On the marquee today are 5 Lesser-Known Rule Breakers (from Nov. 11, 2015) that feature a company providing commercial kitchen solutions, a few big name changes, a couple of even bigger acquisitions, and a wood alternative decking company. Longtime Fool contributor Anders Bylund joins Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner on this trip through time to share the what, why, and when of these stocks' march through the decade.
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A full transcript is below.
This podcast was recorded on Nov.12, 2025.
David Gardner: Ten years ago this week, November 11, 2015, we launched our second-ever five-stock sampler. Five lesser-known Rule Breakers. Lesser known. None of them was a household name. In fact, I'd say even today, 10 years later, how many people really recognize company names like Middleby or Globus Medical? Well, today we fire up the time machine 10 years to the week later to see what actually happened through recessions, pandemics, acquisitions, and all the surprises a decade can deliver. We'll score our returns against the S&P 500, then answer the questions that matter. Mostly, what do we get right? What do we get wrong? Were we missing anything? I've invited longtime Motley Fool writer Anders Bylund to join me as we talk through some lessons you can use on your next 10-year journey, five lesser-known Rule Breakers, 10 years later. Only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.
Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. Thirty times I picked a five-stock sampler on this show, 30 times where I said, Here's a theme, here's a basket. Let's go beat the market and learn some great lessons together. Well, as history shows, we did beat the market, not every time, but most of these samplers were picked to play a game that lasted three years, and we won. We beat the S&P 500. Three years is just three years. I'm much more interested in seeing how they play out over the only term that counts, to me, the long term. With every passing year on this podcast, we did a review of Palooza check-in, 1, 2, and 3 years later to see how these stocks had done, but then we ended it. We just said after three years, we're done. We'll be spending all of our time on review of Palooza episodes if we keep updating every one of these 35 stock samplers every single year, and yet, in September of this year, just 10 weeks ago, this new series was born.
Every 10 weeks, we're going to open up a time capsule. It's a past five-stock sampler that's hitting its 10-year birthday this week. We're going to score each pick equal weighted from the original air date. We're going to see its return, compared to the S&P 500 over the same span. Then we do the real work, what we got right, what we got wrong. Well, actually, I'm not going to do most of the real work. I'm going to have on a Motley Fool friend to help me do that work. This week, it's longtime full contract writer Anders Bylund to join me and discuss together what the decade teaches all of us as investors. We're going to finish at the end with the sampler's overall result, maybe a quick go forward view on each company. That's 10 years later, not just keeping score, but learning how and why Rule Breakers win and sometimes lose, too. Anders Bylund has been a Motley Fool contributor since 2006, mostly writing on a daily basis on the free side, our fool.com articles about stocks moving in the news. But he's also done a couple of stints for our premium newsletters along the way. Anders plays lots of chess and guitar in his spare time while watching three kids go through college and high school. Welcome, Anders, to Rule Breaker Investing.
Anders Bylund: Well, thank you, Dave. Thanks for bringing in for this. It's exciting. It's an honor, really. I'm glad to be here.
David Gardner: Anders, you've been writing for our company since 2006. Do you remember first clicking in to the Mole Evol? Was it on AOL back in the day or the web?
Anders Bylund: No, I was the web. I was a reader for two or three years before I applied for a job. But I do remember my first article here. It was Volvo keeps on trucking, the truck part of Volvo, not the passenger cars. I don't write about that anymore, but that was first.
David Gardner: I love that you remember that, Anders. Some of our discerning listeners may detect that you speak more than one language. Could you remind me where you're from and when you first came to the United States?
Anders Bylund: Born and raised in Sweden. Then I met a girl online in 1995 when online was hardly even a thing. I don't really know how that worked out, but there you go. She's still my wife today, and she's why I moved to Florida in 1997.
David Gardner: That's fantastic. Anders, when did your interest in the stock market first develop? I wish everybody in the United States cared about it, let alone everybody in Sweden. I feel as if you are a rarer breed from your home country, but where does your interest in the stock market derive?
Anders Bylund: My first job after college was for CSX, the railroad. On the technology side, I was running their computer systems system administrator for them, and they had a 401(k) plan that sounded like a good idea. In order to know what I was doing with that, I started reading the Fool, for example, and that turned out to be one of my favorite things to do when I wasn't working. The interest deepened from there, and a few years later, I saw a job opening on fool.com, we're looking for writers now. That turned out to be what I did in college. The computer thing was really a side gig, was the idea while I worked on the Great American novel or something, but it didn't really work out that way. I went back to the writing that way, and John Reeves, who hired me back then, said it was easier to teach a writer to invest than teaching an investor how to write. [laughs] That's how I got the job.
David Gardner: That's wonderful. You're referencing longtime Motley Fool writer/editor, slash I don't know, Fool About Town, John Reeves. I'm delighted to hear that name again. Before we move on to Middleby, our first company, Anders, CSX, still a public company, still a pretty robust railroad. Do you own shares? Do you have any opinion about railroads or CSX?
