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Walker Webcast: The Motley Fool’s Founders Believe in Buying to Hold
Since the largest tech companies now dominate the S&P 500, it’s fitting that The Motley Fool co-founders Tom and David Gardner, Willy Walker’s guests on the latest Walker Webcast, provide their investing advice largely through digital media.
The Gardner brothers, and their company, can bear first-hand witness to a previous stock market cycle that saw tech startups grab the lion’s share of attention—then crash and burn. However, they don’t see the likes of Alphabet, Apple and Facebook going the way of many of those long-vanished startups 20 years ago.
For one thing, as Walker & Dunlop CEO Willy Walker pointed out, the Gardners as investors have maintained long-term positions—10 years-plus—in these household-name tech stocks. “We really love the idea of buying to hold,” said David Gardner.
For a long-term hold to be viable, though, the company behind the stock needs to remain innovative and relevant. Walker cited two favorite stock picks of his grandfather, General Electric and Alcoa. Neither is currently trading near its all-time high, and David Gardner noted that Jack Welch, GE’s longtime CEO, favored a “command and control” business model that didn’t keep up with the times.
Going forward, financial advice will increasingly be provided and received through digital means, which Tom Gardner called “a tremendous tailwind” for The Motley Fool and similar platforms. Increasingly, digital media are following a subscription-based, rather than advertising-based, model.
Success in such a format, Tom Gardner said, depends on “excellent retention rates” among subscribers. It also means striving to eliminate friction in the user experience. That’s an area where Walker and the Gardners agreed that Zoom—a stock-market success story whose CEO, Eric Yuan, was a recent Walker Webcast guest—has managed to excel amid a steep uptick in usage during the pandemic.
The Gardners see commercial real estate remaining relevant post-pandemic, although they anticipate that some of the changes that have occurred in daily life over the past six months will be permanent.
One area where they don’t see change occurring anytime soon is in their 27-year-old company’s distinctive name, an allusion to a court jester in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” who was able to speak truth to power and get away with it. “There’s such a power in standing out,” said Tom Gardner.
Replays of the Sept. 30 webcast are available by clicking here.
For comments, questions or concerns, please contact Paul Bubny
- ◦Economy
