Welcome to "11 O'Clock Stock." Here at Fool.com, we'll be finding a new great stock at 11 a.m. ET every weekday for 50 days. Better yet, we're so confident in the picks that we're investing $50,000 of the Fool's own money in them! To hear more about the series, click here to see a video from Motley Fool co-founder Tom Gardner. Can't make it at 11 a.m. ET? Come back to Fool.com, and we'll have the article in our Top Stories section 24 hours a day.
This summer I made my 100th monthly stock pick in Motley Fool Stock Advisor. Every month since March 2002 (a pretty bad market overall) I have picked a stock that I believed would beat the market over the succeeding three to five years. The average performance of my 100 stock picks is, as of the market's weekend close, +85.6%. The market's directly comparable average over the same period: minus one percent.
How am I beating the market by 86 percentage points -- up and down my list of 100 stock picks? By keeping three simple principles in mind, all of which are present in today's 11 O'Clock Stock, FedEx (NYSE: FDX).
Fast facts on FedEx:
|
Market Capitalization |
$25.4 billion |
|
Industry |
Logistics |
|
Revenue (TTM) |
$34.7 billion |
|
Earnings (TTM) |
$1.2 billion |
Source: Capital IQ, a division of Standard & Poor's.
1. I buy excellence, and it's never cheap.
For 16 years picking stocks online in Fooldom, I have aimed above all at finding the world's best growth companies. Growth doesn't have to be sizzling; the key is to find sustainable growth. I'm looking for companies generating 15%-40% sustainable growth in sales and earnings. The key here is that these stocks never look cheap. Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) looked crazily overpriced when I bought it in September 1997 -- at what is now a split-adjusted price of $3 and change. Marvel was riding the hype wave of the first Spider-Man movie in the summer of 2002 when I recommended it. It didn't look cheap even after selling off that summer, but now "overpriced" Marvel (now, Disney (NYSE: DIS)) has made investors a 16-bagger over a period of time that some people are calling a lost decade; I call it an awesome decade. So, buy sustainable growth, buy greatness, and fully expect it to look expensive.
2. I go where the trends favor me.
The rapid pace of technology and productivity growth is the great story of our time, recession or no. Even during bad economic periods as we've had for almost four years now we have seen ridiculously interesting and incredible gains in technology; iPhones are now doing video chat -- the iPhone itself was only born three years ago. Don't let the boo-birds and the fearmongers scare you out of looking ahead at more incredible technology growth and getting invested right along with that. Figuring out the Internet before the rest of the investment world did was lucrative; how much better off might you be if you figure out OLED displays, the coming personal genomics revolution, or the next great emerging market before most of the rest of the world does? One thing is for sure: There will be more great technological gains and surprises. The secret to getting rich on these isn't much of a secret: It's that you actually have to invest in these places ahead of time.
3. I hold longer than just about anyone I know, which includes 100% of Wall Street.
Want a simple tip on how to beat the market? Zoom out. Most investors, and most all of the professional investment world, are looking at what happened on the market today, or what the next quarter's earnings will be. And with high-frequency trading and other frenetic enticements like real-time quotes, the collective focus is only getting narrower and narrower. A time-honored way to generate investment profit is to go against the grain, to see the same data through a different-colored lens. These days, it's as simple as just zooming out -- looking a year ahead, or three, or five. Because almost no one else is.
Back to FedEx. Trends favor an explosion over the next 25 years in global trade, I believe that's true even if the "new normal" is tepid GDP growth. The Internet and globalization have made the exchange of hard goods easier than ever before. FedEx is the world leader -- over ground and through the air -- of delivering those goods. FedEx is peerless in terms of its consistency, reputation, and dependability of getting goods from one place to another overnight. All that e-commerce we're increasingly doing these days continues to have to be delivered.
I first recommended FedEx in 2003. It remains an open active recommendation at Motley Fool Stock Advisor -- and it's up an OK-but-not-so-great 41% for us so far, ahead of the S&P 500's directly comparable gain of 16%. Consistent with what I said, I'm still holding (I own the stock, too). FedEx is supposed to earn $5 a share in the year ahead, putting the stock at about 17 times earnings -- again, consistent with what I said above, it doesn't look cheap.
But here's where we zoom out: The company has an almost unassailable competitive position, and will drive and profit from the boom I'm expecting in global e-commerce and trade. With a market cap today of only $25 billion, FedEx looks to me like it can double our money over the next five years.
Previous recommendations -- click here for full list of recommendations and performance:
