What do you have to be grateful for? Pull up a chair and stay a while, and let us be grateful together this week. Let's reflect on our world. At the end of another year, let us rejoice in the good things that we have only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing. It's the Rule Breaker Investing podcast with Motley Fool cofounder David Gardner. Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. It's a delight to have you join me during what is for many of us, one of the busiest months of the year.
So thank you for taking the time to suffer fools gladly. This week's theme is gratitude. Nearing the year's end, I do this every year, I wanna reflect on its power. This annual series began in twenty twenty after a conversation with my son, Gabe, who shared insights from the book, Thanks, by Robert Emmons. The book highlights how cultivating daily gratitude can measurably increase our happiness by as much as twenty five percent.
That's above the baseline that a lot of psychologists think you can't really move your own baseline that much. As much as twenty five percent by cultivating a daily gratitude practice and sustaining that over months. Even simple practices like keeping a gratitude journal for three weeks, which admittedly I've never done, but it can improve your sleep and your energy. Emmons' work weaves science with wisdom from philosophers, theologians, and novelists.
He emphasizes that gratitude is essential for a full life. One line from the book's introduction resonates with me. Here it is. It is gratitude that enables us to be fully human. So to my son Gabe, I say, thank you for sharing this. You know, the great twentieth century humanitarian physician theologian and yeah, he won the Nobel Peace Prize too. Albert Schweitzer called gratitude the secret to life.
In one particular sermon, he summarized his position by saying and I quote, the greatest thing is to give thanks for everything. He who has learned this knows what it means to live. He has penetrated the whole mystery of life, giving thanks for everything, end quote. Well, everything sounds like too long a podcast this week, but I do have seven things queued up to give thanks for.
And before I start with the first one, let's just briefly consider the opposite, the opposite of gratitude, and that would be ingratitude. Now for me, that sounds a lot like complaining. Complaining about the opposite of Schweitzer about everything. I hope you don't have anybody like this in your life. If I ever did, I don't have now.
I'm happy to say, but people whose first instinct is to complain, Whenever I have in mind those feverish, selfish, little clods of ailments and grievances, I have to go back, speaking of quotes, to another of my favorite quotes previously covered on a great quotes rule breaker investing podcast, and that would be the great George Bernard Shaw quote from his play Man and Superman on living a great life. Let's do it one more time here, and I quote, this is the true joy in life.
The being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. The being a force of nature, instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community. As long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I wanna be thoroughly used up when I die. For the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.
Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch, which I've got hold of for the moment, and I wanna make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations, end quote. Thank you, George Bernard Shaw, for that beautiful contrast between feverish clouds of ailments and grievances complaining the world won't devote itself to making us happy and the exact opposite, and that is gratefulness. In Schweitzer's words, for everything.
Alright. Well, seven gratitudes this year for my first. Well, darn it. I do this every year. I wanna thank you. Yes. You. Whoever you are, wherever you are, and you were many places, and you're all different. But I'm speaking to you right now. You, a rule breaker, brother or sister in arms, fellow fools, all a community to which I can say with Bernard Shaw, my life belongs.
Thank you for being there, not just, of course, to my rule breaker investing podcast listeners, although most of all, of course, to you. But I wanna thank all Motley Fool members and prospective Motley Fool members everywhere, especially I think of people who are not yet members today, but who are awakened to the beauties of questioning conventional wisdom, which is at the heart of being a fool.
So for all fools everywhere for that spirit of challenge, for doing it in a fun way, which has to be the case if you're a Motley Fool. It's one thing to be a fool challenging conventional wisdom as a fool, but if you're a if you're a motley fool, you're bringing some humor to it just like Shakespeare's jesters. So to every foolish spirit everywhere with gratitude, number one, I say, thank you.
Because arguably, as much as I apparently enjoy talking to myself some weeks on this podcast like this one or to friends and special guests other weeks, I'm talking not so much to me or to them all the way through, but to you. So I especially thank you for listening. An extra thanks if you're somebody who shared your story, if you shared your question, if you've written into our mailbag, any of the mailbags this year or any other year, thank you.
This podcast is powered a quarter of the time by you. About one week in every four, it's mailbag, and it's your awesome stories, poems, and questions which power this podcast. So in a special thanks to you. And by the way, our email address is r b I at fool dot com. So if you're moved by anything you hear this week, if you'd like to share your own gratitude, I'd love to share that on this coming week's podcast. Email me right now, r b I at fool dot com.
