10 Years Later: 5 Stocks to Feed the Bear

**David Gardner** (0:00)
Ten years ago, February 10th, 2016, to be exact, I launched my third five-stock sampler, Five Stocks to Feed the Bear. The market had broadly declined from August 2015 to February 2016 Many Rule Breaker stocks were down double-digit percentages, and had we started a bear market? Well, early on that week's podcast, I said, I thought a lot of the bad stuff had already happened.
So, it was time to pick some stocks, Five Stocks to Feed the Bear. Today, we fire up the time machine. It's ten years later to see what actually happened through recessions, pandemics, acquisitions, and all the surprises a decade can deliver. We'll score our returns against the S&P 500, then ask the only questions that matter, what we got right, what we got wrong. Were we missing anything? Well, I've invited back my sidekick who helped us launch this series, Rick Munarriz, to bring the goods, numbers, and stories. We're going to talk about the lessons that you can use on your next 10-year journey. So, five stocks to feed the bear 10 years later, only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:19)
It's the Rule Breaker Investing podcast with Motley Fool co-founder, David Gardner.

**David Gardner** (1:27)
Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. I hope you had fun. I sure did with Wired founder, Kevin Kelly last week. I think that's probably a bestie for 2026 So, if you didn't get to hear our conversation, I completely recommend Kevin Kelly and his views of the future for your listening pleasure. All right. Every 10 weeks, we open a time capsule on Rule Breaker Investing, a past five-stock sampler hits its 10-year birthday. This very week in 2016, I picked five stocks in the face of a possible bear market. Now, here we are doing something you're rarely going to see on financial TV or podcasts or really any medium, reviewing the results 10 years later, the very week of. As already foreshadowed this week, we're looking at number three of the 35 stock samplers featured on Rule Breaker Investing over the years. We're going to score each pick equal weighted from the original air date. We're going to see its return and compare that to the S&P 500 over the same span. Then comes the real work done this week by longtime fellow fool Rick Munarriz, who's joining in this week with his best answer to this question for each of the five stocks. What is the single biggest reason this stock did what it did? We'll discuss together what the decade actually taught us all as investors. We will finish with the sampler's overall result, all five stocks as a basket. How did we do? We'll probably provide a lesson or two, maybe a quick go forward view on some of these companies. Now, if you're new here, this is our 10 years later episodic series, and that's what we're doing this week. Not just keeping score by the way, though we are, we're here to learn together over the long game, playing stocks the only way that counts, even if so few people seem to do this. All right, the past is prologue, let's light the stage and welcome Rick Munarriz. Rick, welcome back.

**Rick Munarriz** (3:31)
I'm so happy to be here, David. Thank you for having me again.

**David Gardner** (3:34)
A delight. I had so much fun kicking off with five stocks for the next five years.
Ten years later with you somewhere around exactly 20 weeks ago. So let's do it again. This time, Rick, well, the date was February 10th, 2016 You and I are recording this on February 10th, 2026, Tuesday of this week, literally 10 years ago this very day. The sampler was five stocks to feed the bear. By the way, any listener can go right back now and listen to that. Intrepid listeners, you can go right out there on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and pick up what we were talking about. Rick, the stocks were Carter's, IPG Photonics, ELLI May, Planet Fitness, and Mercado Libre. Those are the five stocks you and I are going to talk about. Before we get started, I should point out how the market has done. Rick, it's been a pretty good 10 years. Do you agree?

**Rick Munarriz** (4:25)
Yes, definitely.

**David Gardner** (4:26)
Not every 10 years do we get a 274.3 percent return for the S&P 500 As we speak, the market has more than tripled over these 10 years, and that's what these five stocks are competing against, a plus 274 in the win column for just the market averages. Now, before we get started, I want to mention that we were looking for two attributes with these five stocks, and let me just put them forward right now so listeners know what was happening 10 years ago. I was saying there are two attributes that make up this list of five stocks. The first is companies with a very low risk rating. Now, anybody listening to the podcast a few weeks ago, you heard our Calculating Risk Foolishly, Volume 4, where we took you through my 25-point risk rating system, Etsy versus Duolingo. So with that fresh in mind, know that that was the first attribute we were looking for with this five-stock sampler, stocks with very low risk ratings. And the second one was small cap companies. I was looking specifically for companies with a $1 to $5 billion market cap. I was saying, yeah, we love great big companies like Apple, Amazon and Disney. This is what I was saying 10 years ago this week. But each of those three had declined more than 20% in the previous three months, leading up to that podcast. So yeah, things were pretty bad in February 2016 It's not every quarter that Apple and Amazon and Disney have all lost more than a fifth of their value in three months. But rather than go for the big obvious dogs, we were looking for smaller cap companies. All right, and as we are sometimes want to do, Rick, please strap yourself in because, yeah, we're going back in time this week into the Rule Breaker Investing time machine. Let's strap in.