Anders Bylund: I don't own shares in it or any railroad, not even Berkshire, which would count as the railroad these days. I shied away from that industry over time, and I still know people who work there and all that, but it's just not my gig anymore. I was more on the technology side anyway, so it doesn't really matter what the base industry was.
David Gardner: Well, that makes sense to me, Anders, because one thing you and I have enjoyed together over the years is a Rule Breaker mentality, and I really appreciate a lot of your articles. You and I share some of the same stocks in our portfolios. It makes sense that you didn't fall in love with railroads and maybe more with technology. Well, let's start with a somewhat industrial company for whom technology has mattered quite a bit. We have five stocks recovering from five lesser-known Rule Breakers. We're going to do them one at a time. We're going to do them alphabetically, which is how I presented them on that podcast, November 11, 2015. By the way, any discerning listener is welcome to go back and relisten to that. It was only 17 minutes long, and that can be good prep for this week's podcast. But I'll be summarizing my thoughts as I ask Anders each time, what's happened since? Let's kick it off with Middleby Corporation, ticker symbol MIDD. Well, anytime we go this far back in time on this show, we bring out our Rule Breaker investing time machines. Anders, are you ready to strap in with me as we get ready to go back 10 years in time this week?
Anders Bylund: Camp waits. Let's go.
David Gardner: The year was 2015. Middleby was a quiet powerhouse behind the world's kitchens, both commercial and residential. It was best known for industrial ovens and newly for acquiring Viking Range. Now, Middleby was led by Dynamic CEO Selim Bassoul, whom I praised as one of my favorite living CEOs. Middleby's growth by acquisition model had built it into a global supplier for fast casual and fine dining restaurants alike, with technology and automation driving what they were calling the Kitchen of the Future. Bassoul envisioned half of all commercial kitchens becoming automated by the year 2020, positioning Middleby as the unseen architect behind that transformation. Now, listening back, my bullishness came from Middleby's steady innovation and certainly Selim Bassoul's visionary leadership. Anders, I loved its knack for taking small regional brands global, adding tech and efficiency along the way. It was a smart under-the-radar compounder automating the kitchens of tomorrow. Anders Bylund, before we go over the numbers for this one, just any initial thoughts you have about Middleby?
Anders Bylund: Middleby was always interesting to me because it's not exactly a brand you see out every day, but you see their brands all over the place, like I can't help but looking for turbo shop ovens every time I go to a sandwich place. That's one of their big ones, and they're still around more than ever, to be honest. Things have changed. They had a few bad years. After the inflation crisis of 2022, under different management and all that. Their strategy has changed a bit, and now they're working to spin off some other brands into separate stand-alone company, and that specifically seemed to be some of Selim's creation that they're dropping now, the food processing mostly. I don't know if I'm in love with that strategy shift, but somebody must have crunched the numbers and figured out that that was the way to go. Their new CEO, Tim Fitzgerald, was their CFO for many years. If anybody knows numbers, it should be him, I guess, but things have changed, and it's not really the same company. It's the same umbrella organization over 100 brands, but it doesn't feel the same.
David Gardner: Just looking at the company today and now, of course, the numerical performance that I have generated for this stock for this sampler over now 10 years this week. The stock back then was at $112.84. Today, it's at about 124. It's up 10% in 10 years. Now, the stock market overall over the last 10 years is up 228.8%. I can even take it out to one decimal place. We're recording mid to late afternoon, Tuesday, November 11, exactly 10 years later. Under the stocks up 10%. The market is up 229%. Therefore, Middleby Corporation is way behind the market and no longer has that visionary CEO that I liked so much at the time. In fact, as I'm sure you'll mention, short Selim Bassoul has since moved on to Six Flags, an entertainment brand that many Americans will know, and that company itself has gone through a merger and an acquisition. It's been an interesting time for CEO Bassoul, who built Middleby into a compounding monster over the 15 years or so leading up to me picking the stock for this sampler. Now, for each of these honors, I've asked you to give us maybe two or three reasons as to why the stock has done what it's done. Now, looking back at Middleby now that I've given this performance, 10% gain, what are 2-3 big reasons in your mind for this happening?
Anders Bylund: A key part of Middleby's strategy is to buy up smaller companies and bake them into its brand and into its whole package deal. You got everything from ovens to air conditioning units to food processing, everything you need to run a professional kitchen and home kitchens to these days, thanks to the Viking brands and other acquisitions. But it's an expensive strategy, and it's hard to do that when interest rates are high and it's hard to come by good bank deals. That's been working against them since 2022, at least, and arguably before that, too.
David Gardner: Growth by acquisition, Anders itself can be very accretive and very growth-oriented initially. But as a company becomes bigger and bigger or more successful in its field, starts becoming harder to find acquisitions at scale that will make a difference.
Anders Bylund: That's right. Once you've bought all the good stuff, what are you left with? The quality has to go down over time. Either that or prices go up because you'll have other people bidding for the same deals.
