Motley Fool Money - Amazon's Surprising Rise to the Top

Episode Date: July 24, 2015

Amazon.com soars after big earnings. And Chipotle, Starbucks, and UnderArmour get in on the party as well. Our analysts tackle those stories and debate the future of McDonald's. Plus, behavioral economist Dan Ariely talks about his new book, Irrationally Yours: On Missing Socks, Pickup Lines, and Other Existential Puzzles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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It's the Motley Full Money Radio show. I'm Chris Hill, and joining me in studio this week from Million Dollar Portfolio, Jason Moser and Matt Argusinger. And from Motley Fool Deep Value, Ron Gross. Good to see you, as always, gentlemen. Hey, hey. Earnings, Poulouza rolls on this week. Best-selling author Dan Ariely is our guest. And as always, we will give you an inside look at the stocks on our radar. But we begin with the new king of retail, and that is Amazon. Second quarter sales rose 20 percent, and the company surprised everyone by delivering a profit when Wall Street was expecting a loss. And Maddie, the stock was up big on Friday, and it is now bigger than Walmart.

Story of the year so far for me in 2015 that Amazon's market cap is now bigger than Walmart. I think a lot of us around the table probably predicted that would happen eventually. I bet we didn't predict it would happen this fast. I mean, it's been remarkable. And the quarter was great. Sales were up 20%, really beating the street estimates and Amazon's own ranges. And I know they had a surprise profit, but for me, it's really about the operating cash flow, up 69% to $9 billion over the last 12 months. So anyone who says Amazon's not really a profitable company, just wait. I mean, look at the operating cash flow, wait until they really stop spending in the years to come. It's going to be massive. And of course, another big

story was Amazon Web Services, 1.8 billion in revenue there, up 81% with a 21% operating market. margin, huge business there as well. They took guidance at all. Did they ever talk about the future? They give you anything to go by? They've given a range for the third quarter that's higher than the consensus assessment, but it's not anything out of land. Historically, a tight-lipped company. Yes.

Yeah, I mean, that was on the call. They had more and more questions about AWS, because just last quarter they started breaking those numbers out. And they're still very tight-lipped. They don't go very, you know, too into the weeds there. It's just like, yep, it's doing well, we're cutting prices. I think it was 49 price cuts now. And what that does, it just brings more customers in the door. It teaches them what their customers need so they can make the product better. And they also, you know, talking about the efficiencies they're realizing with Amazon Web Services, Amazon Web Services, is one of Amazon Web Services' biggest customers. So it's its own customers. So that's just pretty unique perspective.

And still no, you know, still no data on Prime members, but you know, most estimates out there have, it's over 40 million. We know those Prime members are spending more on average. But, gosh, It's just been, I mean, it's been a remarkable two decades for Amazon. I'm happy to say we own it in a million-dollar portfolio. Thanks, Ron, in the prior team. But also, it's owned in all five missions in our Supernova service, including My Odyssey One portfolio, where it's always been a full of it. Even I own it.

Oh, look at this. And they, as you said, they don't really break out a lot of information on prime memberships. We had Prime Day recently, and we're going to see those results more in the next quarter. They did tip their hand just a little bit. The CFO is saying on the call, we're thinking. thrilled. He used the word thrilled with the results of Prime Day. Yeah, and I think the estimate was that it was three times the average sales that they did for Prime. I wasn't impressed personally. I went in to try to get some bargains. I wasn't

thrilled with what they were offering. I think what really was the key for them when they were selling Kindles and Fire TV sticks and the Fire TV boxes, those things got sucked up so fast, and then you had waiting lists. And so there were a lot of items that people wanted that they couldn't get. And then from there, you're seeing kind of all these obscure third-party, you know, sales. To their credit, I mean, their third-party partners were really, really happy with the results, too. I mean, I've seen some estimates ranging around $1.5 billion told in that day. And Amazon, as they always do, they try things like this, they'll get it

right eventually. There's no reason they can't roll something like this out once a quarter or once a month. And it's so easy for them to do. I think it's a new, a great new thing for the business. Shares of Apple down this week, because all Apple did in the third quarter was sell 47.5 million iPhones. Jason, nearly a little. $11 billion in profit in just three months, I guess it's time to fire Tim Cook. Well, I mean, the analysts were expecting $48.8 million. They missed estimates there.