Oh, and by the way, this is always the time of year when I get especially to thank my producers this year, my longtime producer, Rick Engdahl, and my recent and sometime producer, Des Jones, my foolish friends. A brand new show every week with no skips and no repeats going back to July two thousand fifteen. Thank you, Rick and Des, so much for helping to make this podcast the best version of itself week in and week out through twenty twenty four and beyond.
Okay. On to gratitude number two, and this one's also pretty easy. This one's obvious. Twenty twenty four was the year of NVIDIA. Thank you, NVIDIA. On April fifteenth of two thousand five, yep, tax day two thousand five, NVIDIA stock traded at nineteen dollars and fifty six cents per share. I know because that's the day I first picked it for Motley Fool Stock Advisor. Since then, it's been one of the great stocks of this or really any era. So let's follow its story.
And for storytelling purposes, I'm using my original cost basis of nineteen dollars and fifty six cents, and I'm gonna trace Nvidia's rise to today. Now, I wanna note four times over the past twenty years, the company split its stock. Two for one in two thousand six, three for two in two thousand seven, four for one in two thousand twenty one, and ten for one in two thousand twenty four.
Thus, shareholders today now have one hundred twenty shares for every one share they own back in two thousand five when I first recommended it. Stock splits reduce the share price while increasing the number of shares in equal proportion. I think most listeners of this podcast already know that, but I'm always speaking to new people too. So I wanna make sure you know that stock splits add no value. The pizza stays the same size. It just has more slices.
So while rule breaker investors do have one hundred twenty shares for everyone that existed back in two thousand five, thanks to those splits, our original cost basis has therefore effectively been reduced to just sixteen cents. And I wanna rush in to add, especially for newcomers, NVIDIA was never a penny stock. Don't buy penny stocks.
It's just that for Rule Breaker investors, when you have stock splits like these and you hold over a long period of time with an incredibly low cost basis, it starts to look like you bought a penny stock. But rest assured, it was nineteen dollars and fifty six cents on tax day two thousand five. Let's let's go through the story then. By October two thousand seven, the stock was making me look good as it tipped the scales at one hundred twenty.
So that's up six times in value in two years, what we like to call a six bagger in homage to Peter Lynch who coined the the bagger phrasing. But then came two thousand eight. One year later, those of you who are investing then, do you remember the year two thousand eight? NVIDIA dropped from one hundred twenty to eighteen. We went from riding high to looking silly. The dang thing had been up six times in value, and now three and a half years later, we were underwater.
By December two thousand nine, NVIDIA had begun to recover. And for my new monthly Motley Fool Stock Advisor pick, I picked one stock a month from two thousand two to two thousand twenty one for Motley Fool Stock Advisor. I re recommended NVIDIA. The stock was back to forty seven. I wrote at the time and I quote, the timing is right and so is the price. Five years later, at the end of two thousand fourteen, the stock finally hit sixty dollars a share.
So, yes, that that bullish re recommendation I bravely made in two thousand nine at forty eight had only seen the stock rise twenty five percent over five long years. And it was still, by the way, just half of what it had been seven years earlier when it was at one hundred twenty in two thousand seven. Though it had now tripled, it was a three bagger from our original two thousand five cost basis around twenty dollars a share. So the stock's at sixty.
Let's bump it forward to two thousand sixteen. Nvidia finally crosses one hundred twenty. So it just reclaimed that early high that we'd celebrated in two thousand seven, nine years earlier. I think you can cue Jack Nicholson in the shining with a little bit of we're back. By the end of that year, the stock had tripled again.
So having started two thousand sixteen at ninety six, it closed at three hundred nineteen and was far and away the top performing stock on the S and P five hundred in two thousand sixteen. It was up one hundred ninety eight percent. That means with our original cost basis of nineteen dollars and fifty six cents and that forty seven dollar reentry, we were sitting a bit higher in the saddle with the stock at three nineteen.
Now I get dangerously foolish urges from time to time where where I just have to challenge conventional wisdom and go further out on a limb to prove a big point. Sometimes it works and, by the way, sometimes it doesn't, but now was one of those times. I thought about all my regression to the mean friends. You know, people who say things like, it's awfully expensive now, or what goes up must come down.
