Old, New, Borrowed, Blue: Investor's Edition

Are we experiencing a correction? Can you make money betting on sports? Is your dog a trick dog? Can sadness lead to pride? This edition of Rule Breaker Investing dives into a wealth of topics.

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 March 2, 2022.

David Gardner: Every once in a blue moon or a new moon or an old moon or a borrowed moon, I queue up a hodgepodge of points that I want to share. They're not really related to each other -- a hodgepodge. As I've done before in the show, I call it "Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue." Each of the four main points fits well, even if I have to shoehorn them into that simple format. You probably know the expression, don't you? It's what brides traditionally are supposed to wear on their wedding day for good luck -- something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. While I won't be providing this, this podcast, you're also supposed to have a silver sixpence in your shoes. Now, if you want to locate a dime or a quarter, and slip it in your shoe for this week's podcast, I think you might have even better luck. Episode 5: Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue. Only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.

Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. A lot happening in the world this week. I think I might talk to that a little bit later. But in the midst of so much business, I thought, why not go back to one of my favorite formats? One of the 25 or so episodic series. In this case, old, new, borrowed, blue -- one we have not done for about two years. I skipped it in 2021. Here we are the first week of March, and I thought, let's go back to something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.

Something old for me is going to be typically something that we've already covered before. Something that I feel like you or at least I should know -- one of these so-called eternal verities usually is something old. Indeed, I will be bringing you, right up front this week, something old that I hope still feels fresh and extremely relevant today.

Something new, well, that's just that. Something borrowed, typically something that I've learned from somebody else or taken from something else somewhere else. Then something blue. Blue has many different meanings. It's a powerful word, in addition to one of my favorite colors. I try to make a different shade of blue each time, and that certainly is the case this week. Without further ado, I say, we get started. 

Now, we start with something old. I'm going to call it telltale foolishness -- with the small "f" this time around. How can you discover that someone you're watching or speaking to, someone you're listening to, maybe doesn't quite get it when it comes to investing? For me, I see this, everything from water cooler conversations to cocktail party conversations to how the media often talk about the markets. To me, the best telltale has always been the language that we choose. "Language is the garment of thought." I had to double-check who said that. I was thinking if it's William Wordsworth, but it was a little bit earlier than Wordsworth. In fact, it was the Scottish cultural critic, essayist, historian, mathematician, the list goes on, novelist, philosopher, Thomas Carlyle, who said, "Language is the garment of thought," and I agree. I think you should too. I think the words that we choose very much both reveal our thinking, and also in some ways, in an interesting way, in future, guide our thinking and our actions. 

The language that we choose guides our future actions. It's a telltale. I've always tried to be an acute listener of what are the terms and phrases that you and I are using about money. If we discover we're using something suboptimal, we're probably thinking suboptimally, and that means we're probably acting suboptimally. I'm here to raise my hand just like anybody else saying, "I'm not perfect." But one way I've tried to improve over time is by thinking about what is the language you are using, and that I am using, when we talk about money and the markets. I think we can upgrade our language, and upgrade our thinking, and upgrade our future actions.

Now, the reason this is something old is I've done this before. I have certainly spoken on this a number of times in the seven years of this podcast, and guess what? I'm about to do it again. Five terms come to mind here. We'll go with A, B, C, D, and E. There's no particular order to these, but the first term that's a telltale for me, discovering other's foolishness is, of course, the phrase, you'll never hear me use this otherwise, I'm about to invoke the data on Rule, which I'll explain to new listeners in a sec, "long-term investor." Investing, by its very nature, is long term. At some point, some years ago, I think in my 20s. I was probably saying long-term investing and long-term investor. I bet you could quote me, or find in the Motley Fool book, maybe the first edition of The Motley Fool Investment Guide, I might, myself, have written "long-term investor."

But we do get smarter and wiser over the years, don't we, fellow Fools? For me, long-term investor is a tautology. It is an unnecessary redundancy in our speech, and therefore, in our thoughts. Because the word "investor" stands on its own, I don't know, like a beautiful structure, like one of the great pyramids or the Eiffel Tower. Investor. It doesn't need to be modified by any adjectives because it itself means from the Latin that we are putting on the clothes. Like sports fans do for their favorite teams, we are wearing the clothes of the things we're invested in. We are fans. If that company that we've taken part ownership of, let's say Apple, if Apple has a bad quarter or a bad year, we're going to keep that jersey on. We're going to be an investor in the companies that enter our portfolios.

