Motley Fool Money - Motley Fool Money: 08.10.2012

Episode Date: August 10, 2012

Disney delivers its biggest earnings ever. IBM considers buying part of Research in Motion.  And Starbucks bets big on mobile payment. Our analysts discuss those stories and share three stocks on their radar. Plus, Spousonomics author Jenny Anderson explains how using economics can help you improve your marriage.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi everyone, I'm Charlie Cox. Join us on Disney Plus as we talk with the cast and crew of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again. What haven't you gotten to do as Daredevil? Being the Avengers. Charlie and Vincent came to play. I get emotional when I think about it. One of the great finale of any episode we've ever done. We are going to play Truth or Daredevil.

What? Oh boy. Fantastic. You guys go hard. Daredevil Born Again official podcast Tuesdays and stream season two of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again on Disney Plus. Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money. From Fool Global Headquarters, this is Motley Fool Money. Welcome to Motley Full Money. Thanks for being here. I'm your host, Chris Ellen, joining me in studio this week from Motley Full Income Investor James Early.

And for a million-dollar portfolio, Charlie Travers and Ron Gross. Gentlemen, good to see you as always. We have got the latest on retail stocks, energy stocks, and the future of mobile payment. If you liked the Smurfs movie, then boy, do we have some great news. As always, we will give you a look at the stocks on our radar, but we are going to begin this week with Disney. Disney reported the highest quarterly earnings in the company's history. Ron Gross, $1.8 billion in profit for the third quarter. That's a lot of zeros.

Yeah, well, Chris, if I use my trademark, they're firing in all cylinders. Will I get away with it? James? Yes. Yeah, Avengers, top grossing film with 2012. Parks knocking it out of the park, if you will. The network business not as robust as in some quarters, but ESPN, Disney's channel, still getting it done.

Company's just doing a great job. In the past, when this company has struggled when it came to quarterly earnings, it was really mainly about the parks, particularly over the last few years. What is the Achilles Hill for this company now? Is it the online? Is it sort of the interactive gaming? Disney Interactive is still losing money. They say that they'll probably be profitable by the end of 2013.

We'll have to wait and see. You can't take that at face value. We certainly need less John Carter's and more Avengers. We can't take $100 million write-offs every quarter, so we need to produce good content. The parks, quite frankly, are – it's the economy. The better the economy is, the better the parks are. But they're doing things like revamping some of the parks. You know, Shanghai is coming online.

And so they're taking the necessary steps, but this is a consumer-based company, and it does ebb and flow with the economy to a large extent. And, James, the stock, despite the earnings, the stock didn't really move all that much. It hit an all-time high this week, but it really didn't move all that much. Is it more like a dividend play now? No. The dividend is very tiny. One point two percent yield. The payout is 19.5 percent, which is really wimpy. It's like the dad that could afford to pay you a better allowance but chooses not to.

I mean, it really should be paying out more. This is not that fast growing a company. But the stock has performed. It's up over 30% this year versus 13% for the market. Not too shabby. And so it's in this kind of like blue chip conundrum at $90 billion of market cap. Nine times EBITDA, not incredibly expensive, not incredibly cheap. So, you know, it's going to do what blue chips do. As long as they put up the numbers, it'll plot along nicely. J.C. Penny's second quarter earnings came in much lower than expected. But Charlie, despite that, shares were up on Friday. What's going on? Ron Johnson has a lot of street cred still at this point, Chris. Apparently he does.

So his comments about what is coming for the company in the fall outweighed what was completely miserable Q2 results. J.C. Penny reported same store sales down 21 percent, and then they yanked their non-gap guidance for the year where they were going to earn 216 a share. And the company also turned cash flow negative for a retailer. That's a very, very bad sign. But they're giving him a lot of credit that this is a turnaround that will turn. They're introducing a new pricing strategy in September, along with a new store prototype, where they're going to have a store within a store concept. Essentially, it looks like they're going to turn J.C. Penny into a mall within the mall. I'm not really that optimistic myself.

But the market liked it, so we'll see what happens. The market must have a ton of confidence in this guy, because to your point about the earnings, These were miserable earnings, and these were really low expectations. And even with the low expectations, James, came in under that. Yeah, it's the equivalent of we're all here standing over a piece of roadkill and wondering when it's going to come back to life. It's not. I mean, this concept is dead. And I've just got to quote, Warren Buffett, as quoted by CNBC's Jeff Mackey, who is just a great quote.

