Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - The 10X Disruption
Episode Date: May 19, 2017Wal-Mart surprises. Alibaba works its magic. Jack in the Box pops. And Home Depot hits a new high. Plus, Stanford economist and RethinkX founder Tony Seba talks about a big disruption to the transport...ation industry. Thanks to Slack for supporting The Motley Fool. Learn more at slack.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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From Fool Global Headquarters, this is Motley Fool Money.
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 Argersinger, and from Total
Income, Ron Gross. Good to see you, as always, gents.
Ron Gross. Hey, how are you doing?
We've got the latest headlines from Wall Street. We will dig into the disruption coming to
the auto industry, and as always, we'll give you an inside look at the stocks on our radar.
But we begin with signs of life in the general retail sector. Walmart's first quarter profits
came in higher than expected, as did Target's. Overall, a better picture than we were talking
about a week ago with Macy's, Kohl's, etc. Before we go big picture, Matty, this is a
good quarter from Walmart.
O'Reilly. Walmart, I guess the headline there is the 63% increase in online sales,
which was a big acceleration. I mean, they were doing, I want to say last year at this
time they were doing single digits. So, they've obviously ramped that business pretty well.
I think you have to put it in perspective, though. Walmart doesn't break out e-commerce
revenue as a percentage or even the actual number, but according to eMarketer, their
sales last year online were $14.4 billion. So, if you expect that 2017 will be a great
year, maybe they grow that business 50%, they'll get to over $20 billion. Just to put that
in context, though, Amazon's online sales, stripping out Web Services International,
North American online sales, going to do about $100 billion this year.
O' Walmart's playing catch-up.
Yeah, they're second, but it's a distant second. When I balance that against
total revenue increase of 1.4%, comps that were up only 1.4%, it's going to take a lot
for that business to really move the needle for Walmart. It's still very early.
Ron, Target's same-store sales fell a little bit, but as the management said,
it's a very choppy environment out there.
It's choppy. I saw one analyst call it less bad.
You know what? Given what we talked about at the beginning of last week's show,
less bad is pretty darn good.
As Matty said, digital channel sales, we saw an increase, 22%. It's a good number, up 22%,
but still only 4.3% of total revenue. Continues to be a struggle. They're going to invest $7
billion over the next few years into redesigning stores and lowering some prices, opening 100
smaller locations. It seems that's kind of the thing that everyone's trying to do now
in urban centers, college campus areas. They're trying to encourage shoppers to make bigger
purchases, which is kind of, they're copying what Amazon does with the pantry, where you
can pay one price and fill a box with stuff and ship it to you at a flat fee. They're
trying to copy that a bit. So, everything was okay. You have negative same-store sales,
but only slightly, so I guess that's fine. Guidance was not terrible, so we'll call it
somewhat encouraging. But they've got a lot of work to do, and they acknowledged that
much and said specifically that things are not where they want them to be.
This week in adjectives, right? It was less bad, somewhat encouraging. OK.
Well, Jason, to the point that Ron made last week, where he said, look, you look
at all these retailers, and the fact is, some of them are going to be going out of business
at some point. But you look at Target, you look at Walmart, these are the two biggest
bricks-and-mortar general retailers in the United States. And I feel like they're staking
their claim, saying, you know what, we're not going anywhere.
Sure, yeah. I think I was over picking up dinner last night from Chipotle, of all
places. We were supporting the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. And I saw a store as RadioShack
right by there, going out of sale, entire stores on sale. I felt like, man, deja vu.
ooh, haven't we gone through that once before? Target and Walmart, I think, are a bit different
animals. And I do think there is a place in this world for them, Walmart in particular. I mean,
there is a physical footprint there that you can't discount. And retail is ultimately about
logistics. And in today's world, I think it's becoming more so. That's why Amazon's done so
well. I think for Walmart, the real opportunity probably on the investing side is for them to
figure out a way to return more capital to shareholders. We were talking about this
yesterday on MarketFoolery. But when you look at the repurchases, for example, Walmart's
repurchased, they brought down their share count about 8% over the past five years. You
compare that to Apple, Apple's brought their share count down more than 20%. Now, that
is a tech company, that's material. So, I think there's an opportunity there for Walmart,
and certainly also on the dividend side as well, the yield is under 3% still. By the
same token, I think, based on what Matty was saying there, it seems like they're going
to continue investing in this e-commerce opportunity for some time to come, which is probably the
right move. But again, I think, from an investing perspective, the bigger opportunity is to
get a little bit better about returning capital to shareholders.