Now, I realize there are many approaches to the markets. I'm here to provide my classical viewpoint. I'm very tolerant of traders. To me, "traders" is the opposite of investors, and they have their charm. They're the other side of the same coin. There's a lot of shared exuberance and interest in the markets between investors and traders, but how we behave fundamentally is different. Investors are in it for the only term that counts, as I've always said, the long term. 

Whereas, traders are generally trading in and out cycles of the market. Maybe they see a new trend coming, and they're going to rotate sectors, or they're looking at stock graphs, and deciding if it crosses the 35.59 line on my stock graph I'm going to buy or sell. There's a very big difference between investors and traders. In general, traders are acting inside of a year with their speculations, and investors are acting outside of a year -- more like a decade in my experience. That's a lot less speculative. In fact, that's a lot more predictable. Because in any given year, the stock market could go down 20% or up 40%, let's say. It could even be better or worse than those things. But over the long term, the rates of return, typically for the U.S. stock market, as I know, so many of you already know, are somewhere around 9% and 10%. 

I like big numbers like that that are predictable, and so I'd like to let time make that happen for me in my portfolio. You will never hear me, going forward, and you haven't heard me for years now, ever say long-term investing or long-term investor. Indeed, if you ever are in my presence, and you hear me use either of those phrases, I license you now to walk up and give me a dead arm. That's the dead arm rule. I've put it out there for years. Nobody has dead-armed me for some time. I watch my language carefully. That's the point with something old, this week: Language counts. The words you choose say a lot about you. They determine, in many ways, how you will act in future, dear Investor.

Well, from A, the sad phrase, "long-term investor," we'll go to B, "correction."

One of my favorite observations that I've made over the years, certainly on this podcast -- and I saw it make the rounds again last week on Twitter, thanks to a few of my followers. Might have been you Jam, might have been you, Jason, I can't remember. But thank you for helping everyone remember that the word "correction" is wrongheaded. It invariably is used to refer to the market dropping. We say, "Wow, we're in for a correction," or "that was quite a correction in that year." And yet when you really think about the stock market and you look at the direction of the line over time, it goes lower left to upper right. For me, that's what feels correct. Now, the market does drop. It's never a straight lower left to upper right. But that we've somehow used the word correction to say that it's correcting, and we invariably use that to describe the market dropping to me has always been incorrect. So that's telltale foolishness term B.

Term C: The word "dip." As I've said many a time -- and that's the whole spirit of something old -- "Dips wait for dips." I truly believe you and I are best served by consistently investing into the market. I like every two weeks, I use that specifically because many people get paid every two weeks, twice a month with their salary and I think it's wonderful if you can save any of that paycheck, systematically pay yourself first and put some of your earnings right away into savings, and put those savings right away into funds in your 401(k) or your favorite new stock pick from Motley Fool Stock Advisor. I think it's just great to Always Be Investing  -- A.B.I. On the other hand, a lot of people store up their money and think at some point, they're worried the market is going to drop, and then they fantasize that they'll be the one to have that money saved and put it in at the right moment, and waiting for the dip, they'll do better as an investor. What I think they often don't realize is the market tends to rise from one day or week or month to the next, and so you're paying quite an opportunity cost by parking money outside of the market over time and waiting for the proverbial dip. And that's why I will simply remind us, in my experience, dips wait for dips. I think we should all be always investing: A.B.I., all the time.

Term D -- this one has been used for decades now, and I guess ever since technology showed up, which I think is back to the Greeks, probably somebody was using the phrase "tech stock." But since I think Tom and I made our first appearance on CNBC in the 1990s, whenever anybody has used that phrase, I've tried to call it out. I certainly can do it very easily here on my podcast with my home crowd here. You'll understand this, but I don't really know what a tech stock is. That phrase has never meant very much to me, and I think people who say "I'm exiting tech stocks" or "looking for a good tech stock" should just drop the tech part of it and just talk about stocks and the companies they want to take part ownership of, because it was true in the 1990s, I think it's only even truer every day since -- technology increasingly is driving the world around us. It is ubiquitous. It is every bit as important to Walmart today as it was to Amazon in the 1990s or Intel in the 1980s. Or let's go back to General Electric a century ago. Technology, which a quick check of the dictionary reveals is "The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry" -- yeah, that's been going on a long time, and it runs through many different companies. 

