In this podcast, Motley Fool host Dylan Lewis and analysts Jason Moser and Asit Sharma discuss:
- The S&P 500's new highs, what to make of the market's valuation and what some of the big names on The Street have to say about it.
- Stargate, the new $500 billion planned joint venture between OpenAI, Softbank, and some of the biggest names in tech.
- Fantastic earnings reports from Netflix, GE Aerospace, and Twilio.
- Two stocks worth watching: Nike and Garmin.
Then, Motley Fool analyst Tim Beyers talks with Frances Schwiep, a partner at Two Sigma Ventures, about where the biggest early stage opportunities are right now in the AI ecosystem and what to look for in great founders.
To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our beginner's guide to investing in stocks. When you're ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy.
A full transcript follows the video.
This video was recorded on Jan. 24, 2025
Dylan Lewis: Valuations to the moon; AI to the stars. This week's Motley Fool Money Radio Show starts now. It's the Motley Fool Money Radio Show. I'm Dylan Lewis. Joining me over the airwaves Motley Fool senior analyst Jason Moser and Asit Sharma. Fools great to have you both here.
Asit Sharma: Good to be here.
Dylan Lewis: We're checking in on the market start to 2025 this week. We're also going to be looking at three stocks soaring after earnings and getting a sense of the next wave of early AI investments. But we are going to start out tackling where the market is at Jason. The S&P 500 hitting fresh all time highs this week as the market processes the new year and the new administration here in the United States.
Jason Moser: Yes, and there are certainly some concerns there that the market is maybe a little overvalued or valuations are getting a little frothy. We saw over the week Jamie Dimon, CEO at JPMorgan, he noted that asset prices are, as he said, inflated. He noted they are in the top ten or 15% of historical valuation, which is fair. Now, you also have to ask yourself, why is that the case? I thought it was interesting to see Stanley DruckenmMiller this week. He noted he said he's been doing this for 49 years, managing money and picking stocks. He said that he feels like we're going from the most anti business administration to the opposite. I'm not saying whether that's the case or not, but at least that's the perception out there. He did also note they talked to a lot of CEOs. You get a lot of boots on the ground research. He said that CEOs are somewhere between, and these are the words he used, relieved and giddy. Maybe the market is a little bit overvalued there, but it does seem like it's at least for understandable reasons.
Dylan Lewis: The Wall Street Journal had a piece out this week talking about the valuations of the market on a Schiller PE basis that the various administrations have inherited as they've come into office, and Trump's second administration inheriting the highest market valuation that we have seen. Some of that I think is a product of so much money flowing into the markets Asit. In particular we're seeing a widening out of the retail investor base in the United States and also globally a lot more money coming into the US.
Asit Sharma: Dylan, the last few years have been very good to US investors or those who invest in the US stock markets. Cumulatively, you're looking at 53 percentage points of returns in just the last two years. That success is attracting a lot of capital. You throw in some of the macro picture, the promise of productivity from AI, an administration that looks like it'll be friendlier to businesses, which hopefully, in turn, increase earnings power, which is one way an expensive market can get not as expensive. I think there's a general sense that things could go well here, but on the other hand, I wonder, as you point out, the Schiller PE ratio seems to hand this weird gift to every administration, which is you're probably going to see the markets go down on your watch. I wonder what will happen. Here we've got two thirds of the total global capitalization just concentrated in US markets, and the US has about 26% I say only a world GDP. It almost feels we're due on a few fronts for a little bit of reckoning in valuations, especially as they've been pushed higher by big tech companies. It's maybe six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Jason Moser: Try to putting everything in context when we talk about valuations and where they stand. If you look at the S&P right now, the market is valued. It's somewhere around 30 times trailing earnings and around 23 times full year 2025 estimates. Now obviously we just started 2025, but that I think shows you some of the enthusiasm there. Then some listeners may be familiar with that old rule of 20, when you take the sum of the PE ratio and the inflation rate. Ultimately 20 is the benchmark there. Anything above 20, you start looking at stretched valuations, anything below 20 looks like a little bit more of an attractive valuation. Clearly right now given those numbers I just gave you, that rule of 20 is being broken. Listen as investors we're happy. But it is, again, I think it gives you some context as to why we have these conversations on potential overvaluation in the market.
