Stock Club EP#178: Brian Feroldi's Stock Picking Strategy to Beat the Market
Join Mike as we take a glimpse into Brian's remarkable journey from an uninformed investor to a stock market savant. We uncover the secrets to his success and explore his perspective on the stock investing world.
Oct. 5, 2023

Key Highlights:

    1. Brian Feroldi's Financial Journey

      Discover how Brian's passion for finance was ignited by his parents' investment missteps. From humble beginnings as an uninformed investor, Brian transformed into a stock market expert, and now he’s out to demystify the market for all investors.

    1. The Influence of Healthcare on Investing

      We delve into Brian's unique healthcare background and how it shaped his investing career. Learn how his transition from healthcare management to the medical device industry steered him toward the stock market. Uncover the advantages his healthcare expertise offers in the world of investing, and explore Warren Buffet's concept of circular competence.

    2. Investment Insights and Tools

      Brian shares his invaluable investment checklists and often-overlooked metrics for making sound investment decisions. Explore topics such as investing in technology and healthcare stocks, valuations, megatrends, and get Brian's take on PayPal as a potential value opportunity or pitfall

    The interview with Brian was really insightful. Dive in, and we’re absolutely sure you’ll gain knowledge that will boost your confidence as an investor. It’s 35 minutes very well spent!

Transcript:

Brian Feroldi: 0:00

I've been an active stock picker for almost 20 years now, and after several years of doing it very unsuccessfully, I joined the Motley Fool and my education just exploded up from there and I became far more interested in stock picking than I was prior to that. A single decision at a single customer, for any reason, essentially blows a hole in the investment thesis for a company. The price of the stock and the performance of the business are 100% linked in the long term.

Michael O’Mahoney: 0:35

Hi there and welcome to Stock Club, a podcast brought to you by MyWallStreet. I'm Mike and today I'm joined by a very special guest, brian Feraldi. Brian is the author of Why Does the Stock Market Go Up and Writes the Weekly Newsletter Long Term Mindset. Before we get into the interview with Brian, just a quick word from our friends at Vodafone Business. Vodafone have recently launched their V Hub Digital Advises you service, offering Irish businesses of all sizes free one-to-one digital support and advice. You don't even have to be a Vodafone business customer to avail of this service. Search Vodafone V Hub to book a call with one of the V Hub digital experts and we will leave a link in the show notes for today's episode. Brian, welcome back to Stock Club. It's a pleasure to have you. How is it all over in the States?

Brian Feroldi: 1:14

Mike, everything is going great here. Thank you for having me again.

Michael O’Mahoney: 1:18

I'm really excited to have you on the show. We had you back about a year and a half ago maybe and it was one of our most popular episodes. So I know the listeners like you and it was just important because I don't think they like me anymore so we gotta keep them on side. But I love what you've done with your voice and the education around investing and stuff. But I'd like to go back to the very start and talk about that moment that sparked your interest in investing in the first foundation, we'll say.

Brian Feroldi: 1:49

Sure. So I grew up in a household that was very good with personal finances. My parents both earned incomes. My parents both lived below their means. My parents both were good savers, so I had a really good foundation in my life for good personal finance habits. However, my parents were not good with investing. The idea of taking your savings and growing it over time was not something that they excelled at. They were both big believers in putting your money into checking accounts and savings accounts at banks, but nothing basically more sophisticated than that. My dad did dabble in individual stocks a little bit, but I think that he was largely doing the exact same thing that I did at the start, which was buying garbage penny stocks with the hopes of essentially trading them to be higher and not doing any fundamental research on the companies themselves, which, to be fair, was very hard to do as an individual investor in the 1990s. So I had a good personal finance background. When I graduated from college and started earning a real income, if you will, in 2004, my dad handed me a copy of a book, the first book I ever read that was specifically about money and wealth creation, and that was called Rich Dad, Poor Dad, by Robert Kiyosaki. For whatever reason, I was just naturally hardwired to basically ingest that information and want to devour as much financial content as I could get my hands on. That book introduced several concepts to me that were completely foreign to me at the time, such as anybody can build wealth in one generation, your house is a liability, not an asset, the rich think differently about money, the rich own businesses, et cetera, and those concepts truly blew my mind and they kick-started a love affair that continues to this day, with me trying to educate myself about everything related to money investing in finance that I can Now. From there I graduated to reading a slew of other books. I looked at investing in real estate, I looked at investing in laundromats, I looked at investing in commodities and I looked at investing in the stock market. The stock market was the best match I found over time for my personality and income. Real estate is a great asset class, but it takes a lot of money and a lot of education to get going in real estate. With the stock market, even back in the mid-2000s, you could start with just a few hundred dollars and kind of teach yourself as you go, and I also learned that I don't like to manage other people, so the idea of owning real estate and dealing with tenants really turned me off. So I found that the best asset class that matches my personality is the stock market, and I've been sticking with it ever since.