I think we head-fake ourselves if we start saying, "I'm looking for a tech stock." Really I think you should be looking for a great company, and you will often find those companies that use new technologies, new approaches. I would even say corporate cultures involve so much innovation, in a sense, those are a technology. Really, I guess I'd like the word "innovation" more than technology. One thing you've never heard me say is "tech stocks." I also don't say growth stocks and value stocks, but we'll leave that for another time.

Anyway, term D, telltale foolishness, something old -- the tech stock.

That gets me to my final one -- E, related in the same mentality, and, in some ways, this one brings all of the others that I've just shared with you together. When I say that I don't like it when people refer to a company, stock as a "name," "Names, I'm looking for some good names." Chris Hill and I have made jokes back and forth over Slack, over the Fool Slack since we can't see each other in Fool HQ, I'm looking forward to that opening sometime in 2022 ... But whenever one of us sees somebody use that, we'll often drop a Slack to the other guy and link to it. 

Because to me the reason "names" are telltale foolishness is because it's usually used by people for whom that company, that stock, is just a name. They may not know what the company does. They probably couldn't tell you very much about who's leading that company. They might be pretty good at telling you where the stock is or what the ticker symbol is. But for many people again, I think for the traders out there, it is just about a name, and what's the next name? I threw these three names away for these other five names.

But for me at least and maybe for you, dear Fool as well, for me that gives such short shrift to what's really happening out there, which is that entrepreneurs are starting things with capital, creating a product or a solution that solves someone else's problem, or maybe introduces new possibilities into the world. And they get capital and they build a company. If they're doing it in a consciously capitalistic way, they're trying to create a win for everybody. Their customers, certainly -- otherwise, why do we have businesses? -- but their employees who drive the enterprise; partners and suppliers. If the environment is relevant, I hope you're treating the environment well. Great businesses are creating wins for everybody and why business truly does elevate humanity in such a wonderful way when it's done right and done well. 

For me, that's not just a "name." Name so superficial relative to really what's happening there, which is human enterprises cooperating for the betterment of humanity. I want to be invested in that. That's why I think, over the last century, you can go from the lower left to the upper right as you look at the progress of the stock market, especially here in the United States of America, and I believe the exact same thing is going to happen in the century ahead and will become more of a global phenomenon. We will be talking about the strength of global markets, not just how great the U.S. stock market has been over the decades, not that we're the only great one. There have been some wonderful places to have had your money invested on planet Earth over the last century. But this model works and it's because of the complexity, the messiness to humanity.

But ultimately, here's some good news. I especially want to say that this week. The good guys outnumber the bad guys. They always have on planet Earth. The good guys don't get the headlines a lot of time, and sometimes they're just a name to somebody else, but we good guys far outnumber the bad guys. In conclusion, telltale foolishness, I hope is an opportunity whether you're hearing the phrase long-term investor, correction, dip, tech stocks, or names, I hope it will give you pause. Maybe enable you to give that other person pause as you talk out a little bit: What does that word really mean? What does it refer to and what's really happening out there? For my longtime listeners, I think you've heard these things before. You recognize this as something old. But the reason I like to bring something old right into the here and now is because many people -- especially newer listeners -- have not heard these things. If I'm challenging you, I would encourage you to challenge me back at the end of this month. Just like every month, there is the Rule Breaker Investing mailbag -- [email protected] is our email address. If you think I'm missing something or if there's an F, G, H, or I term, something you'd like to add to my list as telltale foolishness, I would love to share that out later this month in our mailbag because I have no monopoly on good human insight on words and phrases about money and the markets. You can make me smarter just like I try to do that for you every week. 

So share it out if you see something small "f" foolish.

Next, we go to something new. And my something new, I think a lot of us will recognize as having been around for millennia. But at the same time, especially here in the United States of America, it is ironically perhaps quite new. I'm talking about a way you can use your money that's different from investing. It's more akin to gambling because it literally is gambling. But the reason it's new is because sports betting has become a really big deal in the United States of America for a few factors we'll speak about in a minute. But it's become legal. Not only that it's become pretty big business whether we're talking about DraftKings, FanDuel, or your local bookie who may now be operating legally in the United States of America.

