Thirty separate times about every ten weeks on this podcast over six years, I picked five stocks. I chose a theme that made sense to me at the time, sometimes sublime, sometimes silly. And then I thought to myself, what are the five best recommendations that I can come up with for stocks that fit that theme? Aiming, of course, always to beat the market, the S and P five hundred. Otherwise, hey. Why are we bothering?
Then one year later, we reviewed the picks, and then another year passed, the two year review. Yep. Two years later, we never forget. We hope you wouldn't also. We scored everything transparently and accountably because we're fools. You should expect that of us. Then the three year review, which would always be the most telling.
First, because of course, three years had passed since I picked those five stocks with the increasing passage of time, we really can be smarter about what has happened and why and what we can learn. And that's the smarter part, but if I'd done my job well, then we'd also be happier and richer too. And that three year review was the most telling because most of the time, we ended the game right there. We're gonna keep holding those stocks in real life, mind you. You should too if you own them.
But had I kept reviewing all thirty of my samplers in years four and five and six and so on, we wouldn't have had time to do much else on this podcast. So thirty separate times, I picked five stocks, what I've also called my five stock samplers. And with this episode, we're going to review and learn from the whole shebang, the whole glorious experiment, the glory, and the pain. It's our review a palooza Ultima in ten and a half chapters 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 in this special episode. In fact, you know, I think it's special if ever I call it ten and a half chapters. This is the third time in our nine year history I've rocked my my ten and a half chapter format. The first was as COVID hit. You can go back and listen to it. It was March eleventh twenty twenty for this podcast, Thoughts on Our World in ten and a half chapters.
The second time was when I retired from stock picking at The Motley Fool. That was May twelfth of twenty twenty one, a road less traveled right here on this podcast in ten and a half chapters. This week, it's Revuapalooza Ultima in ten and a half chapters as we look back over six years, what we can learn from the five stock samplers that were picked thirty times over Rule Breaker Investing. I'm excited to share these learnings and the fun with you now. I won't review the old story.
It's actually told in thoughts on our world in ten and a half chapters back in March of twenty twenty, but it keys back to British novelist, Julian Barnes. I see he is seventy eight years of age these days. Julian Barnes was right there in the first week we launched The Motley Fool newsletter as just a paper newsletter for our friends and family. We decided, can we get somebody famous to comment in the very first edition of The Motley Fool newsletter? Sure enough, mister Barnes graciously did.
Again, I tell that story a few years ago, but he wrote a novel called The History of the World in ten and a Half Chapters. We were fans, and that's why I continue to use ten and a half chapters years and years later. I say without further ado, let's get started. Chapter one. Chapter one is entitled samplers because that's what we call them from the very first one. The very first one, by the way, was five stocks for the next five years.
The very first one was September second two thousand fifteen, five stocks for the next five years. But from the very beginning, the intent was always just to give you a sampling. Five stocks. Of course, anybody building a portfolio, especially a foolish capital f portfolio, we've always felt like you should start with twenty five stocks, not five stocks. But, hey, five stocks here, five stocks there, pretty soon you can get to twenty five. There's no requirement anybody do that right away.
We do think by the way, anybody starting investing today should have at least fifteen stocks in your starter portfolio. The beauty of it is commissions round to zero these days and you can buy fractional shares. So just about any of us can start with a low amount of money and invest in fifteen or more companies. Anyway, samplers, you know, like going to whole foods and there's the little bit of cheese that they put out front. You could sample the cheese.
That's what my five stock samplers have been for Motley Fool services. Behind my samplers, we have ample services, Motley Fool stock advisor around now for more than twenty years. Hundreds of stocks under coverage. Motley Fool rule breakers. Many other Motley Fool services. I know I'm speaking to a lot of members right now. You already are familiar with that.
So these samplers were just little bits pulled from different services, most specifically from Stock Advisor and Rule Breakers and a service I managed for many years called Motley Fool Supernova. That's where all these stocks originated from. And one of the fun things about my samplers when I look back at them are some of the low cost bases that we enjoy.
I'll be talking about those in a few chapters coming up, but it's worth pointing out, especially for new listeners, that this podcast started in two thousand fifteen. We started Motley Fool Stock Advisor in two thousand two. Many of the stocks that appear here in the samplers that I was picking in two thousand fifteen or nineteen or two thousand twenty one have much lower cost bases in our subscription services themselves.