You know, the ones who cite studies about how last year's top performers are bound to underperform next year. Now, I recognize this can be true, but I I love to point out when it's not because that'll shock some people, which is kind of fun. And when you're on the opposite side of conventional wisdom and you're right while it's wrong, that's when you stand to make the most money.
So the very month after the media was buzzing about NVIDIA being the top performer on the S and P five hundred in two thousand sixteen, in January two thousand seventeen, I made NVIDIA my new monthly recommendation from Motley Fool Stock Advisor, so that was the third time it had been my big monthly pick. I was showboating, and it worked. This time it worked.
I wasn't picking in a video just for two thousand seventeen, of course, but it was awfully nice to see it rise in two thousand seventeen from our three hundred seven dollar recommendation price in January to five hundred eighty that year. NVIDIA was the S and P five hundred's tenth top performer in two thousand seventeen up eighty three percent. Now quick side note, this has happened in recent times not with NVIDIA, but with Meta Platforms. Kind of fun to note.
Last year, Meta Platforms, the former Facebook, went from one hundred twenty two to three hundred fifty three dollars a share. Last year, it was up one hundred eighty eight percent. Crazy. Right? Because for a company that today has a one point four trillion dollar market cap, it was adding hundreds of billions of dollars of market cap in just that one year last year. So did it regress to the mean here in two thousand twenty four? What goes up must come down? Actually, not at all.
Meta Platforms has gone from three fifty three to five hundred fifty three this year, up another fifty seven percent as of today's recording. So it kind of reminds me of that NVIDIA moment in two thousand seventeen. Anyway, let's go back and finish the story here because I've never heard anyone follow the line what goes up with anything other than must come down, but isn't that kind of the point?
Because when, a, everyone thinks that and, b, we don't and, c, they're wrong, then, d, whether or not their eyes are opened, e, our eyes will likely take on the iconic dollar sign dollar sign look of Scrooge McDuck. Because with great rule breaker stocks, what goes up ends up going upper.
So to continue this remarkable story from two thousand five to present, after running from ninety six to five hundred eighty, from two thousand sixteen to two thousand seventeen, NVIDIA in two thousand eighteen touched over eight hundred and fifty, but couldn't hold it and then fell all the way down to whammo, ouch, three hundred eighty five.
I realize this is a lot easier to show in a graph than it is to speak truth with numbers in a podcast, but I'm just gonna keep finishing it out here because by early twenty twenty, the stock crossed back over eight hundred fifty. Again, it ended twenty twenty at one thousand five hundred and sixty.
And, yes, we're still sitting on our original cost basis of nineteen dollars and fifty six cents now seeing the possibility the possibility of a hundred bagger because a hundred bagger would be one thousand nine hundred fifty six, and the stock closed twenty twenty at fifteen hundred sixty. By the way, as things turned out, we were actually shooting too low because in twenty twenty one, the stock crossed three thousand six hundred dollars.
Having started twenty twenty two just over thirty six hundred, shareholders watched their stock nosedive. Get this once again, just months later below fifteen hundred. From thirty six hundred, it got cut in half in twenty twenty two and closed at eighteen hundred. Now I hope you're noticing how much we are recurrently losing, sometimes waiting years for any gain at all. I hope so. But are you also noticing how much money we've made?
Keep noticing because before I wrap up, let's take a moment now to reflect on the staggering volatility that NVIDIA demonstrated at its new scale. Because when a company as significant, large, and successful as NVIDIA sees its stock price plummet from thirty six hundred to eighteen hundred in a single year, Its market cap shrinks from seven hundred fifty billion to three hundred seventy five billion. That's, again, hundreds of billions of dollars, poof, all gone in a single year.
To me, that's a striking example of how inefficient our markets can be, by which I mean sometimes certifiably crazy. Yes. Crazy. But that doesn't mean there still isn't a lot to learn from the NVIDIA story. As I share my gratitude this year in closing, gratitude number two for NVIDIA. The company stock sits at seventeen thousand two hundred nine dollars a share from our cost basis of nineteen dot fifty six.
Now in real world terms, Nvidia is today trading if you quote it at one hundred forty three dollars a share or so. So what I've done is I've taken out all of the stock splits and just shown you the real world gains made by the stock, whether you wanna count from sixteen cents or nineteen dollars and fifty six cents. But there are some really important takeaways before we move to gratitude number three.