He says, when a great manager takes over a bad business, it's the business that emerges with its reputation intact. And that's what I think is going to happen here. And yet, Charlie, we have seen turnarounds in the retail industry before. We've seen it with, you know, Coach Burberry. I know that's a company you follow. I mean, it's not impossible, but to James' point, it kind of seems like for all of the confidence that the market has in Ron Johnson, the clock is ticking. And the consumers so far are voting with their feet, you know, and even their Internet sales were down 33%. So, you know, they got a lot to prove to me.

The department serves in general are notorious for having trouble. It's not a good business model. It's a very hard business model. model. Bloomingdale struggled for a very, very long time. So some of them survive, but they all can't. Well, let's stick with retail because shares of Macy's were up this week after that retail company's latest earnings came in 27 percent higher for the quarter. The company also raised guidance, Ron. What do you think?

Yeah, a lot of what they're doing is cost-cutting, and you can't cost-cut your way to profitability forever. But they're doing a decent job. They're focusing on local markets. buyers are focusing more on local markets that ever before. My wife actually used to be a buyer for Macy, so I have a little insight into that. But they're doing a fine job. The numbers don't lie. They didn't come up. 16 percent is great. But you've got to grow that top line. You can't cost cut forever. Don't sell yourself short, Ron. You have a lot of insight in Macy's. I may. What are you driving at? Once about a time before you were a world famous stock analyst. You worked at Macy's. I did. It was actually Bambergers at the time. Some of them were

called Bambergers, and I worked at the bath shop when I was in high school. Really? Did you like it? Oh, I did not like it. So, let me just, what should I look for when I'm buying a lufa? Like, is there, no, it was mostly towels and bath mats and baths and carp rugs. If we were to track down your manager at the time, what would he or she say about sort of your strengths and your weaknesses as an employee of Macy's? Well, I prided myself. This was before the days of scanners, right? So everything was done manually into the register. It was a nightmare.

But I prided myself from being quite fast. Used both hands to type into the prices and everything. Great textory. I knew nothing about the products. I didn't know anything about towels. I didn't know the difference between towels. I didn't know what I don't even understand what cotton is. I was of no help to anyone.

Let's move on. Kind of a mixed week for Chesapeake Energy. On Tuesday, shares were up more than 9% after second quarter profits nearly doubled. On Thursday, the company confirmed that it is indeed the subject of a Justice Department investigation into possible criminal antitrust violations. And James, we were talking about this before the show. This was a story that broke in late June. Reuters broke the story that top executives at Chesapeake were colluding with Encana, which is a rival energy company, to keep land prices in Michigan low. What do you make of this week for Chesapeake Energy?

Well, obviously, this news comes as a big surprise to those of us familiar with such an ethical oasis of a company. Yeah, what happened is allegedly Chesapeake and Canada said, okay, let's not bid together on the same properties. And that will have the effect of just keeping property prices in Michigan low. The benefit to Chesapeaker, the silver lining is that this is fairly small. It's a 13 billion market cap company, and I think they spent about $400 million on land in Michigan. So whatever fine or fee will probably not be humanized. And they've got bigger problems, really. That's the other good news, so to speak. They've got much bigger things to worry about than this. I was going to say, the gas prices, natural gas prices are low. This is a stock that's been beaten up. As you mentioned, this is a company with a certainly a history of corporate governance issues.

And yet, a lot of assets, and it seems like for some people, this would be exactly the time to buy Chesapeg Energy. They're selling 13 billion of assets, which is prudent because Aubrey McClendon, the CEO, was just on a crazy spree. They shook up the board. He's still CEO, but he's not chairman anymore. And he really had the old board in his pocket, and that was the problem. The thing is, I don't know if you need to pile in right now. Gas prices are going to be low for some time. So you can probably wait a little bit. Charlie, you agree with that? I completely agree with James on this. I think there's better companies in the space. Give me a name. I would like Devon Energy. All right. We have talked in the past about research in motion and the challenges that that tech company faces.

Bloomberg is now reporting that IBM is interested in RIM's Enterprise Services Unit. And, Charlie, this story broke Thursday evening. And sure enough, Friday morning shares research in motion up 5%. What do you think of this? It's just blind hope. People have been looking for someone to throw RIM a life preserver for a long time here. And so the rumors are that IBM is interested in their enterprise service business. And what that means is that's their network of secure servers that support BlackBerry devices.