A few thoughts about sports betting. The first is, for me, it was always fine. It should always have been legal. Why can't you put down a wager? A speculation about the future with a friend of yours, whether it's about sports or what you think is going to happen in politics?

I love prediction markets. I love the increasing growth of prediction markets. It's been interesting for me to follow Metaculus -- if you haven't seen that site take a look, M-E-T-A-C-U-L-U-S -- some really interesting prediction markets about the state of the world today. That's just one site. There are many examples of this, but I think it was always fine to speculate. In a lot of ways, investing, of course, is speculating. I took pains to try to draw some distinctions between investing and trading with "something old" this week, but at its heart, they both involve you taking some of your money, letting go of it, speculating about the future, and being rewarded if you're right and penalized if you're wrong. Whether it is the performance of Apple's stock over the next year or your favorite sports team or some irrelevant sports teams -- some people don't like to bet on their own teams. That makes it hard sometimes, they like to bet on irrelevant games because it makes it more interesting for them.

But I want to reiterate first up. I think this always should have been legal and I'm fine with it. I've done it myself. Whether it's things like March Madness pools or just sitting there next to your friend at the game and saying, "Hey, I think the next pitch is going to be a strike." All of these things, I think, are fun. They're human. As long as we're not doing really silly stuff with our money, I think it's just fine. Sports betting -- checkmark, I get it. I think it should have been the industry that it is today all along, frankly. Second, why is it so here and now? Why is it something new? 

Well, a few years ago, I had my friend Phil De Picciotto on this podcast, he's founder and president of Octagon. Basically, he's a sports agent and the sports agency here in greater Washington, D.C. Very successful man. He had some great insights about sports. One of them at the time was that stadiums are getting smaller. More of us are watching sports on TV. TV is becoming a bigger deal but things like ticket sales and concessions, those things are dropping. In the face of that, even with TV revenues and internet revenues going up, it's become pretty clear that whether you're the NBA or the NFL or any of the major sports, you were seeing some of your numbers decline. And meantime, there was this whole industry speculating, gambling on what's going to happen, and you had no participation in that because it was illegal even though a lot of people were still participating in the open air. It was, as we say, these days "a thing." Phil pointed out that sports betting will be replacing lost revenues in many cases for the major sports, which is why, point No. 3 -- you are increasingly seeing the infiltration of the coverage that we're getting from the media of our games today listing the lines of the game. 

Like this team's supposed to win by 3 1/2 points, and you're actively seeing some of the color analysts and the studio people speaking to whether that's a good bet or not, a 3 1/2 point line. For some of you, you know sports betting a lot more than I do. You can talk to the complicated numbers in a way I can't because I don't do much of this. But for others of you, you may not even know what a line is. But a line is simply a number that Las Vegas buyers and sellers -- just like stock market buyers and sellers -- agree on as the legit reflection of our best understanding of the future. If we say the line for this week's game is the home team by 3 1/2, we're saying that it's a 50-50 bet. You could either bet that the home team will win by four or more points, or will win by three or fewer points or, of course, lose out. It's a 50-50 bet, which gets me to my final, and really, I guess, my most important point here, which is that I think this is a really bad way to try to make money. I'm all for entertainment. Some of my favorite companies and stocks are entertainment focused, whether it's something like Disney or Activision Blizzard or Netflix, the list goes on. I love entertainment, and I've already said I'm just fine with sports betting and betting in general. It's very human. It's happened for thousands of years. It's how the stock market works in a lot of ways, so I'm just fine with that. But here's a huge difference between sports betting and the stock market. 

We've already talked about the stock market typically rising 9% to 10% per year. That is generative. That is progressive and constructive and good things come out of that. Good things make that happen from one year to the next. The huge difference with sports betting which is seemingly increasingly popular these days. The huge difference is that it is zero-sum. One of us is going to be right in the bet we talked about just a minute or two ago and the other guy's going to be wrong. It's not very different from flipping coins because the lines are set very efficiently and very intelligently. It's going to be about half of us win, half of us lose. Of course, the reason that DraftKings and Las Vegas and this whole industry exists is because they are "the house." They are like eBay. They're matching buyers and sellers, and they're taking their cut. The huge difference between sports betting -- and why I think it's a really bad way to try to make money in any way over the long term -- is because it is zero-sum, and we also take transaction fees out of each of your bets. 