Dylan Lewis: Valuations not getting in the way of where some big money is being committed, particularly in the AI space this week, a new $500 billion joint venture, Stargate announced by Open AI in news headlines this week, Asit. This brings together this joint venture an odd super friends of US tech companies.
Jason Moser: The Hall of Justice.
Asit Sharma: We've got Open AI CEO Sam Altman shepherding this project or bring it together. He brings his friend Masayoshi Son, the very peculiar, sometimes extremely successful and sometimes not global venture capitalist. We have players like MGX, which is the United Arab Emirates sovereign Investment Arm. There are going to be investors in here. Then we've got companies that are maybe more familiar to us. Oracle is going to participate and Nvidia will participate. Microsoft is going to participate on some level, but really the equity funding is going to come from two sources Open AI and SoftBank. Together they'll from the details we're getting, own a good portion of this project. We're looking at so many data centers. It could be 20-30 data centers to be built in the US over the next five years out of this $500 billion and a lot of money spent on GPUs. Now, we should say this has attracted a lot of snark from one Elon Musk, who is not great friends with Sam Altman.
Satya Nadella from Microsoft said, we're good for $80 billion of capex this year, and Mark Zuckerberg got into the act today as we're taping to say, look, we're going to up our spend over at Meta to $60 billion of capex this year, whether we're part of this project formally or not. Details are still to be nailed down, but it is interesting. I think it's also indicative of just the race to invest in AI. That part of the fervor and hype hasn't died down in 2025.
Dylan Lewis: A lot of the names that you mentioned there, Microsoft, NVIDIA many of the leaders at those companies, very familiar to folks that have been following the AI space. I think Oracle came up, and that is a name that we have not talked about nearly as much and probably to our detriment because over the last one, three, five years, the stock has performed incredibly well. AI has been a part of that story. What do you make of them coming into the mix here?
Asit Sharma: Oracle has very quietly taken its licks. They very famously avoided the Cloud and thought it wasn't going to be a great deal and then watched as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure ate their lunch. Credit to Safra Catz, the CEO, and Larry Ellison, the chairman, who decided to just build a new architecture from scratch. It turns out to be really conducive to running AI cheaply. All these start-ups and other companies, enterprise, businesses, governments, academic research institutions are finding that if they run their AI on Oracle servers. They actually get a pretty good return for their money. They've partnered up with a lot of companies and they are plowing money to build more data centers themselves. They're taking their learnings from missing the big Cloud explosion and reinventing how they're going to service the Cloud from scratch is paying off so nicely for them. They've flown under the radar, as you point out, pretty hard to do when you're a mega Cap company like Oracle, but somehow they pulled it off. They've certainly caught investors attention now.
Dylan Lewis: It reminds me a little bit of the great Microsoft revival that has happened over the last 10 to 15 years where humongous tech company that I think had a legacy reputation for a lot of investors and then found that next wave. In their case the productivity Cloud software and the Cloud segment overall, maybe there's some more juice here for Oracle going forward.
Asit Sharma: Could be, and I think that we should look at how aggressively they've invested in their infrastructure and how aggressively they intend to invest going forward. It matches some of the skill we're seeing out of Meta and Microsoft and Amazon, the companies we associate with not holding back when they write checks. Oracle has joined that club. Let's see what they do in the next few years.
Dylan Lewis: Coming up after the break Netflix hits it out of the park with its earnings. Where's the next chapter of it's Big Growth coming from? Stay right here. It's Motley Fool Money. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Dylan Lewis here on air with Asit Sharma and Jason Moser. Earning season is fully underway, and Netflix stealing a lot of headlines this week after their report, Jason, the streamer reminding everyone we are number one. We are King of the Castle. When it comes to streaming.
Jason Moser: Stealing headlines for good reason. It was just another really impressive quarter. Not that I think we should be surprised, but adding somewhere in the neighborhood of 19 million additional subscribers very impressive. I thought interestingly enough they noted in the call too that it's not like most of those subscribers came from folks looking to be able to watch the football games over the holiday season or necessarily to log in to watch WWE. To be sure, they help but that wasn't what drove it. I think that's really what's so impressive with this business. They've just done such a good job over the years, building out a content library that just got something for everyone. Now over 300 million seemingly very happy subscribers. To me, I thought the revenue growth, 16% was impressive. I thought to me even more impressive though, to see the operating margin was up 5.3 percentage points from the same quarter a year ago. This is a company that now is really starting to extract some profitability from the model and there's no reason why that really shouldn't continue.