And that would give IBM control of a secure email offering for corporate users who prioritize security, which does make a lot of sense for IBM. But where that would leave research in motion in the aftermath of such a sale. If it happens is a big question mark. I'm not sure how they could continue to sell BlackBerry devices unless IBM was going to support the hardware side. Yeah. How does this feel if you're a rim? I mean, it's like you're a store and you're trying to stay afloat by having some sale,

and someone comes in and offers to buy all your shelves and display cases, right? Right, and then you can lease it back from them, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's one, I read that the BlackBerry is really hoping that their next iteration of BlackBerry is going to be big for them, so they might want to see how that works out. They haven't been hoping that for a while. Before they get rid of the enterprise business, so that would be meaning this might happen next year, not imminently.

I think that's, like you said, it's kind of, you know, they're grasping its straws. If they're going to get it done, just rip off the Band-aid and get it done. If you're Research in Motion and you believe that IBM is interested in possibly buying this unit, who else is on your speed dial? Are you calling John Chambers over at Cisco System and seeing if he wants to get in on the bidding? Well, there's been some rumors that Samsung might be interested in parts of Research in Motion's business. And the reason would be that Samsung is a major beneficiary of Google's Android system, but they're a little nervous about the Motorola acquisition and Google vertically integrate. and competing with that. So taking either a Blackberry license or making an acquisition could let them have their own OS and stand alone. Coming up, the ripple effects of Facebook's IPO continue to be felt on Wall Street. Details shortly. This is Motley Full Money.

Welcome back to Motley Full Money. Chris Hill here in studio with Charlie Travers, James Early, and Ron Gross. Guys, before we get back to the news, have to welcome a news station to the the Motley Fool Money. We should hear who it is first. WKBK AM 1290 and FM 104.1 in Keene, New Hampshire. Nice. That's our first station, New Hampshire.

I've been to Keen. All right. Back to the news. Guys, remember back in May there was the deal where Yahoo was going to sell part of its stake in Alibaba, the Chinese Internet company for more than $4 billion? At the time, Yahoo said it was going to return the cash to shareholders. Now, new CEO, Marissa Mayer, is saying she may want to use that cash for all. other purposes. And Charlie, shares of Yahoo were down about 5% Friday morning when this story

broke. What do you think? Sure, Chris. And yeah, to your point you mentioned, there was a big proxy fight over Yahoo about this very issue where Dan Loeb, a very famous activist investor, got on the board with two of his appointees. And, you know, part of that plan was they were going to return this $4 billion to shareholders. It was not clear if it was going to be a share buyback or as a dividend, which would be about $3 or $4 a share. that would happen sometime before the end of 2012. Well, as it turns out, Marissa Meyer was hired last month in July, and she apparently has some other plans, which is actually her job.

You know, and presumably the board of directors knew this when they hired her, and so all they're going to do is just make sure that the original plan makes sense or not. And frankly, I think they probably do have better uses for the money than a share buyback. Yahoo's already bought back a billion and a half over the last 12 months. They don't have the cash for. flow to support that. And I think investing in the business is a better option for them. Ron, what do you think? Yeah, I agree. I think Marissa Meyer is doing what's, she thinks is necessary versus what's popular. I give her a lot of credit for that, and especially Yahoo being so

public, it is a tough thing to do. Unfortunately, Yahoo just can't get out of its own way. I mean, this is just another communication disaster, another pullback, another shifting, and going left when people think it's going right. So that's unfortunate, and the stock is selling enough, but I think we have to give her time to do what she was focused on search, though. I mean, and Google obviously dominates that. Is Yahoo destined to be kind of the AMD to Google's Intel, so to speak, like dependent on scraps just to be token competition?

I think perhaps, yes, I think Google is not going to be the only monopoly in search. There is room for other search in this, and it can be profitable too. But I think she'll probably take us places we might not even realize it. Sounds like you give a lot of confidence. We'll see. Guys, two consumer-facing IPOs this week, Blumen Brands, which is the parent company of Outback Steakhouse, and Manchester United, the famous soccer club, both went public this week. And Ron, I think what's interesting here is that a week ago, we saw reports of where these companies were going to price their shares, and they actually ended up pricing them lower when they went public. You've been involved in this type of thing in the past.

