Motley Fool Money - Motley Fool Money: 08.15.2014

Episode Date: August 15, 2014

Wal-Mart fails to impress Wall Street. Kate Spade slips. And Noodles & Company leaves investors feeling hungry.  Our analysts discuss some of the week's top business stories.  Plus, Wired Senior Editor Adam Rogers talks about the business of booze.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Jason Moser from Motleyful Income Investor, James Early, and from Motleyful Supernova. Matt Argusinger. Good to see you, Jets. As always. See you, Chris. We've got the latest results for restaurant stocks, apparel stocks, gaming stocks, and more. We will dig into the business of alcohol with Wired Magazines. Adam Rogers, and as always, we'll give an inside look at the stocks on our radar. But we begin this

week with big retail, and why not start with the biggest retailer of all? Walmart, eat out a profit for the second quarter, but it cut guidance for the full fiscal year. And Matt, got to point out seventh quarter in a row that same store sales fell. Yes. I think this is going to be a little hyperbolic, but I think this is the end. I mean, I think, well, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think Walmart, I mean, look, I'm looking at, look. Oh, the end of Walmart. The end of the end of the end of the end. Oh, the world's going to go on fine.

Exhale. It's the end of Walmart. It's like, if I look at total sales up 2.8%. You know, international's where Walmart's supposed to be growing, right? Well, sales there are rolling up 3.1%. And then, you know, like you mentioned, the comm stores were down again. The big box retail aspect of Walmart, it's just not working. The same store sales there are down repeatedly.

You know, they have rising health care costs. They're investing a lot in online, yet still being crushed by Amazon and other e-retailers. I just think that this is a slow-moving ship that's not going to grow any faster than GDP from now on until forever. And to me, that's just a market loser, for sure. But, James, this is the world's largest retailer. It's not going away overnight. You know, when I think of Walmart, I mean, this is going to take us on a tangent. But in China, it's actually pretty popular.

I've been to China a bunch of times. But it's being eclipsed now by a store called Wumart, which has almost the same level. go almost the same look. The nastiest bathrooms known to man, which I won't get into further detailed. But even there, with the Internet, and I think this is true of all the world, the big box concept, I think is losing out to online ordering. I think Matt's point is true. I mean, there may be some runway outside the U.S., but I don't think it's as long as we used to think. And, you know, Alibaba, we have Alibaba, you know, going public, and that is growing like gangbusters. That is the Amazon equivalent.

equivalent to China. I know we use that metaphor too many times. But that, of course, is going to be a big threat to any kind of Walmart growth overseas in China. And lest you think retail problems are confined to just big box retailers. On Tuesday morning, Kate Spade, the handbag and accessories company, reported second quarter revenue rose nearly 50 percent, and within an hour of the markets open, the stock hit a seven-year high. And then, Jason, the company's comforts call with analysts began, and shares fell 35 percent. What did they say on the call? What did the executives that Kate Spade say? They, they, I tell you what, it's what they really didn't say. You know how we know that the market doesn't like uncertainty. And I think that really the takeaway from this call

was that management just laid out a big fat pile of uncertainty for investors. And that's why investors fled. Because, yeah, when you look at the report, when you look at the numbers, it actually wasn't that bad of a quarter at all. But when they got to the, the discussion about gross margins. That's when really the tide started turning. You know, gross margin was down for the quarter over 300 basis points, 320 basis points, actually, which is a lot. You know, when we look at Coach and we look at Michael Coors, and we look at these retailers that can command a little bit of pricing there, gross margin really tells us that they're able to maintain that. Now, management chalked it up to, you know, a little bit of inventory mismanagement.

They feel like this is something that will not be a recurring theme. But by the same token, they did ratchet down expectations for the rest of the year. They sort of put aside their sort of, you know, projections for 2015 and 16 saying it's maybe not quite so clear. They'll revisit. And when you hear those things in an earnings call, I mean, that's just, you know that Wall Street's short-term sort of fetish is really going to come into play. And that's why the stock got peppered. But what is this? Go ahead, James. You go ahead, sir. Well, I just, speaking of fetish, you know, I mean, it's just that is to me, That is the apparel retail market, right?