I mean, it's all an expectations game. And I mean, to their credit, I mean, the reason why the market reacted, the way the market reacted, is because Apple is still primarily a phone story. 65 to 70 percent of their sales come from those phones. And so, you know, the watch was garnering all these headlines over the past quarter. We really didn't get much, you know, we didn't get much. much data in regard to how many watches they sold. You can sort of extrapolate some data from the other devices segment. Maybe they sold somewhere between two and three million.

I think the concern is there's certainly some doubt that that's going to be the next big product. And that's going to be something they need to come up with at some point, is that next big product. Because as it stands, right now this is a phone company, and they are going to have to continue really nailing it on that phone. It is a phone company with $200 billion in cash, man. Yes. I mean, there's, look, Apple's in a great position. The stock, you know, by all accounts, the stock price is cheap based on the phenomenal growth. I think with Apple, it's going to become a perception story. If the watch is a failure and if the perception out there is that

they can come up with another killer product, well, then you have to start saying, okay, well, it is a phone company, and eventually, you know, replacement cycles get longer, cheaper competition comes in. How much of a driver can that be for growth in the future? I do expect Apple's growth to slow down. And there's also the question as far as how well the music product will do. I mean, that's going to be really interesting to see over the course of the next year how many people really adopted, because there are a lot of streaming players out there already. Spotify, Pandora, to name a couple. And I think people are very used to those apps that they're using. And

from what I've seen, Apple's music app look really noisy and pretty confusing. Yeah, I agree with what Maddie said. You'll see growth slowing. But I think the good thing about the stock is that you really don't need to see high growth here to make this stock look attractive. And if the stock continues to be weak, I think investors really need to. I think that's a nice core holding for years to come. I'd love to see him raise that dividend. I mean, double it. Just, I mean, keep people in. I'll take it. You'll take that. You'll take a double it.

I'll take it. Second quarter profits for Comcast rose 7%. It is America's largest cable provider, Ron. But universal pictures really does seem to be getting a lot of credit for these results. I must be living under a rock. Do you know Jurassic World is the third on the list of the biggest box office hits behind Avatar and Titanic? I did, but I'm kind of a geek about those things. I had no idea. I like what I saw here. For the first time ever, they have more high-speed internet customers than they do cable TV subscribers only by a small margin. Obviously,

very important in this new world we're moving toward to. They have this new $15 a month service called Stream, a broadband video service, trying to get into the new world trying to attract the customer segment that no longer want traditional cable, wants streaming video over the internet. They realize they have to move more and more to that, and I think they are doing so. As you said, the movies continue to do well. Theme parks continued to do well. Business services had a strong quarter. The TV networks, I guess, a little bit of softness there, NBC, CNBC, USA, those folks, not as strong as the rest of the business, but overall, I think The quarter looked nice.

But they seem to be taking a page from the Disney playbook where it's, we've got the movies that we can turn into rides at the theme parks and sell more minion products. And let's not forget Pitch Perfect, too. Oh my God. Good stuff. So the first one, we bought the movie for our daughters and I had not seen it. I watched it with them the other night. They've watched it, I think.

A million times. You purchased the movie, though. We did. We bought it from Amazon. Wow. I mean, you know, the digital copy. Got it, got it. Okay.

