How to Manage Your Cost Basis

In this episode of Industry Focus: Tech, Dylan Lewis and Motley Fool analyst Joey Solitro answer listeners' questions. They provide some perspective on owning individual stocks versus investing in an ETF and they talk about how they approach share allocation, some pitfalls new investors must watch out for, and much more.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our quick-start guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.

This video was recorded on May 8, 2020.

Dylan Lewis: It's Friday, May 8^th, and we're talking tech and mailbag questions. I'm your host Dylan Lewis and I'm joined by Fool premium analyst Joey Solitro. Joey, it's been a while, man; how are you doing?

Joey Solitro: It's been a very long time. I've been waiting for this moment; I've just been waiting for you to slack me, asking if I'd be on another show, because I'm finally back from paternity leave and I'm just ready to answer some questions.

Lewis: Yeah, you've had an interesting 2020, huh? [laughs] With everything that's going on in the world, and then you also welcome another member of the family.

Solitro: I was trying to tell everybody on Slack, like, I'm sorry, the market is tanking because I'm gone, but I will be back on March 23^rd. And I mean, I was joking the whole time, or was I? But market bottoms on March 23^rd, I'm back, and then it's like, hey, we're ready to rage, let's do this.

Lewis: [laughs] I love it. And we are going to be taking some questions that we've gotten from listeners today. And some of these are touching on companies that you know quite well. So, I had to have you on, and really, I just love chatting with you, Joey. You know, it's been way too long, we haven't seen each other in months, we haven't talked in, it's probably six weeks at this point, so happy to make it happen.

Solitro: Oh, yeah, I'm ready, let's do this.

Lewis: Alright. So, we're in the mailbag and our first question is from David, and he wrote in to [email protected]; you can always write there if you want to shoot us questions or comments about the show; David asks, "I was wondering how you think about individual stocks that align to a broad thesis versus an ETF that represents the same thesis with a larger portfolio of holdings? For example, having watched as cloud security has moved from the IT pages to the frontpage of the news ... " love that phrasing there, David, " ... as hacks have shifted from isolated security breaches to takeovers of municipal infrastructure. I bought shares of CrowdStrike (CRWD -4.14%), Fortinet (FTNT -1.65%) and Cloudflare (NET -3.90%). I'm now wondering, however, whether at three companies in the space, I'm better off just buying an ETF and not worrying about the individual stocks. I know there are no hard-and-fast rules for any of this, but any perspective would be helpful."

This is an awesome question, because you know, I think, when you start buying multiple stocks in the same space, you're basically creating your own ETF, Joey.

Solitro: Yeah. Exactly. So, I love this question because I think it's one that a lot of people think about, like, "I don't know how to invest in cybersecurity best, should I buy this?" In David's case, I would say, absolutely do not buy an ETF because you have three great picks that you're talking about right here with CrowdStrike, Fortinet and Cloudflare.

Now, if it's something that you know absolutely nothing about, don't even know where to start, like me with biotech in wanting to buy like the IBB [iShares NASDAQ Biotechnology Index] or something like that, it would make sense. But if you can dig deep into those ETFs, see what the largest holdings are, do some research on those companies, you can usually find the companies that you really want to own or that interest you the most to kind of create your own David ETF.

Lewis: Yeah, I love that, it reminds me of what Jason Moser does with his baskets. You know, he's got the War on Cash basket that he talks about all the time on the Monday episode of Industry Focus, and that's Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Square, I think. And you know, there are a lot of other companies that are playing into the theme of cashless society, more and more payments going digital.

But I think with these pretty tight baskets that Jason tends to focus on, I think he has one that's called "Healthcare and Wealth Care" as well, they tend to be small, they're only about four or five stocks. And I think that what we're seeing here with this question from David, he's looking at a couple of specific companies. Jason has the same approach, because when you buy an ETF, you're not just getting a handful of companies, very often you're getting dozens of companies in that ETF.

