Motley Fool analyst Asit Sharma and contributors Travis Hoium and Dan Caplinger have a lot to talk about.
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A full transcript is below.
This podcast was recorded on Nov.28, 2025.
Travis Hoium: We hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving, but now the real fun begins Black Friday shopping. Motley Fool Money starts now.
From Fool Global headquarters, this is Motley Fool Money. Welcome to Motley Fool Money. I'm Travis Hoium. I'm joined today by Dan Caplinger and Asit Sharma. We're going to get to the state of retail. That's going to be the theme of the day today, but let's start with what I think is the biggest story. That is what in the world happened to Black Friday? This used to be a huge shopping holiday. Guys, I got my first Black Friday email from retailers. They started coming in October 31st. The real flood started November 5th, that's more than three weeks for what used to be a single day holiday. They still say Black Friday sale. Asit, what in the world is going on in retailers right now?
Asit Sharma: Well, we're seeing the desperation heave as consumers have pulled back over the last couple of years. So much more depends on this group of days, starting with October 30th or 31st and running through. It used to be such an event, and retailers took such great advantage of our excitement as consumers. The biggest retailers, the ones that really move the needle in the industry, of course, are the ones who made lots of investments in shipping and logistics. They have the ability now to make money across a spade of days, and that puts pressure on the rest of the industry to respond, and so it's never ending. By the way, I saw my first Christmas trees not long after Halloween out there. There's some more merchandising ahead. But I think this is a natural evolution of the way just as in Big Tech, we see fewer companies swing the results for many, the imprint of Amazon and Walmart, Best Buy these big retailers is something that the entire industry has to adapt to. Unfortunately, for some of us who used to have fun on Black Friday, that means it's a never ending slog to find deals and keep trying to stay awake late at night for some of us clicking away.
Travis Hoium: Dan, one of the things that seems to really change with retailers is there was a formula there. You'd probably sell these TVs at a loss 15, 20 years ago, but then somebody would come in and they would buy a bunch of other stuff, and at the end of the day, you had a huge sale day, you made your margin that you needed to. Now it almost seems like that playing field has leveled out because if I'm looking for a TV, I can just go online. I can even ask ChatGPT what is the best value TV at a certain price point or a certain size. Is this just another example of retailers being put under pressure by any of these big online names like Asit mentioned?
Dan Caplinger: I think so. Also a lot of those big retailers have made big online pushes themselves. Look at Walmart. Walmart is more interested in its online business than its retail business. That's why it's moving its stock to the NASDAQ to position itself as a tech company. I just think that in-person shopping it used to be more fun than it is now. It used to be you had the incentive. You'd get up at 4:00 am, you'd go to the store, you'd get the deal. You'd get the deal that nobody else would get. That was your payoff, and that's what you got. Now, there's FOMO of not finding the best deal that is out there. If you go to the wrong website, I only got 25% off. If I'd gone to this other website, I could have gotten 30% or if I clicked on at 5:00 am instead of 6:00 am. It's just nutty, and so now it's almost like this adversarial relationship. Like if you don't get the absolute best deal, then you find out about it later. You're angry at that first retailer who you did business with, and that's not the relationship that retailers are trying to have.
Travis Hoium: I didn't think we were going to be nostalgic for the running through target at 4:00 in the morning or the fights that ended up happening over, Nintendo 64 as that was my thing from my childhood. But I guess here we are. Maybe that was more fun times in shopping. We did get some data this week, actually this morning as we're recording, we're recording this a few days early. Dan, the numbers are up. Retail numbers are up, but what is the bigger story here as we look throughout the year? We had tariffs coming in in April. That was a huge story that we talked about a lot. We're maybe starting to see some of that impact, but we're also not seeing consumers completely crater. What did we learn from this preliminary data? This is not up to date. We still have delays because of the government shutdown, but what do we know right now?
Dan Caplinger: This is September data that we're looking at, and retail sales up 4.2% year over year from September 2024. That includes a bunch of stuff. It does not include natural price increases, though. You take a look at CPI up 3% over the same period. You're really looking at just like a 1.2 percentage point increase in real terms, inflation adjusted returns on retail sales. When you look at the numbers, Travis, it's not quite as good as that because a lot of that extra spending is really more toward the essentials, the staples types of areas, things like food, clothing, essentials. When you look at discretionary spending, not quite as healthy, we saw some strength in autos, but I think some of that again, September numbers, we saw a pull forward in September as EV credits expired, and so I think that the picture here, maybe not quite as rosy as those headline numbers would make it sound.
