Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - The Most Shocking Stories of 2025

Episode Date: December 26, 2025

Do you remember all of the surprises investors got in 2025? We had tariffs, AI upheaval, and even gold having a great year. We discuss all of it. Travis Hoium, Lou Whiteman, and Emily Flippen discuss: - When tariffs shocked the world - When ChatGPT fell behind Google - Gold’s ouperformance - How well do you remember 2025 Companies discussed: Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL), NVIDIA (NVDA), Oracle (ORCL). Sandisk (SNDK), Medline (MDLN). Host: Travis Hoium Guests: Lou Whiteman, Emily Flippen Engineer: Dan Boyd 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

It's the day after Christmas, so it's time to look back on 2025 Motley Fool Money starts now. Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money. The best things in life are free, but you can give them to the birds and bees. From Fool Global Headquarters, this is Motley Fool Money. Welcome to Motley Fool Money. I am Travis Hoyum, joined today by Emily Flippen and Lou Whiteman. Guys, when we look back on 2025, we're getting ready for this show. I almost forgot how much tariffs were a topic just a few months ago. this happened in April. There were sweeping tariffs put on all kinds of imports coming

into the U.S. So we have to start there when we're looking back on 2025, because that was thought to be a devastating hit to the U.S. economy. And yet the S&P 500 is up about 40% since then. Lou, what did we learn about tariffs or are we still in sort of this unknown territory? OK, so full disclosure, I was one of the people saying the sky is falling. So I'm going to be very defensive in my answer here. I'm likely biased. That said, a couple of things I want to point out. First of all, we live in a world where we're used to hot takes, instant reactions and stuff. Tariffs, like Fed moves and so many other things in the economy, they take time to work through the system. I think if you looked at since April, no, there wasn't that instant,

the world is terrible now. But we've talked about it on here, Travis, the boiling frog economy, And it's just sort of, it's slowly, slowly getting worse. I'm sticking with that. Under the surface, there's signs of distress, even if the stock market's up. Secondly, on the stock market, Main Street is not Wall Street. Yes, the market is up. The market is always ahead of the economy, ups and downs. Wall Street went through the shock, they went through the denial, and then they kind of normalized tariffs pretty quickly. It's, I think, dangerous to say that, yeah, stocks are up 40%. Therefore, there's no pain on Main Street because I do think they're separate things and they are going to play out differently. They did play out differently in 2025 and it will

continue to do so. Emily, how do you think about this? Because the market reaction was almost like the pandemic. I mean, 2020, things crashed in a few days. That's what happened after the tariffs. But then it doesn't seem like Lou's probably right. There is some maybe boiling frog things going on. But you don't go to the store and see prices up 40%, 50% the way that we maybe thought they were going to be in April. So how do we think about this as investors? Yeah, I love this question because to Lou's earlier point, what's interesting is that by the end of April, the market had already rebounded and regained all of the losses after the announcement of the tariff. So this was not in time, obviously, to actually see any impact

from the tariff. The market was not reacting to whether or not we were going to see 40% or 50% price increases. It was reacting to something else entirely. So to the Trump administration's credit, the economy clearly did not collapse due to tariffs. And there were pundits, myself included, that were predicting the worst. I always tend to be a bit of a pessimist. I like to be pleasantly surprised. But let's not forget that in April, that was the narrative. I mean, remember all the big bank CEOs saying a global recession was likely? But it's also true that the economy hasn't exactly boomed, even though the stock market has. And that is, to Lou's point, an important distinction, right? Just because the stock market's going up doesn't mean the average

life for Americans are getting better. And the data that we do have to kind of evaluate that average life of the American is pretty severely delayed, and lots of it's getting questioned regarding accuracy too. But it's still fair to look at what we do have and see what it's telling us, right? Job additions this year have been lower than in the past, and Fed Chair Powell now believes those numbers are overstated to the point where we actually have been potentially losing upwards of 20,000 jobs a month since April. And it's really impossible to say how much of that was due to tariffs versus AI versus business decisions, but they're all key impacts of economic policies, right? So we're still actually looking to see the direct impact of