Solitro: Exactly. So, what I'd like to say, if you can buy three or four companies, you really only need one of those to be those home runs that outweighs the rest, but if you buy an ETF, I mean, yeah, you've got dozens of companies in there, you could have one of those that returns 10,000% over a couple years, but that ETF might not do much because others are going to come down like the value play. So, when I'm thinking cybersecurity, I own CrowdStrike and absolutely love it, because the growth rates are just absurd and it's just the gold standard of cybersecurity right now. So, that's the company I want the most exposure to.

But if I buy an ETF, I'm getting exposure to companies I have zero interest in, like, Palo Alto Networks or something like that. So, I kind of want to find the vertical or the specific company with the highest growth rate that I think can generate the most significant returns going forward, and having exposure to that. And, Dylan, like you're saying how Jason Moser has his War on Cash, like, those are four companies that are just absolute beasts in their space and they can grow for quite a bit of time.

So, I mean, that's not even one where you have to worry about having a massive underperformance out of one of them, but yeah, it's all about picking your horse in the race. And if you can't, and if you're, kind of, like spreading your cash across all of them, yeah, you could win a little bit along the way, but if you want that big winner, I mean, trying to single out the best single opportunity and just pile in.

Lewis: Yeah. And to use the cybersecurity and cloud security space as kind of an example for other listeners that might be thinking through this with other industries. You know, I went and looked, and I'm admittedly not super-familiar with these ETFs, but the ones that immediately popped up. The First Trust Nasdaq Cybersecurity ETF, that is ticker CIBR; and the ETFMG Prime Cyber Security ETF, and the ticker is HACK.

So, the pros, we talked as before, but you're instantly diversified, if you don't know the space well, you're not going to be wed to one single stock with the outcomes for your money. The cons are, though, with an ETF you're paying expense ratios. And both of these ETFs have 60 basis point expense ratios. So, not outrageous, but you are paying for performance. You're also going to have less control over the buying and selling decisions and the allocation.

And just to, kind of, zoom in on allocation, and I think this is an important thing to do with any fund or any ETF you own, David specifically highlighted CrowdStrike, Fortinet and Cloudflare here, and those were the companies that he wants in on, possibly more, but with the ETFs I mentioned, they only own Cloudflare and Fortinet, at least as top 10 holdings, I do not see CrowdStrike in their top 10 holdings. And those two stocks are only about 7% of the portfolio.

And so, you're getting exposure to a lot of other companies, companies like Cisco, Splunk, Ping, Tenable, which, you know, if you don't want all of your eggs in one basket, might be a good thing, but you aren't going to get nearly as concentrated benefits from CrowdStrike winning big, because I think it's only about 4% of those ETFs.

And so, no matter what you're doing, whether you're investing in ETFs, investing in mutual funds, considering it, it's always helpful to look at what's actually owned in there and the allocation, because that's really what's going to determine your returns, Joey.

Solitro: Exactly. And I always like looking at those top 10 holdings, but usually, so say you took these and then you look at the full portfolios of these. And, yeah, you're talking about 30, 40 companies. Even if you pull up by an e-commerce basket, because you want exposure to the best e-commerce. Well, yeah, you could buy Amazon, MercadoLibre, Sea Limited and those guys, or you can buy this basket and have exposure to a bunch of companies you might not know anything about.

So, yeah, where ETFs have their benefits, like, if you have absolutely zero time to research any stocks, but you think cybersecurity is going to be the absolute best industry over the next decade, then hey, ETFs, have at it. And I'd bless that. But if you have the time to dig down or if you're like David and actually know about companies, like, CrowdStrike and Cloudflare, then that's where I'd want to put my money.

Lewis: Yeah. And if you're trying to go the approach of creating your own small baskets, you can look at the holdings for those ETFs and use that as a starter, and say, alright, well, this is going to be my research list, I see that these are the top 10 in this thematic ETF, and start there. But you know, you don't necessarily need to just buy the ETF.

Solitro: Yeah, not having CrowdStrike in the top 10 of that one, that's just disappointing at least in my opinion. Like, Cisco, I don't consider them cybersecurity at all. Like, yeah, they might have a few wings of it, but they do so much.

Splunk. Yeah, it has a lot of cybersecurity to it, but there's a lot of data analytics to go with it, so not really a pure play cybersecurity, where CrowdStrike is just cybersecurity through-and-through.