Travis Hoium: Asit, how are you thinking about the state of retail? Then how does inflation play into that? Because we've been talking about that all year, 3% is not nothing. It's not the 7, 8, 9% that we saw a few years ago, but it's also higher than the Fed typically wants.
Asit Sharma: Three percent is difficult if your wages aren't rising by at least the same amount, and we've seen wage inflation cool. The ability of what we get paid to keep up with what we have to purchase, that's really come to parity. Not great for the consumer. I think the retail environment is fragile. We see that buy now pay later is being used increasingly for the discretionary side and the staple side. People are using buy now pay later in order to purchase groceries in some cases. I think the consumer here, at least in the US really feel stretched. Now, there are pockets of affluent, and the affluent still are paying up for certain types of goods, and we've talked on this show about the success of on holdings in recent years. They're still selling into the strength of that brand. But then, on the other hand, it's so uneven in the economy. I think that's a warning signal as we look ahead to 2026. Now, the US consumer has shown an ability to endure a lot longer than you or I would normally predict, but I do feel we're coming to a point where further gains in retail sales, so the ability of retailers to bring in traffic to have a little bit of price increases that they can pass on, that is paper thin. In fact, the preliminary data that I saw this morning indicates a little bit that those who are importing goods are absorbing for now some of that cost increase, so that's impacting their bottom lines.
Travis Hoium: Eventually that likely gets passed on.
Asit Sharma: It gets passed on.
Travis Hoium: The other piece of information that came out, I think it was this morning was about half of GDP growth is apparently coming from the AI buildout. Building data centers, buying GPUs, all of that stuff. Asit, does that concern you when you look from a macro perspective that in theory this could be a revolution, but one of the ways that this pays off is that AI starts replacing job. It's potentially a negative on both sides. If we keep this investment up, you lose jobs. If you stop the investment, then the economy goes south.
Asit Sharma: This one is super hard to figure out. We've had waves of this in the US in the past where when you thought the US economy had lost its ability to grow in a new direction, it just surprises you. I will point to the boom in natural gas. Part of that was fracking. That was a stop gap in our economy that then let incremental GDP growth. A little bit of growth beyond the core happen, and then we got to the next revolution, and then the next. Then, so maybe two or three revolutions out from that time period. Here we are at AI. This one feels a little different, though. I've seen figures as high as 90% of the incremental change in GDP. That 90% of growth could be due to the AI buildout. Now, in some ways, this is fine for the economy because there are businesses out there that specialize in construction and electrical wiring, and that's great for the economy. But the flip side of that, if we all become so much more productive, it is scary because you don't really see a through line to people having replacement income. If my job gets taken away by AI, maybe it will one day. Maybe the three of us our avatars will be conducting this show in a few years.
Travis Hoium: Absolutely.
Asit Sharma: What will we be doing? Hopefully the three of us will be together having a beer somewhere, but I don't know. It's iffy.
Dan Caplinger: Asit, it's interesting because I've taken that. It's shifted my investing philosophy a little bit. It used to be that I shied away from over investing in high tech stocks because I felt like my job had a lot to do with the success of those high tech stocks. Now, at this point, it's like, well, if high tech has the potential to replace me, it's like, where's that income going to come from Travis? It's going to come from my holdings of the high tech stocks that are profiting from all this stuff. In many ways, it's a career hedge in a way that before I shied away from it is a career concentration.
Travis Hoium: I like that as a career life hedge. If you're in medicine and you're worried about hims and hers disrupting the way that you make money, maybe just buy some stock. Same thing if you're in law, and you see ChatGPT or Gemini coming for that business, maybe that's the way to hedge it. I do want to get to the changes that we've seen in retail. We talked about some of these broad changes, but we're investors. One of the things that sticks out to me is, you look at over the past 20 years, this does not include dividends, but Target stock is up about 200% in the last 20 years. That's a long time for not a lot of gains. Walmart's up about 900%, so a little bit better. But then you look at Amazon, 14,000%. Shopify, I don't think they were quite public, so this is just since they went public, about 6,000%. Asit, what lessons can we learn from those? Because it seems like the things that we've been talking about Black Friday going away, it's because of these companies that are driving these gains for investors.
