Checking In on The Trade Desk, Bristol Myers Squibb, and Other Stocks

In this podcast, Motley Fool analysts Karl Thiel, Rick Munarriz, and Tim Beyers:

• Discuss the implications of mass restructuring at the federal agencies governing biotech and healthcare innovations.
• Profile three stocks broken by bad decisions, bad luck, or bad timing, but which still have plenty of Rule Breaking potential.
• Play another game of Yes, And! with three stocks from the Rule Breakers Database.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. When you're ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy.

A full transcript is below.

This podcast was recorded on Oct. 13, 2025.

Tim Beyers: When are broken breakers worth buying, break it down. You're listening the Motley Fool Money.

Welcome, Fools. I'm your host, Tim Beyers. With me are longtime Rule Breakers teammates and old friends Rick Munarriz and Karl Thiel. It's a Genex Power half hour. [laughs] Today, we're talking about our favorite broken breakers, innovators that have yet to convince the market of their long-term potential. Karl, Rick, we've got a lot to talk about. But first, Karl, since we've got you here, I'd love to take just a couple of minutes to talk about the federal layoffs and any potential consequences you see for the biotech industry. For those who haven't been following along, this relates to federal cuts having to do with CDC and related health and human services agencies. Karl, what do you see in here and what should we pay attention to as biotech investors?

Karl Thiel: We're seeing things that have been affected both by budget cuts, and then also by the government shutdown. I don't want to underplay any of this because every agency that gets cut can have a big impact. But I would say the most important ones near term for investors is FDA. The good news there is that FDA is largely funded by user fees, so drug companies literally pay for their own reviews, which does mitigate the impact somewhat. The agency has said something like 86% of employees are still active and that keeps them active even through the government shutdown. The bad news in that regard, is that there are certain things that they cannot do during the government shutdown, and one of them is accept new NDAs or BLAs. You cannot accept any new drug application that requires a user-fee pavement because literally, there's nobody to operate the till. If you're trying to submit a new drug, you can't do it during the shutdown.

This is one of those things that if the shutdown is a few weeks, hopefully, that doesn't impact things too much. Obviously, the longer that drags out, the more serious that gets. Companies that already have pending applications for the most part should be OK. Companies that are looking at making new submissions a little further out, hopefully we'll be back in business by then, but there is a little awkward period right now. I will say there's some mitigation to that as well. If you're a company that's trying to submit a new drug application that is for something already approved to pick a random example, Ionis has said this year that they're going to submit an approval for a drug called Tryngolza which is for high triglycerides. It's already approved for a rare disease. Because this is therefore a supplemental application, it doesn't require a user fee and they should be able to submit that on the normal schedule. That's the good news and bad news on that. Then I think the other biggest impact for the industry has been all the NIH budget cuts and grant issues. Again, that's a good news, bad news story. I mean, the impact on it is really at the top of the funnel for research, which is that a tremendous number of ideas come from NIH research.

Just to pick an example, you can come up with these stupid sounding studies that NIH is doing. It's like, why are we paying taxpayer money so somebody can study the diet habits of the Gila monster in the Southwest or something? But that's, in fact, where GLP-1 drugs come from, is that early research. You're hurting the top of the funnel when you do that. The good news, such as it is, is that the current budget, which is not being passed because of the shutdown, but the current budget calls for basically both the House and Senate versions call for restoration of most of NIH funding. This is one area in which House and Senate Republicans, for the most part, push back against the White House, and they want to restore most of that funding. Hopefully, the impact will ultimately be less than it could have been, but it's still extremely disruptive, and it's going to work through the funnel for years.

Tim Beyers: Just a quick follow-up on this, and then we'll move on. I think what I'm hearing from you is that there are some short-term disruptions here, but we like early stage. We like early stage biotechs in Rule Breakers. You're the one that brings us most of these. This does not sound like something that over the long term should dissuade us from getting interested in emergent science in biotech. There's going to be maybe some short-term disruptions. There'll be possibly some approval delays, but over the long term, we still should like emergent science biotechs because those are still necessary and will come to market.