David Gardner: Good point.
Anders Bylund: It's not easy, even if you were the CFO for 10 years.
David Gardner: Well, this is a company, as you mentioned, Anders, where the CFO has become the CEO as well. Do you have another thought in mind explaining Middleby's last 10 years?
Anders Bylund: It's not so much explaining how it happened. I think you already looked at that, but the results of that is that it's been trading sideways for 10 years. There's been a big jump and done down, and the end result is that it's been growing, but the stock hasn't. As a result, it's modest value that just 10.5 times pre-cash flow and 13 times forward price to earnings. It may be a decent ticker to look into these days, but you do have to set modest expectations because it's not the fast-growing buyout machine it used to.
David Gardner: Thank you very much. I think at the end, you and I will reflect just on this overall group of stocks, and any additional thoughts we might have about Middleby, we can park till then. But thank you for stock number 1, and that was Middleby. Again, up 10%, the market up 229%. Let's see what happens with stock number 2. This one's had a name change. Ten years ago, as I introduced stock number two in this sampler, it was MicroStrategy. Now, in 2015, MicroStrategy was a comeback story from the dotcom ashes. It was an early business intelligence pioneer that was still led by its intense and sometimes polarizing founder, Michael Saylor. The company's software helped enterprises turn data into insight, just as the mobile and Cloud revolutions were reshaping how information flowed. I described Saylor at the time as a visionary who had seen the data wave coming and built for it early. Even if Wall Street was punishing his stock after a week earnings report that October, the company was small. It had about a $2 billion market cap, but was aiming at a vast, growing need for analytics in a data-soaked world. Now, my why for this stock and its inclusion in this sampler was simple. I believe in the persistence of visionary founders. in the rising strategic value of data. That was my 12 punch here, and MicroStrategy under Saylor looked like a survivor turned innovator, positioned to ride the next wave of enterprise intelligence overlooked company with unfinished upside. Now, Anders, before I give the numbers, your initial thoughts about this company, which has changed its name.
Anders Bylund: No, that's right. They changed the name from MicroStrategy to Strategy earlier this year, and that's after being around for a long time. Michael Saylor did a Super Bowl commercial in the year 2000 at the very height of the dotcom bubble before it popped and to market his company's data analytics business and walking around the stadium and looking like a cool guy, and all that.
David Gardner: [laughs] I had completely forgotten about that.
Anders Bylund: You can look it up on YouTube these days. Everything is forever on the Internet. But things have changed. They still run that business. It's still something they make money from. But it's really just another financing source for their Bitcoin buys. In the year 2020, at the height of the next big thing, the pandemic, they switched their business plan from making software to investing in Bitcoin. The idea is to be a Bitcoin maximalist. This is the only asset that's worth holding in the long run if you want those, and the idea is as Bitcoin goes up over time, then if your money is invested in anything else, like for example, dollars, you're losing. They are doing a lot of that. There's a 21-21 plan where they're borrowing $21 billion and raising another 21 billion from stock sales over the next few years to buy more Bitcoin.
David Gardner: Wow.
Anders Bylund: It's an all-in thing, and it depends on how Bitcoin works out, whether that's a good idea or not. So far so good, but you never know.
David Gardner: Well, you may have done a good job, Anders, already covering in part why this stock has done what it's done, but let me pause you there just to provide the performance. This is the eye-opener. This is the stock that has powered this sampler, and spoiler alert, none of the other stocks has done anything like what this stock has done. Further spoiler alert. I had no idea 10 years ago that any of this would happen in the way that it did. Here are the numbers. We picked Strategy at $17.49 on November 11, 2015. Today, it's gone from 17.5 to 235.5, which means this stock is up 1,249%.
David Gardner: We'll just call it 1250 against the market's 229%. This stock on its own, has outperformed the stock market, the S&P 500, by over 1,000 percentage points. Now, we'll be giving the overall results at the end of this podcast. But, Anders, this is an absolute shocker. Those of us who are willing to allow companies to evolve and adapt and turn into their next butterfly, this was not a butterfly I was expecting to see at all, and yet this has been a remarkable performer. Let me ask you then, what are a couple of reasons in your mind as to why this stock is now up 13 times in value.
Anders Bylund: The fundamental driver of that is that Bitcoin is going up [LAUGHTER] the fundamental driver of that is twofold. It's the greater Fool thing. That's how Warren Buffett sees Bitcoin anyway. It's only worth whatever someone is willing to buy it from you, and in a way, he's right. It's really just an accounting system with a different, encrypted transaction ledger, and that's all it is. From that perspective, it's really just worth whatever somebody else wants to pay you for it. On the other hand, producing more Bitcoin is analogous. It's in the white paper and everything that it's analogous to gold production where gold miners invest in mining equipment and time and money spent to actually use it. To dig gold out of the ground, Bitcoin, you invest in hardware and electric power to generate more Bitcoins and it's a limited thing. There's a hard cap on it. There will never be more than 21 million Bitcoins in the world. Although you can split them up. It's a supply and demand thing from that perspective. If you believe in bitcoin, like Michael Saylor clearly does, and a lot of people do with him, then it could be replace gold and gain 10X more value from here to serve the roles that gold serves now in investing terms. You can't use gold to plate the connectors on your speaker bar, that's not going to work. But it may or may not work out and it may or may not be vulnerable to Quantum computing hacks. I don't know where Bitcoin will be in the next ten years. I'll be either $1 million or nothing, and that will make Michael Saylor look like either a genius or the opposite.