tariffs. And I think it is genuinely still, it's crazy to say this because we're ending out the year of 2025, but it's too early to say that there hasn't been any economic impact from tariffs. It hasn't been what we expected it to be. But there are so many other variables going on today and a growing disconnect between the market and the average person that the real impact probably won't even come until 2026. Emily, one of the things that if you're a relatively young investor, let's say you started in the last 15 years, 10 to 15 years, it seems like every one of these dips immediately gets bought. You mentioned it with April. April, things collapse. And then by the end of the month, we're kind of back to normal and we're on an upward trajectory the rest of the

year. Same thing happened in 2021. Oh my gosh, the economy, the world is shutting down. The stock market collapses. That was when you wanted to be a huge buyer. Is this the trend that things are just collapsing so quickly that the reactions are almost instantaneous and we should be ready to be really aggressive if the market does pull back? Or are these sort of individual things and we haven't actually seen a real recession in 15, 16 years now. And man, when one of those hits, it's going to be real news for a lot of people who haven't invested through that before. Because I'm having a hard time kind of deciphering between those two things. And it's almost like two things can be true at the same time. But how do you think about those pullbacks? Are you more excited to buy

than ever because they're typically quick bounce backs? Or are you cautious because eventually we are going to get through to a real recession. It's such an interesting thought. And I do lean on the side of typically staying invested regardless. And I don't actually keep cash on the sidelines for the most part. I get a paycheck. I invest it whenever I get that paycheck. So you could say that I view it as buying opportunities regardless of whether or not the market is up or down. But I do think to your point, Travis, there is an appetite for opportunity. And I am one of those investors who has not invested through a recession. I am 31 years old. And during the Great Recession, which was really the last time we saw any sustained long

market pullback, I obviously was a teenager. I didn't have my life savings in the stock market the way that I do today. And there are so many people out there who are like myself or people who maybe don't necessarily understand the risk that is associated with, say, a sustained pullback or a Great Recession, but are looking for ways to grow and expand their money because opportunities to do so have been so much more limited for younger investors. So it's not a surprise at all that whenever the market pulls back, you see people who do have dry powder on the sidelines jumping in. It's only a matter of time before a recession does come. The dry powder doesn't last forever, so to speak. But it's so critically important for portfolio management, in my opinion,

to encourage everybody to stay invested regardless of what happens to the market in the short term. I agree 100% with Emily in terms of the advice for investors is to try to block it out and just stay invested. That said, I'll play the role of the old man in the room because Emily, I got two decades on you, so I guess it counts. But look, I think things bounce back quickly during COVID for good reasons because COVID was a weird recession. It was sort of an artificial outside stimulus recession that was dealt with with outside stimulus. So that makes sense. I am going to be the grumpy old man and say it is way too soon to draw conclusions on this one. Yes, the stocks bounce back after the announcement, but I don't think we're out of the woods yet at

all. I think we are wired to look for opportunities now. Definitely, with all the information that comes out of it so quickly, we can process, we can get all those hot takes. Maybe that's a good thing. That's something that when I started investing, that's not the way that it worked. We're not sitting alone in fear. We're hearing people give opinions. That said, I do think that while Wall Street moves separately from Main Street, there is a connection and we will inevitably have a recession and it will inevitably take longer to clear out than we had hoped. And buying in at the first sight is going to bite us at some point. You know, again, as Emily said, the answer is to try not to sell when it's down and try not to, you know,

save powder and all that, just to ride through it and focus on the long term. But I don't think that we've eliminated cycles. And I think that there is one at some point that's going to really take people by surprise. Tell you what, I was not expecting to learn in this segment that I bought my first stock when Emily was one years old. But here we are. This is my 30th year investing. So next year, here's to 31. We can't go forward too far looking back on the year without talking about AI and ChatGPT. I don't think anybody would have thought coming into 2025 that OpenAI would be kind of on the defensive by the end of the year. And surprisingly enough, Google and Gemini are playing offense. They're leading in many benchmarks. The stock is up 60% for the year.