Starbucks third quarter results were arguably the best in company history. Nearly $5 billion in revenue, Maddie. Customer traffic was up. I mean, this was a pretty stellar quarter. I know. The one thing about Starbucks is we always keep thinking about Starbucks is a pretty mature concept, especially in North America, right? But look at this. I mean, you know, sales, same store sales in the Americas, which is roughly 90 percent U.S., up 8 percent. Customer traffic, you said, up 4 percent, average ticket size of 4 percent. A lot of this is people saying that it's people buying a beverage, but then also buying food because they've got a lot of great new food options. But growth was great elsewhere, too. China and Asia Pacific up 11 percent,

up 3 percent in Europe. If the euro and if the dollar wasn't as strong, those numbers would have been a lot, a lot higher. They're going to raise prices on some drinks in the future quarter. I mean, we know Starbucks has tremendous pricing power. I don't expect that to hurt the traffic at all. And they just signed a new distribution agreement with PepsiCo to sell some of their prepared beverages in Latin America. So, I just, the Starbucks brand continues to, you know, go across the rest of the world at a tremendous pace. And I don't expect it to flag anytime soon. Yeah. For me, Starbucks represents the classic value investor blunder, which is not understanding

how many years and for how long a wonderful company can continue to grow in compound results. And if you fail to understand that, you'll never think a stock like Starbucks looks cheap, but those people that can kind of look out further and look a little bit outside the box, Not even a lot, just a bit. Can own a wonderful company for like Starbucks for years. So well said, Ron. So well said. Visa's third quarter profit rose 25 percent. Shares hit a new all-time high this week. Same sort of thing, Ron. Any way you look at it, this is a really big quarter for Visa. Yeah, beat expectations. Profits up 25 percent. There's a little bit of noise in there with

some adjustments. So if you strip those out, I was looking at it, maybe 17 percent increase in profits on the operating line. Still really strong. Revenue was up 12 percent about. payment volumes up 11 percent. That's the big number you kind of look at with Visa. That's a nice number. They raised guidance. A lot of people are now buzzing about that they may acquire Visa Europe, which back in 2007 split off from the company before Visa when public. Europe actually has a put option to visa, to compel Visa to acquire the company. And that would be quite a big transaction. We're looking at perhaps $20 billion. And they say by the end of October, we should have some resolution on that.

Do you think that's a good move, if only for what we've seen out of the EU's economy over the last couple of years? I actually, from everything I'm hearing about what they're saying about, you know, they would love to bring them back into the fold and it would be really strong for the business. I've seen just some preliminary numbers of what it would look like. I think it would be definitely a good move, although expensive. Five years ago, some on Wall Street laughed when Under Armour announced it was getting into the footwear business. Up next, we'll check in and see it.

see who's laughing now. You're listening to Motley Fool Money. I've got two dollars in the chew box. Welcome back to Motley Full Money, Chris Hill here in studio with Jason Moser, Matt Argusinger, and Ron Gross. Under Armour's second quarter profits came in higher than expected. The company also raised guidance for the full fiscal year. And Jason, that is the one-two punch you'll love to see when you want a company. I'd actually throw maybe a third punch in there. I mean, who knows. But I think you keyed in on something there five years ago, people laughing about Under Armour becoming the next great

brand. I want to read you a quote that Kevin Plank rattled off here during the earnings call. He says, and I quote, the mission here is to be the next great global brand, and you're going to see us fight, crawl, and scratch, and do everything we can to make that happen, end quote. That's all you need to know. That's all you need to know about this company. I mean, they are going to do whatever it takes to become the next great global brand, and all signs point toward success. I mean, five years ago, people were laughing about him getting in footwear. Well, footwear just brought in 40% growth this quarter, brought in, I think, about $159 million, $154 million. So, I mean, that's, they went from, you know, kind of a

laughing stock to really actually a leader in that space in a very short amount of time. I'm excited to see how they, how they pursued the connected fitness initiative there, the purchases they made of Endomundo and my fitness app and all that. So I'm excited to see how they pursued the Connected Fitness I mean, that I think they're going to garner a lot of data over time, which will help them in learning more about what their customers want, what they need. They'll develop new product lines. I think we'll see them become more and more of a lifestyle brand. I just, I've said it a million times.