David Gardner: That is very well put, Anders, I suspect we may circle back near the end and just hear a few more of your thoughts about Bitcoin because part of the reason I invited you on for this week to look over this five stock sampler is that you do follow Bitcoin very carefully. You often write Motley Fool articles about strategy and other companies in this space. I really appreciate that analysis. This is almost a single factor company at this point. The whole data and mobile business and the stream of new data and the value of data has all just converted talk about strategy to a single strategy, it seems, which is more Bitcoin. Raise money, we'll buy more Bitcoin. There are, of course, other forms of cryptocurrency and other ways to play Bitcoin, but there's really no public company like strategy at this point, which is one of my five lesser known Rule Breakers from 10 years ago this week. Let's move on now to stock number 3. Stock number 3, 10 years passes and things happen, Anders, and stock number three no longer exists. In fact, it no longer existed inside the three year game that we were playing when I first picked these stocks because NetSuite, ticker symbol N was bought out by Oracle one year after I picked it back in 2016. In 2015, NetSuite was a rising force in Cloud based enterprise software as a pioneer in letting businesses run all their financials, their operations, their analytics from just one online platform. It was a company that had one of those rare one letter ticker symbols. I just had ticker N and NetSuite had become a go to solution for fast growing companies like GoPro at the time and even the Oakland Athletics, whose moneyball GM Billy Beane sat on NetSuite's board. It had a 30% annualized sales growth reflecting strong demand for cloud integration long before that became mainstream. I mentioned that even the Motley Fool back in 2015, we'd recently begun adopting part of the platform, underscoring, to me, its real world utility and staying power. My bullishness came from just seeing that suite as a pure play on the inevitable shift of business systems to the cloud. It was an Agile, founder led innovator turning the back office into a competitive advantage, exactly the Rule Breaker that would attract larger players, and a history shows one year after I picked it, almost the very weak Oracle bottom out. Anders, before I give the numbers, any quick thoughts you have about this company that no longer exists independently.
Anders Bylund: NetSuite was always a big name in the enterprise planning color community, I guess, and it still is only last week, Gartner released their magic quadrant for that sector, and they were in the magic quadrant for that with a leader in both vision and execution under Oracle's leadership. They had been out of that for a while, but they got back for the first time in a few years. Oracle takes this seriously and gives them the resources they need to succeed and it's a big business for Oracle, and I think it was a good buy out.
David Gardner: Yes, it certainly was, and Oracle these days is on quite its own run. Just the numbers for this stock we bought, I recommended NetSuite at $85.63 as part of that sampler. By the way, it's worth me mentioning that for virtually every stock that I'm ever quoting in any of these samplers, our Motley Fool services, in this case, Motley Fool Rule Breakers had a lower cost basis. These were samplers where I was picking them at the time, but often we've held these stocks for much longer than the samplers themselves. Just pointing that out, we have certainly a lower cost basis in Rule Breakers for NetSuite. But it wasn't too shabby $85.63 when one year later, it got bought out for $109 even by Oracle as already mentioned, under it was therefore up 27.3%, and it was a cash buyout. The stock no longer existed. Shareholders just got a cash payout. The S&P 500 over that very year was up 2.6%. Just as I reflected, when we closed this sampler seven years ago after its third year, it has the exact same numbers today. It was up 27.3%. The market was up 2.6%, so we beat the market with this one by 25 percentage points. I don't think we need to spend too much time preoccupied in a company that no longer exists, but Anders, would you like to provide any additional reason as to why you think this company was such a good one year investment?
Anders Bylund: Well, if you took the cash buyout from Oracle and reinvest in Oracle stock at that point, I did the numbers for that. In that case, by now, including the 27% gain in the first year, you would have a 601% return. That's a compound annual growth rate of 22% and even Warren Buffett would be happy with that return. It depends on how you play things.
David Gardner: That's fantastic, Anders. I really appreciate you taking the time to do that. I was too lazy to do that or not quick enough, too busy, maybe, but I'm so grateful you did that. That's pretty awesome to hear. Of course, that is all thanks to Oracle. Now, as a strategy, as an investor, sometimes if you get paid out cash, you are forced, of course, to sell, and you're going to be paying a capital gain on that. But if you really do like the company acquiring it, then you could, right away, have put that money back into Oracle. As Anders is pointing out, it's a seven bagger since then, which is a really nice return compared to the market. We're not accounting for it that way. For this samplers purpose, all we're going to take is a plus 25 point Alpha gain, forgoing the extra 600 points we might have had if we just bought Oracle. But before we go on to stock number 4, Anders one final point from you on this.
