Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - YouTube Has Wall Street Seeing Red

Episode Date: December 4, 2015

YouTube goes shopping for TV and movies. Yahoo! considers selling its U.S. media business. And holiday retail gets off to a strong start. Our analysts discuss those stories and toy industry analyst Chris Byrne offers a preview of what's hot this year. For a free copy of our best-selling e-book, The Motley Fool Guide to Investing for Beginners, go to www.fool.com/beginners.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chris Hillenbrod. Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money. From Fool Global Headquarters, this is Motley Fool Money. It's the Motley Fool Money radio show. I'm Chris Hillen. Joining me in studio this week from Million Dollar Portfolio, Matt Argersinger. From Motley Fool Funds, Charlie Travers. And from Motley Fool Pro and Options, Jeff Fischer. Good to see you, as always, gentlemen. Hey, hey, hey, Chris. We'll break down the latest headlines from Wall Street. We will talk toys with industry expert Chris Byrne. And as always, we'll give you an inside look at the stocks

on our radar. But we begin this week with the big macro. November jobs report saw unemployment holding steady at 5%. 211,000 jobs added, Jeff Fischer, and the two previous months revised up. This is a good-looking report. It does look good. And Wall Street has had a happy Friday as a result. And people are anticipating the Fed increasing interest rates. It looks even more likely that they will about two weeks from now. So, you know, strong enough economy to inch rates higher for the first time since 2006 has people a little more optimistic about this December. Pretty interesting, because in previous times, we were talking before the show where there

would be a strong jobs report. The market would conclude that, well, all right, the next Fed rate hike is coming, and the market would sell off. And of course it didn't on Friday, which I think is a good sign. Is this a signal that people on Wall Street have grown up and have just decided to accept this? There might be some maturity. They're so tired of, let's just get this rate hike done. The other thing I liked seeing, Chris, is that year-over-year pay increased again, a 2.3% year-over-year increase

in pay, which is good. Alright, let's get to some of the big company news this week. Executives from YouTube met with executives in Hollywood to discuss licenses for new content. Matty, they're looking for premium content for Red, which is their new monthly, $10 a month, their new premium video service. You've got Netflix, you've got Hulu, you've got Amazon Prime, and now here comes the 800-pound gorilla. Yes, it is a humongous gorilla. And it is a little bit of an about-face for Google, because when they launched Red back in October, it was really about focusing on kind of their

homegrown YouTube talent, getting rid of ads and having some exclusive stuff that was all just self-made and self-developed. Now, they're saying, well, maybe that $10 a month isn't enough to justify someone sticking with that. So, they want to go out and get some not only original content, but also licensing content, popular TV shows and movies. It's an expensive game to play, and Netflix is on pace to spend more than $3 billion a year on content. But But gosh, Google has enormous cash reserves. I think if there's anyone that's going to do it, and can do it on a big scale, of course it's YouTube. By the way, the second most popular search engine in the world behind Google, which is amazing. I still think Netflix

has such a huge lead, but it's hard not to count YouTube as now a big competitor in that space. Charlie, if you're a TV studio, if you're a movie studio, it must feel like Christmas every day now with all of these different services, and now Google coming in with a big bag of money to say, what do you got in your library? We're shopping. Yeah, I mean, this is the boom times for them. If you're a content creator, you get to shop your wares. I mean, not just to the online streaming guys, but to broadcast TV, the cable channels. Really, the world is your oyster at this point. Google really

has their work cut out for them, though, because not just Netflix, Amazon Prime's video offering offering is solid. Hulu has recently brought in Showtime, a very compelling offering. The interface there is really slick, very well done. I think there's three strong competitors. YouTube definitely has the online audience, the expertise, and the money. It's not easy to do this and do it well. Well, and of course, biggest winner, I think you're right, Chris, is content makers. You just have so much more distribution and potential cash. But again, cable. Traditional cable packages, cable companies, wow. The landscape just gets a little more muddled.