I mean, we go from fad to fetish to fad to non-fad to hate. I mean, it's just we've seen that with Michael Coors. We've certainly seen that with Coach. And I just think this is just such a terrible, hard place to invest. It's a brutal space. But I will say in Kate Spade's defense, I mean, this is not a company that's just levered to handbags like, you know, coach was for the longest time. And I think that what Michael Coors is more or less perceived to be, Kate Spade is somewhat of a lifestyle. which is sort of the direction you see the coach trying to go.

So I think that's at least something that's working in their favor. The stock was very expensive before that big selloff. I think now it's a little bit more reasonable. But I agree with Mattie told. I mean, this is a really, really fickle space. And what's in one day can really go out. And a fickle investor base. I mean, how many stocks shoot up and then plummet down within a matter of hours?

What does that say about, I don't want to say the intellect, but me, the judgment and the patience of the investors in this fine company? Well, and, yeah, I mean, when you work. wipe out a third of your market cap in less than a day. Part of me wonders if this is an overreaction on some level. From retail to technology, fourth quarter profit and revenue were flat for tech giant Cisco systems. They also announced they are cutting 6,000 jobs, which is about 8% of their workforce.

James, where is this company now? First of all, revenue was actually up a bit quarter to quarter, which actually seems like a typo to those of us who've been following this company because it's been so down so long. Cisco has dominant market share in switches and routers. It essentially always had for a long time. They've been dabbling in video conferencing and security and other kind of miscellaneous enterprise-type products, various signs of desperation, basically. But unfortunately, this quarter, the signs of desperation are what are doing the best. So it's like somebody likes you for being fake, not your real self.

But that's okay. The long-term story here is that Cisco was supposed to have all this runway because the Internet is still underpenetrated all. across the world. So everybody's going to need to buy the switches and routers, but they're just not. Maybe it's competition. Maybe it's cloud computing. Maybe it's just, you know, kind of global recessions, but they're just not buying. So we're going to see what happens. The job cuts, Cisco still has 70-something thousand people. So it's material, but it's not crazy. Well, it's the fourth year in a row that they've cut jobs. They've cut nearly 20,000 jobs now in the last four years. And that tells me that they're doing a pretty bad job of hiring, or at least,

figuring out the human resource aspect of their business. Their messaging is that they're reallocating, Chris, whatever that means. They have actually net added people because of acquisition. So they're firing here and then just taking some on by assuming other companies. They say they're reallocating strategically to the best places, whatever that actually means. Is there anything about this stock you like right now? It's an income investor recommendation, actually. I do see 13% upside as of today.

It's one that I would say, I'm honestly less certain about the upside. than others, but they make a lot of cash. And they did $1.5 billion in buybacks, which is, I think, compared to $120 million market cap this quarter. So that's over 1%. They've been buying back a lot. On Wednesday, Amazon unveiled a mobile payment service called Local Register. The new business is aimed at smaller mom-and-pop shops. Matt, this comes with a small device that you plug into your smartphone so people can swipe a credit card,

a lot like the mobile payment company Square. So my question is, how nervous are the people at Square right now? This is another example of Jeff Bezos saying to the world, your margin is our opportunity. I mean, with this, this goes right, faces, you know, right into the face of Square, PayPal. And, you know, for customers who pay $10 to get this piece of hardware and buy the app, if they do it before October 31st,

they're going to pay 1.75% on each swipe in each transaction. Right now, if you do Square, you're paying 2.7%. and PayPal is around 2.7. And eventually, Amazon's going to be charging 2.5% per swipe. So right there, you're undercutting two of the more well-known brands in the mobile transaction space. And by the way, this is a really big space. IDC says that mobile transactions are going to hit $1 trillion in five years.

And, of course, this is also another way for Amazon, not only to profit from that, but also to just remove, yet again, more friction from buying stuff on the Amazon platform, which they're really good at. Mattie, or sorry, Jason, we were talking earlier. You mentioned that, you know, it's almost like Jeff Bezos never sleeps because they're also now dabbling in the college textbook market. Yeah, that's something we were looking at earlier. You know, they had, I think the initial effort here was at UC, one of the universities in California, not Berkeley maybe, but another one. And now it's with Purdue University.

