Motley Fool Money - Fear, Greed, and Quiet Exuberance

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

Wall Street is fearful. Should you be greedy? (00:21) David Meier and Mary Long discuss: - What’s changed and stayed the same since March 2020. - If cooling inflation data is enough to calm markets. - Meta’s plan to train an AI chip in-house. Then, (21:12), IWG CEO Mark Dixon joins for a conversation about hybrid work, changing downtowns, and how companies can measure the financial benefits of in-person connection. Host: Mary Long Guests: David Meier, Mark Dixon Producer: Ricky Mulvey Engineer: Dan Boyd, Rick Engdahl Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Where are you fighting? years ago. Right now, you're listening to Motleyful Money. I'm Mary Long, joined today by David Meyer. David, happy to see you. Good to be here. How are you? I'm good. How are you? Doing pretty well. I thought we would kick off the show by kind of having a moment of reflection, if you will, because five years ago yesterday, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Five years simultaneously feels like a very long time and a very short time. And it's just, that has hit me pretty hard because it's pretty wild to think about all the ways that the world has changed since March 2020. I also think that this anniversary comes at an interesting time because right now is a time

when a lot of people are very unsure and very uncertain about the future, not just about the future of the economy, but about the future of the world. And so it might be kind of helpful to level set a little bit. And again, use this moment of reflection to think about, yes, not only what has changed in the world over the past five years, but also what has stayed the same. So what was true in March 2020 that is also true in March 2025? One thing that comes to my mind is that the stock market was and is reacting to big, scary news. COVID felt unprecedented in 2020. Most of us had never seen or experienced a global pandemic before. For many, this whole year has felt massively unprecedented as well. As we kind of toil that over in our minds,

David, let's turn this back to companies, right? Yes. So my task for you, my ask for you is, what are some companies that back in 2020 got ahead of their skis on valuation and never fully recovered from that? Also, what are some companies that have proven themselves to be really solid five-year holds that maybe did it look that way in March of 2020? For the first part of the question, the company that just absolutely stands out in my mind is Zoom communications.

This was the company that essentially saved businesses, right? Because when office is closed, everyone flocked to their video conferencing technology. And it proved to be amazing. I mean, you've got to think about this company was significantly smaller at the start of the pandemic. And essentially ramped up its infrastructure as minimal. Millions, tens of millions of new customers came onto its platform. And yet, I don't know about you, but I remember Zoom being extremely reliable at a time when it was seeing unprecedented volumes of traffic.

That is actually an amazing technological feat. But as soon as the world got connected via Zoom, like, where else was, you know, where was the growth going to come from? So if you look at the five-year chart of that company and the ticker symbol is ZM, it ramped up just as it should have, right, as the company began to grow. And then it's pretty much stalled out from about 2022 to today, right? We've seen a decline. It can't grow nearly as fast as it was when it was essentially being adopted as a technology. So that's one that got ahead of its, definitely got ahead of its skis.

But one that's been proven to be extremely reliable over that same five years is Service Now, and the ticker simple is NOW. This is a company, again, with everyone moving, businesses were already using Service Now to essentially help them manage all of their IT. And as more and more people went away from, you know, workbound IT to homebound IT. So we have new devices coming on to various networks. People spread out, not just concentrated in an office. They were essentially all over the place. ServiceNow adjusted all of its offerings, was able to attract all sorts of new customers. In the process, kept adding to its functionality.

And the more and more customers that join decided to stay with the company. I decided to upsell to the next level of service that they offered. And if you look at a five-year stock chart for now, especially relative to Zoom, it's pretty much been steadily up and to the right, which is pretty incredible, considering what happened in 2022 when inflation started to rear its ugly head and interest rates went up. The stock took a hit, but it basically powered on through that. So Zoom Communications and now, Service Now are the two that I would think are the best. best examples. Well, and I think that those are, it's fitting to use those two examples together,

right? Because they're playing on the same trend, this move to remote work. And yet Zoom is kind of the one, I'm going to argue that they both kind of follow this lynching approach of look around you, right? But one is very obvious, Zoom, right? Totally correct. Everyone is using it for social reasons, like as to just talk to friends. I had so many Zoom happy hours back then. But one, you have to dig a little bit deeper to find. Do you have to do you have to? to actually lean on expertise in the industry and go a little bit, dive a little deeper than just what is obvious, what's right out there, what is everyone falling. So same trend, but very different ways of riding the wave of that trend. We'll kind of turn this into,