I see all of the kids at my kids' school wearing Under Armour. I mean, this is like the Nike for the next generation. I just can't be more excited about holding this company and having it as a recommendation in a million-dollar portfolio. Well, and sort of like a couple of other companies we've talked about, are already so far in the show. You look across every division. I mean, this is still, first and foremost, an apparel company, apparel up 23%. Yeah, and direct to consumer growth 33%, and that now represented 32% of overall sales. They're

doing really well on the e-commerce front as well, so just tackling it from every direction. Shares of proto-labs up more than 15% this week after second quarter profits came in higher than expected. Help me out, Maddie. I thought 3D printing companies were having a rough go of it. And they certainly are, but I think, you know, we've said, in the past, that ProLabs is a great way. If you like the 3D printing space, it's a great way to play it because they're really on the service side. They're not in the business of making printers and selling printers, which a lot of the other companies are. I love this company. It's a small-cap company that we also own a million-dollar portfolio.

The numbers I like to look at, they served about 11,800 product developers in the quarter. That's 28% growth year over year. Each of those product developers is spending more each quarter with the company. That's huge. The revenue in Europe was up 12%. percent, if it wasn't for a stronger dollar, revenue there would have been up 33%. So, although this is a small company based in Minnesota and North Carolina, they have a really significant presence overseas and in Europe. And I just love what Vicki Holt is doing with this company. They're investing in a lot of new areas, always making, offering more services to product

developers, and including 3D printing. So it's an exciting space. Do you think it's an acquisition candidate five years from now? They still a stand-alone business? I think it's down-alone because I have trouble fitting them in inside any business. There are large manufacturing companies that do what ProLabs does, but not at the level. ProLabs is small enough where they can still serve the mom-and-pop shop or the individual product developer versus Hewlett-Packard or other companies or IBM or design companies that are doing

big manufacturing projects, 3M. So I do think they're standalone. Okay. Shares of McDonald's down a bit this week after global same store sales fell 0.7 percent in the second quarter. But Ron, fear not because CEO Steve Easterbrook said they're going a bounce back in Q3. Yeah, I've heard that. You're given the benefit? Well, I think it's a bold call when you consider how sales, particularly here in the U.S.,

have been dropping quarter after quarter for nearly two years. What's the alternative there? Just to come out and see up, it's hopeless cause, just move along nothing to see here. This is the same company that revamped the Hamburgler in an attempt to revive business. But all right, so the quarter, you know, not great. Revenue down 9.5 percent. U.S. same store sales down 2 percent. Seven quarters of U.S. same store sales decline in a row.

But as you say, the guidance from CEO, Easterbrook is somewhat more rosy. He's got a reorg plan. There's management truffles. There's cutting costs. There's returning cast to shareholders. There's changing its menu time and the time again, trying to get it right. They now have that lovely artisan chicken sandwich. I know you can't wait to get your sink your teeth into maybe a premium sirloin burger. What could be better? We'll have to keep an eye on this. This is a stock that I wouldn't go near until I saw this. the turn, I wouldn't invest in it prior to. I'm not interested in those food items, but the all-day breakfast that they've been testing

in a few locations, one of the things this week we saw, an internal memo leaking out that they're going to be rolling that out nationwide in October. And we were saying this before the show, Jason, I feel like this is kind of a low bar they got a clear here. So if that's a hit, if they can figure out a way to up their throughput just a little bit. So do I want to make griddle at like two in the afternoon? Is that what I'm going for? It depends on what time you wake up. They're taking a cue from the jangler.

The janglers had a lot of success with breakfast all day. I mean, people want it. Sticking in the food industry, Chipotle's second quarter of profits came in higher than expected. But same store sales came in low. Pretty interesting what happened with this stock, Jason. Walk me through it. Well, okay, so we knew from management's guidance last quarter that comp sales were going to be low to mid single digits.

That's what we're expecting. That's what management is expecting. And so they bring in COPS of 4.3%. We promptly saw the stock tank, like 5% after hours. 5% after hours. Now, this only lasted for a short while, because then during the earnings call, something was said that really turned the tide in Chipotle. They just had a phenomenal following day on the market. Now, what was said was a couple of things, really, but I think the thing that really attracted a lot of attention is the fact that they are rolling out additional

price increases on their steak and barbacoa items. They've rolled them out, and they're still about 40% of the stores left to go. And as Maddie was referring to earlier with Starbucks, Chipotle does have that pricing power where consumers are still going to keep on going in. The numbers bear that out. It's not like sales are falling off a cliff. So, you know, they're rolling that price increase out. They're going to have the carnitas back in all of the stores, hopefully, by the early fourth quarter. So, you know, when you see that, along with the fact that they're coming off such a tough comp year from last year, think about this. Four point three percent comps this year, the same quarter last