If you're spending $10 a month on Netflix, on YouTube, on Hulu, on HBO, which is a little more expensive, you really have just a wealth, a treasure trove of content. Why go beyond that for most people? If you want to see the future of television, just look at anyone who's in their 20s or younger. Nobody watches live TV, sports aside. One of the things we were talking about earlier in the week is, for all the praise that Larry Page and Sergey Brin get, they've assembled an incredible team around them. And Susan Wojcicki, who's the person who heads up YouTube, she's just a great leader. And it's a little scary to think about that YouTube, for, as you said, Matty, second-biggest search

engine, for all the money they make off of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki and her team, they They look at this and they say, you know what? We can do better. We can make this even more of a cash cow than it is now. Sounds a little like Facebook and their video initiatives. They're still in the very early innings, and advertising is very lucrative on video. Yeah, early innings. And you're right, you've got a billion users, more than a billion users on YouTube watching hundreds of millions of hours of videos every day. Gosh, what an audience to start really monetizing.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday have kicked off the holiday shopping season, things appear to be off to a good start, particularly online. Yes, we saw the typical video of the crowds on Black Friday, Charlie, but we also saw online shopping up double digits and sales on Cyber Monday topping $3 billion for the first time. Yeah, it's really become more than just Black Friday. It's more of a season of deal shopping in an omni-channel way, especially with the millennial audience, which came out in force this holiday season. That said, Black Friday still had by far the most people in the stores compared to Thursday and Saturday. You know, almost double as many as people were in the

stores on Saturday with 74 million people, according to the National Retail Federation. So the idea that people do like to go into the stores, hunt for deals, wrestle with other shoppers is still intact. But from my standpoint, I like to do it online. I don't want to be up at one in the morning. And that $3 billion number seems big, but it's actually still small. It seems tiny to me. I just feel like in 10 years, we might be talking about $40 or $50 billion. That's probably too much. But it just seems still too small, considering where we are in terms of the e-commerce landscape. Yeah, there's absolutely no question the direction things are going. And again, you look at younger

people who are going to lead the way in the future, and they prefer shopping online. But I think that's part of what fueled the results for traditional big bricks-and-mortar retailers like Target and Walmart. It was younger people saying, yes, I'm interested in what Amazon has to offer, but I'm platform agnostic, so I'm going to look. And we saw, in the case of Target and Walmart, their websites shut down a little bit just because they had so much traffic. The proverbial good problem to have. It's always been true. It's always been said of Amazon since the 90s, well, what's their competitive moat? You can just, with a click, you can be anywhere else and do your

shopping. Now, Amazon has pretty much proven that they're the best at it, so they'll get most of the traffic still. Yahoo's board of directors met for three days this week, and central to the discussion was the question of whether Yahoo should sell its internet businesses at the core of Yahoo. Leaving what? Well, that's the question. They've got the stake in Alibaba, they've got Yahoo Japan. If they sell their core U.S. media businesses, like Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Finance, what are they?

I don't know. The main assets they have include Yahoo Mail and Tumblr. So, if you gut the core, as it were, I don't know what's left. People are estimating they could get $2 billion to $8 billion, a wide range, to sell the core business, with about $4 billion being the median estimate. Revenue has been flat since 2012, at least, since Marissa Mayer took over. $5 billion in revenue hasn't gone anywhere. But I don't blame her. I think once you lose traffic, and once the landscape of the internet has changed as drastically as it had to Google's favor and Facebook's favor, it's very hard to get people to come back. Think about how much the internet has changed since Yahoo was the king of search. I can't

even summarize how much has changed, but it's a completely different game. Right. Jeff, I kind of struggle to see what Ristmeyer could have done with Yahoo. One area, though, Chris, you mentioned Yahoo Sports. The one area that I think Yahoo had just this incredible lead in, an incredible audience, was for Fantasy Sports. It was mostly free back several years ago. I just feel like they had an opportunity to be the FanDuel and the Giraffe Kings. They could have created a multi-billion dollar business there if they had really jumped on that. But other than that, it's really hard to argue that it's not much more than a way, if you want to invest in Alibaba, or I know they have Yahoo Japan,