Asit Sharma: Well, Travis, for the large part, the companies that you mentioned use their cash flow and their balance sheets, maybe not Shopify's, more of a cash flow story, but many of those retailers use their resources to invest in distribution to invest in logistics that enabled them to take advantage of this explosion in online commerce. We have AI now as a theme, and I think they'll continue to benefit because it's the Walmarts of the world, the Etsys, the Shopifys, the Targets that are cutting deals for conversational commerce. In other words, making deals with ChatGPT so that they can sell within that huge funnel. I don't want to reduce ChatGPT to a marketing funnel.
Travis Hoium: But they got to make money somewhere.
Asit Sharma: Hardly can be their destiny. We'll see smaller retailers also play this game because ChatGPT, OpenAI, have such a desperate need to monetize all their investments. Little fish will be able to play in this game, but that's something that you'll need to do if you're a retailer. You'll need to understand how you reach consumers at the point of consumption, which in the future, is not even going to be search or a website, but it's going to be that input box for whatever LLM you're using.
Dan Caplinger: That seems to me to be how retail has evolved, is that retail has figured out that in many ways, they can't do things based on their traditional model. They need to take advantage of these intermediary platforms that expand their visibility, widen the scope of their products. I've got local retailers here who do business across the country, even across the world, but they wouldn't have been able to do that if they didn't have Shopify, if they didn't have Amazon, if they didn't have relationship with these bigger intermediaries. They give up money in order to have exposure to that. So far, it's been profitable for them, or at least more profitable than just having the local business. I worry over the long term if take rates continue to go up if Amazon, eBay, Shopify, keep trying to get bigger fractions of that dollar to a point where their retail partners, the folks in the trenches, finally decide, you know what? You're not leaving enough for us. We're going to get out of that. It's like, are they killing the golden goose as a result of that? I don't think we're there yet, but I do look for that as a potential future risk.
Travis Hoium: AI will definitely play a big role in the future of shopping. We just don't know quite what it looks like yet. That will be really exciting to see how that plays out because it did pay off well for investors in the last big cycle. When we come back, we're going to talk about what we're giving thanks for from an investing perspective. You're listening to Motley Fool Money.
Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. Thanksgiving was yesterday, but this can be a moment of reflection. In the investing world, I wanted to ask you too, what are you thankful for Asit? I want to hear from you first.
Asit Sharma: For all of my apparent cynicism so far in this podcast, there are a lot of things I'm grateful for that I'm thankful for Travis. One of them is that I live in a very advanced and wealthy society where there are numerous opportunities to carve out your destiny. I know that's changed from decades ago, and maybe even a few years ago, I do feel it's harder in this age to pursue and realize your dreams, but it's still possible. I think the ability to make a good life for yourself and maybe those you love is important to most of us so I'm thankful to be here. I'm also thankful for just small moments of introspection. They're so rare in this world in which we live in. I'm going to try to do a better job in the coming year of carving out those moments. We just all need to remember sometimes that we're human, we can disconnect, and we can reconnect with ourselves and with others. Grateful that I can turn my phone off and be a human, and I plan to do that some more than I have in this past year.
Travis Hoium: Probably something we could all do a little bit more. Dan, what are you thinking about right now?
Dan Caplinger: You know, I think I share Asit's thoughts about this. Easy for me. Easy for a lot of people to focus on things that aren't going well. Prices are up, housing's expensive. Lots of things are challenging today. But even in those tough times, what I fall back on and what I see a lot of other people falling back on to is just how much support you can get when you're going through a tough period. It seems like no matter how much the suffering, the whole world may be suffering, everybody in your community might be having difficulties, but when something really happens that takes the whole collective effort everyone to get through it. It's just amazing how people come through, get together, put little petty differences aside, and really help to support each other. I've benefited from that this year. I've been really appreciative of that. Don't discount that. Don't be cynical about it. Don't take it for granted. It is really the most precious asset that you have, are these connections that you have, and just kind of the innate support that you can count on when you're going through a tough period for yourself. Count on that and then try to be that person for others when they're going through the same times.
