Motley Fool Co-Founder David Gardner Reviews Stock Picks

We're approaching the 10-year anniversary of the first of Rule Breaker Investing's 30 five-stock samplers, picked from 2015 to 2021. In this special episode, Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner reflects on the updated results, sharing 10 fresh lessons from both the wins and the whiffs.

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This podcast was recorded on July 09, 2025.

David Gardner: One year ago this week we wrapped our epic Reviewapalooza Ultima, tallying the three year scores for every one of my 35 stock samplers picked from 2015-2021. Well, now the calendars ticked forward one year later. How have those picks continued to fare now with 12 more months on the clock and what fresh lessons can we pry from their wins and whiffs? Let's take a quick victory lap, a few humbling detours and of course, bank some new Rule Breaker insights. It's Reviewapalooza 2025 with 10 great lessons for Rule Breaker investors, only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.

Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. I don't listen to every one of my podcasts. In fact, I think I listen maybe every seven or eight. Sometimes I'm on a drive somewhere, and I'm like, what did it sound like last week? I did listen to last week's podcast. I hope you got a chance to do so, as well, because that really was one of my favorite podcasts in recent memory to think about the Rule Breaker Investing community, the Motley Fool community that we've built up over time, and you taking the time to share steps you've taken toward financial freedom. For you to share that out through this podcast with your stories and your inspirations, really reminded me of why we do what we do at the Motley Fool. Nine phenomenal notes, not a long podcast, either. It was pretty breezy, but sharing your lessons, tips, and guidance for people for really all of us, we all benefit when we hear any one of us take a step toward financial freedom. It might be a lesson personally applicable, or it might be something you can share with a friend or family member. Last week's podcast, what you've done to create financial freedom, Volume 3, pretty sure that's a bestie.

Now, last year, the week after I did my Reviewapalooza Ultima, where we look back at the lessons learned from 35 stock samplers, 150 stocks picked over the course of seven years, watching them age together three plus years at a time. I brought it all together in a really special podcast a year ago this week. If you want to go back and listen, I totally encourage it. It's Reviewapalooza Ultima, 35 stock samplers in 10 and a half chapters. Well, as I said at the time, of course, I have all of those stock picks still in my spreadsheet, live updated with their performance, both individually as picks and then in aggregate for each sampler, and then in overall aggregate for all 35 stock samplers. I check in with that spreadsheet at least once a week just to see how things have shaped up because the real game of investing is not a three-year game. The real game of investing is, well, let's call it more like a three-decade game. In fact, with the Motley Fool having just recently turned 32, we're now living the three decade plus approach, and as I look over that spreadsheet, I'm constantly enamored of the lessons we can learn together, and that's the focus of this podcast. I figured, last year after the July 4th podcast, I did a Reviewapalooza podcast.

Why wouldn't I do the same thing again this year? Looking up and down my spreadsheet at the 35 stock samplers, what 10 lessons can we learn together? Ten points, 10 lessons this week. But first, as I shared at the start of the year, my 2025 book, Rule Breaker Investing is available for preorder now. After 30 years of stock picking, this is my magnum opus. It's a lifetime of lessons distilled into one definitive guide. Each week until the book launches on September 16th, we're sharing a random excerpt. We break open the book to a random page and I read a few sentences. Let's do it. Here's this week's page Breaker preview, just a few sentences from very early on in the book. "It took years for me to articulate what started as intuition and eventually evolved into this question, why do the most esteemed investment books of the past often cause their readers to miss the best stocks of their own generation? I won't claim it's true of every revered book, but it's strikingly true for many."

That's this week's page Breaker preview to preorder my final word on stock picking shaped by three decades of market crushing success. Just type Rule Breaker Investing into amazon.com, Barnes and noble.com or wherever you shop for fine books. I want to mention, if you're listening to this podcast on or around when it comes out Wednesday, July 9th, all week long, closing Friday, Barnes and Noble is giving 25% off all books purchased at Barnes and noble.com. You do need to be a Barnes and Noble member. Membership is free. If you're looking to get Rule Breaker Investing, 25% off, not bad timing for you.

I say, without further ado, let's get started. Number 1. Number 1 is looking at the overall numbers for the 35 stock samplers. The first one ever picked, five stocks for the next five years was picked on September 2th of 2015, and the five stocks pursued by a bear was picked on June 16th, 2021, and those who followed this series over the years know that we typically scored them for three-year periods. My final review of that June 16th, 2021, five stocks pursued by a bear sampler was, of course, last June 2024. As we finished out and reflected back on the overall performance of the 35 stock samplers, the average sampler was up 76.9% and each one being compared against the market average, the market averaged 40% for each of those three-year periods for each of those 35 stock samplers. If you're following the numbers with me, basically, we were up 76.9% on average per sampler, beating the market by 36.9 percentage points because the market was up 40.0, and that's where it all closed down last year. Well, here we are now one year later. The stock market has been very strong, and the historical numbers have gone up pretty dramatically. For Number 1 here, I'm going to be drawing a lesson for each of the points I'm making this week. But for Number 1, let's just do the numbers, then the lesson. As we speak, the average performance of each of my 35 stock samplers is now up 242.1%, and the S&P 500 by comparison is up 123%.