Dylan Lewis: Shareholders certainly happy to see that the streamer is also planning on increasing prices, maybe sling that the subscribers aren't quite as happy about. Asit we have seen them continue to hike prices and also introduce ad supported streaming, like a lot of other streamers have. What do you think of the interplay between these two business lines and what's going on with their overall pricing models?
Asit Sharma: I think when you have a product that people feel that they just can't do without, you can take pricing, and that's what they're doing. Being able to shift some consumers downstream to add supported tiers is good for Netflix. They're taking so much of their capex and building a really phenomenal monetization engine. The AdTech that underlies their revenue is very strong. They're rolling it country by country. It's fine tuned for Canada, something we heard about this quarter. Now they have their own native textC there. They're going to do this country by country, just to target local users. You get this virtuous cycle where maybe get priced out of the full tier, you're content to watch the supported tier.
As they show, they have phenomenal uptake of the ad supported tier. We don't know the exact dollar figures from that. In doing that they're able to throw some Snark at other companies. I love the way only Netflix can subtly take jabs at its competitors. They talked about in their press release being such a pure company, only focused on streaming, not having to deal with the distractions of linear network like Disney and some other competitors. Just very focused core business doing well. That ad business is also meaningful. I hope to see the breakout of that revenue at some point in the near future.
Dylan Lewis: I think as it stands right now, we have to do a little sleuthing to figure out what's going on with that ad business. What I saw Jason was ad revenue doubled in 2024 and that the management team expects it to continue to be growing at a pretty fast clip. We're not getting that breakout that we love as investors. But in your mind, how are you valuing what's going on there, the growth that you're going to be seeing there when it contributes to the business versus the core membership model that we all know and generally?
Jason Moser: I'm not sure that we should expect them to get too terribly granular with it. Remember they are actually going to stop giving us even subscriber forecast numbers. They'll give us numbers when they hit certain milestones, but we're going to even get a little bit less information there. But I think going back to just the success from the quarter, they noted that the advertising strategy continues to take old. It accounted for over 55% of sign ups in ad supported countries. Then ads playing memberships grew nearly 30% from a quarter ago. I think that what they're doing is they went into this with some thought. They understood that advertising supported video on demand is something out there that consumers want. Netflix felt like they could participate. They built this out in I think a thoughtful way to make sure that they were doing something that they thought the subscribers would love. As they continue to raise these prices, sure some people are going to balk at it, but for the most part we're not. For the people that do balk at it, instead of necessarily quitting Netflix, maybe now they just have an option to downgrade to an ad supported membership until they decide to re upgrade again.
Dylan Lewis: Also soaring this week, GE Aerospace shares up almost 10% largely on earnings, but this feels like a little bit of a mix of what the company put out and some excitement around that and the general excitement around the business of space right now in the market.
Asit Sharma: I think you're right Dylan. We're always hearing about companies that are on the cutting edge of space innovation. But there's been more focus recently on companies that supply just mission critical stuff in the aerospace industry. GE Aerospace is a supplier of high performance jet engines, and so they're starting to get some love from investors. They can't produce fast enough to meet their demand, which is the situation of a lot of aerospace businesses just now. Total orders this quarter 15.5 billion, that's up 46% year over year. What I love about GE Aerospace is it's got this amazing spare parts business service business. I liken that too the razor and blades model. If the jet engines are the razors, then all these spare parts and shop visits for repairs are the blades. This is a company that benefits from this backlog of airplanes that need to be manufactured. We have to keep some tens of thousands of jet engines flying in the air all the time, and GE only gets better by that service revenue. A very interesting quarter on all fronts, and they've got a little defense business on the side that grew pretty well 22% year over year itself.
Dylan Lewis: For people watching that industry Asit, would you say that GE Aerospace is maybe one of the more diversified stable players as folks are looking out and seeing other companies like Rocket Labs, Intuitive Machines, and some of the more I don't want to say speculative, but more future oriented business.