Anders Bylund: Yeah. I like what you said about taking your capital gains taxes on the buyout. But if you held that net sweep stock in your IRA account or some other tax deferred in trading platform, then you don't have to worry about that.
David Gardner: You are right, of course, a lot of our listeners are managing their stock investments in retirement plans, Roth IRAs, IRAs, etc. There's actually a lot more opportunity today to buy stocks in people's retirement plans, and I think the present administration is trying to open up even further than that to more forms of alternative investment. But anyway, back in the day for our members in 2016, we decided we will just cash out and we didn't we didn't know who had something in an IRA and who didn't I really appreciate that point and certainly, there's a lot of advantage if you're needing to move stocks around if you're doing so in a tax sheltered retirement plan. Thank you for that, Anders. Let's move on to stock number 4. Now, again, when 10 years pass, lots of things can change here was stock number 4, which was NuVasive, ticker symbol NUVA. It's no longer known by that name. Now, in 2015, NuVasive was a mid cap medical innovator. It was focused on making spinal surgery less invasive, and more effective. The company's devices and techniques were helping surgeons reduce recovery times, improve outcomes, carving out a leadership position in a difficult, a very highly technical field. I noted at the time, its strong quarter. Is sales were up, operating margins, expanding five percentage points. I was talking about that, management raising guidance, all very positive things happening for NuVasive all, by the way, against the backdrop of some larger competitors like Johnson&Johnson in this space, who were reporting declines at the time. This was a focused, disciplined company quietly outgrowing its industry, and for the stock, my optimism for this sampler came from NuVasive's blend of innovation and execution. In a space where progress is often slow and incremental, NuVasive was delivering real results. It was growing, it was profitable, improving patient care. It looked like a Rule Breaker. I'm going to say in scrubs. Smaller, faster, steadily gaining ground on the Giants. That was the backdrop, the picture that I presented of NuVasive back in mid November 2015. Before we go over the numerical performance, well, maybe you could give us a little update. What are some initial thoughts you have about NuVasive which no longer has that name?
Anders Bylund: NuVasive is not something I knew very well. Back in the day, my only real healthcare investment is in a similar area. It would be Intuitive Surgical, the Da Vinci surgical robots.
David Gardner: Yeah, fantastic, one of our great Rule Breakers of all time.
Anders Bylund: Yeah, and my holding in that is up 1,700% in 15 years. You can find success in this part of the healthcare market. NuVasive they seem similar in a way because it's high tech in the medical field, and Globus saw value in that and apparently it's been a good addition to their business recently, improving their spinal surgery services. They have some big rivals to battle against the Stryker and the Medtronic, anew weapon in your arsenal, it's going to be helpful in that struggle.
David Gardner: That's right. For Globus Medical, it is certainly competing against giants. Just to underline this for listeners, NuVasive was bought out by Globus Medical in February of 2023. Again, this sampler was picked November 2015. We stopped reporting on it three years later, 2018. Of course, our 10 years later series is all about keeping up with the spreadsheets and the performance and the stories, and so it was actually five years after we stopped reporting on five lesser known Rule Breakers, that Globus Medical pitched for NuVasive and I think gave three quarters of a share. For each share you had of NuVasive, I believe, you got three quarters of a share of Globus, I might as well provide the analysis now, which means numerically here's how this stock has performed. If you make all the assumptions that you bought shares with us, November 11, 2015, your cost basis would be $69.67. Today, Globus Medical stock is at $84.87 as we record. That means it's up, this is sad, 21.8%. Up 22%, I think our listeners already are onto this. The market itself is not up 22%, it's up 229%, which means that if you'd bought and held NuVasive when I called for in this sampler, you'd be way behind the market, 207 points behind the S&P 500. Just doing quick accounting here, we've had two winning stocks beating the market that would be strategy and NetSuite, and two Middleby and Globus Medical, two stocks losing to the market Anders both of them by about 200 percentage points. It's funny. All of these stocks are up, but going up 10% or 22% over 10 years isn't going to look great against the market averages. Let's bring it back now to Globus Medical and this NuVasive story, Anders. What are a couple of reasons you see as to why this stock has done what it's done?
Anders Bylund: I think it came down to a lack of scale, it wasn't Intuitive Surgical with a lock on a very specific medical technology market. NuVasive had its spine focused services and perhaps the most valuable part of that is now emerging to be the neuromonitoring part for Globus that helps monitor the nervous system during surgical procedures. They call that pulse, under Globus, I don't know if that was the brand name before the buyout, but that's what it is now. Globus just posted blowout results last week and they mentioned pulse as a driver of that.
David Gardner: That's great. You and I were trading notes before the podcast and I was not keeping up with the stock very carefully. Yeah, Globus Medical, by the way, ticker symbol GMED, that's how we now track this position was up 35% on one day last Friday. Just a few days ago, this stock went up by a third of its value in a single day. Again, our results include that, which means the stock is still way way down to the market even after a big move. But I'm glad to hear, Anders, that it was, in fact, the NuVasive centered innovation that is explaining the company's good results right now.