How does that process work? And if you're Blumen Brands, why are you lowering the price of your IPO? Yeah, the IPO market in general is really struggling, whether it's Facebook Group on Zinga, Pandora, or companies that are postponing them completely, where they're kayak, I believe, Formula One, a number of postponed. Yeah, CKE, yeah, CKE, the restaurant chain. So a number, it's just hurting, and it's a function of two things. One, investors' appetites for IPOs are not that strong right now.

And B, starting with Facebook, the valuations just weren't making sense, and people got really burned on Facebook, and now they're being extra cautious. So you come up with a range, you go, if you're a banker, you go, you test the markets, you test the waters, you see what you can actually sell it for. And if it's less than you originally set that range for, you have a tough phone call with the company where you say, hi, it's me. I don't think we can get it done. We've got to go lower, and so we can either cancel or go lower your call.

Do you think that's the big lesson of the Facebook IPO, this whole notion of valuation having, essentially mattering more to people when they're looking to price IPOs? I mean, for a guy, a value guy, it's music to my ears. I love to see some rationality come back into the marketplace. So all is well, I think. I think that's the lesson. Yeah, with Facebook with this, the market is actually a little more sensible than we often give it credited for being. This week, Starbucks announced it is investing in Square, the mobile payment startup company. And beginning this fall, as part of the deal, Square will begin processing all the credit and

debit card transaction at Starbucks locations in the U.S. James, is this more about the customer experience for Starbucks, or is this more about Starbucks really looking to invest in the future mobile payment? Long term, it's the latter. I mean, for now, Square, and by the way, Square, it's kind of like a payment system. If you imagine two cell phones making love, it's kind of how it works. One guy has a barcode, one guy receives the barcode and gets the money. If you're a merchant, you just call up Square, they mail you this free adapter kit that reads the other guy's cell phone. And it also swipes. You can plug this little thing into the top of your iPhone, and you can just swipe credit cards. And it works best for micrachents who might otherwise find it burdensome to apply to take credit cards the normal way.

So Starbucks is not a micro-merchant. So I think that's why I think your latter point makes the most sense, Chris. This valuation of Square is $3.5 billion, and they just invested $25 million, which is not a lot of money. But since Square will be doing the processing of all of Starbucks's transactions now, that's probably the bigger benefit. And we'll see where this goes later on. How much bigger is mobile payment going to get? And we see a lot of players in this space.

We see, you know, obviously Visa and MasterCard. But Square is not the only startup out there that's doing this sort of thing. Is this increasingly an attractive space for investors? Yeah, Chris. And you see Google and Microsoft working with. the carriers and the banks to get mobile payments up and running on their phones in a manner that works for everybody involved because I think consumers would really like to do this instead of carrying around credit cards.

We've already moved from a cash society to a plastic society and now I think we're going mobile. And finally, guys, last year, Sony's production of the Smurfs grossed over 560 million worldwide, so that means we are... How can that be? We're going to see some sequels, but that's not all. is reportedly going to be producing a film version of the 1980s sitcom Alf, which for those who don't remember, Alstead for Ily and Life Form.

Ron, clearly there is a market in Hollywood for movie ideas based on 80s television shows. Yeah. What do you got? Make a recommendation. Does anyone here remember the name Ralph Hinkley? No. He is the greatest American hero. That would be an amazing movie.

Oh, wow. James, what do you got? The 80s were really the cultural, sort of the epitome of human culture. In my view, I was going to go with Magnum P.I. I think there's already been made a movie. I might go with Knight Rider Air Wolf. Charlie, what do you got? I'm going back into the cartoon realm with Captain Caveman.

Oh, I remember, man. I was a big fan of Captain Caveman. Nice. Steve Broiteau, what do you got for us, man? I'm going with Mr. Belvedere. What do you mean by going with him? I love Mr. Belvedere. I wish he lived at my home now, and everything would be so much easier.

Feature-length movie. You're going Mr. Belvedere? Yeah, absolutely. Feature-link. All right, guys, we will see you a little later in the show. Coming up, why cheap sex is good for your marriage. We will dip into the audio archives for a conversation with Jenny Anderson, co-author of Spousinomics. Stay right here. This is Motley Fool Money.

Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Hill. Forget love and romance. My guest this week says the key to a happy marriage is economics. Jenny Anderson. is an award-winning business reporter for the New York Times and the co-author of Spousinomics, using economics to master love, marriage, and dirty dishes. Jenny, thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me. So I've been married for 15 years. And you've never learned as much as you've learned from my book, right? I've got to say, there is some amazing stuff in this book, and amazing, in a number of ways, not the least of which is the amount of economic research that has grounded it. This is definitely not one of those squishy books about marriage and how to get in touch with your inner feelings. This is very grounded stuff here. In a nutshell, how can economics help someone like me who's in year 15 of his marriage?

Well, the book takes a very simple premise that economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources and what is a marriage but a daily waking up and deciding who's going to do what and how are your resources. your very limited resources, I might add, your time, your energy, your libido, your love, how are those going to be allocated every day? And as far as I can tell, like, the source of 99% of marriage tension is over that allocation, who's going to do what, and who's doing what well, and who's not doing what well, and who needs to be nagged and who needs to be encouraged and what incentives are going to work. So the book comes up with, we take ten principles, both from classical economics, but mostly from behavioral economics, and say,

here are some things that are influencing the way you approach things in marriage. So the way you approach the division of labor, are you doing it 50-50 or do you, is there maybe a better system like comparative advantage? How you fight? Do you fight like crazy because you're afraid of losing? That's law-aversion kicking in. How can you do that better? So you name the subject.

I think we have a solution for it, including sex, which of course is a very common topic among married couples. I was going to say, I mean, one of the basic economic principles that I think even someone who isn't schooled in economics knows about is the concept of supply and demand. And for those thinking about picking up a copy of Spousinomics, I will just spot you up with the title of Chapter 3, supply and demand or how to have more sex. Right. So we all know the more something costs, the less demand there is for it, right? So we did a randomized survey of people across the country and asked them, do you want to be having more sex? Most of them said yes. Then we said, why aren't you having more sex? And most of them said because we're too tired, followed not long afterwards by too busy.

So you start from the premise that you would like to be having more sex with your spouse, but you're too tired to do it. So what is the best way to sort of up demand? You need to make it cheaper for yourselves, not money, but, you know, in terms of expending your time and energy. And it's amazing how often couples can either talk about how much sex they're not having or complain about how their schedules won't permit it, or there's a lot of ways we make it expensive for ourselves. And, again, you pointed out this doesn't sound very romantic, and this will not sound like a romantic advice,

but you've got to make it easy for yourselves, especially if you're in the rush hour of life. You know, you're managing jobs, you're managing children, you're managing a lot of things. For that moment in your lives, you need to make it easy. Maybe you need to schedule it. Maybe you need to set a goal. Maybe it needs to be put in the blackberry.

Maybe you need to stop hoping that he's going to sense the right moment and be really romantic, and you need to just sort of seize the seven minutes in the shower and go with what you've got. But make it cheaper and easier for yourselves, and more demand will materialize. The book, every concept we have, we have three case studies. So this is not sort of made up in the abstract. There are couples who do this stuff, and it actually works for them. And I think this is probably the first book about economics that deals with cheaper, sex. So, I mean, I think that alone is going to help you sell a lot of books.

I hope so. You're listening to Motley Fool Money. My guest is Jenny Anderson, the co-author of Spousinomics, using economics to master love, marriage, and dirty dishes. One of the things that you write about goes against one of the sort of classic pieces of advice for couples that are about to get married. And the classic advice is, never go to bed angry. And you, and your co-author are saying, actually, sometimes you should go to beg angry. Why? Yeah, I think that was pretty bad advice. It's like the most common sort of bridal party advice that you're going to get. The reason is because, and I alluded to this before, loss aversion, when we feel like we're losing, we act irrationally. For stock traders, that means,

you know, thank Jerome Kevier at Society General, right? He actually said, like, I knew I was down. I had to bet the house. Like, I had to do everything. everything in my power, including risking $7 billion from my bank's capital, to win. You act. You can't see clearly. And that happens when you're fighting with your spouse, right? You think in this same survey, 37% of people admitted to us that they continue a fight when they know they're wrong. And another 34% admitted to us that they continue to fight when they can't even remember what it was they were fighting about. So sometimes you're just fighting because you feel like you're losing, right? and so you sort of go into crazy mode.