Lewis: Yeah. And it's possible, one thing we didn't mention with ETFs is, it's possible that there are rules around what the ETF will own that prevents it from owning a company like CrowdStrike. You know, this business has not been public for more than a year, and it might be that a fund or an ETF has decided there are a certain rules we're going to be following and we are not going to be picking up shares of anything that hasn't been traded for more than a year or is not fitting within certain market cap requirements. And that might prevent them from owning something that you really, really want exposure to.

Solitro: And at the end of the day, I'm a stock picker, so it's always, like, the challenge, like, if you want to ask me about an industry, I want to have a specific company, like, I want to pick my horse in the race. So, I think that's where I also -- I would personally never own an ETF, but that's just me. But like I said, ETFs would be good investment vehicles for a lot of people, so I'm not going to bash them too hard.

Lewis: Yeah. And I certainly think if you're just getting started, you don't have any exposure to market ETF like a broad-based ETF that gets you immediate exposure to the S&P 500 or something like that, an awesome place to start. It's lowering the cost of admission for the market; it's making things easier. And so, I love them there. I think if you're looking thematic, though, try building your own baskets. Very often you're going to be getting better allocation to bigger winners because you're going to be starting small and you're going to be focusing on the big players that really, truly are dominant.

Solitro: Yeah, build that David ETF.

Lewis: [laughs] The David cyber security ETF. Our second question comes from Marie. Marie writes in, "Love the podcast, especially the IF Tech Show." Hey now! look at that. [laughs] "I have a question about positions. For the everyday investor, what's considered a good position, what determines that? I tend to buy no more than a handful of shares at a time if I can swing it, is that good or too little? If the price is right, is swinging for, say, 10 shares is OK or is that too much at once no matter the share price?"

And this really, Joey, kind of gets at something that we talk about a lot with folks as they're, kind of, getting used to the market and buying shares and investing. And that's kind of the difference between the number of shares and share price and understanding that one of those is really more important than the other when you're looking at your portfolio.

Solitro: This is a very complex issue, and it's actually perfect timing, my very good friend, Lee, just opened a brokerage account a couple of weeks back and he was asking me, how much do I want to put in certain companies, asking what I own, sending him a watchlist. And it was a $6,000 account. And he starts talking about, "Oh, you know, I have 10 shares of Roku, should I get more?"

And I'm thinking, man, wait, hold on, that is a huge, huge portion of your portfolio already, because I mean Roku is a $130 stock, he's got ten shares, $1,300 out of $6,000. I'm like, man, that is a huge allocation. So, a lot of times, I like to push them toward percentage, like, you don't want all your eggs in one basket, of course, not all your money is going to go into one, unless you're just starting out and you buy the SPY [SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust] index fund, like you were talking about.

But if you've got the $6,000 and you want to put it across, you know, 12 companies; maybe that would be too much. I always like to use the percentages saying, you know, no more than 10% if you have a portfolio under $10,000. But if it gets bigger, my personal is I'll never really go beyond 5% as that initial injection of cash.

But yet, it's always kind of like a percentage game and you got to figure out the number you're putting in and then kind of the risk profile of the companies you have to determine those allocations.

Lewis: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And it gets tricky when you're looking at some of the very popular starter stocks. You know, like a company like Amazon, for example. Unless you're able to access fractional shares via your brokerage and can get a third of a share of Amazon or a quarter of a share of Amazon, you're going to be paying, you know, $2,000 for a share. And you look at a $10,000 portfolio and you say, well, OK, this is immediately going to be 23% of my portfolio. Sometimes with companies like that, you just need to bite the bullet, buy the shares, but then realize that you should be adding to other positions as you bring new cash in because you already have huge exposure to a company like Amazon.

Yeah, some people love those concentrated portfolios, but we generally say, it's better to kind of spread the bets around a little bit. So, you know, you're going to manage something where you have $5,000 or $100,000 very differently, but you can normalize that a little bit by thinking about things in a way of percentages; like you were saying before, Joey.

I think too, that percentage-based approach and the mindset of I'm going to buy this multiple times, is super-important, because there's almost this kind of FOMO to getting started, where you're like, "Whoa! behind the eight ball," you know, "I haven't been investing, I got to put my cash to work right now." And you got to start all these positions right now. And often that isn't the best thing to do.