Karl Thiel: I think that's right. I do think there is an expectation that some of the most radical moves made by the administration will be mitigated or reversed at some point.

Tim Beyers: Got it. We'll keep our eyes on this. Fools, let us know what you think and what emerging biotechs you're investing in. Up next, three broken breakers we still believe in.

Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. We like Dark Clouds, We Can See Through. If you don't know what that principle means, I'd like to introduce you to David Gardner's new book on Rule Breaker Investing. Dark Clouds, We Can See Through means, and it's a long-held principle of David's in Rule Breakers. We aren't trying to buy the low, but we love it when a company that we really believe in that has significant Rule Breaker traits gets punished for reasons that maybe are temporary or maybe are unfair. We like these companies as Rule Breakers that may have taken a backward step for reasons that are partially their own fault, but maybe not completely. There are dark clouds, we can see through them, and we're willing to stick it out and wait till the sunny skies return. We're going to talk about three of them. Rick, I'm going to start with you. We're going to start with The Trade Desk because, boy, is it just raining on their boardroom? What's going on here?

Rick Munarriz: It's raining in their boardroom, and apparently, it's like an open roof. It's a convertible boardroom because they're getting soaked. [laughs] The Trade Desk, it's a 15-bagger since becoming a Rule Breaker recommendation 8.5 years ago when Karl Thiel and I coincidentally just approached David Gardner at the same month and said, "Hey, we like this stock." Karl and I rarely have the same stock on our minds, but we did that time. But it used to be a shinier star on our scorecard. The leader in programmatic advertising has fallen 63% since peaking 10 months ago. Obviously, that's more than rain. That's a deluge. The first hit came a few weeks after its all-time high when after 33 quarters of breezing through guidance, it proved mortal. Two quarters later, its most recent quarter, it missed on the bottom line, and revenue failed to top 20% for the first time as a public company outside of the second quarter of 2020 when advertising took a mulligan. They took a quarter off early in the pandemic that time, but there are fears there. The fears that it's AI deployment, haven't gone exactly as planned. There's fears of a competitive market, specifically connected TV, which is always seen as this big growth for them.

Amazon is emerging as a force. The open Internet, but here's the thing, the open Internet. It's at $935 billion market opportunity for digital advertising. It's never going to be a one eats all market. Connected TV is still powerful. Advertisers are willing to pay twice as much to reach a connected TV viewer where campaigns can be personalized and targeted than traditional advertising. The Trade Desk was once priced for perfection. Now, it's only priced for imperfection, but it's also price for infection. A lot of people just are doubting the Trade Desk. That's a good place to go and be a contrarian, and I see that now. You can pick up the Trade Desk for less than 25 times forward earnings. I'll say this again, you can pick up the Trade Desk for less than 25 times forward earnings, which may be a high multiple in most cases, but if you know the Trade Desk, you know that it never trades as cheap. Yes, revenue growth is slowing, and analysts see it slowing. Its guidance calls to continue to go into high teens in the current quarter. Analysts continue to see in the high teens next year. There's still a lot of things happening here with the Trade Desk, but I think it's a steady growing company, still gaining market share because there's no way the advertising market is growing at a double digit pace. I think right now that it's priced actually reasonably. Despite warts and all, I believe it is a broken breaker that is mending itself. To be honest, I don't think it was ever truly broken. I think it was just too much optimism.

Tim Beyers: Cracks in the price, but not cracks in the business. Fair enough. Look, I think connected TV has changed everything and logged in experiences for all entertainment is a big boon for companies like the Trade Desk, but let's go back to healthcare. Karl, Bristol Myers Squibb. Bristol Myers Squibb is one of these companies, by the way, it's been around. I think people would be shocked about how long it has been around. Tell me what you think here. Why is this one a broken breaker?

Karl Thiel: It's pretty clearly broken. [laughs] You could argue that it's not a breaker. I would say that that's fair enough. This is a drug company that's well over 100-years-old. It came to us on our scorecard through Celgene.