Emily, it's up 110% since its April lows. Are you shocked by how quickly Google has made a comeback or is OpenAI losing steam from what seemed like a once insurmountable lead? I actually am shocked, Travis. And I do think it's maybe too early to say OpenAI is behind an AI, but there is certainly evidence that Google's Gemini has caught up and in certain cases, I think, surpassed their competitors. And it was surprising to me just because OpenAI was basically the poster child of LLMs, but it really should not be for anybody who took that one level deeper in terms of their thought process, right? Because Google was able and is able to drop Gemini into all the places that Alphabet, their parent company, already operates. Search, workspaces,

app enterprises, right? Google already has access to all those places that enable them to drive traffic and use that data plus their huge coffers to improve their model training. So despite the fact that there's not a black and white ranking of who has the best AI, there has been clear strides made by Google. But to your point, Travis, I am still worried for Google shareholders and Google as a company, Alphabet, I really should say, heading into 2026. And that's not because their AI isn't great. I think Gemini has been an incredible product, but it's because they're fighting to retain revenue, not expand it. Their business is 100% dependent upon advertising. And as advertising dollars potentially move towards search based

off LLMs, what's happening is, is if you're a company and you have your ad budget, you have to determine where to spend that money. The budget doesn't just expand because there's new opportunities. Historically, Alphabet has been that key partner for advertising budgets and they need to retain that customer. So they need Gemini to work and they need to integrate advertising into Gemini. That way they can show, hey, we're still the best partner we have for your ad dollars. The more LLMs, the more search and other eyes go elsewhere, even if it's only on the margin, it's possible that Google, despite having incredible AI, still loses some revenue dollars. And that's what ultimately concerns me for this company. Isn't it then good that OpenAI hasn't

built an ad business though? That seems to be... But they're trying to. Yeah, they're trying. We haven't seen... That's a long learning curve. So we'll see if they can get that. Fun fact that I learned today, because you talked about distribution, Google has five of the top 10 apps in the Apple App Store in 2025. Just insane distribution. Yeah. These large companies, we're only seeing them grow their scale even deeper. And I hesitate to say the words that every investor fears, which is this time is different. And we always talk about what the next Amazon, the next Alphabet is going to be. And I increasingly, as I have joined my older peers here, believe that the next Amazon is probably Amazon and the next Google is probably

Google. The scale these companies are creating, especially with the advent of AI, is only getting bigger by the day. Yeah. So on the Google point, I think Emily's right that there is still a risk, but I am forever bullish on consumer inertia. And I am forever bullish on the idea that we go to google.com today, and if they can offer a credible answer for me, I'm not going to look elsewhere. So whether it's AI search, whatever, I feel pretty good about that. As for the question of has OpenAI fallen behind, I'm not a techie. Benchmarks to me are like statistics, easily cherry-picked to do what you want. I can't say that. What I think has happened though, when OpenAI debuted, it was magic. It was this world that we never saw before. And as Gemini

and others have followed, that glow has faded. That's really what has happened. I think our perspective on OpenAI and what it is has changed more than really the race. Here's the important thing, though, Travis, to me. It's not really, to me, about who has the most cutting-edge model or who's behind, because for most of us, they're all moving in the same direction, they're all good enough, but these things are expensive. In terms of financing, OpenAI was behind from the start, no customers, no revenue streams outside of AI. I don't think they've fallen behind, but I think they've always been behind from the all-important financing position. And that to me is the concern. It's not whether or not their model is slightly better than Gemini or slightly