Solitro: And you're kind of speaking to exactly what I've been experiencing the last couple of months. I had a friend, in January he wanted to put a very large amount of money in the market. And he's asking me. "Hey, what stocks do you own, how much do you own of each?" And what I always like to do, I don't like to give friends or family specific picks, because you get in the whole thing of, OK, now, it's like, if the stock goes down, I'm the worst person in the world. All I'll do is I'll screenshot my whole portfolio and say, "Hey, here's what I own," just using the CNBC, "Hey, here's all the stocks I own, if you have questions, like, what they do? Feel free to ask me."

But it was one of those FOMO, you know, the Fear Of Missing Out, because the market was pushing all-time highs. I was like, "Oh, yeah, those are all great companies," and it was like, "Oh, I want to get fully invested right away." Like, you know, we're at all-time highs, we're in the 11th year of the bull market, you know, a recession is going to come within the next five years, little did I know it was six weeks away from just everything hitting the fan and the world is coming to an end.

But it's one of those where, I mean, he got fully invested. And it was an epic meltdown. And I know he did some selling along the way on the way down. So, then the bounce back wasn't as significant as it could be. So, yeah, that scaling and approach, I always like to say, you know, if you got all this money, just think how hard you worked to get it, and you want to be very smart.

Buying in thirds is always a great strategy that you'll find all across The Fool that people like to do, because if you love, love, love a company at $50 a share, just because it goes to $55, doesn't mean you missed it. Like, if you think long-term this stock could go up a 1,000% or 10,000%, why are you going to fret over 10%? Like, dollar-cost averaging. And don't worry about trying to catch the bottom.

That's the other thing, is I was getting all these texts, "Oh, man, did I miss it? Did I miss it?" Like, even right now, yes, the market has rallied so hard, but we're still well off of our highs. And even then, trying to look at something based on the highs and lows, that's just a fool's game. Like, you want to look where do you think the market is going to be in 100 years, you might not be here for it, but caring about where a stock was three weeks ago and where it was a year ago or, like, the 52-week high and low, that's just not a game I want to play. I'm focused on where the company is going over the long-term and where you'll get the best return on your investment.

Lewis: I like that philosophy. And actually, I had a very similar conversation with a friend, not so much related to stocks, but talking about Roth IRA contributions. And this is in February, and you know they were saying, like, "Okay," you know, it's a couple; like, "We're ready to make our Roth contributions because we have some extra cash. Should we just put it all in?" And I was like, "You know, I think it would be better if you took ... " I forget what the limits are for 2020, if it's like $5,500 or $6,000 or maybe $6,500, but you divide that in three and just spread it out over the course of the year, because you don't want your cost-basis for that one year tied to that one specific point in time. And that's what we talk about with diversification. So much of that is often through the lens of what you own, but you also kind of have to think about it in when you bought it. And being able to purchase overtime, helps you spread that out, you don't have the cost basis tied to one moment in time.

That's why 401(k)s are so awesome, is because you are buying in, you know, if you're paid every two weeks, you're buying in 24 times over the course of the year. And that means that none of those are going to be at the bottom, none of them are going to be at the top. You know, you're going to be able to have a nice smooth curve for your cost over time, which helps a lot, and it prevents you from making some kind of painful decisions.

Solitro: And speaking exactly into the 401(k) thing. So, up until recently, my entire 401(k) is a single company which I've told you guys about time and time again, Sea Limited. Just because I think long-term this company has such a significant growth runway. So, ever since I started full-time here at The Fool in March of last year, I've been doing a couple hundred bucks, every paycheck, it's just going to my 401(k) and I just buy, you know, eight to 10 more shares of Sea Limited.

Now, of course, that number is going down, because the stock, I think it's doubled since I first started buying it, and it just keeps going up. So, yeah, my average cost of the stock might be $44 now where that original one was $30 or something, but if I think this stock could go to $150 billion market cap, and it's currently sitting at $35 billion or something like that, then I don't care.

Yes, and I'm buying slowly on the way up, if it pulls back, hey, great, I get it on sale, but never really worrying about what price you're getting in at. But then, say, the market were to absolutely tank and then you get more attractive entry points.