which is apparently fairly popular as well. But if they're serious about this, Charlie, I have to believe they're going to have bidders. I mean, it's easy for me to imagine a behemoth like Comcast looking at their entire portfolio and saying, you know what, we can get a little stronger in sports, so let's kick the tires on Yahoo Sports and see if that could fit for us. One of the rumored bidders was Verizon, who took out AOL, and they very well could be interested in Yahoo's assets because their stable telecom business apparently is not enough, and they want to do media and ads and over-the-top streaming as well, so we'll see what happens. One thing Yahoo did do in the past four years is more than 40 acquisitions under Mayer's leadership, but they only spent about $2.5 billion on that. The largest was Tumblr, the blogging site for $1.1 billion.

So they were trying to buy their way into or create an ecosystem that would give them some traction. And it just hasn't happened. And given how much the internet has changed since even 2005 to an app-based ecosystem or mobile and all these other new ways of accessing content, it really also, you have to give credit to Google for keeping up with it. And Google, you know, they have five times the employees of Yahoo. So they invested to do it. Coming up, more earnings, plus we will dip into the Fool mailbag. Stay right here. This is Motley Fool Money. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. Chris Hill here in studio with Matt

Argesinger, Charlie Travers, and Jeff Fisher. Ambarella is the tech company that's a key supplier for GoPro's video cameras. Third quarter revenue rose more than 40%, but weak guidance for the fourth quarter overshadowed that, and shares of Ambarella falling a little bit this week, Matty. Yes, the guidance was it. I mean, the 40% growth year-over-year looks great from the previous quarter, but the current quarter, they're guiding to $65-67 million, which is below expectations, and showing growth of only 4% year-over-year. That's not quite great for a high-flying tech company like Ambarella. And of course, the culprit, you hinted at

it, is headwinds in the wearable sports market, which of course means GoPro. And these companies are joined at the hip. Amarillo supplies the chips that go into the sports cameras. Fortunately, they have some other markets they're in, the security camera market, the automotive dashboard market, those are helping offset a little bit. But until GoPro turns around, and GoPro itself is a pretty remarkable story, the stock was recently trading below $18. This is a stock that was trading post-IPO at almost $100 less than two years ago, and really just perception of a slowdown in the camera market, lower pricing, really hurting it there, and of course, Amarillo's taking the pain from that as well.

That's really the case with GoPro. If you look at their numbers so far this year, it's really the perception of a slowdown, because the trailing numbers are fantastic. That's what we were talking about before the show. I don't think it's anything GoPro's really come out and said, or any of their results. It's really just the market expects that the camera sales are really going to slow. Something on the magnitude of 40% growth this year so far, and to have a stock... I've never seen that divergence between company performance and stock price, I think, ever. Yeah, like Matty and I talked about earlier, the biggest concern, obviously, is the margins.

Margins coming under pressure, prices going down, and then the staying power. If you're not growing your profits right now strongly, when will you? They might have mispriced this camera because they've lowered the price of it twice in a very short period of time leading into the holiday season. Yeah, that's a sign that makes people nervous. But it's really only one product out of several cameras they sell. They have a lineup of price points with different quality. And you could say, if you were bullish, that a lower price is going to stimulate demand that maybe wasn't there before, and they're going to come out with higher volume.

I don't know if that'll be the case. But I think to see it only through a negative lens might be selling the story a little short. So are we just seeing a second overreaction? Was there an overreaction when it was closing in on $100 a share? there, and now it's an overreaction again when it's selling below $18? I think that's perfectly put. I think there was way too much optimism about a year and a half ago for GoPro, and now, I kind of agree with Charlie here, I just think there's way too much potential pessimism. So, I don't know, if you're a bargain hunter, this might

be one to start looking at. That's true. You do see that quite a bit with many IPOs. Far too exciting at the start, and then a year or two later, far too pessimistic. Barnes & Noble's second quarter was a train wreck. The company lost nearly $40 Revenue is down. Stock falling more than 20% on Friday, Charlie. Yeah, this is a brutal quarter for Barnes & Noble. Their sales are down 4.5%.