Asit Sharma: Yes, totally because GE is focused on the aerospace industry, whereas some of these other companies like Intuitive Machines, which is very interesting technology, and it's now getting into the communications business, satellite communications business. They're focused more on the space part of the industry. I like to just make buckets of the two. When you have solid players like this, you can start to build a basket. If you follow the industry. There are some great spare parts suppliers like TransDiM and HCO. You can work in a little bit then of the space space companies as well. All across the range of industry, as you point out Dylan, there's much interest right now. But I like some of these core companies to build a basket round.
Dylan Lewis: From the skies, back down to ground control. Cloud Communications company Twilio out with some fresh earnings results on Friday, Chasing shares up 20%, rounding us out with another heavily followed full stock that seems to be having a pretty good wee.
Jason Moser: I think this is a good example of leadership just doing what they say they're going to do. This is a company we talked a lot about on the show. It was a radar stock back in July of last year. I said to me, it felt there would be a time where the market's a bit more tolerant of companies like these. If [inaudible] Chandler keeps doing what he's doing, I think patients could pay off. Stock was in the 55 $60 range at that point. I think we see how that has worked out for investors, but they said a lot of really good things on this Analyst Day presentation, returning back to that double digit growth that we've all expected. Actually reporting their first GAAP profitable quarter in fourth quarter and set the expectation that for every year here on out, you should expect that this is a GAAP profitable company. They continue to bring that stock based compensation number down as well. Just operating with a lot of rigor and pursuing a lot of growth opportunities, reigniting that growth, it's certainly understandable the enthusiasm in the stock today.
Dylan Lewis: Jason, this was a growth stock, and at one point I think, had to go through the doldrums like so many others did post 2022. Where do you see the expectations of the return profile for business like this going forward?
Jason Moser: I think things are starting to look a lot more encouraging. Again, maybe it required a leadership change. A lot of that came from its old start-up mentality with Jeff Lawson, the co-founder of the business, and now Khozema Shipchandler taking over. He has a bit more of an operational focus. But I think generally speaking what they're doing, obviously it's working and pursuing a very large market opportunity
Dylan Lewis: Jason, Asit we're going to see you guys a little bit later in the show. Up next, we've got to look at where the next wave of AI upstarts are focused. Stay right here. You're listening. Motley Fool Money.
Welcome back to Motley Fool Money, I'm Dylan Lewis. We spend most of our time talking stocks and the public markets here on the show. But the reality is that some of tomorrow's most interesting tech stocks exist today as early stage venture companies. To get this skinny on the cutting edge of tech and where new venture funding is going, especially in places like AI. My colleague Tim Beyers caught up with Frances Schwiep. She's a partner at Two Sigma Ventures. It's an early stage venture fund. There she spends most of her time looking at companies that have a data focus and leverage AI and machine learning technologies. Tim and Francis talked about where the biggest early stage opportunities are right now in the AI ecosystem and what to look for in Great founders.
Tim Beyers: I'm very curious. What view have you developed around AI and ML right now? I assume it's changed, and it's probably changing all the time. But when you look at that industry and the view that you have, what do you see?
Frances Schwiep: Right now I think the biggest opportunity is in the underlying tools that are going to be made available to application developers who are looking to build AI applications. There's this and I think we're ending in the next year will be maybe close to the most exciting tools that are.
Frances Schwiep: Available. I think we're going to see the start of a real ROI heavy Agentic workflows where you really have AI agents completing specific tasks. Maybe I'll just also say, the first part of this wave was obviously a lot of the foundational models, so the Anthropics, the Coheres, the OpenAIs of the world. That is, at this point, I think, mostly baked out, and it's also very capital intensive and late stage game. It's not where we focus at the moment. But on the Agentic workflows, I can go into that. I think I have a view on what makes AI agent tooling very powerful, and the areas in which it can really have a lasting impact and maybe are like most for it to disrupt. My view is right now we are in the tooling and AI stack buildout. Like I said, that involves a lot of things like AI safety tools, data quality monitoring. Automated prompting. Things like AutoGPT and LangChain, all of that I put in the tooling set and now we're just starting to see exciting, true AI applications that are not just being tested in the experimental budgets of the enterprise, but they're actually being used in the day to day workflows of those employees and individuals.