So I have friends -- maybe you do too -- who enjoy sports betting. I've done it once or twice, and I'm totally open to it, but I'd be the first ... and I hope every fellow Fool will hear me right now and share it out with friends and family. Of course, some people have serious problems around gambling. I'm not really speaking about that right now. I'm just speaking about how it's a really bad way to try to make money in this world. Every bet you make you could've instead invested in something that rises over time with a tailwind at your back. You can still have fun watching the games, and you can still make what people sometimes have called "gentlemen's bets," which are basically free bets or bet a dollar. But if you think that you have any shot to make serious money persistently over the only term that counts -- the long term -- I would say you are dead wrong. The math is very obvious. Imagine if the stock market historically rose 0% a year, some years up, some years down, but it always centered back at the number 0%. I wouldn't be talking about it and the Motley Fool would not be promoting the idea that we should all be investors. Well, that's actually the world of betting.

Things center on 0% returns -- slightly less than that, though, because "the house" will take its piece. In conclusion, I hope you're making the best decisions with your own dollars, and if you're like me, you're slightly perturbed by the amount of increasing mainstream coverage that mainstream sports are getting specifically around, which is the way to bet on this particular game. I hope "something new" is connecting with you or those you know, and you'll make really good decisions for those hard-earned dollars that you surely did earn. They deserve better than sports betting.

We move from something old, something new, now to something borrowed. If I was a little too earnest with the first two points, I thought I could lighten it up a little bit here with something borrowed because when I thought, "What should I borrow this time?" I was reminded of some of the favorite pages from any of our past books that my brother Tom and I wrote together, and I even checked in with my producer Rick and I said, "Rick, do you remember 'make your dog a trick dog' from our second book: You Have More Than You Think? It was an interlude in the middle of the book?"

And Rick, who is one of our longest-time, most-knowledgeable Fools said "No, I don't recognize that at all." So I think you, dear Fools, listening to me -- the chances that you actually know what "make your dog a trick dog" refers to is probably, maybe less than 2% of us listening, so this is definitely worth bringing back [as] "something borrowed." So, I'm going to be doing a short dramatic reading from our book You Have More Than You Think. But before I get there, let me briefly explain what the heck I mean by "make your dog a trick dog."

So, The Motley Fool's first book, Tom and I wrote, The Motley Fool Investment Guide, it was published in 1996. It was about the stock market, and that's the one we've recently updated a couple of years ago to refresh it. Because if you're trying to write an investment classic, you probably should give it a fresh look every decade or so. It had been a little while for The Motley Fool Investment Guide. But after that first book we thought, what's a good follow-up? And with Simon and Schuster, our publisher, we decided, let's broaden it. The first book was about the stock market. The second book is going to be about money. Even if you're not ready to invest, how can we get everybody in the world, all of whom, I hope, have at least a shekel, a dollar, or a yen. How can we inspire people to save that shekel, and find more shekels, and ultimately invest them so that you can do that magical trick that we love at The Motley Fool in this world, -- you can have your money make more money for you, which is another wonderful way of thinking about the stock market. You Have More Than You Think is what we called our second book. I love that phrase. It's really the spirit of The Motley Fool to help all of us as we democratize this subject and make you realize you don't need somebody with an expensive suit who tells you you don't know what you're doing. You don't need that person to manage your money for you. You can do this yourself.

You're certainly going to need to make some money yourself and save some money yourself, so that was the purpose of our book, You Have More Than You Think, and it was a lot of fun to write. But at about the midpoint of that book, we thought: "Let's have some fun, just like halftime in some sports like football or soccer -- halftime has some follies and a little bit of whimsy. Let's do that right in the middle of our book, You Have More Than You Think."

The framework for it was, "Well, hey we've spent the first half of this book talking about how to make some money and save some money. We thought, let's have fun. Let's remind you and me that making money is actually easier than many people think in this world."

I think it was Tom who in that chapter pointed out that there are a lot of cash registers worldwide where there's this little cup next to it and it says, "Take a penny, leave a penny." Right there, that's literally free money sitting out there, and whether or not we counseled our readers to just take and not give, I won't say. But it's a reminder that there are a lot more opportunities around us. We started with the first of eight moneymaking ideas in You Have More Than You Think. And it was make your dog a trick dog. I'm not going to replicate that one here. I'm going to share a different one this time. But basically, take your dog, teach it some tricks, and then at the farmers market this Saturday, bring your dog down, put a hat out. Now that your dog is a trick dog, we think you're going to make some money. You're going to have some fun, create some entertainment at your local farmers market by making your dog a trick dog.