Interestingly, the retail stores were virtually flat if you back out the nook. The nook has been really just an anchor on this company for years. They did a new web with BN.com that disrupted the online experience. Sales were very underwhelming there. I think they're down about 30%. The nook was down 32%. So unlike a lot of other retailers that we talked about earlier in the show with Cyber Monday that were doing well, Barnes & Noble just is not getting it done online, not getting it done with the digital orders through the nook.

But the traditional business, the selling of physical books in their stores, actually holding up. I found that to be a little surprising, but that's the bright spot for Barnes & Noble. Well, and they sold off their college bookstore business in August, so I think there was a lot of anticipation on this quarter. This is the first full quarter that we see how they do without that. I don't know. I don't think anyone's expecting it to be this bad. No, the guidance for next year was for sales to be up 1% on flat comps. And then they were very vague, but they were like, lose a little bit less money on Nook.

That's not an inspiring comment. Radioatfool.com is our email address, radioatfool.com. Question from Sam Waterbury in Chicago. I know The Motley Fool usually likes to see corporate leadership with significant share ownership as a way of them having some financial skin in the game. If seeing CEOs selling shares is typically a red flag, should long-term investors be worried by CEOs' share donations? Mark Zuckerberg's recent announcement appears altruistic,

but is it a sign that he no longer sees Facebook stock as a source of growth? Matty referring, of course, to earlier in the week when Mark Zuckerberg and his wife announced that over their lifetime, they'll be donating 99% of their Facebook stake. That's the key right there. It's over their lifetime. Sam, I wouldn't worry at all about this because I feel like Warren Buffett, for example, probably could have said the same thing and might have said the same thing 10 years ago. His intention is also to give away something on the order of 99% of his wealth. I actually look at Mark Zuckerberg's move as a potential positive for shareholders because you could imagine that Mark and his wife are thinking, wow,

over the course of our life, we want the value of Facebook shares to be as high as possible so that we can give the most away. And so, I view it as a positive here in that there's incentive for Mark and his team and his family to increase the value of Facebook shares, not exactly sell and be worried about the value right now. Yeah. Currently, Jeff, we're talking about a value of around $45 billion. And to Matty's point, 10 years from now, hopefully that's higher. hopefully much higher. I love Matty's point, it's a great point. So, $45 billion right now in stock, and they'll only sell $3 billion in the next three years. And meanwhile, Facebook

is likely to create value. Zuckerberg and his wife, they're already worth more than a billion dollars, almost just all in cash, outside of Facebook shares. And he has all kinds of earnings potential, he'll be on the boards of many companies, I'm sure. So, what I like about Mark, one of the things I like is he's a very long-term thinker, that comes off in every conference call that he heads up. He's thinking in terms of 10 years for Facebook every time he talks about it. And now he's thinking that way with his life, and I think that's great. Another question, also from Chicago, from Patrick Barrett. After reading The Motley Fool Guide to Investing for Beginners, I just

wanted to ask about your thoughts on investing in index funds vs. ETFs. I know they're similar, but thought I would get your perspective. Jeff, any thoughts on index funds vs. exchange-traded Really quickly, the benefit of an ETF, exchange-traded fund, is you can buy in or out of it at any time you like. Now, that's a benefit if you're disciplined. If you're not disciplined, that could be a disadvantage. But SPY, S-P-Y, is the oldest ETF in the world, and it's also an index fund ETF with very low fees. You can buy into the market index that way, just buy SPY and keep it, hold it. Or, if you want to go and buy an index fund And through something like Vanguard, you can do that. Just realize there's less liquidity,

look at the fees, and be ready to be locked in there for a long time, which is great. Yeah, Matty, you always want to, particularly when you're looking at index funds, you've got to look at the lowest fees possible. Absolutely, every time. And one of the other differences to keep in mind is that mutual funds will often come with a minimum investment you can make. I believe the Vanguard was $3,000, whereas you could buy one share of the SPY for about $200. So, that is a difference for somebody who's starting out.