Last year, that number was 17.3%. So at some point, you kind of become a victim of your own success. But I think even the market was smart to look through this and see this is a business that still run, fire on all silvers. Well, and to the point about the carnitas, someone had tweeted out a map of the United States earlier this week. I knew that this was going on in some states. There's more than 20 states where Chipotle does not have any sort of pork products going on.

They don't have the two restaurants closest to my house. So, I'll be excited when they get those back. I think that's, yeah. I think it's, as we were talking about earlier, they're doing this with one carnitas tied behind their back. Nicely done. Any guidance on shophouse rollouts? You know, all they do, they mention they'll open up an additional one.

They've opened up an additional pizzeril locale, but they continue to stand on the message that the foreseeable future driver of profits will be the Chipotle namesake store, so we're just going to have to be patient, I guess. All right, guys. We'll see you a little bit later in the show. Up next, a conversation with best-selling. author, Dan Ariely. Stay right here. You're listening to Motley Fool Money. Welcome back to Motley Full Money. I'm Chris Hill. How can we control our emotions when

investing in the stock market? Our financial advisors, a wise investment? And why do socks always get lost in the laundry? Those are just a few of the questions that best-selling author Dan Ariely tackles in his latest book, Irrationaly Yours, on missing socks, pickup lines, and other existential puzzles. He is a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. Dan, welcome back. Always good to talk to you. My pleasure.

Great to be back. Let's start with obviously the most important question, which is why do socks always get lost in the laundry? Okay. So, of course, leaving the metaphysical reality and aliens and so on, a big part of it ends up being a memory problem. So think about what happens with a shirt. You have a shirt.

When do you think about the shirt when you see it? What happened with socks is we have two of them. So what happened when you see one of them and not the other? You think to yourself, where is the other one? All of a sudden it comes to mind. And then you don't see the other one. You say to yourself, oh, the partner of the sock must have gotten lost somehow. But you don't exactly remember which color socks it was or what shape and so on.

And then later on, you find a partner. And you ask yourself again, where is that? where the other part of this pair, and you don't remember where it is and you don't see it. So we basically double count. So we see one representation of the sock, not the other one, and we double count the socks. By the way, as somebody who travels a lot,

I started using mismatched socks. So I also discovered that if your socks just slightly mismatch, people think it's a mistake and it's somehow wrong. But if they're drastically mismatched, then it's kind of a fashion statement. So I now have just these bunch of socks. They're all colorful and different shapes and so on. I throw them into the washing machine.

Some of them I don't know where exactly they are. And then I just throw a bunch to the suitcase, and it works perfectly. Warren Buffett has said one of the best things he ever sort of mastered in his journey as an investor was when he was able to master his temperament when it came to investing. How do we control our emotions, particularly when the stock market more often than probably we would like is a little bit of an emotional roller coaster? Yeah, so first of all, something about Warren Buffett. So in his biography, he wrote that he has a problem with eating donuts and pizzas. So he said that he gave his kids checks for $10,000, but he didn't sign them.

And he said to his kids, if you see me eating a donut or pizza, catch me in the act and I'll sign the check for you. And of course, as a consequence, they were trying to tempt him a little bit more with pizzas and donuts. But he didn't like giving money to his kids so much that this trick worked for him. And if you think about it, this is basically about setting up the conditions, the consequences, long-term consequences, so that we will not act in a way that we don't want to. act. So you can sit there and you could say to yourself, I don't want to act like this. I don't want to get into emotional turmoil. I don't want to eat too much pieces and donuts. How do I restructure the environment where I live to make it less like it I will fall for temptation? Do I want to re-engineer the consequences? Do I want to eliminate temptation? What do I want to do?

