mean, I definitely try to minimize the selling, but one that I do own that I intend to hang on to for some time to come, Axon, I think is a great one. The company that's known for taser technology and ultimately just giving giving law enforcement an alternative beyond guns in order to try to maintain civil discourse. But I think Axon is one that stands out to me that I really, beyond even 2024,

I hope to own this one for many, many years to come. Yeah, I'll throw in an ETF for the Schwab Dividend Fund, SCHD. Owns a lot of the defensive stocks that, in part, I don't feel like picking or researching. But one of those things where I see myself wanting some dividends in retirement. so that's one that I'm hanging on to. Jason Moser, appreciate your time and your insight. Thank you. Before we get to our next segment, first, a couple of ads. Growth stocks steal the spotlight in financial media, but something way more boring is behind a whole lot of wealth creation.

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Brokamp have some tips so you can do more in your financial, professional, and personal life. Happy New Year! We're on day two of 2024. So ideally, you've already begun working on your New Year's resolutions. Of course, I don't know what those resolutions are, but chances are that they have something to do with getting stuff done, like exercising more, saving more, spending more time with your family, picking up a new skill, or just being more productive. If so, this episode is for you, because Bro has some tips for getting more done, financially and otherwise, in 2024. Yeah, and these tips, I learned the hard way, because by nature, I'm kind of a distractible procrastinator. And that can cause problems in your personal and professional lives, as it did

with mine. So about 15 years ago, I kind of became obsessed with productivity. I read hundreds of articles and books, attended conferences, even worked with a couple of coaches. And while I'm far from perfect. I'm a heck of a lot better than I used to be. What does all this have to do with personal finances? Well, the bottom line is your future net worth is going to be determined by the money-related stuff that you get done. The accounts you open, investments you make, insurance policies you buy, flexible spending, reimbursements you submit, and so on. On the flip side, when you look at surveys about financial regrets from older folks, many often have to do with wishing they got something done sooner. People wish they started saving sooner, investing sooner,

but they just didn't get around to it. I spoke just the other day with a guy in his 50s, and he still hasn't taken advantage of the higher 401k contribution limits that are available to the 50 and older crowd. And he said what we've all said. He said he's been meaning to do it, but he just hasn't gotten around to it. So we all have these types of things on our to-do list. Hopefully, these tips will help you be able to cross some of them off in 2024. All right, Broden, your first piece of advice is to have a collection system, which, I'm going to be honest, already sounds a bit like work, and I don't want to do it. Unfortunately, it probably is a little work. For some people, it's just a regular old

to-do list. But it's probably better if you have something a little more robust than that, because productivity really starts with having a system that you trust to collect and organize all the items on your to-do list. Really, this is the foundation of the Getting Things Done, otherwise known as GTD, methodology and book developed by David Allen, who's a prominent productivity guru. Many Fools, including myself and co-founder David Gardner, have implemented some version of the GTD system. In fact, David Gardner is such a fan, they actually invited Mr. Allen to speak to the company, and he's had him as a guest on his Rule Breaker Investing podcast. The main idea is that your head is lousy at keeping track of all that you need to do.

So you must have a way to collect and organize all your open loops, ideally using a tool that is always with you so you can record things as they occur to you, and you can refer to it depending on whatever different context you're in, if you're out, if you're at your computer, if you're at home. For most people, this is their phone, but some people do prefer an old-school small notebook. But if you go with your phone, there is just tons of tools and apps you can use as your digital to-do list.

I used to use Trello, and then I moved to Jira, and you can find plenty of articles online about how to use either of those as a productivity management tool. But now, I just use a handy and really pretty simple app called Remember the Milk, and I love it. All right. Your second piece of advice is, if it can be done in under two minutes, just do it. Yeah. And this is another GTD principle. Don't take the time to add something to your to-do list, which will later get re-evaluated and shuffled around, if you can just get it done in 120 seconds or less. And a number of important things fall under this category. For example, the contribution limits to 401ks increased by $500 in 2024. So, rather than put increased 401k contribution into

my to-do list, I just logged into my account and changed the amount, and it took me less than a minute. I mean, you make it sound so easily, but invariably, I'm going to go to the account, not know my password, immediately get thwarted and distracted. Yes. It might take a couple of two-minute efforts to get it done, but generally speaking, it won't take as long as you think. If you put it on your to-do list to be done later, chances are that it may not get done. Yeah. It's ridiculous the number of things I haven't done because I've forgotten a password. Oh, it's crazy. I got to get on that.