Travis Hoium: Such good advice. I wanted to go a little bit different direction here. I've spent some time in entrepreneurship, and at a time like this, I think about the people who are taking the biggest risks. We're investors here. We get to judge people and founders and CEOs and say that they're doing things right or crazy. But at the end of the day, these founders are dedicating their lives to these companies, and I'm reminded of I was at an event at Piper Jaffray, and they brought in a bunch of interns, and one of the executives said something about how, we're working hard, we're doing things, we're trying to make money, but at the end of the day, we're not taking that much risk. The people that were working for the founders of the companies that were trying to sell, they're taking the huge risks in business. I just think that as an investor, we get to ride along with that, and we get to be the mouthpieces, the talking heads. But if you're these CEOs who started a company 20 years ago, that's a long time to make a huge investment in the sacrifices that they make along the way, in a lot of ways, are not sacrifices that a lot of us would make to build the businesses that they're building. Something that I think is always important to think about at this time is, as investors, we get to benefit from a lot of work that other people are putting in.
Dan Caplinger: It's easy to think that everybody was successful because you only think about the CEOs that end up being successful. Think for everyone that you know, there's so many that didn't make it that took that risk and it didn't pay off. It just makes it all the more special when it works.
Asit Sharma: Then you find those serial entrepreneurs, some who failed numerous times, and then finally draw the lessons together and made it big. Those are fun to study, as well.
Travis Hoium: Speaking of entrepreneurs that could maybe use a little bit of support, go shop at your local restaurant. Those people are putting a lot of risk on the table to put food on people's tables at this time of year. Something to think about if you're willing to spend a little bit of extra money. When we come back, we are going to talk about the stocks that we would give as gifts this holiday. You're listening to Motley Fool Money.
Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. Let's go Black Friday shopping. But let's do this investing style. Dan and Asit, I want you to buy some stocks for some hypothetical people. Maybe you have some people these ages in your lives. I pick these ages because this is who I have at home. What stocks would you buy for a newborn, an 8-year-old, a 22-year-old? Maybe somebody starting their career, starting their investing life, and somebody maybe that's a little bit closer to retirement, maybe still working, maybe in early retirement. Where are you thinking from an opportunity risk profile, and then them identifying with it? Asit, why don't you go first? If you have a newborn in your life and you're gifting them a stock, what are you gifting them?
Asit Sharma: Travis, I'm going to gift them Amazon symbol AMZN. We've been talking a lot about retail, and we've mentioned some businesses that have been around for a long time. So think of Walmart. It's been around for decades. When you look across the landscape, I think there are a few companies that merge the longevity of retail with high tech, as well as Amazon does. I think it will be there for someone who has 25 years of compounding in front of them. This is a business that will overtake Walmart, I believe next year as the world's largest company by revenue. It's on track to hit $1 trillion of revenue in just a few years annually. But it also has some amazing businesses tucked inside, as we know, it's one of the world's largest logistics companies. That's a subdivision of Amazon. It has an amazing high-profit advertising business that is challenging some stalwarts like The Trade Desk. We've heard a lot about that this year. Don't forget Amazon Web Services, which has a run rate some $125 billion in annual revenue. Extremely
Travis Hoium: Pretty big business they've got there as a little side business.
Asit Sharma: This is a lots of side businesses here. I think there's enough there that this conglomerate stays together and will compound for someone who is born today. Of course, no stories without risk, so we need to think ahead of who takes over when Andy Jassy is out of the picture. But the investments it's making in AI capacity, robotics, for automation, etc, are pretty impressive. I'll give them AMZN.
Travis Hoium: Dan.
Dan Caplinger: Travis, I stuck with a Mag 7. I went with Alphabet, ticker GOOGL, and many of the same arguments. Broadly speaking, Alphabet has a big business, has a whole bunch of stuff. For folks my age, you think of Google and the Internet search engine as the big driver of ad revenue of business generally. But more recently, Alphabet's gotten into a whole bunch of different businesses, as well. A lot of people thought that they'd gotten themselves left out of the AI realm, and that made Alphabet. If any of those Mag 7 stocks were value stocks, Alphabet was that value stock for a long time. Maybe not so much anymore. We've seen a big jump in just the past few months as people have realized that Google is not down for the count when it comes to AI.
Travis Hoium: How quickly the sentiment changes on a stock like that.
Dan Caplinger: Exactly. Nvidia is down, Alphabet's out, or even Alphabet's up. Who the heck knows? That's the stock market that we live in these days. But also with alphabet, you mentioned YouTube. YouTube, the unseen cash cow, in many ways, not just generating financial success, but also visibility. It's just such a core part of a lot of people's lives.