At that moment, it really is much better to go to bed angry and catch your breath and stop hyperventilating for whichever party happens to be hyperventilating, and maybe it's both of you, and see how you feel in the morning. And we're not suggesting sort of suppressing your feelings and never talking about it again, but you're not going to get resolution. If your goal is, you know, a happy, fruitful marriage for many, many years, and the goal of that fight is to resolve the issue,

then you need to sort of wait until you can breathe to resolve the issue. And, again, that is our – recognizing that it's our loss aversion kicking in, we can sort of force ourselves to take that time out and then reassess when you're thinking a little clearer, and it's amazing. I can tell you from first-hand experience, I'm a very emotional person. A lot of times in the morning, the issue does not seem nearly as monumental as it did at sort of 2 a.m. And you're a little bit better at. That's one of the things that keeps coming up in the book over and over is this whole notion of cost-benefit analysis and looking at things in your marriage through the last. lens of, well, what is the cost here? What is the benefit going to be? And it's like, well, you know, I don't necessarily want to take out the garbage right now, but, you know, the cost of it is pretty

minimal compared to the benefit of my wife is going to be a whole lot happier. She's going to be exponentially happier than the cost will be for me. Exactly. And again, it sounds very unromantic, and yet there is some real logic to this if you think about it. Like, marriage can be romantic, but dishes are not romantic. Trash is not romantic. You know, deciding who does the carpal. These are not romantic issues and do not require romantic solutions. They require practical solutions. And I think we sometimes just hope that because we're married and because we're in love,

all of these things should be easy. Like, you would never run a business that way being like, well, I hope my business partner just knows what I need. You know, you would assume that, like, you would sit down and say, all right, here's how we're going to divide up the tasks. Here's what you're going to do. Here's what I'm going to do. And when it doesn't get done, you would be upset about it. So we're really trying to address the business of marriage.

because there is a business of marriage, and that's very sad probably for those, you know, perspective to be married. But it's true, and it doesn't have to be a bad thing, but the less bigger than you do about that business, the more time there is for romance and sex and love and hanging out with your kids and doing all the great things you want to do if you're not sort of, you know, at which end arguing about school lunches. You're listening to Motley Full Money. My guest is Jenny Anderson, the co-author of Spousanomics, using economics to master love,

marriage and dirty dishes. You and your co-author, Paula, you did a ton of research here on economics. You did interview surveys. You went to seminars. How did you get the idea in the first place? So the idea was my co-authors, Paula Schumann. She's a page one editor at the Wall Street Journal, and she and her husband were having, they had been married for, they were in their first year of marriage, and they were having a horrible fight. They found the first year of marriage to be pretty tough. And her husband's a web designer, a very visual guy, and he sort of whipped out a piece of paper and did a graph of their mood over time. And it sort of opened the pathway for them to have a much more rational discussion than they had been having about, like, wait, you were really happy then?

Like, that's crazy. I was really unhappy then. What was going on? And it diffused a little bit of the emotion and really kind of led to a conversation and it sort of made him laugh. It just gave him another framework, and she started thinking, like, maybe there's a, you know, maybe there's a bigger idea here. And she wanted a co-author who had more of a grounding in economics and finance, and so we were set up on a blind date. You were set up on a blind date? But what? By your publisher? No, no, no, no. Not a way of a mutual friend. So I was thinking about writing some books related to the financial crisis. And I was complaining to a colleague, actually, that none of them were sort of jazzing me enough to really want to take the plunge and spend the other 15 hours that I'm not

working on these issues at home doing them. And he said, oh, I have a friend who had this crazy idea about, you know, sort of marriage and economics. And it really immediately made sense to me. Like, I could see the idea. And I had written about behavioral economics. And it seemed, it seemed like a clever idea. And I could imagine spending all of my free time doing it, whereas I was having trouble imagining spending all of my free time on some of the other subjects I was contemplating. Now, as you mentioned, both you and Paula are married. How did your husbands feel through this entire process? Like guinea pigs.

Unwitting at times. You know, the irony here is that we, in the process of deciding to write a book about marriage while producing three children and having full-time jobs, we definitely put a huge amount of stress on our marriages. But at the same time, we actually, I think, learned a lot of very useful things. It's very hard to sort of talk about the research and talk about all these great tools and then not take any of your own advice. My husband is actually an editor at the Wall Street Journal as well, and he read the whole book.