That's now looking over all of these samplers, from the one picked 10 years ago to the one picked four years ago. When you average all those numbers, you end up with the average sampler beating the market by 119 percentage points, 242-123. I guess the lesson here for Number 1 is Rule Breaker Investing continues to win grandly, not just three plus years and counting, but I'd say 32 plus years and counting. Especially for people who are new to investing or may have been taught that it would just be luck to beat the stock market. Everybody should just index. I hope your eyes are opening to the possibilities that can come to you when you're actually choiceful, when you decide to buy not all the stocks in an index fund, but the best stocks, the Rule Breakers.

If you focus industry by industry on who are the innovators, what are the companies that meet the six traits of the Rule Breaker stock and when you buy them and you act like a Rule Breaker investor, very different from the Wall Street crowd trading in and out of the market. When you act like a Rule Breaker investor with Rule Breaker stocks, meaning you hold them, not just for three years, but 10, which is our time frame this week, you see the phenomenal returns that can come to you when you pursue this strategy. The lesson, very simply for Number 1 is this works, it wins grandly, and I predict these numbers continue to go up, I hope in an eye-popping way over the next decade. As I closed out each of the 35 stock samplers, after it completed its three-year tour of duty, I always pointed out that we're not selling these stocks just because the sampler is finished now. The gamification of my five stock samplers as three-year games just because that three years was doesn't ever mean that we would sell the companies at that point. I just didn't want to keep tracking them forever, every week, week in and week out. As I said, often, if all we did was review five stock samplers, we wouldn't do anything else on this podcast, but it is worth pointing out the incredible benefits that come from holding a decade plus. More to come on that point.

Let's move to Point Number 2. Point Number 2 is looking over the 30 historically. When we closed it out last year, 19 of the 30 had beaten the market, which means 11 of the 35 stock samplers had lost to the market. It's fun to note now a year later, some of the winners have become losers, and some of the losers have become winners. We'll talk a little bit more about that this week coming up. But even with some changing of the guard, it ends up as of today, of the 35 stock samplers historically now, not just three-year periods,19 of them are winning and 11 of them are losing to the market. Now, I hasten to add we're just talking about beating the market, not whether you're making money overall. We'll talk more about that later too. I've always focused my stock market picking and investing on beating the S&P 500. I say, if you make a pick and it beats the S&P, you were accurate.

You accurately forecast that stock would beat the market, and if you lose to the market with a pick, the language I've always used is you are inaccurate, and longtime Rule Breaker investors will know that the sixth habit of the Rule Breaker investor is to aim for 60% accuracy. What I mean by that is, six times out of 10, you should be trying to beat the market on average. We'll talk some more about that this week, too. You're always going to have losers. Losing to win is one of my most important themes for the world at large, whether we're talking about investing, business, or life, you need to lose to win in this world, I believe. Get ready to lose as you build your own stock market portfolio because it's going to happen to you. But be aiming to be confident enough that you think you're going to beat the market the majority of the time. Don't speculate wildly hoping to strike it rich with some cryptobro portfolio. Maybe that works for some, but I think for me, anyway, as a Rule Breaker investor, focus solely on public market companies, on the stock market. I go in with a mentality, I've tried to share that with you over the years to try to think you're going to beat the market with six out of 10 of your picks, and pick accordingly.

I think it's fun to pull the lesson here from Point Number 2. The takeaway lesson is that's exactly what we ended up doing. Both as we closed down last year and reported that 19 of the 30 had beaten the market, and now a year later, some of them have flip-flopped in terms of who's winning and who's losing. But once again, 63.3%, that's 19 out of 30, 63.3% of these five stock samplers are beating the market, and that is about 60% accuracy. On to Number 3. Number 3 is that the worst ever of my five stock samplers was formerly five stocks for the coronavirus.