we'll bring this up to today, right? We've been talking about the past. We've been talking about COVID having shaken the world five years ago. The spot that we're in now in March 2025 is that similarly to how it was moving in March of 2020, the stock market is moving and not in the direction that we often like to see it move in. That is down. This downward movement is a product of a number of things. One, tariffs, don't know if you've heard of them. Also, some iffy employment data that came out last week. There's recession talk. After years of thinking that we've maybe struck a soft landing, there were also worries about potential stagflation. On that last point, we did get some fresh CPI data out this morning that shows inflation cooling slightly last month,

which is seemingly good news on the inflation front. The Dow opened a notch higher this morning as a result of that data. David, is this the Consumer Price Index, the medicine that the market needs right now? So all those things that you brought up before your question are spot on. They're all worries that are happening now. And the answer to the direct question about CPI and inflation is, I can only give it a maybe. So it is good that the inflation rate came in a little bit less than was expected. But it's not going down significantly.

It's proving to be a little more sticky. Now, this is something I actually do follow. Even though I do fundamental analysis of companies, I've been over my career, I've been learned that I probably need to follow the macro situation a little bit more than I should have in the first part of my career, let's say. It's proving to be a little bit more sticky than people have realized. So the idea of stagflation, right, where you have no or no growth, little growth, or maybe even some declining growth in our economy, as measured by the gross domestic product GDP, if you have inflation on top of that, that's bad. Consumers, that's not good for consumers.

We feel terrible when that happens, right? And the thing that can happen is if those inflation worries persist or go up, that actually is a negative feedback because people don't buy as much as they used to, which can actually potentially cause a recession. I'm not projecting there is going to be one. But all those combined together and then you throw in some other uncertainties, right? There's something called the Misery Index, which is a combination of the unemployment rate and the inflation rate. So if unemployment goes up at a time when inflation is staying high

or maybe even go higher, again, the consumer who drives our gross domestic product feels bad. And when they feel bad, they don't spend as much. So I don't know which direction this is going to break. But clearly over the past week or so, the markets have been getting a little more worried and prices have been pushing down. We'd definitely like to see inflation come down at a faster rate than it has. You talk about the misery index. The stock market is one indicator of investor sentiment and how investors are feeling about what the market might look like in the future. But there are other indicators too. CNN publishes what's called a fear and greed index. It's a marker that goes zero to 100, and it determines or suggests whether

the market is feeling extremely greedy, whereas a one indicates that there's a lot of extreme fear in the market right now. Yesterday afternoon, I checked that index, that fear and greed index was at a 16 this morning. It had ticked up a little bit, but it was still at 19. Both of those numbers put the fear and greed index in staunchly in the extreme fear category. Just this phrasing alone, fear, greed, brings to mind to me a certain Warren Buffett quote that I'm sure many of our listeners are familiar with about being greedy when others are fearful, fearful when others are greedy. Does that apply to today, David, or is there an exception here? Oh, that is an awesome question. So I completely agree with the direction that you pointed out of the CNN Fear and Greed indicator. I think fear has

picked up. But if you look at some of the valuation multiples for various parts of the market, they're actually still pretty high. So if I look at the Magnificent Seven stocks, for example, the biggest of the big stocks, right? Their forward PE ratio still trades somewhere around 25. The S&P 500 index trades at around, let's call it 21, 22. I haven't checked in a couple of days. And small caps, which have been lagging behind, trade at around 14, 15. So if I use the Magnificent Seven and the S&P 500 forward PE ratios, that doesn't show fear. That still shows a little bit of exuberance. So there can be pockets of opportunities in individual stocks, but I would, broadly speaking,

I would actually push back and say, I don't think this is necessarily the right time to buy the market as a whole, but you can always find opportunities in individual stocks based on their individual price movements. So then, before we move on to our next topic for the day, with all that in mind that you just said, what are you doing with your portfolio? Has your outlook for the year ahead changed very much since January 1st of the year? Are you making any adjustments that you'd maybe like to share with the listeners of Motleyful Money? Sure.