All right. Third piece of advice, plan every month, week, and day. Yeah. On my calendar, I have a time on the first day of every month, every Monday, and every morning to see what's coming up and decide on my priorities. Some productivity experts recommend that you plan every day the night before so you can hit the ground running when you wake up, but having a planning time at 7 a.m. every day works for me. Also, as part of my Monday planning, my wife and I email each other our schedules and list of important family to-do items so that we're both on the same page for the week. For me, this planning time has been crucial. It gives me time to process all the items in my to-do list

and identify the three to five things I must get done every day. And I think it is important to be realistic about how much you can get done in a given day. And then I often post those three to five things on a Post-it note, and I have it in front of me throughout the day as a reminder. All right. Which brings us to our next piece of advice, which is to ruthlessly prioritize. Like you said, you can't get everything done in one day. Exactly. My all-time favorite productivity book is called Eat That Frog, 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time by Brian Tracy. The title of the book comes from a quote attributed to Mark Twain. It is, quote, if it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. If it's your

job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest frog first. For Tracy, the big frogs are the items on your to-do list that will have the biggest impact and result in the most progress toward your goals. And he believes that actions follow the Pareto principle, also known as the 80-20 rule, that is, 80% of results come from the 20% most crucial actions. As he wrote, quote, there's never enough time to do all the tasks, but there's always time to do the most important tasks. The most valuable tasks that you can do each day are often the hardest and most complex, but the payoff and rewards for completing these tasks efficiently can be tremendous. For this reason, you must adamantly refuse to work on tasks in the bottom 80%

while you still have tasks in the top 20% left to be done. Tracy recommends that you assign letters A through E to all your items on your to-do list, with A tasks being the most important. Those, of course, are the so-called big frogs. When it comes to how to spend your time, this principle is paramount. Never do a B task when there is an A task left to be done. You should never be distracted by a tadpole when there is a big frog sitting there waiting to be eaten.

And I will say that I did follow this strategy for a while, like labeling everything A to E. But what you'll find is if you do that enough, it kind of becomes just second nature and you don't have to follow it so strictly. So give it a try in the beginning. And I think even that, you'll get better habits to a point where your prioritization just becomes second nature. All right. Your next piece of advice is to put important items on your calendar. Another book I highly recommend is by Sally McGee, and it's called Take Back Your Life,

Using Microsoft Office Outlook to Get Organized and Stay Organized. Even if you don't use a Microsoft product, the book is still enlightening. A key component of McGee's methodology is putting important tasks on a calendar. Here, I'll provide a quote from her. Your head and to-do list have no boundaries. They're limitless. Reality lies only in the calendar because it has time limits. Use it as a prioritization tool, and it will assist you to be more strategic about what you can and cannot do. According to Sal McGee's company's research, there's a 75% greater chance that something will get done if it's scheduled on a calendar. So, if there's something that you must get done, put it there on your calendar, treat it as secret. That way, no one else can

bother you. No one else can schedule an appointment over it. And, and you've allotted a certain time to get that thing done. Reality lies only in the calendar. That got a lot heavier than I was expecting. Okay. Next piece of advice is that you need to increase focus and block distractions with a tomato. Yes. Some people are familiar with this, but back in the 1980s, Italian college student, Francesco Cirillo. I don't know if that's how you would pronounce it. I'm not Italian. But he figured out that he got more accomplished if he worked in 25-minute bursts, followed by five-minute breaks. And he timed these bursts and breaks with a kitchen timer that was in the shape of a tomato. This became known as the Pomodoro technique,