Yeah, I can't help but think it's just too little too late for Walmart and Target
and online. But actually, I hope they succeed. One big risk for Amazon now, I think Amazon's
going to the moon, but the one risk is that Amazon just gets too big, too influential,
and some kind of regulatory antitrust actions start to come ahead and rumble. But if Walmart
has success online, and Walmart's already so huge and already accounts for much more
of total retail sales in the U.S., that makes me think Amazon won't face any of those challenges,
and Amazon can continue to grow, even if a Walmart and a Target have some share of total
online sales. Well, I mean, the ultimate benefit
of all of this. Amazon performing so well is forcing everybody to up their game. We're
going to see some succeed there, and we're going to see some go away. I think Walmart
stands a chance of succeeding as good as anyone out there, if not more so, just because they've
had so much success to date, and they're so big already.
When you say upping the game, for different retailers, that means different things.
For some folks, it's shrinking the footprint and cutting costs to be profitable, but in
less grandiose kind of way. Target here, investing $7 billion to try to compete. There's a lot
of risk in there. If you're throwing that amount of money to try to compete and you're
wrong, look out below.
Well, and on the flip side, you look at Walmart making that acquisition last year of Jet.com
for $3 billion and change. And I think some people sort of raised an eyebrow at that price
tag. But in the early innings here, it appears to be paying off.
Well, again, I feel like they had to do it, and the thing that Jet brought them
was a lot of talent. And talent and resources they didn't really have, or knowledge power.
So, it's a right move, and sure enough, early on here, it seems to be paying off.
From general retail to athletic retail, tough week for a couple of teams. After their latest
quarterly reports, shares of Foot Locker down 15%, shares of Dick's Sporting Goods down 20%.
And Jason, I think back to when Sports Authority went out of business, and one of my thoughts
at the time was, well, this will probably help the Foot Lockers and Dick's Sporting
Goods of the world, and apparently not.
One would think, yeah, it does seem like that probably hasn't played out as well as
the management teams of those two companies were hoping. I think with Dick's Sporting
Goods, I mean, comps were positive, but they were lower than expected. They are going to
be slowing down the pace of opening new stores. I think that's one of the real marks against
this company, is that those stores are just such big footprints. It costs a lot of money
to get that real estate and to keep it open. That means you have to gin up a lot of traffic,
and plainly that traffic isn't going there. Furthermore, what's really keeping them down
here is, e-commerce sales grew 11% for the quarter, but they made up 9.3% of total sales
for the quarter. And that compares to 9.2% a year ago. So, they're basically not gaining
any share on the e-commerce front either. A lot of problems there. And consequently,
you've got shares now trading around 11X full-year estimates, which is significant. Back in November
of 2016, we were talking about this, and shares were trading around 20X. So, obviously, expectations
are very low for Dick's Sporting Goods. And it's funny, because when you look at Dick's
Sporting Goods and compare it to Foot Locker, I think most people would probably think Dick's
Sporting Goods is a better company. Foot Locker is by far and away the more successful business.
Bigger footprint, bigger company, better revenue, better margins. For Foot Locker, I think it's
a lot of the same, but they're far more well-established. I think that's why the stock is still trading
somewhere in the neighborhood of 20X earnings today. 3,300 stores vs. a much smaller footprint
for Dick's Sporting Goods. What about the Foot Locker is really
a mall-based retailer, where Dick's sometimes next to the mall, or in a strip mall, but
not being affected by the tough times that malls are going through.
Well, possibly. But then also, you have to remember that mall footprint or strip
mall footprint, it's far less expensive, particularly today, given the traffic challenges. And you're
still catching incremental traffic that's there for whatever reason. There are more
reasons to go to a mall than there would be to go to one store, for example.
I think that's where they probably are at least able to get some straight traffic
no matter what. What's also fascinating, the derivative
of all this, of course, is that you see Nike hitting, I think, a three- or four-year low.