And they basically are working alongside with university to develop this, you know, digital storefront that's also going to, you know, get books, either, you know, textbooks for purchase or for rental, physical textbooks, digital textbooks, and other items that you could buy from Amazon, they are going to, you know, share in some of those profits from those sales with the school. And so I think really it's an attractive proposition for the school because it helps them really offload. I think a lot of work that they probably don't want to do, don't really recognize much in the way of profitability, you know, to a company that truly is just a logistical feat of nature. I mean, the distribution and the, in the, in the, in the wherewithal that Amazon has built in this platform is just phenomenal.

I expect to see this more and more with more schools. At what point will all goods and services worldwide be bought from Amazon? I mean, it just seems like, I mean, I understand the sarcasm in your statement, but there has to be at least a hint of seriousness there. I mean, it does seem like every day there's a new release of something that they're doing. And, you know, just going back to the retail discussion at the beginning of the show, I mean, it's not, I mean, that is the big long-term trend, right? It's mobile commerce and it's digital commerce. It's e-commerce. We're not wanting to go through these big stores and have to deal with that experience anymore.

And Amazon is by far and away the most proactive in trying new things. And I think that's what you have to really be encouraged by. There will be other players that went in the space. But Amazon is really the one that's defining. and shaping the space. Coming up, a reminder that just because people are looking for healthier food options, doesn't mean they're actually going to buy healthier food options. Stay right here.

You're listening to Motley Fool Money. The best things in life are free. Welcome back to Motley Full Money. Chris Hill here in studio with Jason Moser, James Early, and Matt Argus Singer. Second quarter profits for price line rose 32%. James, I think that for people who are just consumers, it's easy to think of price line as just a big travel site along with Expedia and orbits. And yet, from a business standpoint, it is so much bigger than both of those two combined.

I am actually starting to get interested in this company, Chris. Years ago, I used the service. I saw Shatner, and I decided this is clearly not a thinking man's business. So I just kind of avoided it. But they own booking.com, which is a Dutch-owned 60% of the revenue, Dutch-owned travel business, price line itself, a go to open table. They invested 500 million in C-Trip. They have, I think, about a 4% market share in the world, the largest travel booker in the world, and this stock is up 7,000 percent over the past decade. So Shatner, I think, must feel pretty silly because apparently

he got paid in equity early on, but then he sold his equity very early on as well. Never bet against William Shatner. But it's a strong company. In this economy, do you still growing revenue at 26% that's phenomenal. Well, particularly just in Europe too. I mean, they've been so phenomenally successful in Europe over the last 10 years and we don't exactly have called Europe a great economy

or a hotbed of growth, but it's just been incredible. How long before we get a sense of how the open table acquisition is really making hay for them? Because on the one hand, it seems like it's very much in their sweet spot, but I also can't imagine that's going to be as profitable

as sort of something like a booking.com. Yeah, I don't know what the ROICs are, the returns on invested capital for that business. I mean, obviously, acquisitions statistically like worldwide, four out of five or three out of four acquisitions don't work out, but price line has shown themselves to be adept at acquisitions. So I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Time for something I like to call this week in recent IPOs that reported horrible earnings. Let's start with noodles and company. Shares down 17% on Thursday after second quarter profits and revenue. Both came in lower than expected. Same store sales were down, Jason, and they can't use cold weather as an excuse there.

No, they can't. There are some times when you want to buy the earnings dip, and there are times when you do not want to buy the earnings dip, Chris. And this is one of those times that you do not want to buy the earnings dip. I would avoid this company really altogether. You know, I think that one of their taglines is actually a potential weakness, a world of flavors under one roof. And basically, what's that telling, you know, what it's telling us is that, like,

we don't necessarily know what these guys do well. It just kind of seems like maybe they do a lot of stuff just sort of, you know, okay, I guess. But if traffic is any indicator, then it's not really doing so well at all. And I think that's a big problem here is that the fall off in traffic is really starting to squeeze their margins. There are a lot of fixed costs in keeping those restaurants open. They own most of their restaurants, say, about 400 today. They see an opportunity over the next decade for about 2,500 restaurants here in the United States. I think that's way, way overdone. I just, I don't see They're modeling one consumer per restaurant per week. That sounds actually reasonable now.