better than Anthropic. It's just who has the cash to throw at this. And that's where I think Alphabet and others are way ahead of OpenAI. And it's kind of always been that way. We just weren't thinking in those terms one of the tests i always use is what is my wife talking about what are other parents at soccer games and basketball games talking about uh and that's moved kind of away from open ai so we'll see if those boots on the ground anecdotal insights are true in 2026 when we come back we are going to talk about something we don't often talk about it's gold you're listening to motley fool money new from nespresso blend wellness into your coffee routine with the Coffee Plus range, infused with functional benefits. Choose the coffee you love

with added B vitamins, like Coffee Plus B12 to help support immune function and Coffee Plus B6 to keep your day moving. Or go with the flow and 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 Nespresso.com. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. This one has a couple of surprises for me. First off, gold has outperformed the S&P 500 by about 4x in 2025. That could have meant a flight to safety or hedging against a falling dollar. But Bitcoin is down about 12% as we're recording this year. Emily, what do we make of these dynamics? Well, I think what you're supposed to make

of these dynamics is that not all commodities are made equal. In this case, Bitcoin is not seen as a store of value the way gold is. And they're compared to each other. Wasn't that the point of it, though? Yeah, exactly. The theory behind Bitcoin, it's like a moving target. And so as we look back on some of these years, I'm always confused. Wait, I thought it was supposed to be an inflation hedge. Oh, I thought it was supposed to be a store of value. And it just doesn't quite seem to be what's being sold. Well, ultimately, the purpose of it is what people are buying and holding it for. And if people were buying and holding Bitcoin as a store of value or an inflation hedge, then we wouldn't see the correlation that we have seen over the

last couple of years, which is that Bitcoin is heavily correlated to equities and not correlated to the performance of other commodities like gold. So what that says to me is that the people who are buying and holding Bitcoin or trading Bitcoin are doing so more as a trading opportunity, and investment opportunity, a perception of value, as opposed to trying to control their risk or actually trying to hedge their portfolio with it. And it seems like gold, whether that be the central banks of the world, whether that be individual consumers, it just has use cases and demand that is supported by people who are okay sitting on and holding this as a hedge or store of value. In reality, we just don't see that correlation there for Bitcoin yet. People

might want that. The creators of Bitcoin and other investors might want that to be the case, but it's not the case today. Yeah, the bull case for Bitcoin is how many narratives have there been that have been proven wrong and it's still here, which speaks to its flexibility, which is a weird way of saying it. As for gold, I do think it's interesting. I think probably, though, a prediction for 2026, too much is going to be made about the demise of the dollar. I do think what we've seen here is that because of current events, a lot of foreign players decided to hedge their bets and go into gold. And even if everybody only does that 5%, 10% versus the dollar, that's a lot of players, that's a lot of gold, and that's what happened. The euro wasn't looking much better, so that's

not a great alternative. Other currencies have their issues. But look, the point to me still is that the dollar, for all of its bruising that occurred this year, there still aren't many better options. Gold is not a good option for actually doing commerce. It's a good option for store of value. I think that, yes, if we keep maybe going in some of the red directions that cause the interest in gold, the dollar eventually is going to be in trouble. But I'm not ready yet to say that this seems like short-term to me and not the beginning of a new dollar age yet. And I'm going to stand by that until things get really worse with the dollar. Lou, it seems like some investors are moving towards safety, as you would think about it, things like gold. We've seen bond

yields actually rise, even though the Fed's reducing interest rates, bond yields, which are impacting the mortgage rate and things like that, are actually up over the past few months. Does that tell a story about what the market's thinking going into 2026? Because coming into 2025, it was all go-go, everything's going higher, YOLO. It seems a little different if gold's hitting all-time highs. I think it tells a story, but I think we have to be careful about what the story is. I think it's telling a story about thoughts on U.S. deficits, thoughts on trade and how things are going. I think to some extent, as equity investors, we can lean into or observe it and learn from it. But I'm not ready to say like, oh, flight to safety, therefore equities

are doomed. I think there's a lot going on that doesn't involve equities. And so I think I worry about more over-interpreting that than I do ignoring it, if that makes sense. One of those reminders that the debt market is about 10 times the size of the equity market. The currency market is another enormous market with a ton of leverage in it. So not everything is going to be correlated. When we come back, we are going to play a little game and see how much Emily and Lou were paying attention in 2025. You're listening to Motley Fool Money. New from Nespresso. Blend wellness into your coffee routine with the Coffee Plus range, infused with functional benefits.