Anders Bylund: I'm not saying that was the only driver of good results, but it was definitely helpful.
David Gardner: It was called out. Anything else you see going on in this market? I mean, one thing you and I both know as fellow Intuitive Surgical shareholders, Intuitive has a much bigger platform and opportunity because Intuitive is just in many ways, making their minimally Invasive Da Vinci surgical robots. Basically robot assisted surgery across many different forms of surgery, whereas this has always been a bit narrower, a little bit more focused, a smaller company, a smaller idea, so that we have to point out.
Anders Bylund: Even so Intuitive Surgical still only manages about 10% of global surgeries in the types of surgery that it offers. While also expanding to different surgery types it hasn't gotten approval for yet and new geographical markets. There's still a lot of opportunity and I'm not cashing in my 1,700%. I'm holding on to that stock.
David Gardner: Yeah, I certainly really like Intuitive Surgical as well. For anybody, well, we'll talk about this a little bit at the end. But when I think about technology and surgery and robot assisted and minimally invasive, the first thing I think of these days is not GMED. It's the stock that you just mentioned. We may circle back there. Just to close up stock number 4, then, Globus Medical is how we now refer to stock number 4 and this sampler up 22%, the market up 229%. That means we have two stocks beating the market, Anders, and two losing to the market. Let's see what happens with stock number 5. Again, all of these were presented alphabetically, so we come down now to the last one letter T, the ticker symbol TREX. That's also the name of the company. Trex. Now, in 2015, Trex was a quiet leader turning wood deck into, I would say something smarter. It's composite decking made from recycled wood fibers and plastics, offered home owners a longer lasting low maintenance alternative to traditional wood decks, traditional lumber. I described it at the time as a sleepy company. It was growing revenues around 10%, repurchasing its own shares. It was content to compound quietly rather than chase headlines.
David Gardner: In a market obsessed with the next big thing, sometimes, Trex exemplified to me the power of steady, durable progress, and my bullishness came from Trex's just simple, I would say tangible value proposition, and also it's disciplined execution. This is a stock that has been held by Motley Fool members for many years, going well back before this sampler. It's never been flashy, but it's always been profitable, shareholder-friendly, building a better product in an enduring category, I would say a quintessential Rule Breaker in plain sight, improving the world one backyard at a time. Now, that was my bullish view of things 10 years ago. Before I give the performance, Anders, your initial thoughts about Trex.
Anders Bylund: Trex really lived up to that view for many years up until 2022. At the end of 2021, counting back to 10 years from today, it was up by about 1,400%. And then the inflation crisis hit and people stopped doing big backyard projects and Trex took that hard and it's down up 229% in 10 years.
David Gardner: Yeah. Let's go ahead and give the numbers now, and thank you for that. This has been a remarkably volatile stock. Considering how steady I was talking about it, how steadily winning it had been up to that point in 2015, as you mentioned, Anders, this stock skyrocketed to nearly 150. Let's see. It was December of 2021, it was up at 140. I touched just over that at the end of 2021. It went all the way down to just 40 in 2023. In 2024, it touched a high of 100, and then here we are in 2025, just weeks ago, it was trading at 50, and then it got whacked just in the last couple of weeks, dropping to 33 where it sits today. Amidst all that volatility, what was our cost basis 10 years ago this November? It was $10.03 a share. So this has been a winner incredibly close to the market overall. In fact, just updating the numbers as of the minute we're recording, Trex stock from 10-33 is basically up 229.3% with the market up 228.8. I'm going to call that a minor win for us, literally a half percentage point as we speak. This stock I'm going to call a winner. It's one percentage point ahead of the market. Ten years later, again, the market up 229. This went up just over that. It's remarkable, though, Anders, to reflect that when it was up at 140, it was, as you mentioned, a 14 bagger for Motley Fool members and for this sampler, which really would have made this a monster winning sampler of five stocks. I still like Trex today. We'll talk a little bit more about that. But looking back over these 10 years, Anders, what do you see explaining not just the stocks move, but maybe the volatility?
Anders Bylund: Like I said, it seems sensitive to macroeconomic trends with people's budgets getting crunched or loosening up. And it makes a big difference. It's in the general construction materials market, where you find a lot of giants that have done very well over the last 10 years. Trex is behind things like Ingersoll Rand and Eaton and Otis Elevators, all of those giants have outperformed tricks despite them also being exposed to the same things, the same economic effects, and it makes me wonder if there was anything management could have done differently, you know, to dodge the consumer shifts and the budget conscious. Other people found a way. At the same time, they saw rising competition from pure plastic materials and the cost of the polyethylene that they depend on kept rising. You can't control all of these things. Maybe I'm being mean to the management team, but you do have to wonder if there's anything they could have done differently. There was a D stock of the shipping channels in 2022 also, coinciding with the very worst possible time for such a thing to happen. You can't plan for everything I guess.