So I will say, actually, yes, my outlook has changed a little bit. coming out of 2024 and into 2025, I was confident about the economy. I thought there were, you know, there's a lot of things that were moving in good directions. We've only recently started to see little bits of changes in the data going in the wrong direction, but not severely. So from that standpoint, I have a little bit more worry about the economy, not a lot, but a little bit more. Should I be worried about stocks? I don't know, but it's hard to ignore what's happened over the last week. That's for sure. From a portfolio standpoint, I will say, 2023 and 2024 were years where basically I put my investment portfolio to work and sold lots of things in order to pay for lots of life events, weddings, houses, cars, things like that. So I actually don't have any stocks right now, but I will say this.

I am getting more and more interested in the savings that I have begun to reaccumulate in putting that to work. And I've been touting this for quite a while. I still think there are good opportunities on the small cap side. But if we continue to get these market pullbacks and the S&P 500, especially the largest companies. Those are some of the best companies in the world, whether it's Nvidia or Amazon.com, I mean, you name it. Those companies are well-run. They serve huge markets. They have amazing competitive advantages. And I would definitely be getting interested as those stocks begin to

pull back because why wouldn't I want to own shares of some of the best companies in the world, especially if they're at lower prices. So speaking of some of the biggest companies in the world, we've got two different chip-related stories coming out today from two different Reuters reports. One of those reports reveals that meta is testing its first in-house AI training chip. So this chip would be designed to train on meta's proprietary artificial intelligence systems. It would also reduce meta's dependency on NVIDIA. META's allegedly aiming to use its own in-house chips by 2026. I want to hit on the competition piece in a second. We are still in the hypothetical realm here, but from the perspective

of someone who uses Meta's products. What is the difference between a meta-trained chip and an Nvidia-trained one? So from the user perspective, none. I mean, as someone who interfaces with Facebook or Instagram, you won't feel the difference if Meta decided to use their own chip versus invidia trips to train their AI systems on the data that they have. You just won't. This is, it's definitely all about meta controlling its costs and controlling its infrastructure.

So what do I mean by that? Meta is a unique company in that they actually own their own data centers. So cost is extremely important to them. So if they know, if they can design a chip that's specifically about training on their data, they can optimize that chip. And by optimizing that chip, I can get the most performance out of it. I can get the least power consumption out of it because I don't, an Nvidia chip is an amazing chip that can serve a wide variety of customers. Meta might not, I don't know if meta needs 50% of its capabilities, 30%, 80%, I just don't know.

But a specific chip designed by meta to run only for the sole purpose of training its own data on its own hardware, they can get significant, cost savings, especially at a time when Nvidia has incredible pricing power. Every other competitor wants their chips. So from a user standpoint, we wouldn't feel the difference, but from a shareholder standpoint, this could actually reduce their CAPX requirements, could reduce their operating costs, could push their margins higher, could push their ROICs higher, which would be good for meta-shareholders. Controlling costs, if you're a company, sounds like a very attractive proposition. So it seems, to me, that it is very likely that we'll see even more stories like this moving forward.

If you're in Vidia, how do you protect yourself from other companies coming out and building their own thing or training their own thing? So a very good question. It is a dilemma for them, right? Because the one reaction that they would have is to make sure that their chips basically serve as many customers as possible so that they try to reduce or try to make the switching cost very high, meaning meta, no, don't use, you know, don't go to your own chips. Our chip does exactly what you need and can do it well. But the other part of it is, can meta use it as a

negotiating tool? So can they say, hey, you know, if there's a real threat to having meta or anybody else make a substitute chip, there's probably a price at which they could negotiate with invidia to say, if you don't want me to do this, reduce it by 10%, 20%, whatever that percentage is. So it can be difficult for Nvidia to deal with these direct threats if they truly come to fruition. But the thing to, again, the thing to remember is, Nvidia is the clear leader here. Like, their chips are amazing. They're continuing to reinvest all that capital to make them better and better,

more power efficient. and they price them according to the demand that's out there, which we know is still there and probably rising. So I don't think in the short-term, NVIDIA has to do anything drastic, but I do think it's something that's going to get them to pay attention to the competitive position a little more closely. We'll close with that other chip-related Reuters story. Taiwan Semiconductor has allegedly approached some fellow chip companies, one being NVIDIA,

also AMD, Broadcom, Qualcomm, about going in on Instagram. Intel's Foundry Business together. The property and plant equipment of Intel's Foundry business has a book value of $108 billion, yet Intel as a whole posted an $18.8 billion net loss in 2024, and its stock price has been halved in the past year. David, what would a joint venture like this mean for Intel? Oh, my gosh. This is also such a good question, because Intel has actually had a lot of struggles here. Taiwan Semiconductor has been advancing chip technology at a faster rate than Intel has been able to from a foundry standpoint. Basically, how do I get more transistors on the chip? How do I make them smaller? How do I make them more