Dylan Lewis: Let's talk a little bit about just 2024, obviously the year of the GPU. This has made some investors absolute fortunes. Do you think, and I think you touched on this briefly, is 2025 a bit more of the same? We sometimes like to make reckless predictions here at The Fool. Do you have a reckless prediction about what will be the technology if it's like this is 2024 year of the GPU, 2025, the Frances Schwiep reckless prediction is the year of what?
Frances Schwiep: Man, I do think Agentic workflow is going to be big. I think that's what we'll see in 2025. Although NVIDIA made these big announcements recently, I'm sure you saw. I think the most exciting one was the Jensen Ori platform in computer, which is just a significant leap forward in Edge AI. I think maybe the reckless prediction around that is, I think we will see the fast acceleration in AI enabled hardware, than we've ever seen in the history of venture investing. That is because being able to compute AI at the edge not only possible from the size of the models that we're talking about these days. There's something almost like 270 something trillions of operations per second is what that new computer can handle, just like massive AI workloads. Then it's incredibly energy efficient was something I used to work at a wearable computing company, as you mentioned, was working a product there. Man, being able to get the battery life or just being able to actually run those models on device sucked up a ton of energy. I think this is groundbreaking from that perspective. It's a small form factor, so you can talk about different sizes of hardwares, whether from robotics to drones to whatever future IoT hardwares you can dream up to autonomous vehicles, we invested in a company that is a basically like the autonomous caterpillar and so that's a big one, I think, again, stuff like what NVIDIA is releasing around Edge AI is going to be huge for the breakopen of VAP market. That's I don't know if it'll be 2025. I think, to be honest, the 2025 will be the companies building the hardware around this new computing technology, I think in the next year is when you'll start to see those companies pop up. Then I imagine a lot of 2025 will be focused on Agentic workflows.
Dylan Lewis: The beginning of AI everywhere in every device.
Frances Schwiep: We've been waiting for it, but we now actually have. Yeah.
Dylan Lewis: It does seem like it's coming. I want to come back to the beginning of your career. You started your career as a data scientist, so you have a very rigorous background, seeing the world in very analytical ways. Because you're a venture capitalist, there is some art, and you touched on this, that comes into the process. How much of the investing process is art and how much of it is science? Do you think? I'm talking about it specifically from your perspective, but you can take it as general as you want.
Frances Schwiep: I'm going to say 80/20 science, art, and I like to say take a scientific approach to investing, which is you have a thesis, and then my job is to disprove the null and go through the steps of diligence to get myself over the line on this being a good risk adjusted return profile for an investment. We like to say we look, though, for the glimmer of greatness, which is more of the art part of this. I think it has more to do with intuition. I think it's possible that the 20% is even more important. I think there is a lot that goes into, if you suspend disbelief, there may be no market for the technology today. There might not be a single customer using it today, and maybe there's a lot of skepticism, but on the chance that it becomes great and it's the power law dynamic and you could say this about Airbnb. There was no market for the Airbnbs when they were starting a business, and it sounded crazy. But on the off chance it worked, there is a huge glimmer of greatness there. That's the creative piece of it. It's that intuition. It's trying to peer around the curb and suspend disbelief and dream a little bit with a founder. Then I think there's also creative ways to get to an investment, which might require spending time with the founders. We talked about the magic of human connection and what you see that lights someone up, what sparks your imagination and sparks the imagination of the founder to be dedicating their lives to building this new technology. That is something that I think requires more human connection and less science.
Dylan Lewis: Quick follow up on this one, and then a final question, looking forward. Can you name a founder, doesn't matter to the company, but a founder that you've either observed or interacted with directly, who has that glimmer of greatness, who stands out to you, somebody that we know who's got it?