Under Armour, of course, has struggled. And I wonder, this particular channel for those
big athletic brands is really hurting right now. And if it doesn't bounce back, a company
like Under Armour, which really depends on that channel, it's going to be struggling for a while.
Yeah, and when you look at Foot Locker, Dick's Sporting Goods, companies,
a lot of their inventory is made up of Nike and Under Armour.
So, that's why we're seeing Nike and Under Armour sort of getting pulled back along with these drops.
The nice thing is, with Nike and Under Armour, those are companies that had the wherewithal
to build out very robust direct-to-consumer operations.
And that is ultimately going to, I think, keep them moving forward.
Whereas, Dick's, Foot Locker, companies like those, they have got some serious challenges ahead.
Home Depot's first quarter report demonstrated once again why Home Depot is the No. 1 home
improvement chain in America. Ron Gross, profits, same-store sales, where would you like to
begin?
It's good stuff. It's nice to see a nice report coming out of a retailer. And they
are clearly bucking the trend, as we have said, week after week, of retailers doing
quite poorly. Continue to be helped by low mortgage rates, solid housing market, that's
really the big story here, plus the fact that it's not as easy to purchase a lot of this
type of stuff through Amazon or online, although their online sales are up 23%, so they're
doing a good job there as well. But, same-store sales up 5.5%, 16% pop in big-ticket transactions,
which is a big number, increased their guidance. Stock's only trading 22 times, really. That's
fine here for a company that's putting up numbers. Five years from now, if interest
rates are different and the housing market is different, will that impact their business?
Yes, it probably will, but that will ebb and flow for the life of this company, and I still
think it's just such a solid operator. What's interesting to see is, they've
performed so well here in the recent past. You look at the homeownership rate over the
most recent decade, it's actually just kept on falling. Ever since 2005, it's trended
straight downward, to far below where it was in even 1995, really. There's a great opportunity
for Home Depot here as that homeownership rate starts to tick back up. That is the place
to go, whether you own or rent, whether it's rain or shine. You just have to love these
guys' market opportunity. Interestingly, Lowe's just announced
they were investing $500 million to buy two companies that sell products to apartment
building managers, because they're trying to diversify away from the do-it-yourself
homeowners. Because even though they do pretty well, Home Depot continues to just do a little
bit better. Coming up, a breakup in the restaurant industry. Stay right here. You're listening to
Motley Fool Money. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. Chris Hill here in the studio with Jason
Moser, Matt Argersinger, and Ron Gross. You can catch Motley Fool Money every weekend on radio
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O'Reilly. All right. New England.
Shares of Alibaba hit an all-time high this week. Fourth quarter revenue for the Chinese
e-commerce giant rose 60%. And, Matty, they're also buying back some stock.
Yeah, 60%. It's a huge number when you think of the revenue base. We're talking about what
but this year is going to be a $25 billion revenue base for Alibaba. We know how dominant
they are. Stock's up 40%. Earnings, not that we want to pay too much attention to them,
but earnings were missed only because they're investing so much in cloud computing and particularly
entertainment properties. They're in a battle with Baidu's, iQiyi, and Tencent right now
to be the YouTube of China. Good place to be investing.
I think with Alibaba, it's up 40% year-to-date. It trades for 12 times sales. And it's a $300
billion company. It's not too expensive. But I look at that compared to Amazon at three
times sales, and I say, well, is the risk really worth it? Even though the opportunity
probably compared to Amazon's is obviously so much larger.
How much attention should people pay to the cloud computing stuff? Because that
got some headlines this week. Alibaba appears to be paying attention to what Amazon has
done with web services and said, hey, maybe we could do that.
Well, sure. I mean, you'd imagine they have the same kind of infrastructure that can do
that kind of thing. But there's a lot of, in Chinese businesses in particular, there's
a lot of headline grabbing and saying, well, they're doing it, we're going to be doing
it, and we can do it at a bigger scale because it's China. So, I tend to be a little more
skeptical about those announcements.
On Thursday, shares of Pandora spiked on reports of a potential deal with SiriusXM.
This is not the first time SiriusXM has flirted with the idea of buying Pandora. What do you
think, Jason? Match made in heaven?