Now, in the case of investing, what baffles me is that many people go into the office. And the first thing they do is they open their browser and they look at how the stocks are doing. Now, in what world is this useful information? You could say, well, if you're a particular type of a day trader, maybe you want to know where the stocks is right now. But for most people, what happened to the stock in the past is water under the bridge. What you care about is what's going to happen looking forward. Is this stock going to increase? is a decrease, you might want to do some research, you might want to think about what is the

future potential. But rather than starting the day by saying, okay, let me now do some research on Amazon and figure out if I think the stock is going up and down, instead people look at what happened in the past. And if good things happen, they become slightly happy, and if bad things happen, they become extra depressed. And now there are in no capacity to go ahead and do their research in the appropriate way. So I think that the first trick is to basically say knowing that when we look at our portfolio, we would be more unhappy than happy, and it will kind of cloud our thinking in our emotional state, why look at it before we need this information? So that would be the first part. And then the second part, which I think Buffett has also

mentioned a lot is to think about how not to fall into the trap that everybody else is falling to. So one of the easiest thing to do experiments on is bubbles. You put people in the room

and you give them, let them trade on something and people start buying a particular option or stock or commodity and all of a sudden it goes up and up and up and of course at some point it fails. But getting into a situation which to get bubble is

incredibly common. It happens all the time. So how do we get ourselves not to do it? How do we get ourselves to think carefully and not just be reactive, emotionally reactive to what's happening in the market? I think it is about discipline. It's about being specific about why we're taking particular actions, why shouldn't we take particular actions, coming both with hypotheses and hypotheses again,

and this way we can tame a little bit, maybe not 100% are irrational nature. You're listening to Motley Fool Money, talking with bestselling author, Dan Ariely. His latest book is Irrational Yours on Missing Sox, Pickup Lines, and Other Existential Puzzles. Hearing you talk about how we should essentially focus much more on sort of the future prospects of a business rather than let's just start looking at our stock portfolio prices on a given moment, my assumption is that that's how you manage your own money, that whether you're working with a financial,

advisor or you're doing it on your own or some combination of the both, that you're someone who really tries to limit the amount of exposure he has to, say, the stock market on a given day. Is that correct? Absolutely. I think that information is useful only for making decisions. You know, this is not gossip that I'm just kind of curious about. You know, some stocks might be interesting in a gossip sense, right? Like some football teams might be interesting. in just what's going on with them. But even on the gossip sense, it's usually not the stock value, but what's happening with a company that might be interesting.

But the stock value should only be used and you should only look at it when you want to make a decision. And different people, of course, live differently with the stock market and revise your portfolio a different frequency. And I try to do two things. the first thing I try to do is I try to eliminate what is called the anchoring bias. And the anchoring bias is the idea that you're tied too much to your past decision, that your current decision are too much based on what you've done before.

So imagine, for example, that I went into your portfolio and I sold everything you have without any cost to you, and tomorrow you had all the cash, and then I asked you, how do you want to allocate your cash between all the things you could potentially buy. If what you're going to buy tomorrow is going to be exactly what you had yesterday, then I would say, okay, you've had a good portfolio. But if what you'll buy tomorrow is very different than what you had yesterday, I would ask you, why have you stuck with what you had yesterday? Why didn't you do it by yourself beforehand? And it's because we don't like change. We stick too much to our past behavior. So I try to sit maybe twice a year, not more frequently than that,

and say, how would I like to engineer my portfolio if I was going to do it from scratch? What would it look like? And then, after I think about what I wanted to look like, then I go ahead and I look at what I actually have and decide where are the gaps. And sometimes you would say, well, there's some capital gains here. I don't want them and so on. But that's the first good step. It's just not to be a prisoner to your own past decisions.