This is a sampler I've talked a lot about over the years. It was the most dramatic winner we'd ever seen in its first year. I picked these stocks on April 8th of 2020. By April 8th of 2021, they had all more than doubled. Yet, as they expired and this five stocks for the coronavirus finished out in April of 2023, they were all dramatically down. In fact, on average, they were down 24%, but the market was up 49%, which means on average, these stocks were behind the market by 73.5 percentage points, each of the five, and that's a really bad five stock sampler, my worst ever. But as it turns out, I've done even worse now in the succeeding year, here from 2024-2025, five stocks for the coronavirus, with its booby prize, has now been exceeded or maybe I should say undershot by five stocks riding the bull market. A basket of five stocks I picked on June 21th of 2017, and now as I look at five stocks riding the bull market, I see that all five of them, unfortunately, have lost to the market, most of them dramatically. Not a single one of the five has been a winner. I presented them back in the day. I was having fun in reverse alphabetical order. I wish I could reverse the performance of these stocks, but Zillow Group, Wayfair, Impinj. This was reverse order by ticker symbol. Impinj is PI as a ticker symbol, Pegasystems, and then the worst of all, iRobot. Those five stocks picked in June of 2017. Here we are now, eight plus years later, and the best of them, Impinj, is up 114%, which sounds great, except that the S&P 500 over these eight years is up 155%. Impinj, the best performer is 41 percentage points behind the market. The worst performer is iRobot, which I picked on that day in 2017 at $101.08. It's at three dollars and 93 cents now, as I share that with you, down 96%. When you consider that the stock market itself is up 155%, that one stock on its own is behind the market by over 250 percentage points. Five stocks ride in the bull market, as a basket now, the worst five stock sampler ever. As a basket, they're up 6.1%.

But again, the S&P 500 up 155.4%, and so they are on average, behind the market by 149.4%. That's their average. Of course, some of them, iRobot, have done even worse, and one of them, Impinj, even doubled, but that wasn't enough. The stock market on average doubles every seven years, so if you have a stock that doubled after eight years, you're probably behind the market. What's the lesson from this changeover from five stocks for the coronavirus being the worst ever to five stocks riding the bull market, which, by the way, I was picking stocks that were at new highs as the stock market hit an all time high. Unfortunately, I didn't pick a single significant winner. But to me, the lesson for Number 3 here is stuff happens. Times change, and, in fact, change is the only constant. Now, the good news is, change worked against us here with Number 3. But let's now move to Number 4, where change has become our friend. Number 4, the best ever performer has also changed over in the year we've just finished. When we finished out Reviewapalooza Ultima last year, the best performer for its three-year period, had been five stocks the world needs right now. I picked those on February 15th of 2017, and over just the three years that we tracked them, from 2017-2020, that group of stocks was up 346.7%.

That was against the S&P's 67%. We basically beat the market 280 percentage points for each of those five stocks on average. An absolutely phenomenal performance. But now when you look at all 30 of these five stock samplers and look at their full history, I did mention this, I think on the podcast last week or the week before, the greatest performer has become five stocks for April the giraffe. There was something magical about the year 2017, I guess, because it contained my worst five stock sampler ever, five stocks riding the bull market, which I picked in June of that year. But the one just before it, April 19th, 2017, five stocks for April the giraffe, following the S&P 500 index from April of 2017 to today, it's up 165.8%. Really nice performance for the market over these eight years. My best five stock sampler ever, five stocks for April the giraffe are up 928.2%, which is well over 700 percentage points on average per stock over the stock markets average. All of them are multibaggers, but none has been better than Axon Enterprise.

I will circle back to that stock a little while later. But I wanted to point out with point Number 4 in the same way that we've had a changing of the guard in terms of what was the worst sampler and now what's the real worst sampler? Well, it's also true for the best sampler. Five stocks for April the Giraffe, Axon Enterprise, Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacifico, ResMed, Intuitive Surgical, and Live Nation Entertainment, as a basket, five stocks, a 10 bagger. In fact, more than a 10 bagger here eight years later. What's the lesson Number 4? Well, it sounds a lot like Number 3. Stuff happens, times change. But Asterisk, when you let your winners run, past just the three-year game played by most of my five stock samplers, if you invest more like not for three years, but for three decades, look what happens. One of my favorite watchwords as an investor, I've put this out infinite times before on this podcast. You'll read this one in my upcoming book, of course, because it's one of my favorite lines. Stocks always go down faster than they go up. But they always go up more than they go down, and you have to hold both of those thoughts in mind as a Rule Breaker investor, and you really can't do too much on the upside in just three years, can you? Again, when stocks tend to drop faster than they rise in a three-year period, which is what each of these five stock samplers was pretty much picked for, you can have some big winners, but even just a single stock getting cut in half could really sideline that whole five stock sampler. But if you let those five stock samplers go, not just for three years, but more like 10 years, you start to see the eye popping benefits of rule Number 1, let your winners run high.

The eye popping benefits of Rule Breaker investing become increasingly clear if you just give it time. Keep in mind, so much of the world does not give itself time. The average mutual fund managed mutual fund today trades largely out of everything it held at the start of the year. From one year to the next, from January 1 to December 31, you don't really recognize the stocks at the end of the year that were in that fund at the start of the year. We give away so much of our advantage as investors when we allow mutual funds and institutions to run our money like that. We do so much better for ourselves when we can find companies and just hold them over time. I think maybe my favorite lesson of all from these five stock samplers, and it just gets better with every passing year is the eye-popping benefits of allowing time to be your friend as an investor.