Well, maybe I wouldn't quite go that far.
Match made in purgatory?
Match made somewhere. I feel like a deal here could probably make sense from the perspective
that Pandora does, I think, possess some brand equity through all of its shortcomings, and
there have been a lot. I do think they possess some brand equity that could be meaningful
to SiriusXM in the internet radio space as we start to see competition ramp up and a
little consolidation occur here. But I think Pandora needs this deal or a deal to happen
far more than the other way around. They are in a position where they're going to be a
desperate seller at this point, which is great for the acquirer. They can more or less name
their price. Whether it's $10 a share or $9 a share, who really knows? I think SiriusXM
has to start thinking about life after Howard. About three and a half years, he is responsible
for a lot of the subscription growth, a lot of the subscriber growth there. Now, Pandora
probably isn't going to bring in a lot of paid subs, but it does have a lot of free
listeners, and those listeners are OK being subjected to some advertising. So, Pandora
can make some money on the ad side, and it may just be a nice little addition. You tuck
that thing in a series, you can mask those financials for a while and get some better
operators setting that thing up for better success.
They need to think about life after Howard Stern, but I think SiriusXM might be taking a close look at this,
because they're also thinking about life outside the car.
If you just think about SiriusXM, and the majority of consumption of their programming is in the car,
whereas Pandora, it's outside the car.
So, this may be a way for SiriusXM to really get more into people's homes.
It could be, but by the same token, I think SiriusXM has made tremendous progress on their outside-the-car initiative.
the app that they have that you can keep on your phone gives you access to their entire
catalog of offerings as well. I use it all the time. It's really terrific. I think you're right,
Pandora could couple very nicely with that. Second quarter profits for Jack in the Box
came in higher than expected, but that is not what pushed the stock up this week.
Jack in the Box is the parent company of Qdoba, and it is looking to sell its Mexican chain
because, in the words of CEO Lenny Kama, our valuation is being impacted by having two
different business models. What is he talking about, Ron?
I sense some sarcasm in you.
They're both restaurants. I don't get this.
So, I tried to do some digging to figure out what he could potentially mean. So, first
I looked. Maybe the Jack in the Box stores and the Qdoba stores have different business
models in the sense that one is franchised and one is not, and that is not the case.
They're both somewhat equally franchised. Then I went to the conference call to see
if perhaps one of the analysts asked a question to say, could you please clarify what that
means and no one asked that either so i kept digging and i couldn't find anything and i just
left to believe that what he meant was one's a burger joint and one's a mexican place that's
what he meant i think and he that's two different cuisines that's not two different business models
and for some reason he believes that's dragging valuation down and what's truly dragging valuation
down is that qdoba is just not putting up numbers that that are similar to jack is and you know the
same-store sales have been declining and there's weakness. So, he wants to spin those off and
hopefully create shareholder value as a result, which he actually might be right about that.
Well, I was just thinking, Chris, about what we talked about before the show,
which is, I just think he's a little too late on the whole spin-off idea. I think you're right.
When Chipotle was kind of at the trough, I guess, of its struggles with E. coli and Kedoba's sales
were still somewhat decent, that would be the time to really raise value. I'm not sure now
was the right time. O' Jack in the Box bought Qdoba for $45
million in cash in 2003. They're going to make some money off of whatever they do with
this, but yeah, it really does seem like a year ago was the time to pull the trigger
on this. For sure. But it's still a small franchise.
There's only 699 Qdobas at the end of the fiscal year. There's plenty of runway out
there as long as they can get their act together and people continue to want to consume Mexican
cuisine. Matt Argersinger, Jason Moser, Ron Gross, guys, we'll see you later in the show.
Up next, disruption in the automotive industry might be coming a lot sooner than you think.
Stay right here. You're listening to Motley Fool Money.
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Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Hill. Earlier this week, I got the chance to
talk with Tony Siba. Tony is the co-founder of an independent think tank called RethinkX.
He's also the author of a just-published report entitled,
Rethinking Transportation 2020 to 2030. And what Tony Siba and his colleagues are predicting in
this report will have a dramatic impact on some of the biggest industries in the world.