For example, Mercado Libre was in that very first five stocks for the next five years sampler. The cost basis for Mercado Libre back then, September two thousand fifteen, was one hundred nine dot ninety four, about a hundred ten dollars a share. But Rule Breaker members know that I picked Mercado Libre in two thousand nine. Our cost basis for Motley Fool rule breakers is fourteen dollars, not a hundred ten dollars. So for a lot of these, I was picking them up midstream.
Again, samplers, but for our members, they've enjoyed much lower prices and much longer holds in just about all of these companies. The winners and also the losers. We'll be talking about that in a sec as well. It's worth pointing out that the first two habits of the rule breaker investor habit number one is rule number one, let your winners run high. And the second habit of the rule breaker investor is to add up, don't double down.
And when you think about those two habits taken together, which are all about the power of holding, you can especially appreciate then the benefits of having held these stocks for a long period of time. Later in this week's show, I'll be presenting you the numbers had you kept holding these samplers. I'm saving that one to the end, but the act of sharing with you these samplers midstream, I was in effect adding two winners by picking Mercado Libre in that two thousand fifteen sampler.
It was six years after I'd first picked it and yet that was the new cost basis for the sampler. All hundred fifty stocks picked in these thirty samplers had new cost bases, and I was basically demonstrating letting your winners run and adding up because I was consistently picking winning stocks, even if they didn't keep winning. That's always been my habit as a rule breaker investor. Finally, before we close chapter one, let me just say, why were we doing this? Why have samplers?
Why pick stocks on Rule Breaker Investing? Well, the first most obvious answer was specifically to offer you, my listeners, rule breakery thoughts, the platform of talking about rule breaker investing, and obviously illustrating that through stocks and stock performance themselves That has been at the heart of this podcast for so much of its time. I'm not as focused on stock picking today, but we still talk about stocks just about every week.
We have all kinds of illustrations and all kinds of important points to make. So the reason to have ever picked samplers in the first place was simply to demonstrate for you our free listeners what we do through our services. But the secondary reason for doing these samplers was to prove once again that rule breaker investing beats the market. I realized we live in a world where many people think it would just be luck to beat the stock market.
But whether you look at our scorecard in Motley Fool Stock Advisor, our scorecard Motley Fool Rule Breakers, if If you go back to the original days of the Motley Fool picking stocks on AOL, what we call the full portfolio, you can go to Motley Fool caps, caps dot full dot com and see my TMF spiffy pop scorecard. I've tried to prove over and over again in every arena I was invited to that you can beat the stock market averages.
And even if you don't feel personally empowered to do that, even if you're not on that journey, you can just copy us. You can listen to what I've said on the podcast. You can follow our services. And as they beat the market, you will beat the market as well. The Motley Fool exists to prove that the stock market is for all of us. We're here to democratize investing, to demystify it, and to provide you the power of market beating advice.
So that's always the second reason I'm doing anything to prove to a world that doubts that you can beat the Stock Market Averages end of chapter one, samplers. Alright. On to chapter two, which has to be entitled results because that's the obvious first question how do we do? Again thirty baskets of five therefore one hundred fifty stocks picked over six years. It was a strong overall market, those six years.
Since each of these baskets was basically picked for a three year period, the S and P five hundred average across all thirty of these individual samplers. If you just look at how the market did, on average over three years, it went up forty two point eight percent. That equates to a twelve point six annualized rate of return. That's a good above average market performance over the course of two thousand fifteen to two thousand twenty one. But it's not enough just to have a strong market.
We're trying to have strong stocks beating those market averages. That is the point of our thirty five stock samplers over the course of those six years. Of the thirty samplers, twenty seven of them were picked for our standard three years. One was picked for one year, one was picked for four, and one was picked for five. But for the most part, this represents a three year game that we were playing. Let's pick stocks today, and let's see three years from now, how do we do?
Did that stock beat the market? Did the overall basket beat the market? Yes or no? And let's talk about the performance, and let's understand why Peloton did what it did or NVIDIA did what it did. Let's learn together. That's the whole spirit. So as you look over these results, know that twenty seven of these thirty were over a three year period. One of those others was five stocks for the next five years.
The very first sampler I ever picked, That was a five year game about the market's performance in that year ahead. So I said, hey. Let's take little risk with this basket of five stocks sampler number six. But other than that one for one year and that one for five years, they were all for three year periods. Now over the course and eleven lost to the market averages. So sixty three point three, probably three repeating percent of our samplers beat the market.