Choose the coffee you love with added B vitamins, like Coffee Plus B12 to help support immune function and Coffee Plus B6 to keep your day moving. Or go with the flow and 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 Nespresso.com. we're at the point in the show where we like to have a little fun with little post-holiday game looking back on 2025 what do you remember and what have you completely forgotten lou i'm going to start with you what was the first company to reach a five trillion dollar

valuation do you remember this in 2025 oh i gotta say i know i don't but i gotta say nvidia yes yes you are correct sorry emily you don't even get a guess that that is that's great because i was gonna say apple i think they hit a number of the other trillion dollar marks uh but not that one it will be interesting what company do you think is going to be the first 10 trillion dollar company emily well if history says anything and this ipo happens i guess it's going to be spacex at some point next year yeah that 1.5 trillion dollar valuation yeah if we get a good ipo bounce Speaking of IPOs, that was my next question. In dollar terms, what was the biggest IPO of the year, Lou?

Biggest IPO of the year? Oh, no. Corweave? That is not correct, Emily. I was also going to say Corweave, but you know what? Maybe I'll say Figma. Did they raise more money? No, Medline raised $6.3 billion.

That was just recently. I didn't even know that that IPO happened, to be honest. Maybe we need to look into it. That one is completely... Or not. Yeah, or not. What was the best performing stock in the S&P 500 so far? And I have all these numbers in front of me. So if you want to go through all 500 companies, we can. But Lou, I just want the top one. What is the top performing stock in the S&P 500? Oh, man. Someone told me the other day it was Build-A-Bear Workshop for like last year or two years, but I don't think that was 2025.

five. It's something AI adjacent, but it isn't going to be Netflix. Sandisk. Emily, do you have a guess? Yeah, the S&P 500. I mean, gosh, Build-A-Bear certainly doesn't qualify for these rates, right? I know Tesla's pulled back quite a bit, but it had a pretty strong start to the year. Is it Tesla? Tesla's not even close. Sandisk. It is SanDisk. It is SanDisk. 561% returns. A couple other notable ones. Seagate Technology, 250%. Robinhood, 230%. Micron, 213%. I don't even know where Tesla is down here, but they can't be more than 100%. It's a wild list if you look at the full list. I want to go in the opposite direction. What was the worst performing stock in the S&P 500? And this is, I will give you a hint,

this is a company that you both are familiar with Lou. Oh man. Um, so, okay. I was about to say Fiserv on just recency, but I doubt that that's what you meant with the hint. So, oh, I don't know. Fiserv. Emily. I don't know Fiserv. So I know Lou's wrong, if anything. I, I feel like it might be Lululemon, although I have to imagine there has to be a worse performer than Lululemon, right? Both very, very close. The Trade Desk is the worst performer, 68% drop in the Trade Desk. Pfizer, second, 67% drop. Yeah, this was the really surprising one to me. Decker's brand, so Decker's Outdoor, down 51%. That's number three. Lululemon is number six, down 45% for the year. Those consumer brands have just been absolutely crushed. And Emily, coming into the

year. I didn't think that that would be the story of the year. But if you look at what we talked about earlier with tariffs, I guess that's kind of the story is that consumer spending is maybe not going where people thought it was in the past. The costs have gone up. Maybe that's the tariff impact that we're seeing in the market. Yeah, it's a one-two punch, in my opinion. There is impacts of tariffs, and that has, for the most part, been eaten by corporations, not consumers yet. But we have seen a pullback in discretionary spending by consumers. And we always talk about that K-shaped economy, it's certainly impacting consumer brands a lot too. But let's not forget that Decker's, Lululemon, a lot of these companies had incredible run-ups coming out of the pandemic.