There we are points Number 3 and 4, the worst ever changed up and the best ever changed up as well, and yet the lessons remain largely the same. Let's go on to Number 5. Number five is a quick one. It's fun to note that over the course of these 35 stock samplers, how many of them actually lost money? The answer is two. Good news for people who think stocks are risky and you wouldn't want to be to invest in the stock market, which I think a lot of people feel, of course, I completely disagree. I think most of us at the Motley Fool completely disagree, assuming you're giving it time, the chances of you actually losing money are pretty low, and only two of the 35 stock samplers now to date, looking over the full history of them, the spreadsheet I'm looking at, only two of them have actually lost money. For the record, here they are. Five stocks for the Age of Miracles, basically a biotechnology five-stock sampler picked in 2019, down 11.1% with the market up over 100% so a huge loser.

Then the other one that has lost money so far, anyway was the third to last one picked in January of 2021, remember, this one, five stocks rolled up at random. That basket of five stocks down 28.9% with the market up about 60 percentage points, again, a really big loser to the market averages. But overall, looking at all 30 of these 28 of them, including nine underperformers, nine losing samplers, have all still made money on average. I think the lesson here is, that's usually what's going to happen if you make a commitment to invest in the stock market. Do it along with me, your whole life long. I don't make a point ever of jumping in and out of the market. I got started at the age of 18. Although I was accelerated by a dad who started investing for me at the age of zero and then turned over what he'd made for me when I turned 18. I've been invested my whole life long. I'm going to be invested my whole life long. I think the right mentality, I hope you have this, too, I hope you're spreading this to your friends and family is to invest for your whole life long. The chances of you actually losing money are almost nil over any long-term period and maybe one side lesson here before we move on to Number 6 is look at the two that have actually lost money, look at their names, or what I was purposing with both of them. Five stocks for the age of miracles. It was one of the riskier ones I tried because it was all biotechnology stocks. I'm sorry to say, one of them basically went to zero. Bluebird Bio went from $68-$0.06 and one of them, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, has more than doubled and beaten the market, but for the most part, these were really disappointing performers in a very volatile, riskier industry. That was one of them. The other one had me just randomizing up and down the universe of stocks I picked and just picking five of them, again, largely at random.

That's why I was called five stocks rolled up at random. Rolling dice didn't work out for me so well so a side lesson here for Number 5 is usually when you're really consciously being speculative, at least in my own experience, and it's borne out here by the numbers, usually when you're feeling speculative, you're rolling the dice, you're picking biotechs usually for me, anyway, it hasn't worked well. It's when you have that 60% confidence investing in things that are within your circle of competence, as Warren Buffett would say, that you're probably going to do best, and you should probably keep your money inside that same circle of competence, as well. When I'm picking all biotech or rolling dice, I'm investing a little bit outside that circle. I like to have fun and as I discussed with Rick Engdahl last month for his final podcast and my wonderful conversation with him, a lot of us are gamers. I certainly am, too. I don't mind taking risk, and I also don't mind loosing and it's ironic to me or perhaps not ironic at all. Maybe predictable that the two that have lost look like the two that probably relative to the others were more likely to lose. Let's move on to Number 6. Number 6 is just to highlight the mega winners. I'm just going to call out three companies that were really at this point, anyway, the very best stocks I ever picked in our seven years of five stock samplers.

The first one I'm going to mention is MercadoLibre. When I picked five stocks to feed the bear in February of 2016, I'm really glad I included MercadoLibre, ticker symbol MELI in that list because MercadoLibre is a 28 bagger over the succeeding nine years, obviously powering five stocks to feed the bear as a sampler to dramatic wins because anytime in a group of five stocks, one of them goes up 28 times in value, you're guaranteed to have a market beater and usually a market crusher. That's also true of five stocks that will let you eat cake, which I picked in November of 2017, and I'm really happy to say, included in that five stock sampler was NVIDIA. NVIDIA, ticker symbol NVIDIA is up 29 times in value, helping power five stocks that will let you eat cake to similarly dramatic wins. That five stock sampler is a basket is up 635%. Basically, 500 percentage points ahead of the S&P 500. Thank you, NVIDIA and Jensen Wong. The single best stock to date ever picked in those five stock samplers was picked for April the Draft. The date was April 19, 2017, and Axon Enterprise was the A stock. Five stocks for April the Draft, each of the five stocks, the first letter of their ticker symbol spelled out April. My A stock, and I'm going to give it an A plus was Axon Enterprise now up 35 times in value since.