It reminds me of another of the habits of rule breaker investors. Habit number six, aim for sixty percent accuracy as I've said over the years. In general, when you pick stocks or pick a portfolio, you're gonna be taking some risk especially if you're a rule breaker investor. But don't take silly risk. Don't take stupid risk. Take risk where you think, you know, there's a forty percent chance I'm gonna lose the market, but I'm sixty percent or more confident that we will beat the stock market.
And even if it doesn't end up being those percentages in your actual practice, I'm talking about your mind, your mindset. You should have an aim for sixty percent accuracy. So it's kind of lovely in retrospect to think that over the course of those thirty samplers, sixty three percent of them beat the market. Longtime listeners will know we were on a raging high in early twenty twenty one when the market topped that first year into COVID. It was remarkable. I picked twenty seven at that point.
And of those twenty seven, as I was doing review of Paloozas in early twenty twenty one, twenty five of the twenty seven were beating the market averages. I myself was astounded to have a ninety three percent success rate. I think I said at the time, I don't think this is sustainable, and indeed it was not. We've ended up with nineteen of our thirty beating the market. Of course, the more important question is, by how much?
So the stock market averaged over the course of those thirty baskets, as I mentioned, a forty two point eight percent return. So I'm gonna declare this a success if we pick stocks that were up forty two point nine percent on average or higher. And I'm very happy to say that as a basket, as a group of one hundred fifty stocks, they averaged a seventy five point five percent return.
Meaning, we outperformed the market averages by thirty two point seven percentage points per stock across those one hundred and fifty stocks. Of course, some beat the market by a lot more and some lost very badly to the market. But when you average them altogether, you end up being the market by thirty two point seven percentage points per stock. I like to multiply things.
So if you think about it this way, a hundred fifty stocks multiplied by thirty two point seven gets you to right around four thousand nine hundred combined points of what we can call alpha. So every time you beat the stock market by one point, if your stocks up eleven percent, the market's up ten, you just generated plus one of alpha. We generated four thousand nine hundred sixteen points of alpha over top of one hundred fifty different stocks. I wish in retrospect every winner had been bigger.
I wish in retrospect every loser had been smaller. At different points, we were higher or lower, but I'm very happy and very proud to say that these thirty five stock samplers warmed the market by a couple of dozen percentage points each across six years and across more than one hundred stocks. That's the end of chapter two. Chapter three, let's just call it themes because it was fun to pick a theme for each of these thirty five stock samplers. It was fun and it was helpful.
Now I don't think you need to theme your overall portfolio along a certain theme. For example, I had one of them was five stocks celebrating the two thousand eighteen World Cup. Nobody really needs to build a portfolio that celebrates the two thousand eighteen World Cup, but the creative choice each time we did this every ten weeks or so, what will we call the next sampler? That's fun to look back on. Some of my favorite themes as I think about it, five stocks that will let you eat cake.
And by those, I meant companies that don't involve trade offs. A lot of people have a trade off mentality in life. They think if you do that, well, that means you won't be able to do that. You can never win both times. But I love situations in life where we can, as the saying goes, have our cake and eat it too. And a good example applied to the stock market that speaks to one of the stocks in that sampler.
Imagine if I gave you this option, would you rather have the company that is the number one e commerce player globally, or would you like to invest in the company that is the number one cloud computing business globally? Would you take the first or the second? And the good news is you don't have to choose. You can have both because, of course, Amazon dot com is and has been that company. Five stocks that will let you eat cake featured companies that really give you both.
You don't have to trade off to pick one good thing over another good thing. You should always be looking for the win win. Another fun theme, I went back to this one a few different times. Five stocks feeding the bear. Five stocks feeding the next bear. A lot of times people start saying, you know, the market's high. Look look how high Nvidia is right now. People will say, Obviously, the market's gonna come down to Earth.
This is not sustainable, and I understand at different points, market rises are not sustainable. But I also love to pick stocks in the face of people telling me that the stock market is going down. And so those five stocks that would feed the bear each time, we got some good results off of those. And I I especially like to do it smiling in the face of supposed oncoming doom.
Another fun one I think back on was five stocks that are good, and the trick to those five were all five start with the letter m. That's all. I just looked across stocks and Stock Advisor and Rule Breakers, our Motley Fool services, and said, what are five that start with the letter m that I really like? And I'm happy to say their performance was indeed good. Not all of these were winning, of course. Eleven of them lost to the market and some quite badly.
I still regret five stocks for the age of miracles because I do believe that's the age we're living in right now. As we make so many gains in understanding health and disease and genomics and better practices. There are so many miracles happening around us today that will continue, that will efflorece. We'll see more. Cancer will eventually be cured. We'll figure out all kinds of handicaps the way we can stop those handicaps. I'm sure we'll play around with genes as well.