So a lot of what they've given up this year were gains from previous years. They're just seeing a slowdown across the board. All right, let's go to interest rates because I think this one is interesting. The Fed funds rate on January 1st of 2025, Lou, was? Oh man, I don't know. Four, four even. Emily, what was the Fed funds rate? 4.5%, 4.75%. 4.25% to 4.5%. Today, Lou, that rate is? I don't even know. This is driving the market, Lou. Yeah, I know. All we focus on is it up or down. There's probably a whole segment in that. They've cut 3.5% to 3.75%. Lou hit it on the head. So that's it. I knew it too. Yeah. Well, I'm trying to count how many

cuts, but he kind of gave it to you anyway. But what I think is interesting about that is you're right, Lou, that is what drives the market on a short-term basis. But when you look back on the full year, you don't even remember any of these, any of these rate cuts. So it's like that short-term versus long-term thinking, this is what we talk about all the time on the Motley Fool, but that's it at work right there. You don't even remember what the rate was a year ago. Right. All right. Related to interest rates, and this is a little bit more directly impacting people's pocketbooks, maybe not the same trends. What was the 30-year mortgage rate on January 1st, Lou? And then as a follow-up, I'm going to ask you what it is today. So let's start with

January 1st. See, as someone who hasn't been in the market for a mortgage in a long time, I, I'm going to say it was at, um, uh, uh, high fours, 4.4.825. Emily, Emily is questioning that already. There's no way as somebody who bought a house semi recently, there's no way. Yeah. I bought, I bought my house in 2023 and if mortgage rates were below five and a half percent, which is where my, my mortgage is sitting at the moment, I hope that I would have been wise enough to consider a refinance at that point. So I have to believe that they were above 6% to start the year, although I do know they've come down a bit. I still think they're above 5% today though, right? Emily, I'm going to have you guess

beginning of the year and end of the year. Let's go 6.25% at the beginning of the year and 5.6% end of the year. This is coming from, I think it's bank rate, 6.9% at the beginning of the year, 6.2% today. Obviously, there's going to be variations depending on your credit score and the duration of your loan and things like that. But that's a standard 30-year loan. That's where rates are. Look, 6.2%, what's crazy is we have a 2.875% mortgage that we've refinanced during the pandemic.

That makes moving just, I mean, we're not thinking about moving right now, but just almost impossible if you're giving up that rate. And that's one of those things that I think is gonna be, that's gonna last for five, 10, 15 years for those of us who have that kind of rate locked in. all right for 24 hours about 24 hours give or take who was the richest person in the world in the month of september but there was only for about a day lou who was that

was that larry ellison emily jeezy louise was it a celebrity was it kim kardashian was there was that the spanx ipo i remember this story i don't remember if it was larry or someone else though yeah it was larry ellison that one day that oracle stock popped 40 he was the richest person in the world uh i think that has changed now that spacex is planning to go public with a 1.5 trillion dollar evaluation but we'll see how that plays out i wanted to get your thoughts on where what would have made money over the past year so i have a couple of asset classes. If you had invested $1,000 in Bitcoin on January 1st, how much would you have now? Gosh, I don't know. Would you say $100,000 or $1,000? $1,000. $880. Emily? $1,100. $1,100.