And then the second thing is I almost never look. If I get some new information and I think, hey, I know something that somebody else might not know, or I have some other opinion about what will happen in Greece that I don't think other people are thinking about it the right way, you have to think that you know more than other people in the market. But if I have something like this, then I go in with a decision. But it's almost never the case that these decisions about what I think will have. happen in the future are informed by what happened to that stock in the last year. Let's stick with investing for one more question, and that is the one about the financial

advisors, because it does seem like that there are some financial advisors out there who are worth their weight in gold, but are they worth the investment? I think there's kind of two aspects to it. So let me tell you a story. I set next to a very successful financial advisor and successful, I mean somebody who is making lots of money. And I asked him, I said, look, if you took one of your clients and you spend another hour on them a week, by how much do you think you could increase their wealth? And they said basically nothing, right? There's no marginal contribution to increase their wealth. And then I asked

them, and what would happen if you spend an hour a week with them, not to talk about their investment strategy, but to talk to them about their spending strategy, what they're spending on and what they could be spending less and how much money they could be sending to saving an investment. He said that will probably be in the 10% range increase saving a year. Now, this I think is right. I think financial advisors have a very hard time to increase our returns, you know, in the stock market, but what they could do, which is incredibly helpful, is to get us to think about our spending.

What are we spending too much on? what are we spending not enough on? Are we actually saving enough? How should we think about the trade-offs between now and later and so on? So I think that financial advisors have been focusing for a very long time about optimizing portfolios, where in fact I think that they should be experts in the psychology of money and how to use money to be happier. And the other thing that they should do is they should be a guard between us and our emotions.

So when things go badly, they could stop us from acting against our long-term best interests. For example, when we panic and we want to sell everything. So I think that the role is people who execute a particular strategy is not worth that much, but the role in terms of helping us think about how we want to live with our money. I'll give you one kind of very strange example. And it turns out that when people give money to charity, it makes them happier than they expect to be. It doesn't have to be a lot. You can buy somebody a cup of coffee.

You can give a little bit of money here and there. But if financial advisors knew that, they will tell people, hey, why don't you give X percent a year to charity? And here's the way to do it to maximize your happiness and the way you educate your kids and so on. So I think they have a tremendous role in getting us to think about how we want to live and to live more closer to that. And if they do that, I think then they would deserve lots of money. All right. Last question. And then I'll let you go.

This is a show about investing. And as you know, one of the big investments that each one of us has to make is our time. So I'm curious if there's a tip that you can offer for how any one of us can be more productive with our time. time and obviously get a better return on our investment of time. So we can do a whole show on time. Actually, I don't know if you know, but I had a startup that was trying to help people with time. It's a topic that I'm fascinated with, and it's actually very complex.

But here's one advice, and this comes from the beautiful word called cancel elation. And what cancellation is, is the joyful feeling that you have when a meeting, has been canceled or anything has been canceled. Now, what do you do with this? So imagine that the request is coming on your plate and somebody is asking you to meet them or to help them with something and so on. And the question is, should you do it or not?

Well, the advice is to imagine that you've accepted that request and then a day before it was due, it was canceled. And ask yourself on a scale from zero to one, how much cancellation would you feel? and if your answer is that you would feel a very high cancellation, you're very happy that it was canceled, not because of you, don't put it on your plate to start with.

You see, we're so tempted to put things on our plate, not to say no to other people, and then we have to deal with the stress of being overworked and not having time to do anything properly. But if you can, in advance, figure out what not to put on your plate, that would reduce a lot of distress and leave us open to do the things we actually want to do. The book is irrationally yours on missing socks, pickup lines, and other existential puzzles. It's available everywhere. It's a great read. Dan Ariely, thank you so much for being here.

As always, my pleasure. Where do my socks go? If down some black hole or get zapped the cosmic fire, do they turn the length? I don't want them back. Just tell me where they went. Tell me, where do my socks go. 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 ourselves stocks based solely on what you hear. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Hill, and joining me in studio once again, Jason Moser, Matt Argusinger, and Ron Gross. Steve Roido is our man behind the glass. And also behind the glass this week, guys, a very special.

guest. Philip Greendyke stopping by to visit Fool H.Q. Yes, right, Phil. This fall, he's heading down to Charlottesville. This fall, he's heading down to Charlottesville. He's going to the Darden School of Business, or, Maddie, as they say, back home, Dodden. One of our dozens of listeners. Greenie's wicked, Smod. He's going to Dodd. One more story before we get to the stocks on our radar. We have talked before about how Lulu Lemon Athletica is trying to broaden its appeal to men. The maker of high-end