Some I hope we won't mess up too much. There are miracles around us today and more coming, and I just wish I'd pick five better stocks that didn't lose so badly to the market averages. So as I wind up chapter three themes, I'll just say it's a fun way to think about investing at different points. What is a small basket of stocks that would pursue semiconductors or would pursue East Asian companies that you might admire?
And these themes really are kind of endless and just involve in a lot of cases just our own curiosity. I'm just looking one more five stocks for America since we just came out of Independence Week, and we had a lot of fun sharing last week on this podcast what you've done to create financial freedom over the last year. I picked five stocks for America in June of twenty twenty. I regret that basket lost to the market as well. I hope America keeps winning. Let's move on to chapter number four.
And chapter number four reflects on the single craziest five stock sampler of all. Again, long time listeners will immediately know what I'm talking about, but we have a lot of new people coming on every week. So let me just point out that five stocks for the coronavirus, which was picked in April of twenty twenty, think back to where you were and what was happening in the world in April of twenty twenty.
Five stocks for the coronavirus went through the most amazing outperformance and then underperformance, it experienced the greatest whipsaw that I have ever seen, not just in the nine years of this podcast, but in my entire life. Quickly to review the five stocks for the coronavirus in alphabetical order by company name were Peloton Interactive, Roku, Sea Limited, Teladoc, and Zoom Video Communications.
And one year after I picked those, so April of twenty twenty one, those five stocks were literally up two hundred forty percent per pick on average. That means if you were up more than that, a few were up less. But on average, in a single year, those five stocks more than tripled. The stock market had done pretty well itself. It was up exactly fifty percent year over year. That was the end of year one as we did our review of Palooza episode in April twenty twenty one.
When we next joined in and looked at these in April of twenty twenty two, those five stocks were down one point seven percent. In a single year, Peloton, Roku, c limited, Teladoc, and Zoom went from more than tripling to being slightly underwater. As the stock market basically had treaded water, it was up fifty two percent at that point over the two year period.
So what had been my greatest five stock sampler of all time, and it wasn't even close and we did it in one year, all of a sudden, it became my worst. And things did not improve as we close this one out last year, April of twenty twenty three. History will show these five stocks were down twenty four point two percent with the market up forty nine point three percent. They became the most underperforming of all of my thirty historical five stock samplers.
And by the way, it's not any prettier today. Chapter four, which is the chapter we're in right now, we'll call it crazy coronavirus. That's the title of the chapter, speaks to year four, and that's where we are right now with these stocks. And at this point, Peloton is now down eighty seven percent. Shocking. Extremely disappointing. Teladoc is even worse, down ninety three percent.
The market, by the way, now in its fourth year from the original pick date for this five stock shambler, the market is up one hundred two point nine percent. These stocks have lost almost all of their value of the five only c limited is even up. It's up sixty two percent. But given that the market's up about a hundred three percent, that itself has underperformed. I'm happy to end chapter four right here.
I don't wanna talk about these stocks anymore, but it is an incredible lesson about the volatility that can sometimes hit you in ways you would never even believe. And, again, this is not normal. This is something in my fifty eight years I had never seen before, and I doubt I will ever see again a basket of themed stocks rise so high, so fast, and so quickly give it all back and more and end up in a dark place. Five stocks for the coronavirus. Let's move on to chapter number five.
Chapter number five connects back into chapter number four. We've just turned the page, and we're gonna stick with the same theme. Chapter number five is called losers, and it's a hallmark of Rule Breaker Investing. And while I'm not ever happy about picking a losing stock and I take no pride in losing many times in the past, I'm sure many times in the future, I will say as an investor, if you're a rule breaker, you need to learn to lose to win.
In fact, one of my favorite podcasts I've yet done in our nine years was on November eighteenth of twenty twenty. Check it. It was called losing to win. I totally recommend that to anybody, especially if you're new to investing or new to this podcast. You really need to understand what losing feels like, the power of losing, and you need to know it precedes winning. It marches alongside your winners. The good news is losers can't march that far. Winners always run laps around the losers.
The worst a loser can ever do is lose a hundred percent. You just heard me say, Teladoc's down ninety three percent. So I've gotten really close to that with some of our five stock samplers. The worst you can ever do is lose one hundred percent horrible news. Much better news for you. The best you can ever do is infinite. I picked Nvidia in November of two thousand seventeen. It was our twelfth historical sampler that was one of the five stocks that will let you eat cake.