Before I give the lesson here for Number 6, some curios, some fun with math we can do. NVIDIA, which as I mentioned, has been a 29 bagger for five stocks that will let you eat cake. When we closed it out three years later, we closed that out in November of 2020, and NVIDIA was up 144%. It had been dramatically outperformed by another stock in that five stock sampler, Match Group, match.com, the dating site. Match Group was up 423% as we closed it out three years later, the S&P 500, by the way, was up 39%, so NVIDIA was up 144. Match Group was up 423 but now these days, Match Group has dramatically fallen. It's only up 29% since I picked it about eight years ago, and NVIDIA is now up 2,876%, how times change, by the way, the market up 143 against both of those. NVIDIA plus 2876 Match up just 29% at this point. Yes, when you let time happen, you could have some dramatic reversals. You should be ready for anything as a foolish investor. I guess the lesson for Number 6, celebrating these three huge winners, MercadoLibre, a 28 bagger, NVIDIA 29 bagger and Axon Enterprise a 35 bagger. By the way, we keep holding all those, so I'm going to say 35 bagger and counting. Any one of these winners, anytime you find a stock that goes up 10 or 20 or 100 or more times in value, it's going to wipe out pretty much all of your losers on its own. Just take that 28 bagger that MercadoLibre has represented. Anytime you make 28 times your money, think about it. You could absorb 28-50% losers. If you had a 29 stock portfolio, and you had MercadoLibre up 28 times in value, and the other 27 stocks, averaged losing 50%, a horrendously bad portfolio, you would still have crushed the market with that portfolio. You'd still have 1,300% of gains sitting there on the table, even absorbing those 28-50% losers.

Especially for the math inclined among my listeners, it's really helpful to remind yourself how incredibly valuable, how hugely valuable just one mega winner is. Happy to say we've had a lot more than one at Motley Fool Rule Breakers, and with the stocks I've picked over many years now, we see the benefits of allowing them to run and how just a few big winners literally will wipe out every loser you've ever picked. Let's move on to Number 7. Number 7 is a simple point, and it's pretty much pure bragging. But I'm bragging on behalf of the Motley Fool here because these five stock samplers were all sampled from services where those picks had been made years before. When we're talking about NVIDIA going up 29 times in value as a five stock sampler our cost basis in Motley Fool Stock Advisor for NVIDIA is $0.16. At present prices, NVIDIA is not up 29 times in value for Motley Fool members. It is up 984 times in value. I'm happy to say, while NVIDIA is a dramatic example, virtually all of the 150 stocks that I picked in our 35 stock samplers had been picked much earlier, in many cases, or at least earlier and often at lower prices. All I'm doing here with Number 7, the lesson is that these were and are samplers. But in many cases, we've held these stocks much earlier and for much longer periods of time. If you were just a listener of this podcast, you may not know you may not understand the incredible benefits of making that full lifelong commitment to being invested in great rule breaker stocks in your portfolio. These were samplers.

That's why I call them five stock samplers, and all of them were already existing pick often for years and often at much lower cost bases, which should be beyond just plain bragging, it should be inspiring to anybody who's thinking more seriously about investing in the stock market and becoming a Motley fool investor and a Rule Breaker investor. Let's move on to Number 8. Number 8 and Number 9 and Number 10 are each points that involve looking just directly at one of the five stock samplers and drawing a lessons. With Number 8, let's look at five stocks that pass the SNAP test. That five stock sampler was picked on June 5 of 2019. By the way, I realize I'm throwing out a lot of dates and a lot of names this week, understandably, because we're talking about the real podcasts that we did and the names of the samplers and the dates that we started tracking their results. In a lot of ways, this might be, I hope not an onerous podcast to listen to because we're trotting out a lot of names and dates and numbers and my apologies, but we're an audio only podcast. I hope this has still been valuable. Five Stocks that passed the SNAP test is a podcast you can go back and listen to. Every one of these, I haven't done it myself, but you might have a lot of fun hearing why I was picking each of the stocks I've mentioned this week on the date that I did, the ones I got right, and the ones I got wrong. But I do just want to underline this, with points Number 8, 9 and 10, we look at specific samplers. You might do yourself a favor if you go back, find that podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or Google Play, wherever you find your podcast.

Go back and find that historic podcast and listen to it. If you did, you'd find out that five stocks that passed the SNAP test was one of those that was perfect in this sense. Now six years later, all five of the companies are beating the market. I was five for five with five stocks that passed the SNAP test. The companies, by the way, in alphabetical order Axon Enterprise, Fair Isaac, Live Nation, Nintendo, and Twitter. By the way, Twitter itself, of course, has since been bought out. I think it was $54 a share in October of 2022. The numbers don't still move for one of those five stocks in this sampler, but all five of them, whether Twitter in just a shorter term period or the other four continuing right through to today are market beaters.