Yogaware unveiled its latest attempt this week. Beer. Lululemon has teamed up with Stanley Park Brewing to launch Curiosity Lager available next month in the Pacific Northwest. That is really trying to stretch the brand appeal. It sounds made up. It sounds like it's a parody. It does seem like an onion story, does it? It's almost as bad as Starbucks's recent partnership with Lyft. That's what it sounds like. Just leaves you wondering. I'm scratching my head. Who uses Lyft? I don't even know how to get. There's an app for that. That's a Lululemon. I mean, it's a locker? I mean, not like a light beer.

I don't understand. I also don't get how it's, well, I'm going to try this beer. And even if you love this new Lulu Lemon Athletica beer, what? Then you're going to go buy some yogurt. I mean, you're walking through the doors to the football game. You guys, I've got a 12-pack of Lulu. It's not going to work. It's not like a business model, right? Everything's a one-time thing until it's a success. And then they're in the beer business.

All right, let's get to the stocks on our radar this week. Ron Gross, you're up. New stock on my radar actually comes from a deep value member who suggested it to me. It's called Datalink, DTLK, a 164 million market cap company, real small. Infrastructure for data centers. So they're in the cloud business. Nice area to be in right now. They're making acquisitions, little acquisitions because it's such a small company, but they're growing through acquisitions. Profitable, solid balance sheet, only five times EBITDA, less than two times buck. But this is such an incredibly crowded space, so competitive. I don't understand yet how a company this small can compete. Maybe it's an acquisition candidate. I got to dig in.

Steve, question about Datalink? Does the name of a company affect what you think about it? Absolutely. But that's just at first glance only, and then I come to my senses. All right, Matt Argusinger, what are you looking at this week? Well, hey, we just saw Amazon become, well, the biggest e-commerce company in the U.S. It already was that. But I mean, it's just passing Walmart. It's such a big deal. So I always think of Mercado Libre, M-E-L-I, one of my favorite companies I probably brought it up on the radio show several times at least. But this is the business.

the leading e-commerce company in Latin America. They're really following Amazon's playbook. It's only a $6 billion company. eBay, I know, has it in their acquisition target. So Mercado Libre. What do you think, Steve? Best opportunity in Latin America right now if I'm visiting. Let's say I'm a tourist. I'm going there. What are I going to do in Latin America? Gosh. Let's see. Why don't you take a flight on Copa Holdings, Copa America Airlines, go to Panama, hang out there. I heard it's a beautiful city. You won't get killed. And while you're down there, do a little shopping.

Yes. Online shopping. Jason Moser, what are you looking at? Well, Chris, earnings season is a time of opportunism, and so I'm going to be opportunistic here and go back to the well on TripAdvisor, TRIP. Earnings came out this week, and the market really, in my estimation, overreacted to a miss on the revenue side. But we have to remember that in a TripAdvisor, management doesn't offer quarterly guidance,

so it's a bit of a guessing game from the analysts going in there. But their instant booking product is doing very well. We knew they signed a big deal with Marriott over the quarter of. And then in a call, it was revealed, they also are partnered up with Hyatt, a stock advisor recommendation on David's side of the card, by the way. Average monthly users up to 375 million from 340 million a quarter ago. You know, Steven Koffer runs this business on two, three, and five-year timelines. Very long-term thinker. I like that. They're going to get a new CFO in place here. The CFO there is just resigning. I still like the long-term picture here.

Steve? What is TripAdvisor doing five years from now that they're not doing today? I think you see them continue to pursue that instant booking. I think they have more and more partners and becoming more like a price line, where something like a price line is really, they're never going to be able to become a trip advisor with all of its content reviews. Three stocks, Steve, you got one you like? I'd have to go to a trip advisor. Hey, oh!

Fixed. Atta boy. Ron Gross, Jason Mozer, Matt, Arkansas, guys. Thanks for being here. Thank you, Chris. That's going to do it for this week's show. Our engineer, Steve Broido, our producer's Mac Rear. I'm Chris Hill.

We'll see you next week.