Key Principles From the New "Motley Fool Investing Guide": Don’t Fear Failure

On this episode of Motley Fool Answers, Alison Southwick and Robert Brokamp are joined for a very special podcast crossover event by Motley Fool co-founder (and host of Rule Breaker Investing) David Gardner. The hook? The Brothers Gardner will this week release the third edition of their now-classic tome, The Motley Fool Investment Guide, updated and revised for the world we're investing in today. It's worth recognizing that the path to winning big in the market is going to include a lot of mistakes, too. Embrace that, says David.

A full transcript follows the video.

This video was recorded on Sept. 5, 2017.

Alison Southwick: Earlier this week you were preparing for an interview with Planet Money, and it was about Marvel, so I was like, "I'm going to go hop on the boards and I'm going see what the chatter was about Marvel right around this time," so the early 2000s. And the chatter was not nice. Like, people were really, really upset, and thinking that this stock was a bad recommendation. And they were so upset. And they were so upset at you, just, like, piling on.

And then toward the end of the piling on of anger, you kind of popped into the conversation, you were like, "Hey, I still believe in this stock." And it's just fascinating, because you mentioned the community of The Motley Fool. It's just fascinating for me to see that probably, over and over again, you get beat up on the boards, and you have to keep saying over and over again, "Listen, I still believe in this company. Hold, hold, hold."

David Gardner: Well, we celebrate the spirit of debate, and we love bulls and bears, and we welcome all to Fool.com. And certainly in the 24 years or so that we've been running our company, I've had any number of debates, often ones that I was wrong on. And so that's why we celebrate that spirit, and it's one of our core values at The Motley Fool, in fact.

So I don't mind that. When I don't like it is if it's nasty or personal. I don't think anybody likes that on the internet. Don't feed the trolls, Answers listeners. Don't feed the trolls. It's always good advice. But I mean, it's fine because I'm wrong a lot. And we've selected five topics that are wholesome, good topics, and I'm bringing you some of my best stories. But I want you to know that I've probably picked more bad stocks than anybody at The Motley Fool. I think that's probably factually true. I'm not looking at the numbers, as I've brought some other numbers here today, but, so, you have to understand that we're willing to be wrong and to lose, and that's a critical part of winning. And winning big, in fact, is to just be willing to look silly -- to, in basketball terms, to stand at the free-throw line, and everyone thought you were a professional, and air-ball it eight times in a row. And people are like, "I'm paying for this?" And sometimes the stock market does that to you, or your own style goes out of style. So I'm willing to look like a small-"f" fool.

And so the good news, I guess, with Marvel -- and I'm looking forward to that; I hope that all comes together at Planet Money, their interest in Marvel -- is that Marvel has turned out to be such a wonderful investment. It's a 54-bagger since I first picked it in 2002. And that was helped somewhat by Disney buying it out a few years ago, but really it was a remarkable story of a company that converted from just comic books to movies and then all the other things that are implied by that, as Iron Man, and The Avengers, and the X-Men came along. It was just an awesome, fun investment to win and make a lot of money on.