Travis Hoium: If you have young kids, you are probably watching some YouTube at some point throughout your day.
Dan Caplinger: Got it. Inevitably. Sometimes even without you're thinking about it because their embeds are in all websites that you might be in too. Add to that, other ventures, you've got Waymo on the self-driving car side. You have other bets, Alphabet's got plenty of money to dedicate toward things like quantum computing. It's the wave of the future. I think Alphabet is going to be part of it. I think that a newborn can appreciate that and be in a position to benefit from the appreciation in alphabet stock. Again, ticker, GOOGL.
Travis Hoium: Yeah, I have an 8-year-old who recently decided that he wanted to buy some alphabet stock, and his line was, when I search for something on Google, it's like I'm paying myself.
Dan Caplinger: Exactly.
Travis Hoium: I thought that was great. I want to throw one in here for newborns, go a little bit higher on the risk profile side. I will let. This is one that we actually bought their products when our kids were little, and I think their business has gotten a lot better, 45% growth in the most recent quarter. It's a medical device, but it's an at home device, and they're getting some lock-in. That's one that I don't know, if you let that compound for 18 years, could be a good one. But like I said, when we spent money on those, I was like, Okay, maybe let's put a couple hundred bucks into the kids brokerage account in this because we're buying their devices as well. If you have an 8-year-old in your life, and again, we have an 8-year-old, so I have thoughts on what is going in his portfolio, but he's making his own decisions. So, Dan, what are you going with if you're gifting the stocked?
Dan Caplinger: I'm going with Roblox. Ticker RBLX. I've got nephews. They are, Oh, boy, 13 and 10. I think they are at this point. They are still playing Roblox. I thought that this might be one that they would age out of at some point, and maybe it'll come, but it hasn't come yet. It's just, Roblox has done a really good job of establishing engagement, and part of their business model has been attract those kids to start early, but then the questions always been, can you retain as they get older, and at least based on anecdotal evidence from my family, seems like the answer there is yes, and that's good news for the company because each one of those kids that they bring into adolescence, maybe even into adulthood supports the overall ecosystem. Like what I see there.
Travis Hoium: Asit, what do you have? It seems like yours, you're peering into our lives here in the Hoium household.
Asit Sharma: I'll tell you, I struggled a bit with because this my first thought was Dutch Bros symbol BRO-S.
Travis Hoium: You're hopping up eight-year-old town coffee?
Asit Sharma: Exactly. Then I put some more thought to it and I said, No, that can't work. Then I thought about Spotify, which is looms large in our household. I thought, I'm on the right track. Symbol SPOT. But then I settled on Garmin, symbol GRN. Now, this is a business that's very interesting because, of course, they got their start in GPS technology, and over time, they've retained that. They still have some great satellite devices. In fact, I have a text handheld satellite device. Once in a way, someone in my family, I have three boys now in their 20s. We trek some place exotic or remote, so I like having that can turn their subscription on and off. But the wearables aspect of this business is so interesting. We are a family doesn't have a lot of Garmin products. They're a bit pricey, but one of my sons does have a Garmin computer on his bike, and the metrics that these fitness wearables and bike accessories give are really setting the standard out there in the marketplace. You'll see them sold in some great places like REI. I think coupling this for a young person with the fact that this business throws off a very healthy operating margin, something like 25, 26% can be powerful if you are a little older than a newborn, aware of that product. First of all, it's healthy. It's for people who want to be fit. What better for a young eight-year-old than to point to a product that they could use for years and upgrade as time goes on and be healthy. But also about this business, it's very diversified. It even has a marine segment. Some technology for navigation for boats. It has an automotive equipment manufacturer OEM segment, so supplies technology to automobile. It's a really diversified company. But just circling back to the strongest part of the thesis, it's got a brand that's just extremely strong in the marketplace. I think that brand is going to get bigger and better. They have withstood a lot of competition from many brands over the years. I think this could be a fun one for a youngster.
Travis Hoium: The Garmin Bounce Watch, they've delayed getting into the kids watches, but that's something we've been looking for for years is as these kids start adventuring out in the world on their own, I want to know where they are. Now their Bounce line has GPS. You can do texting, but it doesn't have all the features of an Apple Watch. That is one thing that is on the top of my son's Christmas list.