I took my son there the other day. It was empty. It was fantastic. I think that the growth prospects with his company are overestimated. You know, management referred to weakness in the middle Atlantic where they have about 20% of their overall exposure. And also they believe that the softness in the middle income consumer, which is their sweet spot, is still affecting, is still affecting their top and bottom line there. But I think at the end of the day, this is just one of those, this is one of those restaurant concepts that doesn't quite resonate. like a Chipotle or even a Buffalo Wild Wings because you just, you know, you don't really know exactly what they do so well. And I'm just not too optimistic for future. I was going to say, it's a bad summer for restaurant stocks, not named Chipotle. Shares of King Digital Entertainment down more than 20 percent on Wednesday after second quarter revenue came in lower

than expected. They also lowered guidance. Maddie, this is the company behind the video game, Candy Crush Saga. They went public earlier this year. And everyone, this is one of those IPOs where everyone was saying the same thing, which is, well, they've got one hit game. Do they have anything else? And the answer appears to be no. Right. I mean, crush is the right word. I mean, the stock has been crushed. And I think you nailed it, Chris. I mean, when this came out, that was definitely, I mean, you know, it had a poor IPO. I mean, very, you know, highly valued company. But the IPO was kind of a dud at premier and I think it was down 17% on its first day. And that was the market saying, gosh, you know, we just, we don't believe

that this model can, you know, repeat itself. So, you know, King Digital is, of course, in the business of free-to-play games, and they had this enormous hit with Candy Crush. They've made some acquisitions. They've invested in other games, but the truth is, candy crush is still over 60% of their revenue. Bookings are down there. They look like they're going to be down even more in the next quarter or two. So until they can come out with another hit, it's going to be a problem.

Did I hear correctly that a Kim Kardashian game actually was partly to blame here in taking traffic away from King's products? That is absolutely right. I don't know that. It's phenomenal. I can't remember the name of the company behind it, but that apparently is the hottest game right now. My son downloaded, apparently, candy, he's five, when he was four, candy crush on my phone and they kept popping up, like, all the time trying to sell me stuff.

So I don't mind they're suffering right now. Nice, James. It was almost a year ago the Burger King unveiled what it called, quote, one of the biggest fast food launches. I'm referring, of course, to Satisfries, the locale version of Burger King, French fries, that featured 20% fewer calories, 25% less. less fat than their regular fries. That was almost a year ago. This week, Burger King announced it was dropping satisfied from the menu, and James, gosh,

it's almost hard to believe that this didn't work out. This is philosophically intriguing, Chris. It's almost like a Plato's Cave analogy in the French fry business. And what I mean is this. Go on. It's what is real versus what is perceived. There's a Wall Street Journal article covering this. They brought up a great point.

The McDonald's had a very similar thing in 2002. They said they're going to start using trans fat-free oil to cook the french fries. So apparently their customer service lines, and I'm quoting, its customer service lines, were flooded with complaints about the fries tasting different, even in cities where nothing had yet changed. Ah, the placebo. It's really, really intriguing. We don't know if it's really the actual fault of the satisfied fries, like in a blind taste test sense, or just the idea that people have this weird, agonizing love, hey, they want to be healthy,

but then they don't want to have the, they want to have unhealthy food when they want it. I just, I can't really figure it out. Well, I don't know about you, but, man, when I read the headline the other day that it apparently, like, you know, cutting salt from your diet may not have the health effects that we once thought and that a diet higher in salt could actually be okay. I mean, I danced a little jig there. I said, hey, I was time to go get me some Chipotle and a pretzel. Let's go to our man behind the glass, Steve Brodo. Steve, did you ever actually try the Satisfries?

I don't know. I don't think so. I've eaten fries at Burger King, but I don't recall ever trying to satisfyize. How much of this do you think had to do with the name itself? Because our producer, Matt Greer pointed out to me that this is a little bit like the Sprint Framly plan. It's a weird name. It's creepy. It's not for me, I don't think. Yeah, I think that has just a little bit to do it. But drop us an email, radio at fool.com, and let us know what you think of the Framley plan. Coming up, we will dig into the science and business of beer, wine, and liquor.

I hope you're thirsty. This is Motley Fool Money. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Hill. Adam Rogers is a senior editor at Wired Magazine. He's spent most of the past 20 years covering science and technology, and he's the author of one of this summer's most intriguing books, Proof, The Science of Booze.

Adam, good to talk with you. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Ours is a show about business and investing, and certainly investors have done well over the years buying shares of companies. across the alcohol spectrum, Anheuser-B. Bush, S.A.B. Miller, Diageo, and one of the issues that all of these companies, and I'm guessing anyone, whether they're making beer, wine, or whiskey, one of the issues that they are dealing with on the science front is climate change. Very much so.

Of those three groups, first and foremost, who is the most concerned about the effects of climate change on their business? The winemakers. Why is that? Because they're, well, a bunch of different reasons. One of which is that the places that grapes grow, especially producing higher quality wines, are places that are likely to be greatly affected by changes in climate and the microclimates, the small, ale temperatures and levels of humidity, levels of moisture around the one hillside where you can grow this, the grape that's the only kind of grape that you can make the only kind of wine that you make, as a potential to not be there anymore in a few years. So, for example, the

California, the Northern California winemakers, Napa region, Sonoma region, are very concerned because they see the temperatures that make Napa Cabernet, let's say, unique in the world and high quality going away and moving north, headed to the Pacific Northwest, to the Willamette Valley, say. The same thing, and the same thing true with any of the wine growing regions is true in Australia where they're growing a lot of wine, especially in Australia. Australian wines are kind of known, I'm tarring with a broad brush here, but known as more commodity wines.

They're making a lot more high quality, and they're stepping on them in a lot of ways. They're using other processes besides the artisanal ones to make enough and to make high quantities and to make it at a cheap enough price point that a lot of people can afford it, well, if it gets super hot where they're making that wine, they can't grow those grapes anymore. Now, the reason that I'm separating out winemakers from the folks who make beer and the folks to make whiskey, let's say, is that they're relying on grains, and those grains tend to be seen as more of a commodity crop, which is to say you can grow a lot of them and you can grow them in a lot of places. The distillers, like, even the American distiller, who are making huge quantities

of whiskey, let's say, you know, places like. Jim Beam or Jack Daniels. But all they want is yellow corn number two, and they don't really care where it comes from. They don't really care who's growing it. That's, again, an overstatement. They do. Someone's growing yellow corn number two.

They can buy it, and they can make what they feel like is as good a product as they were making before. So if the corn growing regions of the world move north, that bothers them less than if there is no more corn at all, and they don't see that coming, I think. Smaller producers do worry about that because they're trying to take greater care with regional specific.

for their substrates, right? They're looking for not just a particular kind of plant that they're going to make whatever booze they make out of, but also where it comes from. If you're St. George Spirit here in California and Alameda, just right across the bay from my office, it's not enough for them to have sugar cane to make the rum that they make. They have to have California sugar cane. And so if conditions change and you can't grow sugar cane in California, they can't make their rum anymore. So the smaller-scale places begin to worry about it more than the large-scale ones.

I would say, again, another exception, I know that the Scotch whiskey makers have some concerns about climate change because they need such high volumes of barley. If the places where you can grow barley change and if more storms come and knock down your barley before you can harvest it and all the things that people worry about with climate change happen to their barley crop, they can't make whiskey anymore. I know you were talking with scientists and your focus was on science, but I'm curious if you've got a sense from the people that you interviewed if they feel like this is still a good business. whether or not they enjoy the craft of making beer or whiskey or wine, do they still feel like this is a good business with a bright future? Because for a very long time, the business of soda was a good business to be in in the United States. And we've seen over the last 10, 15 years, soda consumption steadily falling. That's an interesting parallel to make. Yes, they do as far as I know.