This is an opportunity for me just to remind, especially new listeners of what I mean by the SNAP test, because anytime I look at a sampler and all five of the stocks have beating the market, I sit up a little bit more in my chair and say, maybe there's a good lesson here. The SNAP test is something I invented and first wrote about in our book Rule Breakers Rulemakers in 1998. It's a very right brain simple approach to picking stocks or a little test you can add to any potential stock pick you're thinking of making. The SNAP test is simply if you were to snap your fingers later tonight and you made the stock you're researching or thinking of buying, you made that company as you snap your fingers, disappear overnight. Would anyone notice would anyone the next day really care? It's ironic to me that the SNAP test was beautifully illustrated when Marvel Avengers came out and supervillain Thanos snapped his fingers some years ago on the silver screen, and you saw half of creation disappear, half of the superheroes disappear. It was such a beautiful example of what I'd been writing about 20 years before that. The idea of snapping your fingers and watching stuff disappear, would anyone notice? Would anyone care? It was particularly ironic because I used the SNAP test to pick Marvel stock back in 2002, when I added it to stock advisor. t the time, Marvel was a money losing, having just recovered from bankruptcy comic book company, and it had just come out with its first new movie, that first Spider Man movie with Toby Maguire and it was doing well at the box office. I decided if I were to snap my fingers and Marvel disappeared, how many people would notice and how many people would care. As I thought about it, again, 23 years ago now, back in the day, I was thinking, so many of us grew up with these stories. If you made it all disappear, that would be devastating. Not for everybody. It was more of a niche company back then, but a lot of people would notice and some people would really, really care. The prospect at that point of more Marvel superheroes coming to the silver screen, it wasn't a done deal at all. It was just starting.

But I was literally using my snap test to pick Marvel. Then Marvel years later got bought up by Disney. It's since overall the of essence, about a 50-bagger for Motley Fool Stock Advisor members. But I really loved it when things came full circle and Thanos, in a very famous way, snapped his fingers and illustrated beautifully a little lesson that I've been trying to teach 20 years before. Here we are now, you and I looking over these five stock samplers and five stocks that pass the snap test. Is undefeated and unscored upon with its snap test backing. My lesson for you is use the snap test. Before you buy a stock, ask yourself, how many people would really notice if the company you're looking at disappeared overnight, and I hope so, would anyone be heartbroken? Not just, of course, the owners or the employees, but the customers and the world at large, would it notice? Would it care? It's a great gut check. It helps people avoid rinky dink, penny stocks, or fly by-night kinds of operations. It helps a lot of Capital F Foolish investors avoid speculation, because really, what are going to be the great stocks of this generation and the next generation? The answer is, companies creating huge positive impact. Companies that are solving old problems with new technologies or creating entirely new possibilities that a generation or two we couldn't have dreamed of. These are always the rule breakers. These are the companies that pass the snap test.

I highly recommend you use the snap test in your own investing. Number 9. Number 9 looks at the 29th, the second to last five-stock sampler. Picked in April of 2021, it was entitled Five Stocks to Teach Rule Breakers. Indeed, if you'd like to go back and listen to that podcast yourself or share it with a friend who doesn't know what Rule Breaker Investing is, it's a very good short course teaching how we invest in Rule Breakers. I picked five stocks to illustrate some of the key points, the cardinal points of Rule Breaker Investing. As the market collapsed in 2022, my own personal portfolio in 2022, after having had a monster run up in 2021, pretty much cut in half in 2022. That was a brutal market year for many Motley Fool investors. These stocks were in tatters somewhere in late 2022. I was reflecting back at the time going, it's ironic and unfortunate that I named this sampler Five Stocks to Teach Rule Breakers, and they're underperforming.

Not a great look for me, not great optics for my approach to investing through this sampler. I'm very happy to say now with some more passage of time, Five Stocks to Teach Rule Breakers is a winner, and it's becoming more and more of winner over time. I'll just briefly share out the five stocks and then several quick lessons that these five stocks do teach about rule breakers. The five companies, I was having fun that week, I picked all stocks that had the letter A. Starting their name and their ticker symbols. The Five Stocks to Teach Rule Breakers, April 2021, were Airbnb, Axon Enterprise, AeroVironment, Activision Blizzard, and Apple. As of today, if you just bought and held those five, of course, Activision Blizzard was bought out by Microsoft not much longer after I'd initially picked it. But when you look at all five of those, as a basket, they're up 116.6%, and the market's up 43.3%, so we're up 73.3 percentage points on average, marking to the S&P 500 for each of the dates that those stocks were bought and in one case, sold. Phenomenal performance, 116 to 43%. We're up 73 percentage points per stock. Here are some of the lessons now that I think we can see that five stock sampler teaches. The first one is the obvious lesson, picking stocks is valuable, and it's fun. I had a lot of fun thinking about what stocks I'd want to pick to illustrate Rule Breakers. I was also hot dogging a little bit and having fun making them all stocks that started with the same letter, making the point that there are many other stocks, had we picked C or D or N, NVIDIA.

There are lots of other letters I could have selected, but I think Lesson Number 1 here is that picking stocks is valuable and it is fun. Indeed, these five stock samplers and your own portfolio, much more importantly than historic five stock samplers, it's a valuable exercise to do your whole life long. Yes, it's a lot of fun. A second obvious lesson is we're going to have losers. Airbnb, one of these five stocks is down 24% from when I picked it in April of 2021. Markets up about 50 percentage points. Airbnb is a significant loser at this point. Activision Blizzard was actually bought out by Microsoft slightly below the price I had picked it sometime before so it ended up being a loser as well. In fact, that leads me to Lesson Number 3, which is, when you look at these five stocks, three of them are beating the market, two of them are losing to the market. Sounds like that ratio I keep talking about aiming for 60% accuracy, another lesson taught unintentionally. I didn't know at the time, but taught by this sampler is 60% is the goal we're shooting for. I'm glad as of now anyway, that's what we're hitting.

Then the final lesson, I think, taught by Five Stocks to Teach Rule Breakers, is that winners win. What do winners do? Winners win. You should let your winners run high. In this case, of the three stocks beating the market, one of them is really the champion. Of course, it's Axon Enterprise picked 147, four years ago, now around 790 so the stock is a five-bagger. When you let your winners win, guess who else is going to be a winner? You. I've constantly tried to impress upon listeners week in, week out, year in, year out. What do winners do? If you agree with me that much of the time, not every time, they win, it makes a lot of sense to look for winning companies with winning products and services run by winning people doing winning things in this world. Their stock is probably premium priced and has had a really nice run over the last year or five. It's been winning, and guess what? It's going to continue doing, not every time, but on average. It's going to continue winning. Axon Enterprise is a stock. We have a much lower cost basis in Motley Fool Services than that 147 from four years ago, and yet that five-bagger has powered Five Stocks to Teach Rule Breakers. Onto Number 10. Number 10 has me looking at the very final of the 35 stock samplers. The one I exited with, and because we love Shakespeare here at The Motley Fool, because I was an English major who enjoyed my Shakespeare studies through undergrad, I know that Shakespeare's most famous stage direction is Exit Pursued by a Bear. That is the stage direction in his tragic comedy, A Winter's Tale, and I used it as my exiting title for my final five-stock sampler picked in June of 2021, by the way, not a great time to be picking stocks.

Within a year or so, Five Stocks Pursued by a Bear, you wished you'd exited them in the first place and never entered them at all because they were way down. In fact, when I closed out this sampler in June of 2024 at that three-year mark, last June, they were, as a basket, down 16.2%. The market was up 28.6%, which means basically we were down 45 percentage points on average per stock across those five stocks. Well, I'm really happy to note here in closing this week with my tenth and final point that as of now, just in the last few days, Five Stocks Pursued by a Bear, which did indeed have

Axon Enterprise included in it, I think I picked Axon Enterprise in maybe four of the 30 samplers. I was doing it toward the end. Axon Enterprise is the only stock of the five that is beating the market, but it's beating it so substantially that as a group, Five Stocks Pursued by a Bear closed out as a losing loser in June of last year is now up 49.7%, the market up 46.9. We are up 2.8 percentage points with my 30th and final five stock sampler. Again, this is only after four years. It will be interesting to follow it over four more years and maybe four more years after that. A happy note here with number 10, Exit Pursued by a Bear, which a bear market was coming, and in retrospect, at least for the following couple of years after I picked this group, I was ruing that we couldn't just exit without including this five-stock sampler, but what a delight to see this comeback story of these five stocks largely powered by Axon Enterprise, because, by the way, Peloton has not done well, that was in this sampler. Unity Software has been a significant underperformer. The Trade Desk has done OK, but underperformed in the market. A company I certainly still favor. Zillow, a stock I continue to own as well, also behind the market. But Axon Enterprise on its own has brought that five-stock sampler into present day winning.