Let me start with this, because the type of disruption that you have been studying and
researching, particularly when it comes to the transportation industry, that's something we've
talked about on our show for years. And what struck me about the report that you and your
colleagues put together is the timeline. Because if I'm reading this correctly, and I like to think
that I am, you believe that driving in America is going to reach a tipping point, not in the
far, far future, but in three years. Do I have that right? You have that right. 2021, essentially,
when autonomous vehicles are approved that's going to be the key enabler at that point
essentially the the disruption of the whole transportation system road transportation
system in america is going to start and then yeah it's going to take just a decade
for 95% of the miles traveled to be electric, self-driving, and on-demand. Yes.
So, one of the key phrases in what you just said is, if approved. Because that's, in some ways,
the technology disruption, the business model innovation, those, I think, are almost taken
as given at this point. I think for a lot of investors, they look at autonomous vehicles
and think of the government, whether it's the federal government or state and local governments
and the approval process. And I'm curious, from where does your confidence come that the
United States federal government is going to move quickly when it comes to approving
autonomous vehicles? Oh, there is two things. One is that this is not U.S. dependent.
essentially think about basically transport as a service about these vehicles as computers and
wheels they're essentially they have no steering wheel they have no pedals it's a computer run by
an operating system and a gpu or a computing platform that's going to run that operating
system. It's not unlike personal computers or tablets or an iPhone. So the key thing is going
to be to, when you look at the history of computers, there have been two operating systems
that essentially dominate. In personal computers, it was Windows and Mac, and then in smartphones,
It's iOS, Apple, and Android, and so on.
So there's going to be a whole rush to develop the one operating system that's going to come in first.
And that one operating system may or may not come from the United States.
So China is investing a lot of money.
You see companies like Didi in China, which pushed out Uber, beat Uber in China.
They're investing massively in creating this operating system.
Baidu is developing this operating system.
A lot of companies in Europe are developing this operating system.
So all you need is one of these operating systems to work at level five, which is full autonomy, in order for this race to start.
And it may not happen in the United States.
So, you know, while we did the numbers for the United States, the truth is that this can happen anywhere.
And any economy that does not get onto task, onto this transport as a system, is going to be uncompetitive.
It would be essentially like an economy running on horses trying to compete with the internal combustion engine 100 years ago.
And so once one country gets it and approves it, essentially it's going to have to happen everywhere because it's going to be a competitive thing.
You can't compete with a technology that's 10 times cheaper, essentially for transportation and logistics and so on, than your competitor countries can.
So this is a race. This is not going to be dependent. Yes, it's going to be dependent on regulation, but it's not going to be dependent just on Washington, D.C.
And in the United States, this is being done at the state level, mostly.
In California, essentially 30 companies have been approved for as soon as the end of this year, 2017, to do autonomous testing pilots on public roads.
So California as a state is way ahead of the game in this respect.
And several other states are in the process of approving autonomy in the United States at the state level.
The subtitle of the report that you and your colleagues put out recently is
The Disruption of Transportation and the Collapse of the Internal Combustion Vehicle and Oil Industries.
Last time I looked, the oil industry was enormous with deep pockets.
The type of disruption that you're talking about really seems like something that will be fought very hard,
not just from regulators, but also, I mean, there are enormous companies that have very keen
interests in the automobile industry staying pretty close to what it is right now. I mean,
do you really think that 10, 15 years from now, the oil companies are going to be dramatically
smaller than they are right now? Yes. And essentially, yes, you're right in that
they're going to push back and they're already pushing back. But if you look at the gains from
the transition to transport as a service, and also if you look at the companies that they're
going to be pushing back against, the largest companies in the world by market capitalization
are getting google amazon apple and so on are basically getting into this uh game so into into
this game into this this industry so essentially it's not going to be just the large oil companies
versus you know the little you know hippies doing an electric vehicle it's going to be you know the
large oil companies versus Apple and Google and Tesla and then Amazon and so on.