Asit Sharma: Why this is important, Travis. When the three of us were kids, you literally could go play out in the woods. Forget your parents or your neighbors, nobody would even think of you until dinnertime. It wouldn't stress out after 15 minutes, like where is my kid. Technology like this, it's a good middle ground. This could let you let your kids go play in the woods again if you're going to stress and be a 21st century parent, so be it. You can check once or twice. I see they're playing Ford out somewhere. Now I can go back to my own deal. Technology can help us go back a little bit toward the way things were and just let kids be kids. I'm excited for products like this.
Travis Hoium: Twenty two, 25-year-old in your life, Dan, what are you gifting them?
Dan Caplinger: I'm going with Ferrari, which ticker RACE, Stock Advisor pick, and I'll tell you, I've gotten into Formula 1. There's a lot of people who've gotten into Formula 1. Ferrari has not exactly.
Travis Hoium: But not for Ferrari at this one.
Dan Caplinger: That's the thing. Not the most successful 2025, but nevertheless, it is a good regular way for race fans to see Ferrari vehicles, and it adds to the panache. We were talking earlier in the show about retail and how luxury retail occupies its own space, not quite as up and down as you may see for discretionary retail at other areas of the income spectrum. Ferrari's just done a great job year in year out, maintaining its luxury brand. I think that continues for decades to come. Great pick for a young adult.
Travis Hoium: Always make one less car than they have demand for. Asit, what are you looking at?
Asit Sharma: I want to rave just a quick bit over Dan's pick. I love that idea. I think Ferrari is such a strong brand, and not the greatest F1 year, but traditionally, they are so big in F1 and such a hallowed brand. It draws people to that industry in general. I will say, Gens I had to be in India on short notice just a few weeks ago. I was there about 10n days, and on the third day, we took a taxi. Taxis are very cheap in Bombay, Mumbai, as it's called today. This one driver just clung to us. We would come out of a store, he'd still be there. He's like, can I take you to the next place? What's interesting about this story is he had these beautiful Ferrari decals on his iconic blue old school Mumbai taxi. It's such an aspirational brand wherever you go, people love Ferrari. Let me go to my choice, though, for 22-year-old. I'm going to go out on the risk spectrum as you did some Travis. This is a company called Astera Lab, symbol ALAB. This is a semiconductor company, a smaller player that supplies basically interconnectivity components to businesses that work within data center. It helps speed up signal between GPU, CPUs and different parts of the data center. They also are working on a next generation technology which allows different components on a server rack to pool their memory. Every GPU CPU contributes memory to one pool, and it makes it a much smarter rack. That's their next stage of technology. It is a volatile business. It's going to be up and down. But again, if you have the time horizon, much as you spoke earlier, Travis, I think it's a good business for a youngster to look into, don't bet the farm on it, but get businesses like this in your portfolio, a long growth curve ahead despite the risks inherent in this industry.
Travis Hoium: Quickly, if you have somebody that's closer to retirement, just one sentence. What stock are you thinking about Asit?
Asit Sharma: For me, I think GE Aerospace. The reason is you can still get some growth out of this company. It does pay a dividend, and it's in an industry where there's just pent up demand, as far as the eye can see. We can't build plane engines fast enough to satisfy military and commercial demand. That's more than one sentence, but I'll stop here.
Travis Hoium: Dan.
Dan Caplinger: Travis, I'm 55. My biggest holding money where my mouth is Berkshire Hathaway, ticker BRK-B, Buffett's retirement, not a problem, in my view.
Travis Hoium: You get a little Google with it. When we come back, we're going to talk about the stocks on our radar. You're listening to Motley Fool Money.
As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows the Motley Fool's editorial standards, it is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. One of the things we like to do with investing is make it identifiable to time of the year. If you don't maybe want to talk politics at the Thanksgiving table or around the holidays, maybe tie it to what's going on in the world, what you're spending your money on this holidays. Dan, when you think about that, what comes out in Thanksgiving food, investing, travel, where does your mind go to?
