When it comes to picking companies that can do great things for your portfolio, there are any number of criteria you can choose. Are they temporarily undervalued? Do they have a massive opportunity ahead? Are they Rule Breakers that are changing their industries, or the whole world?
Well, Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner takes many things into account when he weighs investments, but this week, he's picking a five-stock sampler of companies that are poised for gains because they are riding massive trends. (Special thanks to listener Paul Knaapen, who asked David to chose the five Rule Breakers with the strongest tailwinds.)
In this segment of the Rule Breaker Investing podcast, he talks about landfill and garbage collection giant Waste Management (WM 0.04%) -- a simple play on the inescapable fact that Americans produce an ever-growing quantity of ... well, waste.
To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our quick-start guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.
This video was recorded on Sept. 4, 2019.
David Gardner: Stock No. 5. After companies like Roku and Teladoc and The Trade Desk, this company is going to sound awfully humdrum. The ticker symbol is WM. The company name is Waste Management. You probably can picture that yellow and green W and M logo. If you're in the United States of America or Canada, it's probably driving around your neighborhood from time to time, picking up trash, distributing it to their centers. This company has the largest network of landfills in the U.S. A great competitive moat for the business. 252 landfills, the No. 1 player. Also, hundreds of transfer stations. The business of Waste Management is critically important to a growing society, especially one increasingly conscious about recycling and making the best decisions about the things that we throw away. I love that this company is the leader. We're finding, again, the leader doing something really important in this world. What's the tailwind? The growth of excess. More stuff every year. More stuff to throw away. A growing population in the U.S. and Canada with global potential. Waste Management, also a company paying a nice dividend.
What you have here is a company that stabilizes this five-stock sampler. We're taking some big risks with some stocks that have already run up a lot, even though they're still smaller companies. But with my two bookends -- NextEra Energy, the $100 billion-plus company, and then Waste Management, which, by the way, tips the scales at a $50 market cap -- I really like this five-stock sampler. I should mention, Waste Management is also a recent pick of mine for Stock Advisor. I picked it on June 20th of this year at $116.06. Well, it's up to $119 right now. It's up about 3%. That is against a market down 1%. It's been a market-beater. Of course, don't expect a company like NextEra Energy or Waste Management to ring up triple digits for us in the three years ahead, but do expect them to be stable companies. If, in fact, it's a weak market at points the next few years, we might be particularly grateful that we added these companies to our five-stock sampler.