And where you're saying, you know, space it out over the course of the year, I have a friend who is a self-employed realtor, and he can make a specific contribution every single year. And I think it's, like, $9,000. He's like, "Yeah, I can put $9,000 in on this day." And I was like, "Do you think you could space that out to where you maybe make a quarterly contribution, because then, you know, get some cash to play here and here and here, because that would be a better way to go about it." Especially, I mean, imagine if he could put some to work in the first quarter this year, that would probably quadruple by the time he makes his year-end contribution for this year.

So, yeah, if you can space it out or if you've got a 401(k) at your fingertips or self-directed 401(k) is always odd. I mean, that's a stock-picker in me saying that, but I definitely think the whole, you know, put money to work slowly, will be the most successful strategy for most investors.

Lewis: And psychologically, it's just such a benefit. You know, if you look at something and you say, OK, I've got $10,000 to invest and you put $3,000 we'll say, to work at once, and you buy a handful of companies. And then the market sells off 10%, you still have several thousand dollars that you can go in and look and say, "You know what, this is an opportunity, this is a chance to buy up shares at a discount relative to where they were," instead of hand wringing and saying, "Oh, boy! you know, I'm stuck here," or having to sell on the way down, unfortunately as some people do.

Our third question for this mailbag actually kind of ties into this concept. So, I want to rope it in this conversation, Joey. This is from Jeff on Twitter, and Jeff asked, "I understand that winners win, and the reason for adding to them, however, I hate increasing my cost-basis, how do I deal with that?"

Any psychological advice there, Joey?

Solitro: Okay. So, from a guy that got Etsy at $7.99 and has wanted to add to it so many times, but I don't want to mess up that cost basis, because seeing that percentage return is so great. One of the tricks that I learned is, you can have your cost-basis tool on these different platforms. So, if you love seeing those beefy returns and want to show them off, you can go into the "my account," go to "cost basis," you have to go to your "unrealized gain and loss," because that goes to your current holdings that you haven't sold, and there's a little "+"next to companies that you bought several times. So, like, I can click on my holding in Pinterest and I see, OK, so my first position is down 15%, ouch, but because I was smart and bought on the way down and I bought at $10.90, was my last purchase, that is up 79.9%.

So, you can always go across and you can see. Now, that works when the stock is going down. And say, Etsy, if I would have been smarter and added to it at $16 and $20 and $24, the same menu, you can click on and see, OK, the first time I bought is up 5%; second time I bought is up 3%; up 1%. So, you can, kind of, see how it goes.

I'm even looking at my Roku cost-basis, it would've been very smart if I would have just bought and held my original position, it's up 86%, but then it came down a little bit and I bought more, that's up 70%. And I love the stock still so much today, I was buying on the way up, and I bought again at $90, and that's 41%, I bought again at $114, that's 11%. So, I prefer buying stocks on the way up, because it's a great company, it's crushing it, it goes up a little bit more.

Buying on the way down is usually, stocks go down consistently over an extended period of time for a reason, and that's where, it's just like, you know, the bag is getting heavier. And you don't want to be that bag-holder. So, it's kind of like catching a falling knife when it comes to value stocks. But you know, don't let that cost basis, I guess, become too much, like, oh, I want to see that huge gain, because there's that cost-basis tool. Like, if you want to show how that first time you bought a company that's up 1,000%, you could still access it.

Lewis: Yeah, I think there's an old axiom, like, don't let perfect get in the way of good. And you know, it might be awesome to have a slug of a stock, a small position, that's up to 300%. But if the market is up 20%, and you have a second position that's also up 80%. That's pretty darn good; it's not perfect, [laughs] but it's pretty darn good, and you'd take it as outperformance.

You know, there are also some companies where they are high-growth businesses. And the one that most immediately comes to mind with me with this is MercadoLibre, where it has been just gangbusters if you look over the course of five years. But if you zoom in and you're looking over the past year, I mean, there's a point where shares sold off 40% and that is not an isolated incident. If you go back to 2019, shares sold-off about 20%, to almost 30%. And so, you know, there are some big winners over long periods of time that have had a lot of hiccups along the way. And while it can hurt to see, you're paying slightly more for something, the advantage of spacing those purchases over time is, you know, there are good businesses that miss earnings one quarter and wind up on sale, and it's really nice to be in a position where you can add to them.