David Gardner: Thank you for that. And really 2025, just looking over the stock, Anders, was trading arranged between 50 and 70 bouncing back and forth up and down over the course of this year. It really has only just been the last couple of weeks that all of a sudden, it's not between 50 and 70, it's at 33. Now, whether that's a bullish sign, finding a winning stock at quite a low price or not, this company has a market cap of only about $3.5 billion today. Still been a winning stock, though, for Motley Fool members. Generally, I say tie goes to the performers. This stock really has performed over time. I'm not following it as carefully myself these days, but I think it's an interesting company. I would suggest it for anybody's watch list because I think what they do is fundamentally good and successful. But you're right, some of their economic inputs with higher prices, inflation, things like interest rate changes, there's a lot of sensitivity of this business, a smaller business around those factors, so something to watch out for.
David Gardner: All right. Well, Anders, I think it's time to crawl back in our time machine because we've now reviewed all five of these stocks. What we were saying way back when, what has happened since. Let's strap in and return to the present day. You ready?
Anders Bylund: Yeah.
David Gardner: Wow. That's always a little bit more jarring than I'm expecting. But let's just hop out of the machine, and now here comes the big reveal, Anders. I'm going to first provide the overall performance for this Five Stock Sampler after 10 years, then let's you and I just talk about anything we think about any of these stocks right now going forward to close. And so the grand reveal. This is Five Stock Sampler Number 2, picked on November 11, 2015, 10 years ago this week. The five stocks were competing against the market's 229% return. However, one of those stocks, since it got bought out one year later, we only add in three percentage points for the market, not 229. So when you average the markets return across these five positions, that comes to 183.5%. So 183.5% as we speak is the S&P 500 gain on average. I'm happy to say that when you take these five stocks together, they have risen 304.4%, meaning we are basically 121 percentage points ahead of the S&P 500. That's right. If you'd simply bought these five stocks, they have crushed the market averages over the last 10 years, and yet it's also worth pointing out, it really is just one of these stocks that explains most of the outperformance.
Now, I want to speak to that briefly, Anders, as we open it up some and talk about the sampler and the stocks within it. The first point I'd like to make is that this is actually very similar to 10 weeks ago when I brought out the first of our Five Stock Sampler 10 year reviews, it was five stocks for the next five years. That was the name of it. And like that one, three of the five stocks beat the market. So that's really good news. We had three out of five outperform, same one here, although it's also true that first one that just one of the stocks pretty much won it all on its own. For that one, it was MercadoLibre, which at this point is now a 19 bagger since being picked 10 years ago. Of course, for this one, it's a company that's changed quite a bit over the 10 years, and that's Strategy, ticker symbol, MSTR. Anders, my first thought about this sampler is it looks a lot like the last one. They're not all going to be this way, but often when you let time pass and you let the winners win, and the also runs just also run, this is not uncommon. Your thoughts back?
Anders Bylund: Right, and especially when you started out with the concept of choosing stocks people hadn't heard of in the first place, you're going to get a diverse range of outcomes from that and sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don't, but it only takes one or two big winners to make up for all the losers.
David Gardner: That's a really good point. It is true that when you pick five lesser known Rule Breakers. First of all, these are all companies 10 years ago, that I was saying, I think these are Rule Breakers, fulfilling most of my six traits of Rule Breaker stocks that I'm looking for. I also lightly referenced just a few minutes ago, three out of five beating the market, which reminds me certainly of habit number six of the Rule Breaker investor. It's right there in my Rule Breaker Investing book, where we're shooting for 60% accuracy. We're trying to beat the market if we can, 60% of the time three out of five, and that's exactly what this particular sampler has done. But I think you're right. When you have companies that are lesser known, small to mid caps, if they really are Rule Breakers and some of these turned out to be and some didn't. But that's going to excite interest probably in bigger players like Oracle, like Globus Medical, companies that will end up buying out these companies are changing them up. So you're right. I think this set of stocks was more vulnerable to external intervention.
Anders Bylund: Yeah. Really, a few points of the match will settle the result. I geeked out on tennis stats the other day. I used to play tennis a lot and watch it and I thought, I'm sure Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic and Rafa Nadal have just very impressive winning 70% of their points or something. They published this stuff online, the ATP. You can go in and check and all three of them have won about 53-55% of the points over their careers, and they win all the grand slams and have all the records, and that's all we need to do, win the right points. I think that's what happened here. MicroStrategy, in this case and Mercado Libre and the last one, you don't always know how they're going to win. Like MicroStrategy came out of left field. But for all I know, they could have succeeded as a data analytics company too if the dice had rolled a little differently over the years. But the point is one worked out and that's all it takes.