Michael O’Mahoney: 4:43

So this is putting you on the spot a small bit, but if you could distil your investment philosophy into a sentence, what? What would that look like?

Brian Feroldi: 4:50

sure it invests in high quality, high growth, long duration assets and holds them until they're no longer great.

Michael O’Mahoney: 4:59

Nice, I like that. It's a long sentence now, but I'll take it. You know it's so. I think your catchphrase is. One of your goals or mission statements is to demystify the stock market. What do you think is the most important step? And demystify in the stock market for investors, either new or old?

Brian Feroldi: 5:18

Yeah, I firmly believe that the stock market, specifically the US stock market, is the greatest wealth creation machine ever Made. It is a system, it is a marketplace that allows ordinary people with ordinary incomes to generate Extraordinary wealth within a single lifetime. It's truly a miracle. When you step back and think about it, however, I would argue that 90 to 95 percent of the general population are. They know, they've heard of what the stock market is, they've heard of what the Dow Jones is, but they know nothing Beyond that point. Even people that have money in the markets through a 401k or an IRA. I don't think that many of them could pass a very simple test asking questions like what is a stock? What is the New York stock exchange? Why do stocks have value? How, who? Or how about this one? Who gets the money when you buy stocks on an exchange? A lot of people think that the stock, that the money you paid, goes to the company itself. So I've made it my mission in my career mission statement to demystify the stock market, and I do my best to provide simple education that helps people to better understand the greatest wealth creation machine of all time.

Michael O’Mahoney: 6:38

That's great, and so are you. You didn't originally study finance, but you went back into the finance MBA and the route you've taken is very much from an individual investor's perspective. It's not from a finance Type will say you know a financial MBA, the likely route to go down is hedge fund or investment banking or whatever else. How did you settle on this kind of Educational path? Will call it yeah so.

Brian Feroldi: 7:05

So when I was in college, I had no idea what I wanted to do for a living. So my parents suggested to me which I think was good advice. Just go with a generalised business degree. Right, that is a generic enough Major that you can get your hands in a bunch of different aspects of business and you can kind of learn what you like Front from there. So I thought that that was a decent enough idea. So I graduated. When I graduated in 2004, I had a business degree and my concentration was in healthcare management. That seems very specific. The reason that I chose that as my major is that if I did that, if I said that that was my major, I would save five thousand dollars per year. I was like okay. I guess that's my major. I did something, a lot of people that take that major go into healthcare consulting or they go into, like the insurance world, and I certainly tried to get my Foot in the door with that when I first graduated, but it did not. It did not come to be, but I did end up working for a startup medical device company Right out of college, which proved to be a fortuitous Decision. But when I graduated from college I still had no idea what I wanted to do, or really no idea what interests me in my career, and it was only after working for a couple years and learning about investing Did I discover that I was extremely interested and extremely passionate about investing in the stock market. I had no idea how to turn that into a career, so I was mostly just doing it as a hobby and studying it for fun on the sidelines. About 10 years into my career in the medical device world, the company I was working for changed their policy when they basically said if you go to get an MBA, we'll essentially pay 100% of the tuition at the time and I kind of thought, well, I don't really need an MBA, but I can't pass up the opportunity to essentially effectively get it for a few thousand dollars out of pocket, considering that my company is going to pay for such a big part of the tuition. So when I went back to get my MBA, I decided to concentrate in the thing that interested me at the time, which was finance, and at that point I'd been investing in the stock market and studying financial statements for more than 10 years, so it was interesting to see how it's taught academically about investing and reading financial statements versus what I'd learned just on my own.

Michael O’Mahoney: 9:32

It's interesting how those small decisions of tuition costs and all the rest can dictate such a big part of your life down the road. It's that branch theory, isn't it? Yep, absolutely so. With your background in healthcare stocks, I know that that's one area of the stock market that has interested you. How do you feel that has, we'll say, given you an edge over other investors, because healthcare in particular is an incredibly complex industry. I know some of the largest US companies in particular are healthcare stocks, but it's murky waters for someone who doesn't know well enough, I'd imagine.

Brian Feroldi: 10:08

Absolutely. Healthcare is, I think, something like 17% or 18% of the GDP of the United States. It's an absolutely massive industry and it's extremely complex, but there are hundreds of billions, if not trillions probably trillions of dollars at this point that are spent on healthcare every year in the United States, so it's just a massive market. Now, my interest in healthcare, or my expertise in healthcare, really came as a direct result of the job that I had. As I said, when I graduated from college. I was working for a startup medical device company, and when I joined that company we were pre-FDA approval, so no revenue, no product on the market. We were just in the R&D stage and soon after I joined we did get FDA approval and about a year into my employment we launched the product to the market. My initial role with them was in the marketing department, so I was in charge of making brochures, the website, the user guide, all kinds of labelling and stuff like that related to marketing. But after a year I switched over to being on the sales team and that was a wonderful decision from both a career and an education perspective, because I saw firsthand just how complicated the United States healthcare market was and, more importantly, from an investing perspective just how loyal healthcare providers are to certain products or services and how difficult it can bet them to be to change their habits. So I was in the sales for this company for just about 10 years and it was my job to go out to healthcare providers and convince them to stop using a device that they'd used for a decade or more and to start using my devices, and I learned firsthand just how high the switching costs are in the medical device industry. And if you look back at history, the medical device industry has been historically a pretty good place to put capital. The margins are very high. The spending is essentially recession proof, because nobody's going to not get a medical procedure done just because the economy is doing bad. The switching costs are pretty high and those factors generally lead to high returns on capital for medical device companies and, in turn, pretty good stock returns. So I'd invested in companies like Dexcom, intuitive Surgical and the likes, and those companies have been phenomenal, phenomenal long-term holdings. So when I started to become a writer for the Motley Fool in 2015, naturally they said well, how about you focus on the healthcare industry, since you have some background in it? So I started studying insurance companies in more detail, hospitals in more detail and, of course, medical device companies as well.

Michael O’Mahoney: 13:03

Yeah, and it feeds into the Warren Buffett concept of circular competence. You can legitimately say you have an edge there because of that experience and because of being in the room and seeing those switching costs in the various entries for a smaller company like yourself and that goes into any investor listening. If you are in your nine to five and you have that informational advantage or operational advantage or whatever it is if you work in a cybersecurity company, you know that industry better and that's where you can really get an edge. That's what Warren Buffett is saying with that circular competence theory. So that's great to hear in action, I suppose, and how it dictated your investing career. Okay, let's get into investing checklists. For our listeners who don't know what the Feralty Quality Score is, and I don't know, that could be a very long answer because I've seen the spreadsheet and it's extensive.