So there's certainly some tongue in cheek throughout this interlude, throughout what I'm sharing with you this week. But the spirit of, "Hey, use some imagination," you can make some more money and save some more money better by using your imagination -- that part is true. So make your dog a trick dog instead of just a dog. I think I'm reading here from page 114 of the paperback edition of You Have More Than You Think when I say -- we framed it up this way, we now proudly present eight original and brilliant entrepreneurial ideas that we call "trick dogs." 

"Every one of them can be done right now, requires minimal start-up cash or none at all, few additional materials, and no previous experience. All you have to do is finish reading, set down the book, exit the room, and begin. It's that easy, the future is now."

And at that point in the book, we launch into "make your dog a trick dog," which I've already referenced. It's funnier to read it out than I just summarized and I could have shared that with you this week, maybe I will in some upcoming podcast, but I wanted to skip, pass "make your dog a trick dog" and "bottle your own water" and "borrow your friends' books and sell them" and "command your own squeegee army" and go to No. 5, something borrowed this week on Rule Breaker Investing. Here we go: "Attend the bathroom at expensive restaurants." I'm reading from Page 118,

"One touch of elegance missing at even the most extravagantly outfitted restaurants today is a well-dressed, completely equipped bathroom attendant. Do you know how to spell opportunity? Before starting, you're going to need to bring with you the proper accouterments. Most of these can either be found around your own bathroom or be purchased at your local pharmacy superstore. Everything is a superstore these days."

"Fill a large shoebox with cotton balls, fragrance bottles, dental floss, hand lotion, nail clippers, Q-Tips, deodorant, and the always-essential mustache comb for men or mustache clippers for women. Now, you just need to set up, so put on a good dark suit or dress, and select the most expensive restaurant in town. Do not make the mistake of going anything but first class. Pass furtively and directly back to the bathroom of your gender. Open up your shoebox beside you, lay a clean white towel over one forearm, and then just stand there inside the bathroom entrance very much minding your own business. Believe it or not, most of your money has already been made. Just by standing there, beaming with professionalism, you'll land a steady flow of tips."

"'Up your salary' by pretending to clean the place, scurrying about as they stand over a urinal or enter the stalls or primp themselves before the reflecting glass. For many, this will be enough, but aggressive entrepreneurs can bring in so much more money with just a bit more effort. Start ahead of time by removing the rolls of toilet paper from every stall. Once your patrons are seated, nature running its course, gently, deliver your question. "Will you be needing any tissue paper?" To which they will respond, startled, that yes, of course they will. Tempted as you may be to charge them for it, restrain yourself. Instead, just drop them the roll, consider the service complete, and collect their inevitable and often quite high tip as they exit. But before they're out the door, do spruce them up a bit. A quick roll down their back with the old adhesive lint remover may be appreciated. The key is to be deliberate but not forceful. It may take practice."

"OK, at some point, somebody will question you or complain to the manager. You'll find out just how good a restaurant this really is during the inevitable confrontation. If you get kicked out, good riddance. You didn't want to work in that place anyway, and there are a bunch of other joints where you can apply your trade. But any restaurant worth its chef should congratulate you and hire you on the spot. After all, they should be asking themselves, 'Why weren't we providing this service to our patrons already, charging the prices we do?' Plus, hey, you were even bringing your own stuff with you. The restaurant had failed to provide its own dental floss and nail clippers, and it took someone with energy and vision to correct this ... all the way to the bank."

And that is the end of that particular section. After it, "make your car collector's item," "be a broker to the world," and, of course, the closing, "take a few pennies, don't leave a penny." Each of these truly is timeless. It's a delight to go back and read something written in 1998 and think about how, yeah, you probably could still bottle your own water and make some money in this world anyway. Attend the bathroom at expensive restaurants -- something borrowed.

Now to close: Something blue. I'm blue this week. Are you? I think a lot of people are pretty blue this week and in more than one way. But speaking just for my own self this week, I'm blue for a personal reason, and that is that this past week, I lost my uncle, Jimmy Lowe. Indeed, his life is being celebrated today just after I finish this recording, and I want to speak about being blue and my Uncle Jimmy, though I'm not going to even try adequately to sum up his life and what he meant to many. Heck, you can Google "Jimmy Lowe obituary" and the top hit will give you lots of biographical information about this fine man.