Solitro: Exactly. And that's exactly what I was doing with Shopify with my daughter's accounts. Shopify, I mean, I absolutely love that company, I think it's going to be the fastest company to reach $1 trillion market cap from going public. And I mean, that's going to be a long ways away. So, maybe we'll have this quote in 30 years when it hits that.

But it's one of those where if I was concerned about this stock has been on such a huge run over the last five years, I shouldn't buy it for my daughters, but I think where would the stock be when they're 20 or 25 when these accounts mature. Buying them 10 shares of Shopify in the high-$200s might have seemed not like the best move at the time, but you know, stocks like that absolutely take off.

And now I've got my son, Theodore, where he's got his account. So, far he's only got, what, Pinterest, Sea Limited and Roku in his account. And I just keep thinking, like, OK, I need to get him some Shopify. But of course, now the dollar amount is so high, it's like $700 a share. I'm like, OK, we'll let some cash build up in his account, but I don't care whether the stock is at $700 when he buys it or $600 or $500 or I mean, crap, it could be at $1,000 at the rate it's going right now. But it's just, I want to own a piece of a very, very good business or a great business that I think could be significantly larger over the long-term. And, yeah, don't let that, kind of, mess up where you're going to be.

Lewis: Yeah. Another way to look at it that might be, kind of, psychologically helpful is, you know you buy your first position, and you may know a good amount about a company at that point, but you cover a company, you track a company a little bit differently when you have skin in the game. You know, you're going to follow what's going on with that business a lot more intimately and you're going to be a lot more concerned with their quarterly results.

If you wind up seeing that, you know, after owning it for some number of quarters, shares are up 20%, 30%, 40%. And you're like, "Man, I should have bought more early." The other way to look at is to say, "Well, it seems like my original thesis was probably pretty good and we're seeing that play out over these quarters and now I'm in a position where as long as I still see that thesis intact and the numbers are moving the way that I want to, I have a higher conviction in buying the stock," you know, "It has proven to me that it is worthy of my dollars and while I am paying a little bit more for it, maybe my level of confidence in it is higher as well."

Solitro: Yeah. And seeing that performance over time should help you gain more confidence. Using MercadoLibre as another example, my good friend, Jason, he first started investing, didn't have a lot of cash and I think he bought, like, two or three shares of MercadoLibre in the high-$200s. And as he would deploy more cash, he's like, "Man, MELI has just been crushing it nonstop, I want to buy more." And of course, it was like at, say, $500 share and then it runs to, like, $700, then it comes back down, but he doesn't care about where the swoons are, he's just wise beyond his years apparently or just not an emotional investor like a lot of people get.

But every time he has capital ready to go, he's like, look, MercadoLibre has just been that one stock that has constantly crushed it for me. And I always tell him, like, "Yeah, look, it's still only, like, what $35 billion, $40 billion company right now. If you think this has Amazon-like potential of reaching $1 trillion. Like, this is still a very, very tiny company compared to what it could be one day." And I think that's what you got to look at it is, is this company mature and is this one that's going to trade sideways over the course of time or do I still believe in it so much that I want to own more? And usually for your big winners, the answer will be, yes.

Lewis: Yeah. And that's why that market cap, kind of, approach can be helpful. It's a lot easier to look at something that's $1 billion business and say, oh, this could become a $10 billion business or a $15 billion business in time, than it is to stare at a share price sometimes, and say, oh, it's gone up a lot, I don't -- you know, like, you lose the context for the size of the business and its operations.

And so, over time, I've tried to look a little bit more and say, like, OK, we're looking at some software companies that are sub-$2 billion, are there some examples out there of companies that service similar total addressable markets but have blossomed into $10 billion, $20 billion companies? And if you can say, yeah, the answer is yes. And the financial back it up and the thesis is there, then, you know, it's nice to get shares at $1 billion as a valuation, but if it's going to grow to $20 billion, it's OK to buy them at $5 billion too.

