10 Years Later: 5 Winners in a Thinking World

**David Gardner** (0:00)
10 years ago, May 4th, 2016, to be exact, I launched my fourth five-stock sampler, Five Winners in a Thinking World. Michael Bloomberg had just given a commencement speech to the University of Michigan, and my pal and longtime fool Morgan Housel had excerpted in his social media feed this line from Bloomberg, and I quote, for the first time in human history, the majority of people in the developed world are being asked to make a living with their minds rather than their muscles, Bloomberg had said, and so it was time for me to pick five stocks that would seem to do well in an increasingly thinky thinking world. Well, today we fire up the time machine 10 years later to see what actually happened through recessions, pandemics, acquisitions, and all the surprises a decade can deliver. We're going to score our returns against the S&P 500, then ask the only questions that matter. What do we get right? What do we get wrong?
What can we learn from that? I've invited back my longtime fellow Rule Breaker, Tim Beyers, to bring the goods, some numbers, some stories. We'll talk about the lessons you can use on your next 10-year journey. Five winners in a thinking world 10 years later.
Only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:27)
It's the Rule Breaker Investing Podcast with Motley Fool co-founder, David Gardner.

**David Gardner** (1:36)
Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. A delight to have you with me for this episode of 10 years later, which we're about to get into. But before we do, I want to mention next week's podcast.
It's my birthday. It's my annual birthday present from you to me. It's What You Have Learned from David Gardner. I've done this every year the last several. If there's something that you've learned from me, from this podcast, from my book, from our business, The Motley Fool, or any random board game suggestion I may have given you, whatever you may have learned from me, I would love to hear that back. You can email us, rbi at fool.com. You can also tweet us on TwitterX at RBI podcast, but specifically best are probably emails here. If in your subject line, you say what I have learned or something to that effect, we'll know to route it right to me for next week's podcast. We are recording in advance of my actual birthday, which is May 16th. I'll be turning 60 in just a little less than two weeks. But next week's podcast is my What You Have Learned. And I'd love to hear a story or a point or an idea. Again, our email address, rbi at fool.com. Thank you so much in advance.
All right, every 10 weeks, we open up a time capsule on this podcast. It's a past five stock sampler hitting its 10-year birthday. And this very week in 2016, I picked five stocks that I hoped would benefit from an increasingly cerebral world, five winners in a thinking world. And now here we are doing something you're going to rarely see on financial TV or podcasts or really any medium. We're going to review the results 10 years later, the very week of. As already foreshadowed this week, we're looking at number four of the 35 stock samplers featured on this podcast over the years. We're going to score each pick equal weighted from the original air date. We're going to see its return compared to the S&P 500 over the same span. And then comes the real work done this week by longtime fellow fool Tim Beyers, who's joining shortly 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're going to discuss that together, what this decade actually taught us as investors. We're going to finish with the samplers overall result, probably a lesson or two, maybe a quick go forward view on a couple of these companies. If you're new here, that's our 10 years later episodic series, and that's what we're doing this week. We're not just keeping score, by the way, though we are, we're all learning together how and why Rule Breakers win. And oh, by the way, sometimes lose, too. And over the long game, playing stocks the only way that counts, even if so few people seem to do this. I want to now welcome back Tim Beyers to Rule Breaker Investing. Tim, heya.

**Tim Beyers** (4:39)
Hey David, it's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me on. I know we're going to talk about some stocks. We're going to talk about where I am. But I do want to answer quickly. You're first, like everybody else is going to email in. So I'm going to give a template for people if they want to email in a lesson from you. I'm going to give one you might not expect of what I learned from you, which is this. Rule breakers can come from anywhere. And I mean anywhere.