Frances Schwiep: I think Will, who's the founder of WHOOP , it's one of our investments. He is relentless about how he tests and iterates on the product and how much focus he drives for the business. I think one of the biggest mistakes founders make is they start to lose focus and a lot of people did not believe in him. He was like, I'm focusing on, I don't know if you used a WHOOP before, but I'm wearing one. It tracks your athletic performance, your sleep performance, and he's obsessed with performance. It's not a step tracker. It's not like a wellness app. It's for true athletes that want to track their performance. People try to push him in a lot of different directions, like you need to add steps, you need to focus more on nutrition and add these other things, and he's like, no, we're going to get as fine tunedly good at performance as possible. I think you saw this with the founders of Google. They're like, we're going to focus on the milliseconds of getting you the retrieved answer from a search query.
He's like that when it comes to tweaking the performance metrics. When you wear a WHOOP and you use the application, you get very highly tuned and precise data about your body and your performance from your muscle activity to your hitting your VO_2 maxes, what zone you're in when you're training and pushing it on a treadmill or lifting weights, where you are in your sleep in terms of REM and restorative sleep, things like that, that he drills in and double clicks into that product. Then he has built a very loyal and motivated team behind him, in Boston and we actually had the new CTO come and speak at one of our meetings recently, and she is just incredibly inspiring and actually recently led to the release of an AI bot where you can ask questions. I recently asked my WHOOP, how many minutes does it take for me to fall asleep and it said something like 65, which is too long. We spend like 45 of those dressing about the next day or something. But it's amazing. Now you have this AI chat bot, because they have such good data and they focus so much on metrics and so much on the data they were collecting. Now they're able to layer on this AI agent, basically, that can be your health coach. You can ask questions of this very rich data source and data asset that they've built up over time. I think I have a lot of respect for him as a leader, as a product builder, and as someone who knows how to focus and make the right trade-offs.
Dylan Lewis: Relentless focus and right trade-offs. Great. Let's end on this. Imagine that I am pitching you a business idea. I'm coming into the meeting, and you're going to give me a piece of advice before I come into the meeting. What is your piece of advice for me so that I come into the meeting and have a hopefully successful meeting with you and your partners?
Frances Schwiep: I think the biggest one is tell me why people need your product and why you have to build it. You can't buy or hire your way into product market fit. I think you have to focus on building a product that users and customers ultimately, really want to use. You just can't skip steps. I think I've seen folks maybe focus prematurely on scaling the company without the killer product first. Maybe that's skewed toward my background, which is I have more of a product mindset, but I think one is telling me, it's really just connecting me and helping me understand, why this product needs to be built and then obviously, why you are the one building it. What makes you uniquely capable of building this product then, of course, we can get into market and your business model and all that. But Those are the big ones.
Dylan Lewis: Listeners, if you're Motley Fool Premium member, you can catch the full conversation between Tim and Francis on our website. It was part of our AI summit for members earlier this month. We'll be sure to drop a link to that for members in the show notes for the podcast version of this week's radio show. If you're not a member and you want to join, head over to fool.com/signup join Stock Advisor. As a Stock Advisor member, you get two new stock fix each month, rankings on the whole scorecard of companies in the service, and access to all episodes of our premium podcast. Stock Advisor Roundtable. You can learn more at fool.com/signup. We've got Asit Sharma and Jason Moser coming back with me in just a second. They're bringing some stocks and stories on their radar. Stay right here. You're listening to Motley Fool Money.
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Dylan Lewis: 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 sell anything based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards, it is not approved by advertisers. Motley Fool only picks products it personally recommend a friends like you. I'm Dylan Lewis back on air with Motley Fool analysts Asit Sharma and Jason Moser. Fools, we are here taping in the third full week of January. By this point, experts at Baylor say that most people have failed their New Year's resolutions. Jason, here at The Fool, we're all about keeping score. I have to ask, how are we checking in on the New Year's resolutions so far?
Jason Moser: Well, I love that. You and I spoke before the new year and a one, two punch on the resolution front personally, just trying to wake up every day with a bit more of a glass half full view on things. Just tackle the day with a smile. So far so good, Dylan. It's working. I'm not going to lie. On the back end of that, I said I wanted to add three new companies to my portfolio and we're going to get into radar stocks here in just a minute. To be continued.
Dylan Lewis: A teaser. Asit, what about you? How's the resolution progress going?
Asit Sharma: Hey, it's mid late. [laughs] I have more than one resolution, so is a 33% rate any good?