Dan Caplinger: I think that there's two things that I want to highlight here. One is that there's been in my life much more of an emphasis on experiential stuff than there is on physical goods. It's like we all have enough food. It's a celebration. We're lucky in that respect. We have plenty of material things, but what we don't have enough of is time together. I think smart businesses are starting to realize there's a lot of people in that boat and that if they can offer experiences that people can share, that is a moneymaker. The other thing I'm maybe doing, we're taking a trip. My in laws are in the Southern tier in New York. We're heading up to Rochester for a show. The Kodak Tower is still there, and for me, that's a lesson for my nephews in investing survivorship bias, Eastman Kodak, one of the biggest technological innovators in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly a husk at this point. The Rust Belt has plenty of these stock reminders that yesterday's boom can turn into today's bust, but also lots of green shoots coming up in those ravaged areas of the country. It's encouraging to see.
Travis Hoium: Investing lessons are all around us, I think is the lesson there, Dan. Asit?
Asit Sharma: I was on a very similar wavelength, thinking about my answer to this question because we love to travel as a family, and sure we've gone through our more materialistic phases, but at this point in my life and I think our family's life, we love to just be together. If we can travel together, that's great. I encourage folks look around when you're traveling. There are brands. Not all of them are the best investments, but from the airlines.
Travis Hoium: Do you use Airbnb, Booking.com? Is that.
Asit Sharma: I use them both, and I alternatively love to stay in an Airbnb or a hotel, depending on where I'm going and what this situation is. But looking on the ground at businesses when you're abroad is so much fun. You see global brands, and you will see some reappear and reappear. Quick one, which is, again, maybe not the best investment unless you're at retirement age is McDonald's. What crazy menus they have, whether you're in Rome, again, or Mumbai, like I was. I always love to at least stop in the McDonald's and see what the crazy stuff is on the menu. McDonald's, bring some of that back to the US, please.
Travis Hoium: We like to end the show with stocks on our radar, along with comments and questions from Dan Boyd behind the glass. Dan Caplinger you're up first. What's on your radar this week?
Dan Caplinger: I'm looking at Kratos Defense and Security Solutions. It's ticker KTOS. I took the question literally, What's the stock on your radar? It's a stock that makes radar equipment. We've got the Christmas season coming. You get all these goofy reports from NORAD is tracking Santa on the radar. If that's happening, it's probably Kratos equipment that's doing it. They are helping out with a whole bunch of other defense stuff as well. Might not be the first thing you think of with stocking stuffers for the kids, but the trends that we're seeing in Washington and around the world with greater spending on defense have plenty of shoppers in the government looking for deals on the equipment that Kratos is selling.
Travis Hoium: Dan, is this the stocking stuffer you would like this holiday?
Dan Boyd: I don't know about that, Travis, but what I do know is that Kratos shares a name with the main character from the God of War video game series, and those were pretty good.
Travis Hoium: Asit you're already, that's a tough task to beat Dan's pick if we have a video game tie, but what's on your radar this week?
Asit Sharma: On my radar is Alibaba, the e-commerce and tech giant in Asia. I did a little research on Alibaba's name. I couldn't tie to a video game, but it is indeed named after Alibaba and the 40 Thieves. Founder Jack Ma famously thought that the idea of open sesame was just tied into this brand and it would open up new avenues for commerce. What I like about Alibaba is that it reminds me of Amazon websurces, which I talked about earlier. It's one of the biggest online retailers in the world, but it has a great little cloud business that is growing well in excess of the rest of the company. Very nice profit margins, relatively cheaply valued versus hyperscalars in the US, and they threw off about $21 billion in free cash flow over the last trailing 12 months. I'll be quiet here to get my question from Dan.
Travis Hoium: Dan, what do you think about Alibaba?
Dan Caplinger: Alibaba makes a lot of sense this time of year, Travis, Black Friday and everything. But Asit also, like, I don't know what really sets it apart from its competition, because there's a lot of e-commerce out there.
Asit Sharma: I think what sets it apart is that they really jumped into AI and a little bit of quantum computing. They pulled back from that. They're really just tech for it. They're fierce innovators. They love that e-commerce side, but they know the money is where AI and the next generation of computing lies. That's where they're putting their models.
Travis Hoium: Dan, which one's going on your radar this week?
Dan Caplinger: Asit had a fantastic pitch. I got to go with Alibaba.
Travis Hoium: Congratulations, Asit. I need to look at Alibaba again, too. For Asit Sharma, Dan Caplinger, Dan Boyd, and the entire Motley Fool team, I am Travis Hoium. Thanks for listening to Motley Fool Money. We'll see you here tomorrow..
