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Brendan Byrnes: Two hundred picks overall in Rule Breakers; 86 are making money, just 75 are beating the market, so you're looking at maybe around a third or so, yet the service overall, if you average out all the picks, has been destroying the market.
How does that work, and how should Rule Breaking investors view that, as far as how they need to invest in these companies?
Tom Gardner: First of all, I think most enterprising thinkers out there in the world should be a subscriber to Rule Breakers, and I think they should be buying stocks in that service. It is a wonderful way to get a sampling of what's happening in the world, of the new things that are being created out there.
But when you make investments in high-growth, innovative up-and-comers, you're going to end up with a lower success rate. You're getting up to the plate, and you're not swinging like Rod Carew of the 1970s, trying to hit singles.
What ends up happening, as you said, three out of 10 beat the market, four out of 10 make money. Six out of my brother's 10 recommendations -- out of every 10 -- is losing money, and, in fact, let me say this. For a nine-month period in Rule Breakers, two picks per month, 18 recommendations in a row, all of them lost money, including a company like Pacific Biosciences in California, that's down 90%.
But alongside that, you have returns of 41% versus 16% for the market. This is what happens in the marketplace, when you're looking at high-growth, venture capital-like investing in the public markets.
Just like venture capitalists, we're going to interview some venture capitalists in Rule Breakers, and we're going to bring that up on Fool.com as well, and you're going to learn that if they get two or three right out of 10, they're extremely happy with the results, and those results are two times the market's average.
But you've got to get in the game and understand how to make those investments. You've got to buy more than 10 of these stocks. You've got to hold them for more than two or three years, and what you're going to see is that some of them are going to turn into five-, 10-, and 20-baggers, and that's going to make up for the volume of stocks that are losing to the market, or not making money.
This is the best performing investor in Motley Fool history, David Gardner, and it's a very unorthodox style of investing, but it's actually pretty methodical.
Some people think it's fairy dust, and how does he do it? But he's got some criteria that he teaches in the service, and I think anybody who's using that service can get results that are as good or better than my brother's results.
Rule Breakers is definitely an interesting way to invest. It's not typical. It's not common value investing that you see Warren Buffett and others do.