David Gardner: That's a really great point. I love that tennis comparison. It's reminded me of fellow Rule Breaker Sem Verbeek, who had a big win at Wimbledon, mixed doubles, and a Rule Breaker investor as well, past guest on this show. I'm guessing that even when Sem won the mixed doubles at Wimbledon, he and his partner probably only won about 53-55% of their points. I wasn't really realizing that, but it makes sense when you explain it.
Anders Bylund: That's all it takes. You need to be steady and consistent when it matters.
David Gardner: Anders, well, you and I have not seen much of each other in person over the last decade or so. I do keep up with your writing on the Fool, and I do think that you are a tall person. Is that right?
Anders Bylund: I'm six foot six and dropped weight from 250 to 230 recently.
David Gardner: Wow. You even loom pretty big in my Zoom screen that I'm seeing you. But I'd forgotten truly how tall you are, and of course, that is an advantage in tennis, is it not?
Anders Bylund: It is, at least on serving. Some of the biggest serves you'll see are tall guys.
David Gardner: Wonderful. Well, thank you for that tennis point and that tennis analogy. Let's shift here before we close to talk about Bitcoin a little bit, because this is something that you follow much more closely than I do. You've already given a pretty good overview in terms of what they are, how many there are, and the overall view of Bitcoin. What is your personal view? It sounds like you remain invested in Bitcoin and you're benefiting. Am I right?
Anders Bylund: Yeah. I bought my first 20 bucks of Bitcoin in 2014, didn't do much with it then. But at this point, I wish I had because it's up by some ridiculous percentage by now. But I caught a real interest quickly after that and just by playing around with it, I used to own this wide range of just silly coins that sounded like they would be different and better somehow. But it's really I've come to realize just a different accounting system and bitcoin is hard to beat because scale and acceptance is a core part of what makes it work. Without those things, it's hard to build value. I would never do what Michael Saylor is doing and bet the literal farm on Bitcoin. But if there was one to go heavy on, it would be that one. I have a few other favorites at this point, like the Web3 thing happening, so Ethereum is going to gain from that and Polkadot looks valuable. But for the most part, Bitcoin is where it's at and that's why it remains about half of the entire cryptocurrency market.
David Gardner: Which increasingly looks like a winner take all position, which I guess makes sense when we think about what would be a global standard, and we're talking about currency.
Anders Bylund: Yeah. There could always be some up and coming new thing that Bitcoins thing better or whatever. But then again, Bitcoin isn't set in stone. They can change the program, they can change their policies over time. There's voting involved and the people running the computer network have to accept it. Cheating your way into this is not going to be easy to do because it would be very expensive to just buy the votes you need. It works because of the large scale and we'll see how it works out. They have to protect against the quantum threat over time. But there are algorithms for that and they just need to take the votes and adopt a better solution and implement it and hope that nothing goes wrong when they do.
David Gardner: Thank you, Anders, and I appreciate your perspective there. It also comes from somebody who's both an investor and a writer, but I'm also going to mention a technologist, somebody who really loves technology and has spent his life in and around that. I think you're a triple threat here, and I appreciate your viewpoint. There's a little bit of a future look at some of these companies and some of our thoughts. Obviously, Anders, you and I both favor Intuitive Surgical when we talk about the area of minimally invasive tech driven surgery. That wasn't in this particular five-stock sampler. Had it been, we would be an even better outperform. But I'll still take a 304% return over 183 every year or every decade of the week, which doesn't make any time sense. But then again, we've been in a time machine, so I'm still a little flustered. But that is a future look at some of these companies. Your mileage, dear listener, may vary. I want to thank Anders Bylund for taking the time to jump into the time machine with me and get back to 10 years ago, where these five stocks were picked and for Anders and for me to be able to sort through them together this week with you, fellow Fool, talk about what worked, what didn't, what we can learn.Well, that's what we're trying to do on this podcast, which is now in its 11th year. We're going to be doing 10 years later pretty much every 10 weeks going forward. This was number two of 30. Next one will be early February. Five Stocks to Feed the Bear was the name of that Five Stock Sampler. In the meantime, I also want to thank our producer Bart Shannon for his good nature and his always timely sound effects. I want to thank again, you, Anders Bylund. Anders any final word? Maybe something in Swedish to go?
Anders Bylund: Something in Swedish. We can really snack a little.
David Gardner: Excellent. And what did you just say for the rest of us?
Anders Bylund: I said, thank you very much for inviting me and I would be happy to be back.
David Gardner: Wonderful. Thank you for explaining that, and we will be happy to have you back. We want to thank you most of all, dear listener, for tuning in to a discussion of, to me, the game that counts the most investing and investing over the only term that counts, and that's the long-term game. How much fun it is to think back over 10 years. I was saying to Anders earlier off air, I don't think there are many investing podcasts out there that have 10 years of results that they're reviewing this week. I think most people just don't think or act that long. Or as Anders said offline, there actually haven't been that many podcasts around that long. Anyway, how much fun it is to think back over 10 years to listen and to learn. Thanks, Anders. Fool on, my friend.
Anders Bylund: Fool on, Dave.
David Gardner: And that's it. Ten years later.