Now, I don't know the economics of all of the different categories, but I can tell you a little bit about the economics of the ones that I know. The small-scale American distillers, the craft distillers, are very optimistic, not necessarily about each and every one of the little tiny distilleries that's opening up around the country, but as a broad class, they see themselves on the same trajectory as Kraft Brewing was about 30 years ago. And if you compare, if you pick the right year zero for it, then they are actually on the same trajectory for a number of breweries that we're opening in, let's say, 1984 or whatever, pick a number, and number of distilleries that are opening now. They think that the laws are going to change and make it more possible, more feasible for them, state-to-state to sell their own product and their own distillery. They think that they're going to have more and more in response to an increasing demand for unusual and more, let's say,

weird stuff to drink. You know, it's local and artisanal. Now, it's not exactly the same. The parallels break a little bit because the craft brewing industry grew up in response to a perception of a lack of quality in the national brands. And that's not the case here. Nobody argues with a straight face that wild turkey is bad bourbon. It's delicious bourbon. I was just going to say, I would certainly hope they wouldn't argue that.

Right. So there's no, whereas they were arguing 30 years ago that, that, I don't mean to pick any one beer brand out of any other. People were saying Budweiser didn't taste good, and that's why you were going to make something like Anchor Steam, another San Francisco brand, to respond to these nominally, these bad-tasting national brands. So they're very positive.

Brown-spirit distilling, American whiskeys and scotch whiskeys and Irish whiskeys are very excited right now because they can't keep up with demand. I mean, so much so that they're having to change the rules for their labeling. issuing what they call no age statement whiskeys because they're running out of the of the oldest barrels which are the things that take the longest obviously they're at the oldest but also because they spend a lot of time aging they they lose some volume to evaporation so a 25 year old barrel has less in it when you open it when you put it into a bottle than a 12 year old barrel let's say and they're selling more and more to asian

countries so china becomes a market indi becomes a market Japan's always been a big market and all the whiskey that was sort of, that you could find, and it didn't cost that much, but it was still rare and unusual. Now all that stuff is basically gone. You just don't find that anymore for a price that, let's say, a print journalist who wrote a book about alcohol might be willing to pay hypothetically. So they're positive. You're listening to Motley Fool Money talking with Adam Rogers.

His book is Proof, The Science of Booze. Let's talk about the science of hangovers, because that's something you come. cover in your book. And what was striking to me was that essentially scientists haven't figured out a cure for hangover, a true cure in the sense that maybe you have a friend who says, oh, just do this and do that, and that'll take care of your hangover. But in terms of a scientific cure, one doesn't exist? How is this even possible? I know, right? Like, come on, science, help a brother out. What are you doing? Now, some of the reason that they don't have a cure for a hangover is that they don't really know what a hangover is.

And some of the reason that they don't really know what a hangover is is, is that they're not really sure how ethanol affects the brain. So if you don't know how the booze actually makes you feel the way it does, it's hard to figure out what the bad outcome, what the cause of the bad outcome is going to be. And part of the reason, just to be really reductionist about it, that they don't know how ethanol affects the brain is that they don't really know the brain works. It doesn't take a long conversation with a neuroscientist before they start to tell you what they don't know,

and there's a lot more of it than what they do, which is cool. That means that they're on the cutting edge of science. The interesting part of science are the questions, not the answers. But what they don't know about hangovers is how it's possible that you can feel as bad as people do when the ethanol, when your blood alcohol level goes back to zero, your electrolytes are back to normal, your, the kinds of sugars that you're digesting are back to normal.

Basically, almost all of your baseline diagnostic numbers go back to where they were before you started drinking the day before, and yet you feel terrible. There's obviously something wrong, and they're trying to figure out why that is. The best research that they have now suggests that it's an inflammatory response, like when you have the flu or something. And there's a symptomatic overlap there. that has an intuitive power to. It does feel kind of the same.

There's also a lot of symptomatic overlap with migraine. If you're the kind of person who gets migraines, you know that those can feel a lot like hangover. And that's probably because the receptors in the brain, that is to say that the tiny elements of the synapses that are the connections between the neurons that make up your brain as a whole. A lot of the, there are a bunch of different kinds of receptors

and they do a bunch of different things. And the specific ones that are involved in migraine may also be involved in our response to ethanol. And so it makes sense that they'd be involved in our response to have too much ethanol in hangover. So the question is, well, if it's an inflammatory response, what do you do about that? And there are anti-inflammatory drugs that you can buy over the counter. That's what acetaminifin is or ibuprofen is. Of course, if you take those in quantity, they all have their own side effects as well.

