Investment Guru Stock Tips and Expert Advice

David Gardner gave this presentation on Rule Breaker Investing at the MicroCap Leadership Summit (MLS) in 2020. David co-founded The Motley Fool with his brother Tom in 1993. The Motley Fool is a financial services company whose purpose is to help the world invest better by speaking the truth about Wall Street and empowering millions of people to take control of their financial lives. The Motley fool is a sizable operation with around 400 fools that help spread the company’s mission, and the company has been twice named Glassdoor’s #1 Best Medium sized Company to work for in America.

I’m very excited for this episode. As you see in the title, my guest today is Annie Duke. One of my earliest memories of watching sports, believe or not, was watching the 2003 and 2004 World Series of Poker. Seeing legends like Chris Moneymaker and Greg Raymer win the title, then all the tournaments in between, was so cool, and all I wanted to do was play poker. Another stand out amongst the greats playing these now televised events was, you guessed it, Annie Duke. Since retiring from the game in 2012, Annie is an author, corporate speaker, and consultant in the decision-making space. Annie’s latest book, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices, was released in the fall of 2020 from Portfolio, a Penguin Random House imprint. Her previous book, Thinking in Bets, is a national bestseller. As a former professional poker player, she has won more than $4 million in tournament poker. During her career, Annie won a World Series of Poker bracelet and is the only woman to have won the World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions and the NBC National Poker Heads-Up Championship. Prior to becoming a professional poker player, Annie was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship to study Cognitive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Annie is the co-founder of The Alliance for Decision Education, a non-profit whose mission is to improve lives by empowering students through decision skills education. She is also a member of the National Board of After-School All-Stars and the Board of Directors of the Franklin Institute. In 2020, she joined the board of the Renew Democracy Initiative. Long story short, she’s incredible, and I’m still wrapping my head around what I learned from speaking with her.

In 2020, many of us outperformed. But to be honest — 2020 was a year that made most of us look a lot smarter than we are. All you had to do was own some technology stocks, not sell them, and you were up 50%+. Apple (AAPL), the largest public company in the world, was up 80% in 2020. Amazon (AMZN), the second largest public company in the world, was up 76%. Tesla (TSLA) was up 740%. I communicated to my IFCM investors in my Q4 Letter, “We don’t want to downplay our accomplishments, but truth be told we aren’t sitting around hand slapping and grab-assing about the past. We are focused on the future and this is where we will spend the remainder of this letter.”

If asked about possible silver linings to this pandemic, I would list first the chance to spend more time with family. Our son Andrew and his wife and son moved in with Nancy and me in Los Angeles at the beginning of the pandemic, as they were renovating their house when Covid-19 hit, and we lived together for the next ten weeks. There’s nothing like getting to spend months at a time building relationships with grandchildren, something we were privileged to do in 2020. I’m sure the impact will literally last lifetimes.