Brian Feroldi: 14:00

So I've been an active stock picker for almost 20 years now, and after several years of doing it very unsuccessfully, I joined the Motley Fool and my education just exploded from there and I became far more interested in stock picking than I was prior to that. Now, if you join any stock picking service out there, very quickly you start to learn that there are far more ideas for your money than there are actual good places that you should put your money, and at the time I felt like I was sipping from a fire hose. The number of recommendations and stocks that I should buy was far higher than my capacity to actually buy them, and what I was trying to do at the time was keep everything in my head where I was like oh, I really like this company's gross margin and I like their leadership position, but I like that this company is growing faster and it's profitable. But I like that this company has a founder-led management team and I'm worried about that. This company has customer concentration issues. Finally, I got smart enough to say to myself maybe I should write this down and actually create a system for myself for picking investments. So I've now done this. I've now iterated on this checklist that you're speaking of multiple times. I'm currently on version three of it and it's more battle-tested than it's been in the past. But, broadly speaking, I have a set of criteria that best match what I personally am looking for in an investment, and whenever I come across a new stock idea or a new business, I take that company through my investing checklist and I ask myself things like what do the financial statements look like? I want to see a strong balance sheet, a high gross margin, high returns on capital, free cash flow earnings and earnings per share growth. And I ask what's the competitive advantage of this company? What's the moat? Does it have a network effect mode, a switching cost mode, a cost advantage mode, an intangible mode or counter positioning? And, importantly, what's the direction of that moat? I ask myself what's the long-term growth potential of this company? Is it growing organically or via acquisition? Is it a top dog and first mover in its industry? Does it have operating leverage in the business? Does it have demonstrated signs of optionality, et cetera, et cetera. So my list is pretty long and as I go down and fill it in I get an idea for how high of a match this investment is for what I personally am looking for Now. After that's done, I then take it through my anti-checklist, or something that I call the gauntlet, which is basically a list of criteria that turn me off as an investor. So for me that's things like accounting irregularities. If you have accounting irregularities you're dead to me. I'm not interested in you. If I can't trust the numbers, I'm not going to make an investment in the business. I don't like any customer concentration or any supplier concentration. I don't like single points of failure in businesses. I don't like it when a company is in an industry that's being disrupted. I don't like it when it depends on outside market prices for success, such as interest rates or oil prices. I don't like it when a company has high stock-based compensation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So with my checklist, I can now take any company I've never come across, run it through my checklist in the matter of about an hour or so, and at the end of that process I get a very clear idea for is this company a match for what I'm looking for or is it not? And then I just research further the ones that are best matched and wait until I think they're trading at attractive prices and add them to my portfolio.

Michael O’Mahoney: 17:46

There you go, simple as Out. Of the metrics you look at, which do you think are most often overlooked by investors from that checklist, Overlooked by investors?

Brian Feroldi: 17:58

That's a hard one to say. I would say customer concentration is a pretty serious risk in my opinion. Essentially, when one company gets 10% or more of its revenue from a single source, that can be a big risk to me as an investor and I've gotten burned in the past by buying companies that get like 50% of their revenue from companies like Walmart or from Apple, and that means that a single decision at a single customer for any reason essentially blows a hole in the investment thesis for a company. Another one that I think is overlooked is what's called optionality. It's just what does the company have the ability or a demonstrated history of rolling out new products or new services that open up needle-moving revenue opportunities? When I look back at the biggest winners of all time that I have, that's companies like Mercado Libre, Amazon and Tesla, and all three of those companies, when I bought them, now look completely different from a revenue perspective than they did when I initially bought them, because they were internally developing products and services that opened up brand new revenue opportunities down the road. The classic example is AWS at Amazon. When I bought Amazon, it was a leading e-commerce retailer and things like Amazon Prime and AWS didn't really exist at all, but those have now become major contributors to both the company's top and bottom line. And, more recently, advertising, which wasn't even on my radar at all when I was an initial investor in Amazon, is now becoming a significant source of high-margin recurring revenue for Amazon With Tesla. When I bought Tesla, the only product it had was the Model S, and now it has four models that are on the road and many more models to come. Tesla probably has the highest optionality of any company I've ever studied as an investor, and Mercado Libre when I bought it was just like the eBay of Latin America and it was just starting to get into the payments business. You can make a strong argument now that MercadoLibre is more of a payments company than it is an e-commerce company. So I think that trying to find investments that have strong optionality, the ability to launch new products and new services internally that generate needle moving that one's key needle moving growth is a really underlooked way to invest.