And a lot of them, sadly, again, have overlap with hangover, so gut symptoms, for example. So it becomes a tricky problem. The one really very good study on treating hangover came out of Europe, used a drug called Clotam, which is not available in the United States. It's an anti-inflammatory prescription strength, very powerful anti-inflammatory, that's prescribed for migrants, and that seemed to have an effect. And a couple of the over-the-counter, like the kind of something you can buy online, you know, the whole thing over-over therapies, one of them is extractive prickly pear cactus,

no pal and that also has some anti-inflammatory characteristics as well but a couple of things that have been shown in studies to have an effect on hangover a therapeutic effect so I'm talking about decent studies not the kind of stuff you buy at the at the convenience store right that's next to the counter next to the cash register that those never work or at least no studies ever shown that they work but there are a couple of studies that have shown that for example this something called peritinol which is a vitamin B6 analog has some effect. And anecdotally, I've tried that and felt that it had some effect, but don't take medical advice

for me. I'm a print journalist. But I like that you went the extra mile and did some research for the book. I felt that at that point, it seemed like we had to try some stuff. So, yes, I did have a couple of people over, and we had some research cocktails and tried a bunch of the ones that we could get our hands on, and it didn't go well for anybody. It's all in the name of research. Before I let you go, I have to ask for a whiskey recommendation or two.

You were kind enough to be a featured guest at our recent member event in San Francisco. And even better, you helped me pick out some whiskey for the reception. But for folks listening who maybe have never tried whiskey or bourbon, what's one or two that you would recommend is just something they might want to try if they're going to dip their toes in the whiskey? waters. Oh, if you've never had one and you want to, like, so you've never had a single malt and you want to try one that will make you into a fan forever instead of like, oh, I can't

drink that stuff. There is a there's a whiskey that I was one of the first bottles I ever bought called Glenn Farclis. G-L-E-N-F-A-R-C-L-A-S. It's one of the few single malt distilleries that's still family-owned

in Scotland, so it's not owned by one of the big transnationals like the A-JO So, which isn't to say that any of those companies don't make great stuff, too, but this place is still the same family, has been for generations. They make some wonderful stuff, and it really is, it's just delicious by any objective to take it hurt, even if you've never tasted this stuff before. It's sort of a lighter spirit. It's not that PD phenolic isa kind of whiskey. It's not the scary one. It's a good one.

And then in the American whiskey, you know, I mean, as I intimated before, I drink wild turkey, so I tend not to get too fancy, but I do, I do really like a blend of bourbons that the folks at St. George Spirits here in California make, they buy Kentucky bourbon and then make their own blend. It's called B&E for breaking and entering, and that's a very good bottle of bourbon and not very expensive. It's also a great name, too. Good name. The book is Proof, The Science of Booze. It is already a New York Times bestseller, so pick up a copy because this is your ticket to more interesting conversations the next time you're out with your friends. Adam Rogers, thank you so much for being here. It's my pleasure. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Coming up, we'll give you an inside look at the stocks on our radar. This is Motley Full 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 yourself stocks based solely on what you hear. Welcome back to Motley Full Money, Chris Hill here in studio with Jason Moser, James Early, and Matt Argusinger. Guys, before we get to the stocks on our radar this week, you can always drop us an email. Radio at Fool.com is our email address. Got an email from Dominic Dohn in Irvine, California. He writes, do you have any reading recommendations for a new college graduate? who is still trying to stumble into the real world, and real world is in quotation.

So here's a young guy, just graduated from college. Any reading recommendations, James? Chris, I have not read an investment book in my life. I've read technical accounting books and certain things to tax books to understand aspects of it, but I'm not a big believer in the narratives. You can pick that up from articles, certainly on our site and others, Dominic, but the danger of reading some of these books is getting enmeshed in some particular guy's ideology or some philosophy, and you want to be careful about joining your team right off the bat.