That's a great point. And with any ETF you look at, you have to look at what their actual holdings are. Don't just look at what it's called, because there are so many out there now, and some are misleading. And just remember, with ETFs, even though the fees can be comparable, low fees to an index fund, you are paying commissions every time you buy or sell, in most cases. Alright guys, we'll see you later in the show. Up next, we're going to the toy industry with Chris Byrne. Stay right here, this is Motley Fool Money. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Hill. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are behind us,

but there's still a lot of holiday shopping in front of us. So what is the hot toy for 2015, and what will the new Star Wars movie do for the toy industry? Chris Byrne is the Executive Vice President and Director at TTPM, a product review site for toys, tots, pets, and more. And he joins me now. Chris, always good to talk to you. Thanks for being here. My pleasure. Thank you. Don't keep me in suspense. What is the hot toy this year? Well, you know, the good news is there is no one major hot toy. There are a lot of things that are doing really well, and we always think that's good news

because it means people are finding the toys that are right for their kids. And from a business standpoint, it really spreads the wealth around the industry. How does something become the hot toy? I'm old enough that when I think about the concept of a hot toy, I immediately, my brain goes back to Cabbage Patch Kids, to Tickle Me Elmo, and just the frenzy that surrounded these toys. What makes something like that happen? Well, that's when you get a fad, and nobody can predict a fad, and nobody can market something. If they tell you it's going to be a fad, you look the other way.

And that's what happens then is when something sort of jumps into the mainstream culture and it's being communicated to and talked about by many more people than would ever actually buy the toy. So, for example, Cabbage Patch Kids in 1983 became so huge because it led the news. People were having a slugfest in the aisles of Kmart to try and get the darn dolls. So it really did become a news story. And then, of course, more people wanted it and it just took off. It had a life of its own. You don't really see that so much these days.

You're less likely to because if you really want to get something and you're really willing to pay for it, there's an auction site or a reseller on Amazon where you can usually find it. The expectations for the new Star Wars movie in the film industry could hardly be higher. I mean, there are a lot of people expecting it to be the number one box office hit of all time. What about in the toy industry? What are the expectations for the ripple effect of the new Star Wars movie? And who has the most riding on it? Well, it's really interesting.

We're guesstimating or we're projecting $1.2 to $1.3 billion worth of Star Wars merchandise being sold related to this movie. And I think that you're going to see a wide range of things. There's everything from the sort of lower-end promotional, you know, in-and-out, for want of a better word, kind of product that a company is doing, to the large-scale players like a Hasbro. And I think somebody like a Hasbro has really the most to gain because they have the lightsabers that kids want, and they've got the action figures in a lot of the vehicles. And, of course, Disney, the Disney Store, has a whole line that's just based on Star Wars. You've also got, you know, sort of an opportunistic toy, which is brilliant, the Sphero BB-8 droid. And that's the new astromech droid that's being introduced. That's the one with the sphere, with the little half sphere on top that we've seen in the trailers.

You know, that's sort of just a logical extension of that brand. Where we're concerned is not all the toys are great, you know. And with all this, as much product as there is out there, some of it's probably going to be left on shelf. I see I thought you were going to say the concern is for absolutely all the other toys because I've seen some stories about other product lines literally being squeezed out of aisle and shelf space just so retailers can make space for the Star Wars stuff you know we've heard a little bit about that but I I don't think it's true there's there or overall true I mean they're finding space for you know nobody's nobody's squeezing out barbie uh she she's she's still