Michael O’Mahoney: 20:38

That's great, and three very subtle, humble brags there showing you when you invested in those three businesses. Okay, so I want to talk about AI. Have you ever thought about coding that checklist into some sort of Brian Bosch? That almost does it for you.

Brian Feroldi: 20:57

I have not, but the AI tools that are out there are getting easier all the time, so I guess that's something that could be done in the future, but that's well outside my area of expertise.

Michael O’Mahoney: 21:09

Yeah, you're happy to get down in the nitty gritty for now.

Brian Feroldi: 21:14

Absolutely. Are you talking about essentially encoding something that goes out to the financial statements or goes out to the annual report and actually pulls the data in in a more systematised way?

Michael O’Mahoney: 21:24

Yeah, exactly. You can just feed it a ticker and it'll spit out your parolee score at the bottom.

Brian Feroldi: 21:29

Yeah, I don't know if that would be possible because a lot of the things on my scoring system are subjective by their very nature. I don't think any AI would be able to tell you oh, this company has a great network effect working for it, or this company is counter positioning in its industry. Some of these things could certainly be automated. For example, I like to check if the company has a history of exceeding Wall Street's estimates? Does the company have a history of outperforming the S&P 500? What is the company's glass door rating? So some things on my checklist could certainly be automated. But I actually find there's a lot of value in doing it manually, because it takes time to really develop a thesis and, importantly, believe that thesis on the inside and to have, and have to have, conviction in a company. I don't think I could do that by simply reading an AI generated report. I would still personally want to do the work manually myself, but using AI as an initial extra screening tool before I would take the time to do it on a company. That makes sense to me.

Michael O’Mahoney: 22:29

Yeah, that's interesting how you said that, how you wouldn't maybe be able to trust that the AI is right, because it reminds me of Jim Simons from Renaissance Technology. So he's one of the early leaders in quant investing and I remember he used the models to make money, but he wasn't sure why and he couldn't sit right with it. He's making hundreds of millions, but he would stop it and make sure he could figure out exactly why the money was being made and then he could eventually trust it. So it's interesting where you're talking about. There is definitely a place for AI when it comes to analysis and everything, but the human touch is certainly needed, I think, and I would agree with you there too.

Brian Feroldi: 23:11

Yeah, well, let's say you did develop an AI system and the AI said this stock is a great long term buy and you go out and buy that stock and then that stock falls 30%. What do you do then? If you don't have the conviction to know what is going on and is the long term thesis in this company busted? You're going to be in a place where you have no clue what to do next and the odds of you panic selling out of that investment, I would think, would skyrocket at that point at least they certainly would for me. So, taking the time upfront to know why you're investing, what could go wrong and really developing a process for yourself, that seems like a lot of work, but it pays dividends for years to come.

Michael O’Mahoney: 23:52

Yeah, you can't borrow convictions, Isn't that the saying? Right, okay, we're going to do a bit of a quick fire around, so I'm just going to throw a few questions at you. You can just give me one sentence answer or a fast answer. We'll call it that all right, okay, so first off, your best investment decision Buying Tesla. Buying Tesla. Do you want to give a year just to give a proper break? 2012? Very nice, 2012. Okay, your worst investment decision.

Brian Feroldi: 24:24

Jeez, how much time do you have Using leverage, using a synthetic long, to buy Kinder Morgan?

Michael O’Mahoney: 24:32

Okay, very good. Most important metric in your checklist?

Brian Feroldi: 24:38

Boy, that's a hard one.

Michael O’Mahoney: 24:39

Moat, Moat, nice On moats. Then which moat would you think is the most profitable? We'll call it for an investment Network Effect. Network Effect, very nice. Okay, your biggest missed opportunity. If you could go back in time and push the buy button or the sell button.