Now, when I thought about what to do for blue for this week's show, my first thought hadn't been about my Uncle Jimmy, it was instead to share one of my five favorite poems this week. It's been a while since we shared a good poem together on the Rule Breaker Investing podcast, so I combed back through one of my lists -- I keep many lists, and one of them is my five favorite poems. 

I did a quick text search of them for the word "blue" -- what else? -- and indeed, one of my five favorite poems at present does contain the word blue, and "something blue" is going to enable me to read you that beautiful, bluetiful sonnet in just a bit. But then, when my Uncle Jimmy died, I felt additionally blue, and it gave me something else to reflect on. My Uncle Jimmy was always of this world, but as he made it into his mid-80s, it's fair to say that he was naturally and increasingly recognizable as an old-world figure in the best way -- an old-world gentlemen. He went to the same schools I did, up to college. Both Episcopalian schools, St. Albans in Washington, D.C., and St. Mark's in Southborough, Massachusetts. I had the pleasure of going to both of those with my cousin, his son, Garrett. All three of us, actually, whether we were bulldogs at St. Albans or Lions of St. Mark's, all three of us on the athletic fields wore blue: Yep, that was the color of those schools. And from there, my uncle Jimmy went on to Yale and Yale Law School, more bulldogs, by the way, more blue. And Uncle Jimmy loved his schools and he served on school boards, he was a generous benefactor, one of those guys who still got misty-eyed and wistful when thinking back to his schoolboy days and worked to make those just as special for his kids and his kids' kids. As I, feeling blue this week, prepare to drive down to historic St. John's Church right here in Washington, D.C., near the White House to celebrate a life near and dear to many, I also then noticed that the poem I'm about to share with you that includes the word blue, is perhaps the most beautiful in the English language to capture flight. Flight in combat, no less written by a combat pilot.

Combat -- very much on our minds this week, making millions, if not billions of people this week feeling, well, blue too. Then I thought just to look into the poet of this poem, High Flight, which was alluded to once famously when Ronald Reagan spoke after the Challenger disaster. And who was this poet? This 19-year-old poet who wrote High Flight and then tragically died just a few months after. John Gillespie Magee Jr. -- not a name today that connects with most of us, and so I wanted to remind myself of who this man was, who used the word "blue" in this poem, which really is the only reason I thought to include it this week. But then two more reasons showed up. The first because if you're like me, whenever you see or think blue this week because of this week, where we are in history right now, you see a second color right alongside it and it inspires you. You see blue and gold. You see it on many flags out there, you see it projected on the Eiffel Tower or that skyscraper in your city and you recognize that this gold and blue are bringing many of us together in ways that are deeply felt and deeply important, and so we think blue for that first reason. But then I also noticed -- and in a way, this is purely coincidental and maybe in another way it's not -- but this poem High Flight was enclosed by Magee in a letter to his parents shortly before Magee was killed in his Spitfire VCH plane flying in 1941 for the Royal Canadian Air Force. 

Despite being in the United States at the time, since the U.S. had not yet entered World War II, Magee had crossed the border into Canada, so he could join someone, some countries, some air force in order to fight the evil of Hitler. Magee, who was from a well-heeled family like my Uncle Jimmy. Magee didn't have to volunteer or fight at all, but fight he did, and that poem reached his parents in Washington, D.C., perhaps the last thing that they would receive from him, before his untimely death at 19.

Coincidence or not, where was that letter, that poem mailed? Well, to the city from which I broadcast to you today to the very church, where, blue, I am headed in a minute for memorial services, historic St. John's Episcopal Church, which my Uncle Jimmy loved and at which he served and attended for decades and the same church that John Gillespie Magee Jr.'s father was in 1941, when he received that letter as the curate. As I realize this, as you can see, with much swirling together, I felt even more blue. 

But now, I mean by that blue, that blue of the gold and blue, not sad blue, the proud blue is what I felt. And blue, I will now share with you this poem which you may have heard before, but which is now even more, one of my favorites, High Flight by John Gillespie Magee Jr.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air...

Up, up the long, delirious burning blue,
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark or even eagle flew —
And while with silent lifting mind, I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

High Flight, this week, was dedicated to my Uncle Jimmy Lowe, and more broadly and connected in to the things that count, to the gold and the blue.