named after the Italian word for tomato. And so, I followed this strategy using an online tomato timer. Just do an online search. You'll find plenty of them out there. And here's the key. During those 25 minutes, you can only work. No checking email, no checking social media, no getting coffee, no going to the bathroom, no chatting with colleagues. Once the 25 minutes are up, you can do any of those things for five to 10 minutes. But then the next 25-minute Pomodoro begins. All right, next piece of advice is to give up on perfection. Yeah, one of my all-time favorite quotes about productivity comes from David Allen,

and it is, perfection and productivity are mutually exclusive. And this is because perfectionism can actually cause procrastination. One study found that procrastination was associated with significantly negative automatic thoughts in general, as well as automatic thoughts reflecting the need to be perfect. And as psychology professor and author of the book, Solving the Procrastination Puzzle, Tim Peichel said in a Fast Company interview, procrastination is not a time management problem, it's an emotion management problem. And the truth is, few things in life need to be absolutely perfect, including your financial plan. Just doing something and getting most of the way there, whether it's saving, investing, insurance, estate planning, whatever, is better

than never getting started due to perfectionism. To paraphrase Voltaire, don't let the best be the enemy of the good. This happens in my family. My dad is very much a jump in and just get it done and don't plan it and whatever, it's done. He gets things done, but not necessarily very well. whereas my brother is very much like, uh, it's gotta be perfect. It's gotta be perfect. So it's going to take him a whole, a month of getting himself psyched up to do the project. And he's got to watch all these videos and he did it. And then when he's, when he finally does get around to it, it's done well. But that's, that's how I see that in my family. It clearly obviously depends on what you're talking about, right? If, if, if someone is designing and building an

airplane, you want that to be absolutely perfect. Yeah. But when it comes to so much of your personal finances. Like I hear people talk about like, well, I'll increase how much I'm saving retirement. But once I look at my budget and figure out exactly how much I can save. And I was like, you know what? Just save more. Now you'll figure it out later, whether it was too much or too little, but just do something. Yeah. I feel like I could be wrong, but I feel like you maybe are a lean to the perfection kind of person and I'm a get, just get it done. Whatever kind of person I was, but I got over it. I got over it. In fact, I really am now. I've just, I'm just going to do something and I'll figure it out later. Especially with your finances, a lot of

things, they're sort of self-correcting. You get a signal ahead of time, like, oh, I overdid it or I underdid it, and now I can make a change. Our last piece of advice is to just get going. Yeah. In 2017, Axios interviewed Kevin Systrom, who was the co-founder of Instagram and then at the time, actually, he was the CEO of the company. In response to the question, what's your favorite life hack, Systrom said, if you don't want to do something, make a deal with yourself to do at least five minutes of it. And after five minutes, you'll end up doing the whole thing. And a similar strategy is recommended by James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, an easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones. Clear's version says that any new habit can be boiled down to a

two-minute first step. So start there. So for example, if you want to make exercise a habit, just start by getting ready. Fill up your water bottle, put on your running shoes. that may be enough to get your motivation going. And I'll just add here that James Clear is also the source of one of my other favorite productivity quotes, and that is, we must suffer one of two things, the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. Again, bring in the heavy this early in the year. No. All right, bro. Well, what are your final parting thoughts for our listeners on getting financial things done in the coming year? My guess is that you'd know which financial

tasks you've been avoiding, but will have a significant positive impact once they're accomplished. Whether it's choosing a money management system, boosting your savings, making an appointment with a financial planner, or maybe an estate planning attorney. Each person's money-related, quote-unquote, big frogs are different. But here's one suggestion that could benefit everyone, and that is put a weekly money hour on your calendar. As I mentioned earlier, putting a task on your calendar increases the chances that it'll get done. Also, in the course of all my reading about productivity, I learned that many successful people actually have a money appointment on their calendars, an hour each week devoted to

tackling all the dollar-related to-dos. Use your hour to pay bills, update your budget, check your portfolio, submit reimbursements, monitor your credit score, all that good stuff, and cross off any other important money-related items. Usually, it won't take a whole hour, but you'll feel much better and likely be much richer over the years by regularly getting your financial things done. As always, people on the program may own stocks mentioned, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell anything based solely on what you hear.

I'm Ricky Mulvey. Happy New Year. We'll be back tomorrow. Our podcast is represented by Airwave Media.