Brian Feroldi: 25:00

So Dexcom? I owned a company called Dexcom, a medical device company, for about six weeks and that turned out to be and it has been 50 bags since then. So I had a firsthand understanding of how good that company was doing, how fast it was growing, everything that should have been a top holding for me and I should have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in that company by now if I knew what I was doing.

Michael O’Mahoney: 25:27

I think I would note to the red cent how much I would have had if that was me. Are you actually speaking of Dexcom? Are you worried about the iPhone? Sorry, not iPhone. What Apple are doing in the space now with the Apple Watch, do you?

Brian Feroldi: 25:41

think that, oh, potentially.

Michael O’Mahoney: 25:42

Yeah.

Brian Feroldi: 25:46

Yeah, I mean Apple is always to be considered. But breaking into healthcare is not easy and I think Dexcom has done a nice job about building itself. It's always been on the leader from a technology perspective. But, to be honest, I have not studied what Apple is doing in the space all that closely.

Michael O’Mahoney: 26:03

Okay, here's your favourite book on investing.

Brian Feroldi: 26:09

I'll go with Warren Buffett and the interpretation of financial statements.

Michael O’Mahoney: 26:13

Very nice. The most common mistake you see investors make Selling too early. Selling too early yeah, I think that's almost verbatim. Either the biggest mistake people make themselves or the biggest mistake they see other people make is the early sale.

Brian Feroldi: 26:29

The one thing you wish everyone knew about investing is that the price of the stock and the performance of the business are 100% linked in the long term.

Michael O’Mahoney: 26:42

This is a tough one now, maybe to get into one sentence. But what makes a company antifragile? I don't know. This is more Brian. Stofell's investment thesis, but I like the term. Cash and options. If you can only invest in technology or healthcare stocks from here on out, which would you choose?

Brian Feroldi: 27:03

Technology.

Michael O’Mahoney: 27:05

What non-investing activity do you find to be the most beneficial to your investing career? Walking, walking, yeah, keep it simple. And then, just to finish up, your favourite writer or financial commentator right now? Morgan Housel, Morgan Housel, yeah, very good. Okay, we're going to finish up. I'm going to ask you and I know this is very reductive from all you've told and everything but if you can, because this is what the people tune in for to give us some of your favourite stocks right now, investing trends or even areas to avoid. You've carte blanche to go ahead with that one.

Brian Feroldi: 27:42

Yeah, sure. So in the last 19 years, we've seen some. I've invested through some interesting market cycles. The thing that the market taught investors during the 2010s was essentially de-emphasize valuation and chase growth at all costs and in a zero interest rate environment. That investing style worked extremely well. Over the last year, with interest rates finally rising, with inflation finally coming back, interest rates have to be considered and valuation has to be considered now, far more than at any time over the last 15 years or so. So I am more focused on valuation today than I have been historically. But even with that being said, I personally still like to invest in underlying megatrends and to ride out megatrends for a long period of time, and I still think that e-commerce is a megatrend that is out there. That will be the gift that keeps on giving to investors for decades to come. I think you can also make the same case with FinTech. There are a lot of great financial services companies out there and financial technology companies out there, and I think the move towards digital payments is still in the very early innings of its growth cycle. So those two categories have experienced gut-wrenching volatility in both directions over the last three years, but I still think both of them are a great place to look for investment ideas.

Michael O’Mahoney: 29:14

For established trends like that, would you look for international participants? So Macauro Liber is a great example, but you could go as far as C-limited over in Southeast Asia. I know TikTok is having a huge influence in their TikTok shop, especially in China. Is seeing a trend that you know works, we'll say, in the US, maybe developing in a fast-growing nation? Is that a tactic you would use there?