And then on top of that, when you look at the idea that transport as a service is going
to provide cheap, accessible transportation to a lot of groups, door to door, to a lot
of groups who have been left out of the car ownership or even the public transportation
system, the elderly, the disabled, and so on. There you have it. You're going to have, you know,
oil companies on one side, and you're going to have Apple and Amazon and AARP and groups
lobbying for disabled and so on, on the other side. So it's going to be a big fight. It's not
going to be a one-way fight in that respect. Let me add one thing. This is on day one,
2021 the day that autonomous vehicles are approved the cost per mile of transport as a service
is going to be 10 times cheaper than buying a new car 10 times cheaper every single time
that there has been a 10x difference in cost for a similar product or service in history
And all the disruptions that I've studied in history, every single time that there has been a 10x difference in cost, there has been a disruption.
I don't know of a single case in which that has not happened.
And this transport as a service disruption is a 10x disruption.
In terms of the many ripple effects this type of disruption could cause, certainly when you think about the average city in the United States,
one of the things you touch on in the report, fewer cars on the road overall and parking
becomes obsolete, really? Yes. So when you look at the fact that today we drive our cars 4% of the
time, when you have a vehicle that is autonomous, it can drive 40% of the time, 60, 80% of the time,
it can be driving around all the time. So we modeled 40% of the time, which is 10 times
efficiency. And what we got was that you needed a fleet that is 80% smaller than what we have
today. So we'll need 80% fewer cars on the road than what we need today. So yeah,
parking is going to be obsolete, especially in the high real estate areas in San Francisco,
New York City, London and Chicago and so on. Parking is essentially a waste of space. We
could use that for productive uses, whether you want a green space, whether you want
new businesses or housing and so on. But yeah, we're going to have 80% fewer cars
And they're not going to need to park. I mean, we park our cars 96 percent of the time right now, which is a huge waste of money and space and so on.
And what that's going to bring to America and to the world is essentially new land.
It's going to open up real estate that hasn't been available in 100 years.
And if you just think about the numbers, L.A. has 200 square miles of parking and, you know, 180 square miles of that, at least maybe 160, 180 square miles of L.A. is going to be vacant.
It's going to be empty. And just to give you an idea, you could fit three and a half San Francisco's into the vacant parking space in L.A., three San Francisco's.
So policymakers in L.A. are going to have to decide, do we want to create the wealth of three San Francisco's or do we want to have that, you know, a desert, basically 180 square mile desert?
So, yeah, a lot of land is going to be available for development because it's going to be vacant, parking space.
There were reports earlier this week that Ford Motor is planning to lay off 10% of its employees around the world.
Meanwhile, Ford Motor's stock is hitting a 52-week low.
We talked earlier about the oil companies.
It kind of seems like unless they are investing heavily in the next generation of transportation that you and your colleagues are writing about in this report, it seems like the traditional automakers are in deep trouble as well.
They are.
So what's going to happen is the auto market is going to shrink by about 70%.
We're going to need 70%. The production of new vehicles is going to go down by 70%,
which means that a lot of them are not going to survive. And on top of that, you have new
entrants. You have electric vehicle companies like Tesla and computer companies like Uber
and so on who are getting into the space. So you're going to have a smaller market
and new entrants. So it's going to be a very difficult space. Having said that, today the
traditional automakers have an advantage over the startups. I mean, they have the manufacturing
capability, they have the skills. Making an electric vehicle is actually quite easy. An EV
has 20 moving parts as opposed to 2,000 moving parts in a combustion engine automobile. So it's
very easy to make. The question is, will they actually commit to going in this direction? Do
they see this as the existential threat that it is? And if they move quickly, they have a good
chance of surviving and thriving. But those who deny it are not essentially are going to be in
trouble. Last question, then I'll let you go. Just because I'm curious, what do you drive right now?
I don't. Basically, I don't own a car. I use Uber and Lyft and Zipcar and so on. I've been using
what we call pre-task, pre-transport as a service for years now, for 10 years.
And initially, it started as research. I started doing research into this new thing 10 years ago.