No, Bitcoin is down for the year. You would have $930. Now, here's the harder question, Lou. if you had turned your U.S. dollars into euros on January 1st, how much would those euros be worth in U.S. dollar terms as of today? That $1,000 would be worth, gosh, it spiked up and then went back down. I'm going to say it's basically $1,000. No, that's boring. $1,050. Emily? Let's lock in $1,100, Travis. Emily, $1,140. Wow. So yeah, it's, it's just crazy. And this is what I wanted to bring this back to the tariff discussion that we had earlier. Was our tariffs more important in 2025 to the economy or was it the drop in the dollar? Emily, like what do you think? Because the dollar

dropping 11% is huge. Yeah. It's, it's sizable. It's not unusual to see currency changes like that. But I do think the reaction that we've seen from central banks across the world is very indicative of this. And we already talked about the performance of gold over the course of this year. And about a quarter of that over the course of the past year was driven by buying by central banks. And it's not that they're holding less U.S. dollars or that U.S. dollars are less important. I mean, it's still the global currency, right? But it is showing that they're diversifying away from U.S. dollars, which is putting pressure on the U.S. dollar. we're going to end on this one i'll give you a softball to end it the s&p 500 i'm going to go

with spy the etf well how much is it up in 2025 and the winner is going to be the one that gets closer here lou 15 it was very close but i was going to guess i'm going to go higher than lou though because i know our recommendations and stock advisor it's been heck of a time trying to keep up with the market performance this year. I remember even some of our best performing individual stocks are still trailing the market, even though they've done some incredible work over the course of the past year. So I, even though 15% was maybe where my head was, I think I'm going to go 20% because I have to be contradictory and I also need to be right. You were, you were right in the direction, but the magnitude a little bit off 16.2%.

So our fictional winner for today is Lou. It's, it's so interesting to look back. didn't say negative yeah it's true it's so interesting to look back on the year and think about what we thought coming into the year what actually drove the market because it when we're especially when you're looking at these things on the day-to-day basis like we are you can lose sight of that long-term picture so hopefully that was helpful and you guys had fun with this little game when we come back we are gonna talk about stocks on our radar you're listening to motley I was dreaming when I wrote this Forgive me if it goes astray

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for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. I wanted to go back and look at what we thought about the market coming into 2025 because Emily, a lot has happened, but the conventional wisdom coming into 2025 hasn't really played out. If you remember the election that just happened, crypto was on an absolute tear. Elon Musk was entering the White House. It seemed obvious that crypto and Tesla in particular were going to be really well positioned, but that hasn't really happened. So is anything really obvious anymore? Because as we look towards 2026, it seems like uncertainty is sort of the name of the game. Yeah, it's funny, Travis. You know, look, I failed economics in college at least once

because I would get so frustrated with the professor who would say, well, this is how things should work. And I'd be like, well, there's all these other different variables. It doesn't always operate like that, right? And I would get frustrated about the concept of what's theoretical versus what's practical. And I think that same thing is true in life, right? You can believe things are supposed to work a certain way. You can come into a year thinking, here's all the factors. Here's how it's supposed to play out. But the reality is that the world we live in isn't black and white. There's a lot of different variables that continue to impact different aspects of what should otherwise be a pretty simple equation. And those factors change people

and they change how they react. So in my opinion, the lesson coming into 2026 is to focus on your process, not the outcome, because sometimes the outcome is very different than the process and the work that you put into decision-making. Yeah. To answer the question, is anything obvious? No. And that's what makes this fun. It also might explain my lack of hair, but that's just kind of how it works. The big takeaway for me is that, look, we are terrible at predicting the future, but the more you focus on long-term trends versus short-term trends, we can't predict reactions. We can, I mean, it's the boring way to say it, but it's over and over again. find good companies that can weather storms in bad times and are compelling cases in good times

and just go out as far as you can. Not that you can predict what things look like in 10 to 15 years, but where we get caught up is the speed bumps, the turbulence, the air pockets, trying to predict what's next. And yeah, maybe other people are good at it. I am really crummy at it. So it's best to not try. Lou, how do you think about those obvious things in that short-term thinking and long-term thinking and then the disruption that ultimately happens i mean that was one of the stories coming into the year i'll bring just another thing you know everybody thought google was toast and we talked about them in gemini and chat gpt a little bit earlier but you know there's one where you could have bought alphabet stock at 16 times earnings that's a great