energy efficient? How do I manufacture this? This is an extremely difficult manufacturing problem to solve when you're trying to basically optimize variables that don't want to be optimized against each other. So what it can do is it can bring in outside capital, outside expertise to try to get the Intel Foundry sort of moving back on the technological innovation trajectory that they would like to be on. But the price would be you have to give up some control, right? They won't own the Foundry outright because the owners, the group of owners,

if this comes to fruition, you know, would want to share in the spoils. Where Intel does have the advantages, the U.S. government would like to see Intel be a significant piece of this market. So if I read correctly, the promises that Taiwan Semiconductor and the group of investors along with them won't own more than 50% of this, which sort of seems like a good thing to do. But in order for the Intel, to basically get back on the right trajectory in terms of technology, in terms of capacity,

output, things that the United States really wants from a strategic standpoint to be able to control more of their own chip manufacturing. It probably has to move in this direction. Otherwise, it will continue to lag behind. David Meyer, always a pleasure to have you on the show. Thanks so much for spending your morning with us to record this segment of Motley for Money. Thank you very much for having me, Mary. These days I'm all about quality over quantity, especially in my closet. If it's not well-made and versatile, it's just not worth it. That's honestly what I love Quince.

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That's a full year to wear it and love it, and you will. Now available in Canada, too. Don't keep settling for clothes that don't last. Go to QINCE.com slash Motley for free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash Motley. One of the ways that COVID changed the world, offices got a whole lot emptier, but some have been starting to fill back up. Next on the show, I'm joined by Mark Dixon, the CEO of International Workplace Group. IWG likens itself to an Airbnb or Uber for offices.

Mark and I talk about the current state of hybrid work, the changing dynamics of cities, and how corporations can measure the financial benefits of in-person connection. Today, this idea of hybrid work is pretty common. That's due in large part to kind of COVID and the rise of remote work, but not entirely to that. But you founded Regis, which is now IWG, in 1989. So employees are familiar with this shifting role of hybrid work in our lives and in our own experiences. but as an industry insider and somebody who's been in this business for three decades, how has the idea of hybrid work evolved over that pretty long time period? It's not about real estate and it's not about sort of COVID or pandemics. It's all about technology. So when I started the business with one center, you know, you had huge,

tele-mobile phones that you needed were heavy and not very mobile, didn't work very well, and you had telex and you had facts, you didn't have the internet as such. Now, the world changed with the, in the way technology has just completely changed how people work and how they can work, that is the driver, that is the catalyst for change. So as technology develops, it makes companies and people, makes it possible to have dot completely new and much more efficient ways of carrying out their juices and being more productive. And that's what we're part of. And that's what's driving the evolution and development of the business. So can you shine a light on what exactly some of those technologies look like?

So I know IWG is rolling out this increasingly asset light model. You're partnering more with companies that are wanting to utilize office space. Apart from granting access to that office space, that different companies might want to utilize. What kinds of services, whether that's technology or an amenity of some other sort, does a company get through partnering with IWG? Well, again, we're sort of middleman between the property investors and then a huge number of customers, large corporations and so on. So the sort of services, we offer a big range of services here from clearly we do offices, but we also have a huge medium room business. you know, people need to collaborate more, that's become bigger.

You can use an office by the day. That's become a huge business as well. You've got services. All the offices come. They're completely equipped with all the infrastructure that you need to operate your business, all the technology, everything is there, all the furnish, the whole thing. So you can just turn up and use it, whether that's for one person, for one day, or 100 people for over 100 days.

Whatever you want, you can buy it. So we've involving now to more services. We have a consulting firm as an example, which helps companies make the transition to hybrid work. It's actually an important change for a company. It's not just about space. It's about changing work practice. And we have a work from home business that does about $400 million of revenue where we're supporting more than a million people that work from home. So there's lots of different aspects to what we do.