Tim Beyers: That's right.

Karl Thiel: Bristol acquired Celgene [inaudible] .

Tim Beyers: It swallowed a breaker.

Karl Thiel: Exactly. It swallowed a breaker and has continued to struggle since. I would say that it is a broken breaker that I've come to believe in again, and that is basically a valuation argument. This is not usually where we're coming from for Rule Breakers, but I think it's a reasonably compelling case in which you have a company that's guided for earnings per share in the $6.50 range there, a little bit to either side of that. Revenue is going to be around $47 billion this year. That gives them a PE multiple of less than seven. I think that number alone tells you that there's some trouble at this company, but I think that trouble is pretty well-recognized at this point. They have one of the worst patent cliffs in the industry. A patent cliff is when a drug that you've been selling for very high margin, lots and lots of money suddenly goes off patent, generic competition comes in, and your market share tanks, and pricing pressure goes way up. That's going to happen with Eliquis. Eventually, that's going to happen in the 2028 range with Optivo. It's a challenge. This is a company where you're going to see both profits and revenue drop for a period of years, but I think that is more than priced in at this point, and the company is paying a dividend in the 5.6% yield range. It's a dividend that I think you can count on. They have 93-year history of paying a dividend. Ninety-three consecutive years. There's no reason they're going to stop doing that. They're not in danger of dropping out of profitability. In fact, they have their portfolio of new drugs is growing quite nicely and being offset by legacy drugs that are seeing declines. I think it's a pretty sure fire way to collect a very nice yield, and then I think eventually start to see some price appreciation as that very pessimistic multiple just even comes back a little bit.

Tim Beyers: Is it possible that that multiple expands once we start to see, because if I heard you correctly, and I think I did. Look, they're facing a giant patent cliff, but it's not like they've stopped innovating, and they are building a backlog of drugs. This is the old dog that's cooking up new drugs. Sorry, I made it sound way too much like Walter White there. I didn't mean to do that. But you know what I mean? There's a big backlog here. If that backlog starts to show promise, that multiple could expand quite quickly.

Karl Thiel: I think even just any sign that they're going to be able to return to growth will do that. They have some fast growing newer drugs that are relatively new introductions, and they made some interesting acquisitions around radiopharma, for instance, and some next gen oncology drugs. I think this is a point in which there are lots of reasons to be negative, I don't want to say we're necessarily at peak negativity, but I would say that there's definitely a very dark cloud hanging over the company, and any sign that that's lightening up could help with the actual stock price even while you're just collecting the dividend.

Tim Beyers: Not just dark clouds, storm clouds. Fair enough. I'm going to take Progyny. Progyny, ticker PGNY. I've talked about this before. I own it ever since our Fool 24 interview with CEO Pete Anevski. I've been interested in this company. Part of the reason is that it has gotten so destroyed. On the Rule Breaker scorecard down 41% as of our taping, down 99% versus the market. It is broken in terms of the price here since the IPO, but that does not mean that these are unnecessary services. In fact, I think they are growing in importance, and so they're not getting enough credit because I think the healthcare market is, and Karl, I'll be curious if you have a thought about this, but this is my view of it. Because the healthcare market is so Byzantine, there's so much debate about it. There's so much worry about prices. This business and product, which is essentially aimed at those who self-insure, which is not a lot of companies. It's a growing number of companies that do self-insure. They manage a bucket of money. They use an insurer on the front end, and then they pay benefits on the back end, and they get discounted versions. Then they build a menu. The Motley Fool is like this. As full-time employees, this is what we have. We are self-insured company, and we have good benefits, and the company works within a structure in order to do this, and has been very successful at it for a lot of years, and we offer Progyny as a benefit. You know what? I think we are going to see a lot more of this. Now, revenue was only up 9.5% in the most recent quarter, but I will say this, gross profit increased 16%, so there's more efficiency here. It's a profitable company generating cash flow, and this is what I like the most, that despite all of this uncertainty around healthcare, the client base, so again, self-insured companies expanded to 542 in the most recent quarter, and that was just about 6.75 million members. These are covered individuals under Progyny. That's up year-over-year from 473 clients, which again, self-insured companies, that's a lot. That's fairly big growth, and the number of covered people underneath that was, again, grew to 6.75 million up from 6.47 million.