Brian Feroldi: 29:44

I think investing in foreign companies does come with its own set of challenges. They don't think of shareholders the same way. They don't have the same shareholder protections that we do in the US. So it is my preference, whenever possible, to buy companies that are listed on US exchanges, because then they have to comply with GAP accounting and US disclosure standards. But yes to your point if a trend works in the United States, it can be a great trend to look for in other countries. My personal preference is to buy companies that are in the US, that are succeeding in the US, that are taking their technologies, developing the US and the companies themselves are commercialising them internationally. That's my favourite way to play the international markets is through US-based companies, but in some cases going directly to those companies, such as Mercado Libre, can make sense.

Michael O’Mahoney: 30:34

Okay, I'm going to put you on the spot. My favourite e-commerce stock right now.

Brian Feroldi: 30:38

Mercado Libre.

Michael O’Mahoney: 30:39

Are you going to say the same for Fintech?

Brian Feroldi: 30:43

Oh for Fintech. Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, it's also a great Fintech. It's also a great Fintech play. One company that I know is a great business and it's really down in its luck but I've never studied it closely is Adyen. So that's on my research list and I know a lot of investors that I respect have a huge amount of interest in and have bought shares of Adyen. It's not one that I've studied closely, but it's very high up on my research list.

Michael O’Mahoney: 31:11

Absolutely. I've got so much attention on it now. I think it was one of those high flyers and a lot of people saw it as Europe's version of stripe bush. I think it's down about 50% since its most recent earnings, about 80% From all-time highs. So I think people are smelling an opportunity there. But what would you say, especially in terms of FinTech? The general discourse is going along the lines of Maybe it's becoming commoditized in the payment space and payment processors. What are your thoughts on that?

Brian Feroldi: 31:41

That's it. That is entirely possible, but I think that there's a lot to the payment processes. When you think about Making digital payments securely, fraud-free, and doing that very easily is something that I think companies are going to do. That's a core service that companies are going to need for years to come, a ditto for transferring money to Friends and and family. So there is an argument made that there's been so much innovation in the space that margins are going to come down. Take rates are going to come, come down, and if that is true, then FinTech might not be a great place to have capital a long term, but I still, personally, visa and mastercard are two of my biggest, two of my biggest positions Personally, and both of those companies, I think, are well positioned to continue to succeed, no matter kind of what happens with the level Below them. But still, even with that in mind, I think the FinTech area is a very interesting place for investors to look and still could have long-term potential.

Michael O’Mahoney: 32:39

Okay, I'm gonna ask you one last question now, and then I'm gonna let you go, because I know I've put you on the spot about five times already, but we're talking FinTech, paypal. Do you think deep value territory, value trap somewhere in between?

Brian Feroldi: 32:52

I own PayPal. My hunch is that it's a value opportunity, not a value trap, and my money is where my mouth is on that one. But I will say that the market has really, really punished that company. So it's possible that I'm overlooking something.

Michael O’Mahoney: 33:08

Okay, thank you very much, Brian. It's been an absolute pleasure. We will hopefully see you again on stock club soon. Take it easy, all right. And actually, if you want to Tell people where you're writing, so you have your book, why does the stock market go up? It's out on Amazon and all the rest, and then your newsletter, long-term mind-sets. Is there anything else you want to plug where you're?

Brian Feroldi: 33:29

yeah, well, we mentioned my investing checklist before. I do make that freely downloadable if people are interested. So it's just Brian for all the comm backslash checklist. If you could throw a link in the show notes to that, that would be great.

Michael O’Mahoney: 33:41

Perfect. All right, you see everything in the show. That's Brian. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure and thanks everyone for listening. Remember, if you'd like us to talk about any stocks in particular, you can message us on Twitter at my wall street HQ, on tick tock, at my wall series. Simply just email us a pod at my wall street Com. Thank you very much for tuning in this week and we will talk to you again. Just a quick interruption here to remind you about our friends and sponsors at Vodafone business. Vodafone have recently launched their V Hub digital advisory service, offering Irish businesses of all sizes free one-to-one digital support and advice. You don't even have to be a Vodafone business customer to avail of this service. So just search Vodafone V hub to book a call with one of the V hub digital experts and we will leave a link in the show notes for today's episode.



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