company that is trading for a good value that ended up not being a value trap but sometimes you get a Nike and that just keeps going lower. The Trade Desk, another one that we talked about earlier. How do you differentiate between what's a great company that the market has short-term thinking and what is something that's fundamentally broken? I think, I mean, to be honest, I don't think there is a set formula. I think you have to look at every situation and try and figure it out on your own. I do this a lot. Most of the time I spend looking at stocks are kind of fallen angels trying to figure out their value. I can tell you, for everyone that's been a double, I have one that hasn't worked out. Again, just the simple block and tackling lessons. Don't be overtly

concentrated. Don't assume you know everything. Don't get too arrogant. Just look at the situation and try and filter out the noise from where is this company going long-term. Easier said than done. But I think you just have to take a look and look at the individual situation and try and make sense of it if you can. If you can't, stay away. We like to end the show by getting to Stocks on Our Radar. Let's bring in Dan Boyd to get some questions from him. Emily, I think you have the most explaining to do. So why don't you go first here? That I do. The stock on my radar this week is Coupang. The ticker is C-P-N-G. For anybody who's unaware, Coupang is a South Korean e-commerce business, often likened to the Amazon of South Korea. But to be honest,

they do a lot more. They have streaming services. They have the Uber Eats food delivery, the Instacart-esque grocery delivery. They're basically a way of life in South Korea. And it's unfortunately on my radar this week for some bad news. They had a massive data breach that led to the exposure of the private information of the majority of the population of South Korea, because that is how widespread Coupang is. And now the founder and CEO is coming under fire for not showing up for some of the court cases that are coming out of this issue in South Korea. They did oust the Korean CEO, but not the founder himself, who lives here in the United States. So they're in some deep water here. But the reason why I still like this opportunity, even though the

stock has given back virtually all of its gains this year is because this is such a big issue simply because coupon is that important to the economy and the everyday life of people in South Korea. I think the company will get through this controversy. And I think it just goes to show how pervasive and how monopolistic this business is. Dan, how do you feel about CEOs who don't show up for court appearances? You know, Emily, one of Emily's favorite things to do on this show is to bring companies. She likes a sandbag, basically. She likes to bring companies to radar stocks that are having trouble and she knows are in the news for bad reasons. And I don't know, maybe just to see what happens. She likes chaos at Emily. Yeah. Yeah. I don't

know, man. This is a this is a tough one. I don't know if I would want to be investing in a company like that. You're lost, Dan. All right, Lou, what's on your radar this week? Dan, I'm going to go out on a limb and say I have one that you do know what they do. I'm talk about Boeing. Okay. Boeing has been flying through turbulence for, it's been a half decade now. Numerous attempts have been made to call the bottom and all have been proven way premature. With all that said, I'm going to call a bottom. I think Boeing has finally gotten management right, which it didn't do the first time around. CEO Kelly Orberg has been there about a year now, cleaning up the mess. Regulators are easing restrictions on airplane production, which

should lead to a big boost in free cash flow. Boeing won't be free cash flow positive in 2025, but I think they can generate $10 billion plus by 2028. If they can fly straight, it's important to remember Boeing is one half of the biggest, most important duopoly in the globe, and it has nearly a decade worth of a backlog for orders of new jets. I can't believe I'm saying this, but Boeing, I think, is one of the best ideas for 2026. Dan, what do you think about Boeing? I mean, the meme is that Boeing planes fall out of the sky, right? So I'm not sure about either one of these companies, Travis, if I'm going to be honest.

But I do like about Boeing that it is headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. There you go. Well, we are apparently going dumpster diving today. So are you choosing the founder who won't show up to court or the planes that fall out of the sky? I got to root for the home team, Travis, so we're going to go Boeing. For Lou Whiteman, Emily Flippen, Dan Boyd, Behind the Glass, and the entire Motley Fool team, I'm Travis William. Thanks for listening to Motley Fool Money. We'll see you here tomorrow.