First of all, the market is willing to bid rule breakers to exceedingly high, and I would also say exceedingly low points as stocks, sometimes just separated by a year or two. So the volatility, you have to recognize and appreciate. You have to ride it if you wanna have a hundred bagger as an investor, whether it's Nvidia or frankly any other stock. It's also proof positive though that that original pick was a phenomenal pick. We are up eight hundred eighty times since two thousand five.
But even my price is forty seven dollars a share in two thousand nine and three hundred seven in two thousand seventeen looked really great. Now that we're at seventeen thousand plus dollars a share. So each time we were buying higher, but it was still a great pick. And when you really think about it, it was a heck of a buy every other year in between two thousand five and two thousand twenty four and every single day of any of those years. Think about it. This year included.
It's now the most valuable public company of all time. It is a classic rule breaker. It fulfills all six of my rule breaker stock trades, and rule breaker investors who followed our six habits will recognize how valuable that combination of our six habits holding stocks for long periods, for example, how valuable that combination is when you combo it with the six rule breaker stock traits that I talk about all the time. So, yeah, I'm very great.
I'm so grateful to have shared all of that with so many of you. In the end, the proof is in the pudding. It's the business performance of the company and its five star CEO, Jensen Huang, that are the real reason for riches here. You're not gonna have great stocks without great companies. You don't have great companies without great people. And that perhaps is the lesson to learn for all time, and it was proven for all time this year.
And not because Nvidia was a hot stock this year or last, it was proven for all time because of the ride that Motley Fool members have been on from nineteen dollars and fifty six cents or in split adjusted terms today from sixteen cents to today's price of a hundred forty three and a half for NVIDIA. Thank you, NVIDIA. Alright. On to gratitude number three. In my old new borrowed blue podcast earlier this year, I went deep with the color blue.
I called it the study in blue briefly on that podcast, and I'm gonna bring that back now into this expression of gratitude for this year, this week's podcast, a study in blue. In fact, I wanna express four gratitudes, four blues. Here again near the end of twenty twenty four. So thank you in advance, blue, four blues. Let's start with the first, blue sky.
The term blue sky when we talk about thinking represents boundless optimism and creativity, free from the constraints of the current realities or limitations. It's about envisioning what could be rather than what is. It encourages an open minded approach to problem solving and innovation. I think a three time Rule Breaker Investing guest Warren Burger's great book, A More Beautiful Question. A More Beautiful Question is all about that blue sky, blue sky thinking.
On the cover of the book, there's just a big question mark, and guess what color that question mark is. Yep. It's blue. And when I think more about blue and blue sky, I think of my friend, fellow optimist, Bill Burke, who joined me on this podcast earlier this year. Bill heads up the Optimism Institute. He has his own podcast. It's called the Blue Sky podcast. The line that starts off every one of his podcasts, and I love it. Here it is. There's always blue sky above.
Sometimes, you just have to get your head above the clouds to see it. Blue sky optimism is integral, I would say, to my own success as an investor and certainly for entrepreneurs. Optimism is practically a required personality trait. It needs to be laced into your character for you to be a successful entrepreneur most of the time. So so these things are enabled by the blue sky. The first of my study in blue gratitudes here and before I move on to the second, I should just mention blue sky laws.
They're what protect investors against fraudulent sales practices and securities fraud. So, of course, I love that phrase too. The whole movement, by the way, started state by state about a century ago. These days, many states in in the United States have based their blue sky laws on regulations that were put in place decades ago, but it's all there for clear visibility.
So blue sky embodies both the spirit of unbridled optimism and the foundational principles of transparency and protection in finance blue sky. Next, let's go to blue ocean. The blue ocean strategy is a business theory. It's also a book that suggests companies are better off searching for ways to gain uncontested market space, the so called Blue Ocean, rather than compete head to head with other companies in an existing industry.
The authors of the theory, which they did, as I mentioned, turned into a book, they'd call head to head competition with existing competitors. They'd say that's red ocean. So blue ocean strategy is focused on creating new demand. So that's the best way to make your competition irrelevant. When you create new demand, you encourage innovation, you emphasize the importance of offering something unique to your customers. It opens up new frontiers, opportunities for growth, and profitability.