there um hot wheels is having a good year and hot wheels has has star wars licenses um you're you're going to see games though there are some star wars games so i think that because the the fashion element of the toy industry is what's going on right now it is going to squeeze some people out but you know then the beauty of this is is you've got the online merchants and you've got target and Walmart and Amazon doing really well online. So if you lose some shelf space, you're going to be still accessible online. Is this a situation where the rising tide of Star Wars lifts all the retail boats so that regardless of any individual major retailer, they're all going to have a pretty good holiday? It's just degrees to which they're having a good holiday? Well, to a certain extent, I think

that's true. I think that there's going to be, especially in the weeks coming up, as we know that there's going to be more Star Wars merchandise released in the next couple of weeks that was held back because it would reveal too much about the movie, quite frankly. And

you're going to see more of that. You're going to drive traffic into the store after people may have done their toy shopping already. So if they're going back in for new Star Wars stuff, that's really the benefit of something that's hot, either a property or a product, is it does drive store traffic.

That said, you're not necessarily a kid who's not into Star Wars, and there are some, maybe too young or whatever. They're going to want something else completely different, and that's been good for the tech sector of the toy industry,

like VTech or a little bit of LeapFrog with their Epic tablet, and some of the games, like Hasbro's Pie Face, which is just a ridiculous game where you get smacked in the face whipped cream. I love it already. I'm glad you mentioned technology because I remember a few years ago, you and I were talking about toys and technology and the degree to which that line gets

blurred. And I'm curious, from your perspective, which companies are doing a good job of marrying technology to toys i think a lot of the companies have gotten much better at it and if you look at some of the apps that are out there now they're much better than they were a couple of years ago uh there's a small company out of portland oregon uh called zing that has a very hot line called stick bots which is s-t-i-k-b-o-t and this is these are little uh two and a half inch tall robots with suction cups on their feet and hands, and you use the free app to create stop-motion movies. And kids are doing that. They love playing with them. So that app is really well integrated into the play pattern. Similarly, with a company called Wonder Forge, they have a Disney stop-motion

movie maker that's designed for even younger kids. So it's where the technology enhances the play pattern or extends the play pattern, it really works well. If you wind up the toy, go have a sandwich and come back, then the technology really doesn't add to the play. And technology within the toy industry is not necessarily anything new if you go back to, gosh, I mean, even the 1970s where home video game systems really started to come into existence. But it does seem like the iPad and the rise of tablets over the last few years has essentially blown that wide open. And I'm curious how you think tablets have changed the toy industry.

Well, it's really interesting. I think tablets are part of children's lives. I mean, no 9-year-old or almost every 9-year-old alive today has lived in a world where there's the smartphone. And you don't always think about that. So this technology is kind of like the air to them. They don't think twice about it. it is a little bit of a myth that kids only want to play on that because you go out in public and

you see kids playing with the tablets or the phones. But I think that today's kids, what that means is the technology by itself isn't magical enough. It has to enhance the play pattern. And I think that that's where a lot of the toy companies have been focusing and addressing and expanding their work. So what do you say to parents who are concerned about quote-unquote screen time for their kids and they're trying to manage that because left unchecked your kid just becomes a zombie? Well I think that you're still the parent you get to set the rules you know and it's really you know I see a lot of we talk to a lot of parents and a lot of them are very successfully saying that we're limiting screen time to X amount of hours in a day

or a week, and the kids know that they can use that, but at other times, they need to be doing other things, and kids will do other things. I mean, we've seen, even as we've seen the boom in technology, we've seen a tremendous growth in arts and crafts and Lego and all of these things that are tactile or physical or creative that bring things into the physical world. So I think that balancing that out, you know, we talk a lot about the balanced toy box, just like a balanced diet. Kids need these different types of play experiences. You're listening to Motley Fool Money, talking with Chris Byrne, toy expert, executive vice president at TTPM,