I can promise you he would never in a million years read any relationship book. So it was very useful to both of us because he read the book, and he actually, I think, found a lot of it very useful, could understand the more analytical framework, but he could also use the book on me. So when I use a horrible tone of voice, I'll say, that's not very spousinomical, you know, and say, well, it seems to me that your loss ofversion's kicking in, or, you know, is this really comparative advantage at its best? And, you know, and he's right. There are moments where, I mean, I don't particularly like it being used against me, but there is, you know, there were sort of tools that we can both use now. And I sort of feel like as married people, we just, I'll take any tool I can get. Like, I think marriage, you know, for 40 or 50 years is hard. And so you should look for as many tools as can help you get through it. You're listening to Motley Fool Money. My guest is Jenny Anderson, the co-author of Spousenomics, using economics to master, love marriage and dirty dishes.

Jenny, before we move on to buy, sell or hold, what is one thing right now that every listener can do to improve their marriage? Commitment devices. Better, I'm going to say this, and I would probably not say this to a lot of audiences, but you have a smart one, so I'm a really smart one, so I'm going to go out there with this one. Better intertemporal decision-making. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

I know. Decisions we make today that have consequences in the future. We are procrastinators as human beings. We say we're going to save for our retirement, we don't. We say we're going to exercise, we don't. We say we're going to eat well, we don't. We say we're going to be a better husband or wife. We don't.

We need to put in place commitment devices to be the husband or wife that we want to be. So, you know, if you've been talking for the past eight weeks, about, you know, eight years about how you want to do more new things together, or you want to go on more date nights together, or, you know, you really do want to find a babysitter that you love so that you can get out of the house everyone's while. Do it. find a way to commit to it. Force yourselves to do it. You know, prepay a babysitter. You know, find the best babysitter in the town. Book them every other Saturday night. So you have to go out. You are forced to plan. Do something to make yourself do some of the things you say you're going to do and you never do. So, you know, as a couple, I've heard a lot of couples say, you know, there's scary research that says that married couples exercise much less than single people say, okay, let's say you as a couple have said you want to get into shape. Commit to doing a race where you have to raise money. for a good cause. Like, are you really going to screw over all those people who are giving you money to cure cancer? No. So go do that. If that's what our court requires to get your lazy butt out of bed every Saturday morning to go running, you know, I feel like these commitment devices are a very powerful tool to get us to do things that we want to do, but we just never really get around to doing. I love the idea of prepaying a babysitter. That is brilliant. Especially if it's a babysitter, your friends know, because you don't want her ratting you out.

with your friends as like the couple who come Saturday night really just wants to sit on the couch at home. Exactly. All right. Let's wrap up with a round of buy-seller hold, and we'll start with buy-seller hold, the idea that honesty is the best policy. Self. That was fast. But with a caveat, which is obviously honesty is the basis of a good marriage, but there is such a thing as too much information. You don't want to overload your partner, high information processing costs.

You know, it's hard to process a lot of information. it can paralyze us. You need to be honest. You do not need to tell your partner everything you're thinking about them, especially if those are very negative thoughts. Buy seller hold separate bank accounts for spouses. I'm going to say hold on that one, and again,

there's a caveat. If you have separate bank accounts because you've chosen to have separate bank accounts, totally fine. If you have separate bank accounts because you've never gotten around to having the conversation about whether you should merge them, major self.

Because that is active versus passive decision-making. Passive decision-making, it means you didn't make a decision, and so you're just kind of going with that which you had because it's the easiest thing to do. Not a good idea for anything in your marriage, but certainly not with your money. You need to make an active decision as to what you're going to do with it and how you're going to manage it. And finally, buy-seller hold, Spousinomics, the movie. Buy Spousenomics, the TV series. Really? I'm just saying. I'm not saying anything's happening. I'm just saying if I were going to buy the film or the TV show, I would buy the TV show.

TV is hotter than film right now. Okay, because the Freakonomics guys, they got a movie out of it, but Spousanomics, the TV show. All right. Spousinomics, a TV show. All right, we are going to stay tuned for that. And as I mentioned, there's a whole lot more online at Spousanomics.com. The book is Spousanomics, using economics to master love, marriage, and dirty dishes. It is a fascinating read.