So I wouldn't say it's a bad thing. I'm the odd man out and not reading, but I've gotten this far, I guess, whatever that says. James Early, anti-reading. Okay, good. Maddie? Well, we've talked a lot about Amazon on this show, and like some of us here, I've read, I'm reading the Everything store by Bradstone, which is the Jeff Bezos biography that just came out last year. I think it's a phenomenal business book, entrepreneurship book. investment book. And I think it hits a lot of cords, especially if you're just out of college and looking at careers and where you want to go. Jason? Yeah. I mean, I guess if you don't look for something sort of business investing related, book Bull by Maggie Mayhar was really good. Kind of looked at that

boom and bust cycle from 1982 to 2004. You sort of see how irrational in the market got as technology was really changing the way we lived. And I just thought that was a really fun book. It's not so, it's not investing related so much as it's just, you know, real life sort of business related. And thinking, you give you some sort of foundational and how you might want to think about things, you know, going forward. And, I mean, if you're not looking for something like that, I mean, I always enjoy reading about U.S. presidents. To me, that's just kind of a fun sort of history sort of buff, I guess. What about cats? Cats. Nah, not too much into cats. I'm a dog guy, James. But I would say, you, I read the bully pulpit, the book on Taft and Roosevelt. And that was a really good

book. I would recommend that one, too. Let's get to the stocks on our radar this week. We'll bring in Steve Brodow from the other side of the glass to hit you with a question, James early. You're up first. For people who like to profit from death, or actually care for the deceased, I should say more respectful. But it's a reality of life. You know, it's a reality of life. Everyone is born and everyone dies. Stone War Partners, ST-O-N, is a master-limited partnership.

This is an income investor recommendation that basically owns cemeteries. And they yield 9.9%, which is nice. they have very strange accounting because of certain state trusting laws that require them to put a certain amount when somebody pre-pays for the burial vault. They have to put the new trust, and they can recognize the revenue later on. So it's kind of quirky. People don't understand it, but I'm a believer long term. Steve? I'm a stillmore shareholder, thanks to James Early.

And my question for you, James, is should we be afraid of companies that are dark? You know, that's your choice, Steve. I choose to accept life in all its facets. I mean, I invest in sewage companies and death care companies. It's all part of our existence here on this planet. Matt Argusinger, what do you got this week? Oh, it's one I've brought up before. Mercado Libre, M-E-L-I, had great earnings earlier this month, up about 20% cents,

but I don't think this one is done. It's a big leader in Latin American e-commerce, making some great investments in their business, and they've been held down by some of the macro problems happening in Argentina, Venezuela, and Brazil, but this is one where, you know, the short interest in this stock before the earnings was over 30%. So I feel like there's a bit of a squeeze going on. It's got room to run. Steve, question about Mercado Libre? Is there a difference between e-commerce and regular commerce anymore? Well, the E. Yeah, that's, there it is right there. Yeah, when does it just become

commerce? I mean, like, when does e-commerce just become commerce? Because that's the norm. I think the answer can be found in Plato's Cave. Jason Monser, we've got about a minute left. What's in your radar? Taking a look at Mobile Iron, this is a relatively new IPO, but the world is going mobile. We talk about this all the time, and really consumers have led the way, but now the workplace is really jumping on board. And what we're going to see here in the coming years is workplaces adopting that mobile platform, whether it's tablets or smartphones.

And Mobile Iron essentially develops the platform, has the tools and the know-how to help enterprises incorporate that mobile presence into their own day-to-day operations. So who knows, maybe one day mobile iron might be even serving us here at the Motley Fool. But an interesting little company ticker is M-O-B-L. Yep, that's it. Steve? Should I ever buy a company that has just gone public? No.

I think that is just a patent-standing rule that I have is I just, no. Steve, just a few seconds left. You got one you like? Stonemore. Kurtz-Hullner. I like it. Great dividend deal, too, right? Huge.

All right. Thanks for being here, guys. It's total bias. You already own chairs. That's going to do it for this week's show. The show is Mixed by Gail Año Nuevo, our engineer, Steve Broido. Our producer is Matt Greer. I'm Chris L.

Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.