NVIDIA from that point is now up two thousand three hundred forty seven percent. More than twenty two hundred points of alpha way beyond the market averages, just a single stock pick. Do the math with me. Let's take the four worst samplers I've ever picked in our podcast history. I've already named most of them. You already know. Five stocks for the coronavirus, on average, each of those five stocks underperformed the market by seventy four percentage points.
The five stocks for the age of miracles two thousand nineteen, on average, those five stocks underperformed the market by sixty five percentage points. The other two, five stocks rolled up at random, maybe something you shouldn't do too often, and five stocks pursued by a bear. That was the thirtieth and final five stock sampler I picked in June of twenty twenty one. Those were both really bad baskets.
The first one was down fifty two percentage points on average, and pursued by a bear was down forty five percentage points on average. So quick math with me. I apologize for the math I'm throwing down in the podcast this week. I realized this is an audio medium. Math for a lot of people isn't their favorite thing to listen to. Although, if you're a baseball fan like me, you love it. Let's do some quick math together. I just gave you the four worst samplers of all time.
Four samplers equals twenty stocks. Let's say on average, those twenty stocks lost to the market. This is right about on point by sixty percentage points. Twenty times minus sixty is minus twelve hundred, which is horrific. You've just gotten the four worst samplers of all time minus twelve hundred.
That one NVIDIA pick in five stocks that will let you eat cake in two thousand seventeen, hundred points of alpha, so you can deduct the twelve hundred that the four worst samplers altogether represent, and you still have a plus one thousand. And that's just off my biggest winning pick across all hundred fifty of these. There are others too, and that's why I want everybody listening to me right now to understand it's okay to lose.
So much of the rest of the world I would submit especially people new to investing and understandably so. Hardwired as we are with our human psychology, so many people are so afraid of losing and even just have their first stock go down twenty percent or fifty percent. Maybe they've paid for a Motley full service and their first stock is down twenty five percent after a month, they'll often call our customer service line saying, I think I I wanna cancel because I'm losing.
And I just want anybody, especially new investors to know it's okay to lose. The key is to hold on to your winners. One amazing winner, and we have a bunch of them, one amazing winner will wipe out every losing pick you've ever made and leave you profit on the table. That's the secret that most people miss because they're not playing the long game.
And most of our financial cable TV shows, most of our financial journalists, and frankly, most Wall Street investors are playing a very short game so you never get exposed to the beauty of this, the greatest secret of all. In passing as we approach chapter number six, let me just say, in that same five stocks that let you eat cake, I had two horrifically bad picks. So right alongside some of my greatest picks, I picked 2U, which is also down ninety three percent since I picked it.
And another of my favorite companies at the time, Match Group, has lost a substantial amount as well. So sometimes your winners and losers were picked on the same day in the same market conditions and have radically different outcomes, but I hope you've heard me clearly here in chapter five. Radically different outcomes is great news for anybody who holds because your winners will crush your losers. Let's move on to chapter number six. Alright.
On to chapter number six. I'm sick of talking about losers. Let's talk about some of our favorites. As I think back on what were three of my favorite five stock samplers. Well, I've already mentioned one. Five stocks that let you eat cake. We've talked about that one. But typically, my favorite ones are the ones that did the best. So you are my favorite five stock sampler if you went out there and crushed it. And I have to mention five stocks the world needs right now.
It was February of two thousand seventeen. We're coming out of a hard election in two thousand sixteen, a so called divided America. There was was fake news and other things. And I was asking, you know, what are some calming forces in our society? People worried understandably about the condition of our environment and planet Earth. And so I picked five stocks the world needs right now. One of them was a real loser, Alkermes, which is a biotech company we won't talk about right now.
But with the stock market up a hundred thirty seven percent over the succeeding four years, this was one of the three that was not for three years. It was for four years. I was thinking four more years, maybe a political slogan, but it was February two thousand seventeen to February twenty twenty one. And this group of companies in particular, I'm happy to say I picked Tesla because I was thinking about our environment and something a company the world needed right now.
And just Tesla on its own, a fourteen bagger over those four years, made five stocks the world needs right now, our number one performer. I also wanna speak to five stocks that got trouble, another of my favorite performers with the stock market up seventy three percent. This basket of five companies, all of which started with a capital t that rhymes with p and stands for pool.