It is a relationship book that guys will actually enjoy and find interesting and, oh, yeah, it might actually help you with your marriage. Jenny Anderson, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me. That man sitting on a little stool takes a money from my hand while his eyes take a walk all over each. Hans made her ticket smiles and whispers good luck, well, cuddle up an angel, cuddle up my little dozen will. Right down, baby, pinned to this tunnel of love. Coming up, we'll give you an inside look at the stocks on our radar. Stay right here.

You're listening to Motley Fool Money. Making that easy money. As always, people on the program may have interest in 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're here. I'm Chris Hillen, joining me once again in studio, James Early, Charlie Travers, and Ron Gross. Gentlemen, it is that time once again. Time to get to the stocks that are on our radar.

and we will bring in our man Steve Broido from the other side of the glass, our Mr. Belvedere fan, Steve Rydow, with a question about your stock, but Ron Gross, you're up first. All right, Steve, I think American Greetings is really interesting. Ticker symbol AM, it's an old school greeting card company, as you may know, along with Hallmark, they dominate the industry. In the age of the Internet, nobody really cares about a paper greeting card stock, but that is exactly why it's cheap.

It pays a 4.3% dividend. It's at 14. I think it should be 22. Wow. Steve, what do you think? How difficult is it for American Greetings to get their cards into locations? I would imagine that must be where they spend their most time. Yeah, so the American Greeting Card stores are not actually owned by American Greetings any longer, but they have the kind of exclusive contract to get the product into there.

The big transition in the industry now is moving to these value chains, whether it's the Walmart or Target, and a lot of cards are sold into those chains. It's not a problem getting them in, but it does lower the price point and therefore the margins. James, what do you got? I got something boring for Steve. Steve, natural gas prices are very low, which is bad for producers, but good for users of natural gas and shippers. So I'm going with Questar. The ticker is STR. It's on my radar. This is a natural gas company based in Utah. Its profits are split roughly one-third between being a gas utility, just distributing the gas pipeline, and then also being an explorer for the gas.

So it profits on all levels of the gas spectrum. Steve? Does it have an awesome name help kind of inspire you? you to look at these kind of companies. Questar just sounds fantastic. It does sound kind of like larger than life. It just raises dividend 5%. So it popped up on my screen. But the name helps. That really does sound like something like NASA would name, you know, a space shuttle Questar or something like that. I don't know. I'm just throwing that out there for the folks at NASA. Charlie Travers, what do you got for a stuff? I'm going wildly speculative here with Nokia,

tickers N-O-K. And Nokia World is September 5th and 6th, and that is when they're going to unveil their lineup of Windows 8 phones. Microsoft Windows 8 comes out October 26th. This is make or break time for Nokia. So one way or another, it's worth watching. I am actually bullish on the stock myself, and I think they're going to surprise a lot of people. Steve? In a sentence or two, can you just tell me what went wrong with Nokia? I mean, in 1999, Nokia was one of the most successful companies in the world, and now it just seems like it's stumbling. They still are one of the largest handset makers in the world along with Samsung. And what went wrong was their symbion operating system that they developed in-house could not keep pace with what Apple was making and what Google turned out with Android.

It was just very outdated, and that's why they had to team up with Microsoft to get Windows on their hardware, which people love. Steve, you've got a stock there you like of the three? I'm going Questar, just because the name is awesome, and the dividend sounds great, and natural gas sounds like something everyone will be continually to use, except greeting cards, I don't know, we're on. Sorry, man. Chris, before we end, I want to sneak in. a happy 80-second birthday to my wonderful father. Happy birthday, Dad. Yay. Oh, fantastic. How's he going to be celebrated? What's like, does he have like a go-to, like, cake or something like that?

There'll be a dinner, certainly, probably some beef-related dinner back in New Jersey. Did you send him an American Greetings card? I will send him an online card from the American Greetings site, yes. I was going to say, man, you've got to talk your own book. If you're going to come in here talking about American Greetings, and it's like, oh, well, I'm going to play up this stuff. I will not be doing one of the free cards. I'll be paying. Oh, okay. Well, there we go.

All right, Ron Gross, James Early, Charlie Travers. Guys, thanks for being here. Thank you, Chris. That is it for this edition of Motley Full Money. Our engineer is Steve Broido. Our producer is Matt Greer. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening.

We'll see you next week.