and author of the recently released book, Funny Business, Harnessing the Power of Play to Give Your Company a Competitive Advantage. What are a couple of things we can learn from games that can help us in the workplace? place? Oh, well, there's a lot. First of all, you need to know the rules to play the game. Every company and every organization has its rules either written or unwritten. And knowing how a corporate culture works is really important because it is like a strategy game, or it certainly can be a strategy game. The other thing that I really love about what we discovered is what we call drop it if it doesn't work. When have you seen a child with a toy going, I know if I just to spend eight more hours on this it's going to be so much more fun um you know kids kids like say

oh this isn't fun and they go on to the next thing similarly we see businesses time after time invest in ideas that they aren't working whether it's the ego of the uh the manager or you're trying to gratify something or for whatever reason it's clearly not working and we see millions of dollars go down the tubes as people try to make things work that aren't really viable The Motley Fool was started by two brothers, David and Tom Gardner, who are very much lovers of games. David Gardner loves board games more than anyone I know, and he certainly owns more board games than anyone I know. I'm curious, when you look at the landscape of board games, what are a couple of suggestions for families who are looking to engage their kids with a board game or two? Well, I think there is no play experience that is quite like a board game.

You can't replicate it in a computer. You can't replicate it in any other way because you've got a bunch of people with different personalities sitting around a table interacting with one another. I personally, I love strategy games. You can have simple strategy games like Othello, more complex ones like Risk. For little kids, games of chance are great. I mean, Candyland or Chutes and Ladders, These are great games for little kids because they learn about the randomness of chance and that, you know, sometimes you have to start over again when you go down the shoot.

But I also think games that facilitate conversation and talking are great. There's the game of things from Patch Products or one of my personal favorites, Pictionary, or even something like Apples to Apples. These are games that get people talking and interacting and sometimes learning things about other members of the family. Apples to apples, definitely a favorite in my house. Two more questions, and then I'll let you go. You mentioned LeapFrog earlier, and at The Motley Fool, we focus on businesses and stocks, and LeapFrog shares have not done well recently. And I'm curious if making a business solely out of educational toys is a bad way to go.

It's definitely not a bad way to go. I think that leapfrog has certainly had its troubles. They remain some of the best creators of educational content out there. If you look at their apps or the things that they do, they do really brilliant, engaging stuff. I think they've had a challenge in that I'm not sure that they anticipated how much the secondary market for tablets would take off. So, for example, that a parent is going to hand down their tablet to their child once they're done with it. They get the new tablet because otherwise, what is it? It's an hors d'oeuvre tray.

I mean, it's really, you know, you have to. So I think that you're going to see them focusing more on content and hopefully pulling out of it because they really do understand education in a way that no other company does. As we talked about earlier, Star Wars-related toys have certainly sucked up a lot of oxygen in the toy industry this year. What's one or two toys that are under the radar that you want people to know about? Something you've reviewed on your site that really looks like a winner, but maybe not many people are hearing about it yet. Well, certainly one of my favorites is from Wonder Workshop. and this is a company that makes robotics

and they have two robots, Dash and Dot. Dash looks like sort of three spheres in a triangle with another sphere on top. It's got an eye. It's completely programmable. Dot is a sort of just one sphere and the two can interact with each other. What I love about these is that you are teaching kids

essentially coding but it's in the context of play. Kids are having a wonderful time as they play with things. So I think that that's really, you know, that's some of the best learning as they are engaged in all kinds of interaction and experimentation and trial and error and all of the things that are great about play. And the other thing I like, just because I think it's really gorgeous, is an item called Spineos from Fisher-Price. And it's kind of like a perpetual motion machine. If you remember the sort of wire things with the magnetic wheel on it that you turned around, this is like a big contraption. It stands about two feet tall.