And when I think about some of my, maybe yours too, my favorite rule breakers, these are classic blue ocean companies. We've already talked about NVIDIA with its GPUs. How about how about Tesla creating so much demand with electric cars that it has refashioned an entire industry? These have been fantastic stocks. They're one so worthy of holding for a long time. These are blue ocean companies. So so much for gratitude for blue skies and now Blue Ocean.
Let's next go from ocean next to to the Moon. A Blue Moon is when you get a second full Moon within the same calendar month. I think it's every twenty nine and a half days, the lunar cycle happens. The moon fully rotates around the earth and because our months are not twenty nine and a half days every one of them, but closer to an average of just over thirty days.
What that means is every couple of years, we get a month with two full moons, and that second full moon, that's what we call a blue moon. Hence, the saying, once in a blue moon, which we as humans generally mean to denote something that happens very infrequently. But in the context of gratitude and here of investing in businesses, a blue moon opportunity can be seen as a rare and valuable chance that shouldn't be missed.
It's those unexpected moments or or market conditions that have seized upon can lead to significant achievements or breakthrough. I'd say at a personal level, dear listener, think of your once in a blue moon moments. The ones you took up, even the ones you maybe failed to take advantage of. A career leap that all of a sudden presented itself involves some risks, but maybe you took it. Once in a blue moon, maybe it's made all the difference.
Or in other contexts, how about that once in a lifetime travel adventure you got invited on? You said, yes. And you climbed that mountain or you went across that ocean, and you've got the pictures to show it and stories for the rest of your life. A once in a blue moon opportunity. So let's be thankful for them even if we didn't take up everyone that they exist and especially when we say yes is so worthy of our gratitude.
Well, let me close my study in blue with the last blue and that would be blue spaces. Blue spaces refer to the beneficial effects that bodies of water have on our mental and physical well-being. Research suggests that being near in or around water can significantly boost your happiness, reduce your stress, improve your overall health. The color blue itself is often associated with calmness and serenity. Blue spaces tap into design principles.
They emphasize your connection and my connection with nature. So incorporating blue spaces into our lives whether it's walks by the beach, living near water, or just simply choosing travel destinations that offer aquatic tranquility can be a profound source of rejuvenation and joy. So there you have it. Blue skies, blue ocean, blue moons, blue spaces. Gratitude number three. Thank you, blue. Alright. On to gratitude number four, and this one is the flavor of the year.
I have to express gratitude to artificial intelligence. I use chat GBT every day. I know some of you do too, and there are many other forms of artificial intelligence. Heck, before any of that, there was Waze. I remember using Waze ten plus years ago. Basically, artificial intelligence where drivers report in what's happening on the roads at large and gives you a much better picture of where you should drive and navigate traffic than just a standard map or GPS.
And so Waze as an early form of AI has added immeasurable value to my driving life. Anyway, it's artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence takes many different forms, and I realized some of them are considered threatening. And often we hear things like, it's gonna be the end of the human race, artificial intelligence. By the way, I highly doubt that, and I'm incredibly grateful so far for artificial intelligences, but most specifically, Chat GPT.
So gratitude number four, Chat GPT, thank you for the birthday gift ideas. Thank you for proper pronunciations. Thank you, Chat GPT, for helping me learn fun facts whenever I'm traveling. Chat GPT and artificial intelligences enhance all of my travel experiences. It's accelerated my thank you note writing this year as well. Thank you, Chat GPT, for another favorite news. Thank you for your efforts at punching holes in all of my most confident notions.
In all of my new ideas of phenomenal use by the way, asking artificial intelligence to give you a little bit of pushback about your favorite ideas. By the way, Chat GPT, I also wanna thank you for always answering in just seconds. It takes me seconds to come up with a bad dad joke. So thanks to Chat GPT. Great gratitude to all of the artificial intelligences that are helping to inform our lives and improve our society. That's not all of them, but that's most of them.
And for most good people, that's their intent as they work on artificial intelligence. But for me, most particularly, the one I use almost every day, I highly recommend it to you as well. It's free, chat GBT. And, oh, by the way, one new use because I developed a new episodic series for rule breaker investing this year. Just did one last week. My second chat GBT asks and David answers where I have it challenge our notions about Rule Breaker Investing.
I had a lot of fun doing that podcast last week, and we did one earlier in the year to kick off. So there's yet another use of chat GBT. Okay. Let's move on to gratitude number five. This one I shared a couple of years ago, and I felt moved again this year to express this gratitude again. I first had to articulate it at a high school reunion. The year was nineteen ninety four.
