Time to Buy Live Nation Entertainment Stock?

In this segment from Rule Breaker Investing, Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner dives into one of five stocks that could earn a spot in your portfolio -- his final pick is Live Nation (LYV -2.37%). The company organizes major live events all over the world, and in 2016, its shows attracted more people than NFL, NBA, and NHL games combined. 

Tune in to learn more.

A full transcript follows the video.

This podcast was recorded on April 19, 2017.

David Gardner: Which brings me to our final stock this week and that's stock number five and it's Live Nation (LYV -2.37%) . Live Nation, ticker symbol LYV. This is a $6 billion company. Today as I speak the stock is trading just under $31 a share.

So Live Nation -- you might well already be a customer. I bet you are. You might have the Ticketmaster app on your phone. A lot of people do. Live Nation Entertainment was formed by the merger, some years ago, of Live Nation with Ticketmaster.

Now Live Nation is the business that conducts the concerts. The big events. They own some of the venues, or they have relationships with them, but they sign up artists like U2, or Madonna, and then they primarily just promote them for those live events that they do.

And that's where a lot of the money in a "we used to make more money on CDs" world that we live in today -- that's where a lot of the money is made today [and that's] concerts. And not only do you have the Live Nation portion of the business, but you have the very complementary Ticketmaster part of the business just selling the tickets to those events.

So we're talking about the number one global player in this business. A company that invests heavily back into itself, so it doesn't show a lot of profit. It doesn't really look like it's making money. It's making a ton of cash flow. It tends to invest that back heavily into itself to continue expanding. More people attended Live Nation events, shows, last year than all of the people attending the NFL games here in the U.S. (American football, the NFL), the NBA basketball games, and the NHL hockey games, all of those combined.

So you can see we have a company that does a very substantial business. It is clearly the top dog and the first mover in this area, and I don't see anybody unseating them any time soon. And yes, there are more global possibilities for this company, as well. So that's Live Nation.

All right, I mentioned at the start that there would be an as yet, unnamed theme. What are we going to call this episode of Rule Breaker Investing ? And you know, ultimately I'm going to leave that to my friend, Rick Engdahl, my producer, who typically names most of these. So as you're downloading one of our podcasts, if there's a cute name or something that jumps out at you, that's Rick's work. So I'm going to ask Rick -- not here on air -- I'm going to ask him to think about how to name this, but I'm going to tell Rick and you, right now, what our theme was this month.

So if you take my five stocks again, the ticker symbols (AAXN, PAC, RMD, ISRG, and LYV) and you take the first letter of each of those ticker symbols, it spells "April". And darn it, we're in April.

So I'm being cute. Having a little bit of fun. But there is a point to this madness to my April stocks. And the point is that each of these stocks comes from what we call here at The Motley Fool our Supernova Universe. Supernova is one of our premium services. It's one of our higher-end services.

I know many of you are members -- I would love for all of you to become members over the course of time -- but all the Supernova Universe comprises is the picks that I've made for 10+ years in both Stock Advisor and Rule Breakers . And when I add all my picks together and bring them into one universe, I call it the Supernova Universe. And my point in selecting five stocks, almost at random from that universe [is] just trying to spell out an acrostic as a cute way to do a theme for this week.

I believe that in this universe of approximately 200 stocks, basically I think ... Let's go back to the night skies, here. As an investor, I think that this is where you want to train your telescope. There are a lot of stars up there at night. There are a lot of different directions you could look.

But over in this one corner of the sky, you've got my 200 or so companies. And I believe (and we've actually done studies that have shown this) that you can almost randomize your selection from these 200, as long as you pick enough of them (15 or 20), and you will beat the market something like (I'm making up the numbers here [as] they change all the time), 95% or more of the time.

Now by no means is that forward-looking. That's definitely not a promise or guarantee to anybody, but it is reflecting on 10-plus years of work and I think just encouraging you to recognize that in a world where so many other people are just picking index funds, and mailing it in, and Vanguard ... And God bless Vanguard. Vanguard is growing at a faster rate than the rest of its industry combined.

I just think that you and I have an even better chance of beating the market when no one else is trying to do so anymore, it seems. And meanwhile, we've just trained our telescope over to this area of the night skies. So that's kind of how we're having fun here with April.