It's got a magnetic track on it, and they've got these little sort of, they look like yo-yos without strings on them, and they roll up and down the track. It's really colorful. And what we like about it is it really is, again, trial and error for kids. It's cognitively appropriate. It grows with them, and it fosters exploration and creativity. Before you buy a toy this holiday season, go to ttpm.com and check out the reviews

from Chris Byrne and his colleagues. Chris, have a great holiday season. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. My pleasure. Coming up, we'll give you an inside look at the stocks on our radar. This is Motley Fool Money. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. So, don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Hill. Joining me in studio once again, Matt Argersinger, Charlie Travers, and Jeff Fischer. Earlier in the show, guys, we had a listener email make a reference to

The Motley Fool Guide to Investing for Beginners. It's our bestselling e-book, and it's now free. You can get it. Just go to fool.com slash beginners if you want to get started investing or you know someone who does. Fool.com slash beginners. The e-book is now free. It's time for the stocks on our radar. But first, let's bring in our man Steve Broido from the other side of the glass, who's been gone. He won the Fool's Errand, which is our company's monthly excursion, where you get to go away for two weeks. You get a little cash in your pocket. Steve, one highlight from your trip.

I know the listeners missed you. We missed you. But I know you enjoyed your trip away. Where'd you go? And one highlight from your trip. Sedona, Arizona. I think the highlight was being in Arizona. I love Arizona.

It's a beautiful place. I think the highlight was just getting to see all the landscape in the Southwest. It's very inspiring. Alright, let's get to the stocks on our radar. Matt Argersinger, you're up first. Lots of pain in the pipeline business for almost a year now. I was very tempted to pick Kinder Morgan, which has just been destroyed. But instead, I'm going with Spectra Energy, ticker SE. It's a company we've bought several times in a million-dollar portfolio. Much safer play on what is, I think, the best way to invest in the energy business right

now, which is pipelines, which are essentially toll booths with contracts that bring in lots of cash flow. You get almost a 6% yield with Spectra. I like it. Steve, question about Spectra Energy? Will oil ever go away in our lifetime? In our lifetime, no, I don't think so. I think it'll still serve a key spot in the transportation market for many, many decades. Charlie Travers, what are you looking at? In a tough environment for restaurant stocks, Panera has really been bucking the

trend. CEO Ron Shaik and his team over the last few years have done a lot of great work removing customer pain points, making it very easy to order online and just pick up and avoid the long lines. Nobody wants to wait 10 minutes for their lunch. And that's allowed them to break out into additional areas like catering and small deliveries. So I really like what that team has done in the last few years. And the ticker? PNRA. Steve, Panera Bread? Does Panera promote loitering? It just seems like couches and a fire. Everyone's hanging out and reading for about six hours with one cup of coffee. It's like the anti-Starbucks in that regard.

Jeff Fischer, we've got about a minute and a half. What are you looking at? Alright. It has been fun to see Panera roll those changes through. I'm looking at Cabela's. Ticker is CAB. They are an outdoors retailer with about 50 locations. And the word is, well, now the news is, they're looking into strategic options to potentially sell themselves or partner with somebody. Bass Pro Shops may be the one they merge with. So I bought some shares this week after looking at it for a while. Steve, question about Cabela's? What is the benefit of going to a Cabela's versus just buying most of the stuff on the internet? Well, I think, my father-in-law is

an avid hunter, and I've only been to Cabela's with him. He likes to try things out, pick up whatever he's considering buying, physically hold it, try clothing on. They have big ... A lot of camping equipment, too. You want to test drive that stuff before you get out in the woods with it, probably. Exactly. And the few times I've been there, it has been crowded. They're unique enough to draw in that audience. Steve, Cabela's, Panera Bread, Spectra Energy, three very different companies there. You got one you're curious about?

I don't know. The Spectra Energy sounds interesting because this industry seems to be dying. And also, you don't want to be seen as promoting loitering. Absolutely not. Most definitely. All right, Charlie Travers, Jeff Fisher, Matt Argesinger. Guys, thanks for being here. Thank you, Chris. Go to iTunes, subscribe to the podcast. Check us out.

Check out our other podcasts as well. That's going to do it for this week's show. Our engineer, Steve Broido. Our producer is Matt Greer. I'm Chris Hill. We'll see you next week.