My class was gathering back in Southborough, Massachusetts where I graduated from Saint Mark's School in nineteen eighty four. So in nineteen ninety four, it was our tenth reunion. Nineteen ninety four, by the way, side note, also the year The Motley Fool launched on America Online.
Anyway, the joy of our regathering as high school classmates ten years later was bittersweet because early on that weekend's Saturday morning, we gathered at the chapel for a brief service in mourning of one of our classmates, one of our brightest classmates who'd enrolled in the Naval Academy after graduation and who had died during a training flight in the Atlantic Ocean, north of Puerto Rico, having launched from, but not ever returning to, the USS John f Kennedy.
I've been asked to say a few things at that chapel service, and I felt the weight of that without really knowing, as a young man, what to say. These days, when needing to learn something, I could fast chat GBT or maybe at least start by Googling. But in nineteen ninety four, Google still wouldn't exist for four more years, so I don't know how I started searching about for what to say. Maybe Yahoo, but but I lighted upon upon this.
Part of what we lose when we lose someone, part of what hits us hardest is that we actually have just lost part of ourselves. The part of ourselves that blooms, blossoms, shows itself in only a certain way in the presence of that friend or dear family member. And now, by their death, that part of us has to go away. The part of me that is only with you is now gone. The part of me that is only with you is no more. I felt this earlier this year once again when my wife lost her dad.
I felt it at the funeral and then at a separate memorial service and, of course, a number of times since I felt it for all of us, for each of us, there that day at the funeral to pay tributes because each was a certain version of themselves only in the presence of that man.
In the same way that you show different sides of yourself to your mother or father, different than you showed your best friend from high school or your cousin or your favorite college professor, favorite because she saw something special in you, that version of you, that unique version of you with its own history of stories differentiated from all other sets of stories. That version of you melts away when someone you love is gone.
Gerard Manley Hopkins in his poem spring and fall to a young child begins by asking his addressee, presumably a young child named Margaret. Margaret, are you grieving over Golden Grove unleaving? It's fall, just like it is here, autumn, and the beautiful Golden Grove is dropping all its leaves and perhaps this sensitive child cries at the sight. But as the poem bends to its brief end, the poet asserts, it is the blight man was born for. It is Margaret you mourn for.
George Saunders in his world beater of a book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain says that, quote, there are many versions of you in you, end quote. And that puts me in mind of this same thought about loss, part of the loss, part of the mourning, and part of the healing. Very important parts too are the recognition and acceptance that we have now lost something of ourselves that we will never regain. It is the blight man was born for. It is you yourself that in part you mourn for.
And so during this season of fall in the Northern Hemisphere where the leaves are dropping and we reflect back upon the years it's been, including our losses, which have been many, I'm here to underline something to be to be thankful for here too, to be self aware about this. Because though I've recounted a few stories of loss and reflection on what loss really includes, the part of me that is only with you is no more.
I wanna be the first to celebrate and underscore the part of me that is only with you because that's very much alive if you and I are both alive and worthy of gratitude for all those that we're connected with. Think of that joke from your school days that you can only truly appreciate with the person who is with you in those days. That spouse or partner or therapist who knows only this or that thing about you. That person that you can or choose only to share something with.
That child who makes a hero of you even if you don't feel heroic yourself. That way that you show up that is only in that context. Those contexts, those connections, those relationships, which one day may cease when one of us does, those things are precious.
So an awareness of that, perhaps especially over the Thanksgiving table next week, that acknowledgment and appreciation of those with whom you are connected, that that part of me that is only with you needs to be felt, seen, I would say acknowledged. If you like, thanked, appreciated for however long and however rich you can make it. That part of me that is only with you is gratitude number five. Alright. On to gratitude number six, this one's pretty straight up. It's frameworks.
I'm grateful for frameworks. They've helped me so much in investing, in business, and in life. In early days of this podcast, I went over the Gartner Hype Cycle. If you don't know what that phrase means, go ahead and Google it along with the phrase rule breaker investing. Listen to that podcast and learn yourself a really helpful framework for thinking through rule breaker stocks. So I think of Clayton Christensen's fantastic disruptive innovation paradigm.