Dylan Lewis: You're diversified. [laughs]
Asit Sharma: I noticed in the article, that you shared with Jason and I, that the folks at Baylor say that 88% of people who set New Year's resolutions fail them within the first two weeks. I want to meet the other 12% and start hanging with them in the street. [laughs]
Dylan Lewis: You can be part of the 12%. I believe in you. The nice thing about resolutions, you can pick them right back up at any point during the year and keep making progress.
Asit Sharma: That was the point of this article that you can succeed by failing, picking yourself back up, making that incremental progress, which I think is a great principle to hold.
Dylan Lewis: Well, let's help Jason make a little progress on his resolutions. Let's get over to stocks on our radar. As always, our man behind the glass Rick Engdahl is going to hit you with a question. Jason, let's hear what you got for adding stocks to your portfolio.
Jason Moser: Well, it's 2025, and I indeed have added one of my targeted three. I bought shares the other week, Dylan, in Nike, Ticker, NKE. I think everybody knows about this business. Tremendous brand equity, obviously, the global leader in sports. But recent blunders by former leadership have created some headwinds. They really worked on prioritizing the digital business over the last several years and neglected their wholesale partners and so new leadership there, I think, is going to focus on balancing those scales a little bit with new CEO Elliott Hill. It's understandable why the stock has been taken to the shed and it has been taken to the shed. When you see the headwinds they have created, you see the impact that that's on the bottom line, sales actually decelerating for a company like this. Then they noted in a recent call that over the near term, the effect of the actions that they're taking in order to write the ship will result in lower revenue, additional gross margin pressure and higher demand creation expenses. That doesn't paint a very good picture, Dylan. The stock reflects that today. But I do believe that this is a business that will recover. They were self inflicted wounds that I think they can recover from. A big focus on those wholesale partners going forward. There's a reason why shares are at 22 times earnings today, but I think it'll get closer to its historical norm in the coming years as new leadership executes a good comeback.
Dylan Lewis: Who doesn't love that? Rick, a question about Nike Ticker, NKE.
Rick Engdahl: I would love that. I'm a long time Nike shareholder, but not long enough, I'm afraid. How many years do you say I have to wait to come back from my?
Dylan Lewis: Well, my intention, Rick, is to hold this business until I'm long gone. I think, patience will pay off here. That 2.2% dividend yield gives us a lot of incentive to just hang in there and watch them do their thing.
Asit Sharma: I'll hold on.
Dylan Lewis: Asit, what's on your radar this week?
Asit Sharma: I'm looking at a stock that was up 69% in the last 12 months. Why would I even do that as a radar stock? Well, it's trading around 28 times Ford earnings, not too expensive and the company is Garmin. Now, this is a business that reinvented itself. Years ago it was known as a GPS company. It's become more of a consumer facing company with lots of fitness wearables. It also has an outdoor segment, an aviation segment, a marine segment. An auto original equipment manufacturer segment. It's very well diversified as a business and it just has this way of chugging along very quietly. I mean, this is a business that throws off a lot of free cash flow. Operating cash flows increase every year, almost approaching a billion bucks now for a relatively small company. I just like the way that Garmin has established a brand for itself in the fitness market. I myself have looked over some of their products, including some very snazzy accessories for my bike, haven't bought them yet, but keep an eye on them.
Dylan Lewis: Not only a radar stock, but a watch list item for Asit's personal fitness journey. Rick, a question about Garmin Ticker GRMN.
Rick Engdahl: This seems like a company that should have died and didn't. Is that because of good leadership and is that leadership still in place?
Asit Sharma: The leadership is still in place and you're absolutely right. Not just on the executive level, but the whole management team has been together for a while and they know the drill, they know how to run this diversified business and they keep the focus on churning out great new products that we see in stores and online.
Dylan Lewis: Rick, you going into a company in your portfolio already, Nike, or something new with Garmin?
Rick Engdahl: I got enough Nike. I'm going to go with Garmin. You guys turned it around once. I guess I can trust them.
Dylan Lewis: There you go. Jason, Asit appreciate you guys bringing your stocks. Rick, appreciate you weighing in. That's going to do it for this week's Motley Fool Money radio show. Show was mixed by Rick Engdahl. I'm Dylan Lewis. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.