There's clearly a whole bunch of companies that are interested in Progyny services because they do have some better indicators and results for helping those who are having trouble building a family, starting a family. They're well known, their principal product is for infertility, and they tend to help those couples who are trying to trying to have a child. They tend to show clinically better results, and that does show up. They get chosen more often. This is another piece of this. They do have other things they're doing. One of them is they've introduced menopause support, and there's strong initial reception for this. Twenty percent of existing clients and 40% of new clients are considering taking up Progyny on that menopause support. This is not the only extra service that they're working on. Last point on this. Anevski and a lot of his leadership team back when the stock was a little lower than it is today, it was still in the teens, but they were active buyers on the open market. They are not selling shares. They've been, if anything, accumulators of shares, and that's another thing I like about this. But I don't know, Karl, I'll ask you to tell me I'm wrong, if you think I'm wrong, is just the generalized confusion and concern about the healthcare market, something that is a dark cloud that weighs over a service like Progyny, especially since it's for those companies that are self-insured?

Karl Thiel: Well, I'll put it back to you just a little bit, which is beyond that concern, which hard to say how people are regarding it. Do you think there's a concern just that the client base is, as you say, mostly self-insured companies? There's just a simple cyclical economic concern around layoffs and economic contraction around some of those companies. That might be something that's holding the company down and also something that you presume we get past.

Tim Beyers: It could be. The other piece of it, though, is that as they introduce more services and the existing clients use Progyny for more things, you would think that offsets. Rick, do you have a thing you want to add here?

Rick Munarriz: When you mentioned the buybacks, they've retired almost 10% of their shares over the last year-and-a-half. It was mostly done last year, but it's still in there. But to me, I see the point here again, and I'm just connecting the dots here, which I think is what we do as Rule Breakers, but couples are settling down later in life than they used to. This means fertility treatment, surrogacy, adoption, all these things that Progyny helps out are going to become more popular. They're going to want that when it comes to coverage, and that's going to be great for Progyny, I would think.

Tim Beyers: I think that's right. Let us know what you think. What's your favorite broken breaker? Give us a comment. Wherever you consume your podcast, just leave us a comment, and let us know. We'd love to hear it. Up next, we play the Yes And game again. Stay tuned. You're listening to Motley Fool Money.

It's time for Yes And, which is our improv style game that Rick brought to us a while back. If you like this game, write me a note, [email protected]. Let us know because we'll keep bringing this back. If you want something else, I'm going to keep playing Faker Breakers, Faker Breaker, and we're going to keep doing Yes And. As a reminder, the Yes And game is pretty simple. We start with a bullish statement about a stock, followed by another, and then followed by a concern. We go round the horn with three stocks taken from our Rule Breakers database, and we just make a statement about stock, and then it's yes, and, yes, and, yes, but, we'd raise a concern, and then we end the scene. We're going to do this for three stocks. When you are ready, Karl, we're going to start with you, and your pick, which is argenx.

Karl Thiel: I'll test my ability to make compound sentences. [laughs] Argenx based in the Netherlands, is a very successful biopharm. A company sells a drug called Vyvgart, mostly for myasthenia gravis. Sales jumped 97% to 949 million in the second quarter, that's nearly a four billion dollar run rate, and still growing.

Rick Munarriz: Yes, and as strong as stateside sales have been, it's growing even faster outside of the US market.

Tim Beyers: Yes, and it appears that Vyvgart is a positioning to capture? Do I have this right, Karl, 50% market share in CIDP? That is an extraordinary number.

Karl Thiel: You are right. Yes, but any market this good attracts a lot of competitors and there are some very serious ones that could be better than Vyvgart.