I think of my six traits of a rule breaker stock. I spoke to them a bit earlier with Nvidia. Those traits have guided my investing decisions without changing the same traits since I first wrote Rule Breakers, Rule Makers with my brother in nineteen ninety eight. I'm still using the exact same six traits that helped me pick, well, NVIDIA in two thousand five. That's another framework.
Or the twenty five point risk rating framework that we practiced on a podcast earlier this year when we compared Kinsale stock to Chewy stock. We did that on a podcast earlier this year, introducing my twenty five point risk rating framework, a way to put a risk rating on a stock, something that many people have a hard time doing. Or how about Deborah Myers' five habits of mind?
I blasted that one out and blast from the past volume eight in January of this year, but that's a long standing, lovely framework. If you don't know what it is, you could at least Google it, or you could listen to it on this podcast. Even just style boxing, what Morningstar has done for the mutual fund industry by looking at funds that focus on large cap companies versus small cap companies or more growth oriented companies or more value oriented companies. That's in Morningstar's parlance.
I don't really use that myself, but that's a pretty effective matrix. Alright. Even just was reminded of one by my friend Victor Cho, the former CEO of Evite a few weeks ago at conscious capitalism. He was talking about the Eisenhower matrix. Some of you will know this, but if not, this one's simple. Picture two axis. Right? Sort of like a plus sign, and one of them at the top is important and at the bottom is not important.
And then the sideways intersecting axis is on the one side urgent and on the other side not urgent. So you've got a box that's important and urgent. The opposite would be not important, not urgent, and then the other two as well. So there's a framework you can use. And my friend, Victor, I thought this is a pretty great line. He said, you know, my goal in life is to go from one day to the next and not allow anything in that box. And he's pointing at the box that says urgent, important.
And the goal, as Victor is conveying, is never to allow something that is important in his life to become urgent. It's very admirable. I'm sure he does pretty well at it. There's a framework you can use, so I am thanking gratitude number six, the frameworks. You know, there's an old line. It's sometimes you'll see it on a t shirt, maybe on a bumper sticker. Whoever dies with the most toys wins.
And I'm pretty sure most of the time people are joking when they put that on their t shirt or their car. But more seriously, I would say whichever investor fills up his or her toolbox with the most frameworks and knows the right time to apply the right framework, that investor wins. And by the way, it's not just one person. It's not a zero sum game. We can all win at this. In fact, you will win more and more as an investor if you turn this gratitude number six, frameworks into an action plan.
Keep filling up your toolbox with more good frameworks. Gratitude number six. Alright. And my final one this year, gratitude number seven. I don't do this every year, but I certainly will when the S and P five hundred is up twenty percent or more in any given year. And as of this recording, it's up twenty five point one percent in twenty twenty four. So I wanna thank the stock market and why we invest. I wanna start by saying that that we can even invest. That is worthy of our gratitude.
For many of us hearing me right now, we were born into a society that we're in danger of taking sometimes too much for granted. It's it's hard to appreciate all of the things that have privileged us, that we've inherited in some cases or just naturally been surrounded by or fallen into through serendipity. I mean, let's go back deeply into history. One of those things is that we have currency that lets us store up value.
My good friend, Wikipedia reminds us that originally currency was a form of receipt representing grain stored in temple granaries. In Sumer, in ancient Mesopotamia, and in ancient Egypt. They eventually realized that coinage would be easier than grain anyway. Yeah. Thank you, currency. And thank you, banks, which enable us, most of us, though not everyone in the world today, most of us to protect our savings. Guard it. Know that it will be there for us from one day to the next. Thank you, banks.
And then actually through the stock market, we can translate our savings into part ownership of companies whose products and services and work in this world we admire. Companies you can take pride in, that you can actually become a part owner of through the small miracle of the stock market that we too often may take for granted. That's that's pretty great. And even better, because it does get even better, is if you've invested well in the stock market and you give time, time to happen.
Good stocks grow in value over time. NVIDIA, good news for you with you and me doing very little. I've done very little to power the stocks that have powered my life and the lives of many of you who listen to this podcast, follow The Motley Fool over the years. I mean, I've done very little in the grander scheme to help Amazon or Intuitive Surgical or Mercado Libre.
Each of those is a hundred bagger plus for me, but they've done so very much to empower my life and many, many others toward financial freedom. I've done so little in return, so thank you, stock market, that you were even there. And, also, thanks for being reliable. You're quite predictable over the long term stock market even though you can be flighty in the short. Your reliability is squarely behind my enviable record as a market timer who is right sixty six point six percent of the time.