A fun and final note to end on except that that's not the final note this week. I just wanted to mention something I'm intending to do starting in early September of this year. Because as I've tried to point out repeatedly this week as we look back over this body of work, these 35-stock samplers picked over seven years and now tracked up to 10 years in the case of the earliest one, as I've reflected on that, I've repeatedly said we learn more lessons in a 10-year period or a five-year period than in just a three-year Gammafied period. I think it would be really fun for me to ignite a new episodic series for Rule Breaker Investing where each time one of these samplers hits its tenth anniversary, we do a podcast, we look at the five stocks, we see how they've done, and we learn the lessons of why they've done what they've done as a gift to the long-term players out there. Investors all, those of you who are playing the long game and think we can probably learn more from 10-year periods than we can from three-year or certainly one-year periods, a lot of people have an even tighter view of the market. In my experience, most institutional managers are only looking about six months ahead. I think we'll have a new opportunity, starting with the very first five stock sampler picked, which was Five Stocks for the Next Five Years, picked on September 2 of 2015. Somewhere around September 2 of 2025, I'll be kicking off our 10-year Reviewapalooza.

Every 10 weeks after that, my intention is to look at that next sampler and the one after that and learn the 10-year lessons. Here at the end of this week's podcast, I'm reminded of the incredible benefits of seeing things that others have not seen and how inspiring that can be. I was thinking back to my undergraduate English literature studies.

One of my favorite poems was On First Looking into Chapman's Homer by John Keats. It's a Sonnet. I'm just going to share it now because it's only 14 lines. It's a beautiful poem, but I want to make just a couple of lessons in closing as we think about what Keats wrote in light of our approach to investing, and I would also say to business and life. Here is Keats' poem. Much have I traveled in the realms of gold. In many goodly states and kingdoms seen, round many Western islands have I been, which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told that deep browed Homer ruled as his domain. Yet did I never breathe, it's pure serene till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold. Then felt I like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his Ken, or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific, and all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise silent upon a peak in Darien. For those who have not heard that poem before and wonder what exactly that's about, Keats was inspired by the first time he read a translation of Homer, be it the Iliad or the Odyssey the first time that he had seen a new translation of Homer's epic works by Chapman, a century or two before George Chapman and Elizabethan playwright. I think it was the Odyssey, for the record, not the Iliad. But Keats, a sensitive soul, a lover of language, an amazing poet who died too young himself, was deeply moved by Chapman's translation of Homer that he'd just come across. Now, where is the comparison to Rule Breaker Investing? Well, I see three quick things to point out. The first is that Keats, in a sense, had traveled much of literature before. He was highly educated, but Chapman's translation made Homer explode with fresh color. I would say that's a bit like Rule Breaker investors suddenly see familiar things like ticker symbols or the S&P 500 or investing Writ Large. All of a sudden they see it in a new light when we take our Rule Breaker principles and we really apply them to meaningful periods of time. I'm not suggesting anybody had a Keatsian moment of recognition like Keats had with Chapman's Homer this week, but I do think taking the long view, which is so rarely shared, so rarely spoken to in modern financial media.

In many cases, because people don't invest this way, therefore, they don't keep score over time and so all of a sudden, they're shocked in the same way that Keats likens his revelation to an astronomer who discovers a new planet in some ways, each of our five stock samplers over the last decade has been its own little planet, and some of them are happy, beautiful planets, and some of them are dark, destructive, self destructing planets. But whether we're talking about Axon or Shopify or Nvidia or bad stocks like Zoom Communications, which has been an underperformer for me, it's just reminding you as a listener that we're constantly discovering new lessons, especially when we look where others aren't. When we aim our telescope at a different part of the sky that CNBC is looking at. The poem's climactic image, which is Cortez staring at the Pacific. By the way, historically, it was Balboa, not Cortez. But for the first time, a European group standing and looking at the Pacific Ocean, how stunned the crew was looking at each other with wild surmise? To me, I liken that to the moment, I realize on a much smaller, non-historic scale, but when you or I, as investors, for the first time, see a 10-bagger in our portfolio or get your first spiffy pop or even better, even closer to staring at the Pacific with wild surmise, when you first grasp and first hold that first 100-bagger. The Reviewapaloozas done over the years had some hilltop moments for each of those 30 samplers. But I'm looking forward to our episodic series, the 10-year reviews where we're going to stand together, look back over 10 years of data, and maybe feel a little bit of that wild surmise at how far curiosity, optimism, and a willingness to sail west can carry a Fool. Fool on.

David Gardner has positions in Apple, Intuitive Surgical, MercadoLibre, and Zillow Group. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends AeroVironment, Airbnb, Apple, Axon Enterprise, Intuitive Surgical, MercadoLibre, Microsoft, Nvidia, Peloton Interactive, ResMed, Shopify, The Trade Desk, Unity Software, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Zillow Group, and Zoom Communications. The Motley Fool recommends Bluebird Bio, Fair Isaac, Grupo Aeroportuario Del PacíficoB. De C.v., Impinj, Live Nation Entertainment, Marvell Technology, Match Group, Nintendo, Wayfair, and iRobot and recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft, short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft, and short July 2025 $120 puts on Live Nation Entertainment. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.