IWG currently has a market cap of a little shy of $2 billion US dollars, but you've called out, again, in these earnings that you just reported earlier this month, that you see a $2 trillion addressable market. Walk us through how you land on that number. Very rough numbers. This is the real estate market, if you like, the whole of the market's about, depends how you measure it, but between $6 and $8 trillion. That is all real estate, all commercial real estate.

how you get to $2 trillion is that about a quarter of space will be occupied by hybrid work operations. So that is the opportunity. It's about support. There's about 25% of the workforce, about 1.2 billion workers globally that are office workers. And that is based around about a quarter of those people buying hybrid or support one kind of another. I want to talk a little bit about culture because I feel as though you all must be uniquely positioned to kind of see how the future of work is changing, to see how company cultures are changing, and how office or remote or hybrid landscapes play into that.

So it's hard for a company that's fully remote to build a culture. It's also hard for a company that's hybrid to build a culture. Are there any examples of client companies that you work with that you think have handled this transition to the hybrid world, especially well when it comes to building culture. I think the impression is that somehow it doesn't build culture, but it's, again, culture is not built through proximity. That's the sort of fallacy. The culture is built through companies focusing on their people and making sure that people are communicated to well,

and making sure people are clear about their objectives, making sure people are brought together at appropriate times in a curated way, so that they meet when they need to meet. The idea that somehow you bring people into an office for two days a week or three days a week, and they all meet up is really not, that is very unlikely to happen.

So coming back to your question, many companies, not a few, tens of thousands of companies have moved to a lot of them, especially in startups, go hybrid only from the beginning, much more flexible, much cheaper, and basically enable them to just hire people anywhere because their biggest problem is hiring people and managing costs. We can see a lot of large corporations that are also embracing hybrid because well managed. it saves the money, makes their people more productive, and enables them to hire more and better people.

So there are thousands and thousands of companies already embracing it, but it's a management change, not a property change. You know, everyone's sort of missing the ball. The ball is about supporting people to be more productive. We've been able to measure that. It's not about whether it's in an office or at home or wherever it may be. It's about that. And you have to work on culture.

We see oftentimes companies save money on real estate, invest more in culture. Talk to us a bit about how you all think about location. So remote work in any capacity gives people back time that was previously lost to a commute. And IWG has said, okay, the reality is that the office is not dead. It's just moved to a more convenient place closer to where people actually live. 80% of the new locations that you all signed in 2024 were in suburbs or smaller towns rather than in traditional central business districts. I would think, though, that it's hard to be an international company and still have a pulse on where in suburban areas or rural areas there's a demand to meet. So how do you all approach expanding and access in suburban and more rural locations?

What does that research process look like? computerized, basically in short. So we use the same software that McDonald's or Burger King would use to assess how many people, our kind of people, live in the vicinity. You know, again, it's a wonderful digital world where all this stuff is available. So we know the characteristics of our customers. We check that there's enough demand in the area. And we've been very successful, as you said, we published our results,

our ability to fill up our centres, in very rural locations as well as the suburbs has been great. You know, we've done well. We do one building with an owner. We do them more because we're able to create revenue and cash flow for them. So it is a technical activity, but it's no different to a fast food chain rolling out their concepts across the country. Kind of relatedly, I'm curious how different countries are approaching the changing work

environment. How does hybrid work look different in the U.S., which is increasingly a growing market for you? You've just changed your reporting structures that you're reporting in U.S. dollars rather than in pounds. How does the hybrid work environment look different in the U.S. than it does in, say, Europe? Well, it's sort of similar. I would say the U.S. has got higher adoption. I think U.S. companies much more focused on the bottom line. They don't mind kicking tradition out the door and saying, look, what works best, not what people think works best, but what actually will help our bottom line. So, number one.

But it's happening everywhere from the most traditional places, places like Japan, to anywhere in Europe. It happens quicker when public transport is less good, let's say. Places some cities or countries where the public transport is cheap and very good, you know, commuting is not a problem. It's quite short. Smaller countries, places like Copenhagen, Denmark, all the offices are near where people live. So you're always in the city, you can cycle to work. So it's like a, it's a close thing. But for all the bigger capital cities, it's a problem. The infrastructure's not there, or it's expensive to use and time consuming. So that's what's

driving everything. And basically, it's that plus technology. And it's, it's that plus technology. And it's, It's productivity and the way you can get that very visible for the people that manage people and the companies that pay for it to be able to see, are we being productive or not. As always, people on the program may have interests 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. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers. The Motley Fool only picks products that it would personally recommend two friends like you. For David Meyer and Mark Dixon, I'm Mary Long.

Thanks for listening, Fools. We'll see you tomorrow.