Solitro: Yeah. I would say, if you look back at the biggest winners over the last 10, 20 years, I would guarantee you, you would have more success buying stocks at their 52-week highs and their 52-week lows, because most of the time -- I mean, David Gardner, he says this quite a bit, but, and I believe in it so much, is, winners keep on winning. I mean, usually a stock consistently hits 52-week lows for a reason and it continues lower, while those winners as they keep hitting their 52-week highs, if you were to add stocks at their 52-week highs, you'd probably do much better.

Lewis: Yeah. And I love that we got all these questions. I mean, I love the mailbag episodes that we get to do. And we do them basically when the mailbag gets full. So, Jeff, David, Marie, I'm so happy that you guys wrote in with some thoughts here. Joey and I certainly love taking questions and chatting through things.

And listeners, if you want us to talk about anything in particular, write in, [email protected] or you can tweet us @MFIndustryFocus to have that conversation.

We like getting recipes too. We got some smoker recipes. I gave a shout-out last week for that, but you know, you don't always have to write in with stocks, you can also write in for Austin and Joey, you guys can write in about baseball stuff and they'd love to hear about that.

Solitro: Yeah. And for Austin, if you could write in some alternative meat smoking directions for him to try out, I'm sure he would love that.

Austin Morgan: I'll take the hard pass on that one.

Solitro: [laughs] I just wanted to hear his voice; there it is.

Lewis: [laughs] Yeah. And we're giving love in particular to Tom, who wrote in with recipes for smoked lamb chops and maple smoked salmon, which we'll be giving -- I think Austin was going to try the salmon and I was going to try the lamb chops on the smoker. We'll see when that happens; I got to make sure I can get the cuts and meat for it, but.

Solitro: I think there's a company coming out with some alternative crab meat that we can get Austin to try.

Morgan: I don't know about that, that sounds a little weird.

Solitro: You saw that, right? It's like an alternative meat crab cake or something like that?

Lewis: I did not see that. No, but I believe it though. And, you know, I would toss a Beyond Meat sausage on the smoker and see how that turns out. I'm OK with that.

Solitro: Oh, that stuff's good.

Lewis: I think they are very good. I also like the real thing. [laughs] So, I'm not beholden to one or the other; I'm happy to have both. Joey, I know that you're a Beyond bull.

Solitro: Hey, it recently joined some services here. I want to say, I was very early on that one, but I saw the light after I tried it and I think as you see all the issues that these big meat producers are having with COVID just ravaging their plants. And kind of, I don't really trust a lot of these meat companies with the cleanliness of their facilities. So, you see a guy like Ethan Brown just an ultimate class act and plant-based -- it's just something I could get behind. And I got to say, it's worked out well for anybody sitting around me that was listening and bought that stock.

Lewis: Yeah, we kind of have the full spectrum here, because you are the Beyond bull. I'd say, when I grill, I will normally get some Beyond products. And Austin, [laughs] we did a YouTube video together about this and he was not convinced, so a little bit of everything --

Morgan: ... yeah, I saw the opposite of the light. I tried it and I saw darkness; I'm not going to buy this.

Lewis: [laughs] Yeah, it's good to have some in the freezer. You know, if you have a friend who doesn't eat meat come by. But --

Solitro: Austin is not within the total addressable market of Beyond Meat.

Lewis: No, not yet, we'll see. [laughs] Maybe they can get him with crab legs. [laughs] On that note, Joey, thanks for hopping on today's show, man. Loved answering these questions with you.

Solitro: Always a pleasure.

Lewis: Alright. Listeners, that's going to do it for this episode of IF. Like I mentioned, you can catch us at [email protected], via email for our questions or you can tweet us @MFIndustryFocus, reach us there too. If you want more stuff, subscribe on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.

And as always, people on the program may own companies discussed on the show, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against stocks mentioned, so don't buy or sell anything based solely on what you hear.

Shout-out to Austin Morgan for all his work behind the glass today. It's Friday, so you know what that means, we're going to be playing things out with Checks and Balances by full-time full Burke Ingraffia. For Joey Solitro, I'm Dylan Lewis, thanks for listening and Fool on!