Rick Munarriz: Yes, but US accounts for more than 80% of current product sales of the Netherlands-based company. That's a lot in the recipe of a foreign company relying largely on the US market for sales.

Tim Beyers: Yes, but it does look like in Q1, there was a bit of seasonal insurance reverification delays and increased Medicare Part D utilization leading to higher discounts, missing investor expectations. The regulators aren't always friendly with this one.

Karl Thiel: Seen.

Tim Beyers: Excellent. Karl, [laughs] you did it. There's your first. There's your first. Now, we're going to go to the expert here, Rick. Celsius? Let's do it.

Rick Munarriz: Celsius is a disruptive leader in the growing functional beverage market.

Tim Beyers: Yes, and I see this every day, Rick. Every time I get on a bus or train to commute into the office, I see at least one Celsius drink, not only on the way, but in the office where I end up going to work. Celsius, no matter what we say about its growth rates, it is everywhere.

Karl Thiel: Yes, and it widened its footprint by acquiring Alani Nu and managing the Rockstar beverage and deepened its steak with Pepsi.

Tim Beyers: Yes, and that PepsiCo deal, PepsiCo increases stake in Celsius from 8% to 11%, getting a great distribution partner even deeper in exchange for Celsius taking over that Rockstar brand. Yes, and the company's international division grew by 37% to 18.6 million. That's including expansion in Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and France. Successful global market penetration is happening.

Karl Thiel: Yes, but Celsius risks cannibalizing its brands with this much larger portfolio of beverages.

Rick Munarriz: Yes, but after three years of revenue more than doubling, investors saw how fickle the energy drink market can be for Celsius last year.

Tim Beyers: Yes, but US revenue did plunge 33% year-over-year to 247 million. Good foreign revenue not as great on domestic shores.

Karl Thiel: Seen.

Tim Beyers: Let's talk Salesforce. Salesforce has closed over 12,500 agent force deals since launch, and more than 6,000 of those are being paid deals. Salesforce is really ramping up. It's AI.

Karl Thiel: Yes, and in their Q2 for fiscal 2026, they raise their full-year revenue guidance to over $41 billion, and are looking at improvements in operating margins and solid cash flow growth.

Rick Munarriz: Yes, and salesforce.com has a strong track record of making shrewd acquisitions that it can amplify through its own ecosystem.

Tim Beyers: Yes, but Salesforce is now trading for a premium that is going to be hard to justify as the AI hype starts to die down, even with all that free cash flow.

Karl Thiel: Yes, but they confirmed 4,000 job cuts in 2025 and some hiring pauses showing some struggles underneath the hood.

Rick Munarriz: Yes, but after decades and I mean 2-3 decades of annual double-digit growth sales consistently, revenue rose at a single digit clip in fiscal 2025.

Tim Beyers: Seen. Fools, that's Yes And. Let us know what you think about the Yes And game. Let us know what you think about our broken breakers and which broken breakers make the most sense for you. Do check out when you want to hear more, if you want to hear more, about dark clouds you can see through and all of the various Rule Breaker trades, please check out David Gardner's new book, Rule Breaker Investing. For those who want to learn the long-term benefits of compounding in high growth, high quality companies, it's a great place to start.

Thanks to Rick and Karl for joining me today. As always, people of 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 or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards. It is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for information purposes only to see our full advertising disclosure. Please check out our show notes. Please also tune in tomorrow when Emily will have a bit more Rule Breakery content for you. For Rick Munarriz, Karl Thiel, our engineer is Dan Boyd, and our producer is Anand Chokkavelu, I'm Tim Beyers. Fools, see you again soon. Fool on, everyone.

Karl Thiel has positions in Bristol Myers Squibb and The Trade Desk. Rick Munarriz has positions in Celsius and The Trade Desk. Tim Beyers has positions in Amazon, Progyny, and Salesforce. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon, Argenx Se, Bristol Myers Squibb, Celsius, Progyny, Q2, Salesforce, and The Trade Desk. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.