That's my record. And, yes, siree, ladies, gents, and fools, once again, this time last year, I made this market call. I said, I think the market in twenty twenty four is going up, and boy did it. And guess what? I think the market is going up next year too. Well, I said at the start of this last gratitude gratitude number seven that it's for the stock market, which which I've just spoken to, but also my gratitude is to why we invest. Why we invest?
That's another thing I'm extremely grateful for, not just the market itself, but why. So in closing, I wanna share with you a brief essay, which I've turned into an audio essay that recurs only once a year on this podcast right around now, as well as a poem that was inspired by it to close this way once again, my annual gratitude podcast. This is an essay I first wrote in Motley Fool Stock Advisor in two thousand ten.
I should mention, by the way, shortly after I'd written that on our discussion boards at fool dot com, one of our members who went under the screen name Captain Haiku, which I later understood to be two young women who are sisters, composed a brief poem on the Motley Fool message boards in response. So I'm gonna share both my audio essay, but also their poem to close. So here we go. Gratitude number seven, closing it out with why we invest.
My favorite episode of my favorite mini series, Band of Brothers, is entitled, Why We Fight. Without wishing to spoil the story for those who haven't yet seen it, I won't give away the answer to the question, but the episode is a beautiful, sad, and gripping piece of Hollywood poetry, and the phrase why we fight has since stuck with me, and it's morphed into my own phrase, why we invest. So let's peel every layer of the onion away at the start. At the root of the fruit is this simple reality.
We work hard in this world to build up savings. That savings, we call capital. Our capital represents the sum total of our lives efforts expressed monetarily above and beyond what we've spent. When we invest, we're doing something very wonderful and very difficult. We're forfeiting the enjoyment of the use of that money in the near term. All our instincts and temptations, many of our peers, perhaps even a spouse, urge us sometimes directly or subtly by association against saving.
Spend it now reads or sings or shouts anyone of thousands of messages confronting the typical adult every day, but investors take at least some of their capital and do the exact opposite. We forego the instant gratification that on its own is admirable, but we go one further. We investors, we crazy investors forfeit the enjoyable immediate use of our capital for no certain reward.
As stock market investors in particular, we invest willingly knowing that our unspent and unenjoyed capital may actually at least partly disappear. If there's a better reason for calling ourselves fools, I don't know that the world will ever find it. In particular, practicing my own unique style of rule breaker investing seeking to maximize my returns. I flat out know that I will lose money on many occasions.
If you throw in the academic studies that say investing in individual stocks isn't worthwhile because you can't reliably beat the indices, well, now you can see why do it yourself investing is a niche. I mean, it's a niche we've been helping to grow at The Motley Fool, but it's still a niche. Here's why we invest for our children and grandchildren.
Because our parents and grandparents did and made our lives so much better, because every dollar we invest helps support the companies and businesses we admire and buy from, because we love and celebrate ownership and believe this world will be far stronger for more owners, not more renters. Because the academics are wrong, because with Arthur O'Shaughnessy and his ode, we are the music makers, and we're the dreamers of dreams.
And investing is our instrument, and making dreams come true is even more a Motley Fool thing than Disney. I I think a very real Motley Fool end in a hundred other reasons besides these are all in part or in whole why we invest. So keep at it, dear fool. Now before I close with captain Haiku's response, I wanna remind you, next week is our rule breaker investing mailbag. So give me a gift. Will you drop me a thought, story, question, poem of your own? All are welcome.
We'll record next week's mailbag probably on Monday, so please get me a note now or over the weekend. Our email address is r b I at fool dot com. And okay now to close, captain haiku's response scribed by two foolish sisters in a short sequence of haikus that speaks so well to why we invest. And it goes like this. Sorry can't truncate. Each word has import and heart, not selfish, we build. Many years gone by hard work, hard times, good times too. Haiku needs little. Why do we invest?
So that our hard work endures beyond our short years, so that our children start their journeys on a hill and see the mountain. We build battlements that endure shelter others from the worst of storms. We launch sturdy ships. We will not see the far shore, but have no regrets. We are a small part of all we set in motion, and thus, we invest. As always, people on this 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. Learn more about Rule Breaker Investing at r b I dot fool dot com.