It's not something that just popped into my head. And I've done the numbers for a long time.
and yeah it makes total economic sense to go in this direction and transport as a service is going
to be even 10 times cheaper than what i paid today so i drive i have access to a million cars as
opposed to owning one i love that you're walking the walk i am that's how that's you know but in
order to do real research you have to live it and basically I've been doing it for 10 years
and I've been doing the numbers and it makes sense a lot of of the pushback that you're going to hear
is how can I you know I love my car how can I do this or that how do I go to the supermarket I've
been doing that for 10 years and and the truth is that once you go in that direction and it's very
easy to do it actually you can just get an uber uh and try it you can and and and in 2021 it's
going to be get uh you know an uber or lyft or whatever that's autonomous you don't have to sell
your car before you try it's very easy um and then you go to the supermarket one day and you decide
you know what it's you know not the end of the world as we know it and you use it more and more
and more it's a product that's easy to try and once you try it enough you make the decision it
doesn't make sense for me to own a car i can do this and that's when the mass migration
of people selling their cars and transitioning to tasks is going to begin if you want to learn
more from tony seba and read the report for yourself just go to rethinkx.com up next 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. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. Chris
Hill here in studio with Jason Moser, Matt Argersinger, and Ron Gross. You can check
out past episodes of Motley Fool Money and all of our podcasts by going to podcast.fool.com.
And while you're there, you can kick the tires on our flagship investing service, Motley
Fool Stock Advisor. The brand new issue just came out. Two new stock recommendations from
David and Tom Gardner. So, check it out by going to podcast.fool.com. Time to get to
the stocks on our radar and our man behind the glass, Steve Broido, hit you with a question.
Ron Gross, what are you looking at?
I got a recent total income recommendation for Steve. It's National Grid, NGG. It's a
London-based company, but it's ADR Trades here on the New York Exchange. They own and
operate regulated electric and gas distribution networks, both in the U.S. and the U.K.
Transmission business is kind of like a toll booth, which is a nice business. It's very
consistent cash flow streams, which makes it a really great stock from a dividend perspective,
4.4% yield. That should be a pretty safe dividend. Just sold their U.K. gas distribution business,
special dividended, if that's a word. It isn't. Out the profits on that to shareholders. And I
think the stock has potential as well, not just in the yield. Steve, question about National Grid?
With a utility company like this, what is one metric I should look for,
not understanding distribution of power at all?
Certainly, industrial output, the strength of the economy in general. This business is less
... Commodity prices don't affect this business as much as in other businesses,
because it is a distribution play. But I think economic output in general would do you well.
Jason Moser, what are you looking at this week?
some dividending in biggins, all investors, OK? It's not a secret, Nike, ticker is NKE,
we were talking about this earlier, how poor results from Dick's Sporting Goods and Footlocker
have brought down companies like Nike and Under Armour. I think this is fairly short-lived.
I think the upside with these guys, particularly Nike, they have very strong direct-to-consumer
businesses. You look at Nike, the direct-to-consumer business represents more than a quarter of
total sales today. That's up from about 20% in 2014. We have Nike on the watch list and
MDP. We've been really patient with this one. We target about $50 per share. It's a pretty
risk-free way to get what we think is 8%, 9%, even possibly 10% annualized return over
the coming five years. So, we are very close on this one.
Steve, question about Nike?
Do you understand their relationship with Apple? They have the thing you can put
in your shoe for a while, and then it's the watch, and I don't know what they're doing
with that.
Yeah, I don't understand the relationship with Apple at all, Steve, so I'll just ...
Don't we all have a relationship with Apple?
In some way, right.
Matt Argersinger, what are you looking at?
Really simple, Walt Disney, ticker DIS. Everyone keeps worrying about ESPN and
the network's business. Just stop already! Disney's doing fine. Double-digit growth,
Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, Beauty and the Beast, which was a monster, literally, buying back
loads of stock. You've got Bob Iger in the saddle for the next two years. If you want
A 10% annual return for the next 10 years, right now, by Disney.
Steve?
I'm a shareholder.
How many more Star Wars movies do you think there will be in the next 20 years?
77.
Infinite.
Three different businesses, Steve.
You got one you want to add to your watch list?
I might look at Nike, just so I can understand their relationship with that.
All right, Ryan Gross, Jason Moser, Matt Argesinger.
Guys, thanks for being here.
Thanks, Chris.
That's going to do it for this week's edition of Motley Fool Money.
Our engineer, Steve Broido.
Our producer, Matt Crear.
I'm Chris Hill.
Thanks for listening.
We'll see you next week.
We'll be right back.