For those who know the music man, anyway, Five Stocks that got trouble was one of my silly groups of stocks, all of which started with the letter t. Again, I'm very happy to say, though I didn't have Tesla in this one, I did have the trade desk, which was an eight bagger for this group of companies. So a lesson learned from our favorites is often it was just one shining star that would pull up all the rest around it.
Of course, I'm always trying to hit a home run with all five of them, but the reality is you usually don't hit five home runs. If you hit one, it can make a five stock sampler or your overall portfolio over time a huge winner. And I know many of you, especially those who own Amazon or Nvidia, understand exactly what I'm talking about. And a a bonus fourth favorite as I look back over those list, five stocks that feed the bear. I love to think back to that one.
That was the third one we'd ever done. It was February of two thousand sixteen. Over the previous three months, great big companies, Apple, Amazon, Disney, all of them had lost twenty percent, one fifth of their value in just the previous quarter. And I was saying at the time, I think we might be six months already into a bear market, and we were talking about what stocks you'd wanna own to feed the bear. So in that podcast, I specifically looked for companies that had lower risk ratings.
Risk rating is something we've talked a lot about on this podcast. I like to estimate the risk of holding stocks. I like to look fundamentally at the companies and put a risk rating on them. And that week for the podcast, I was specifically, of course, focused on lower risk companies because if we're gonna be in a bear market, it's better to have lower risk things than higher risk things.
But I also paired that with a second attribute we were looking for in those five companies and that was smaller companies. Often larger companies are safer just because they have more heft, more balance. They have more employees, more partners. They have bigger balance sheets. Smaller companies are usually more vulnerable. But if you can find very low risk small companies going into a bear market or midway through, as the market recovers, those often can be superhero stocks.
And the five companies that I picked in that third sampler were Carter's, that's right, the baby clothes company, IPG Photonics, the laser company, Ellie Mae which had its mortgage platform for mortgage brokers, Planet Fitness, I think we all know what that one does, and fortunately, three of those companies went on to beat the market, two lost, but since one of them was such a spectacular performer for me in many different contexts over the years, that four bagger actually,
Planet Fitness pretty much four bagged along with it, carried five stocks to feed the bear. So sometimes it wasn't just about picking stocks that would start with the letter m or t. It was looking for specific attributes here, low risk ratings and smaller market caps at a certain point in the market cycle that happened to work really well for for us. Let's move on to our final few chapters, chapter seven. Chapter seven, let's entitle re upping.
I already mentioned habit number two of the rule breaker investor that is to add up. Don't double down. When I look at my portfolio, I have new money coming in. I think, you know, I wanna add to one of my existing holdings. I think most of the world looks at its losers and says, which one is gonna get back to even? And that's where a lot of people allocate their money.
But as a rule breaker, I've always tried to subvert that to go against that conventional wisdom and specifically look for the best performers. You know, when shown a list of stocks making their fifty two week highs versus stocks making their fifty two week lows, in my experience, maybe yours, most people will say, well, show me the list of the fifty two week lows because those are the ones I wanna buy low and sell high.
But having learned this from William O'Neil, the author of the book, How to Make Money in Stocks, I know, and I've tried to teach it and share it for a couple decades now. I know to look at the stocks making fifty two week highs when we talk about which ones we wanna invest in or add to. And so part of the key learning, something I had to include in the review of Palooza Ultima this week is my tendency to re up certain stocks across multiple samplers.
I think the king of these was, just mention it, Mercado Libre. In the thirty samplers I picked, I picked Mercado Libre in five of them. So if you think about the hundred fifty stock picks I made, five of those one hundred fifty were a spectacular performer. Tesla appeared in three different samplers, so three of the one hundred fifty were Tesla. More established companies like Alphabet represented many times. Some of my big winners, Booking dot com appeared a couple of times.
Netflix, one of my great all time stock picks. I think it's my personal largest holding today. Netflix only just picked once out of those thirty five stock samplers, but the main point is to find the winners. What do winners do? The punch line goes, they win. Find the winners. Let them keep winning. Don't sell them. Don't cut the flowers and water the weeds.
Water the flowers, cut or ignore the weeds, and the re upping that we did across these five stock samplers, while it wasn't fanatical and it didn't happen mechanically or every time, if you look back through the results, you see a reliance on certain companies that we really believed in that were winning really well through this period. Sometimes they had death defying drops.
NVIDIA itself, check it, in the last few years, everybody's favorite stock today and one of our greatest performers of all time at this point has had some really death defying drops over the last few years, let alone the last twenty years that we've held it. So that's gonna happen too, but I think the act of adding up, not doubling down is darkly underlined, highly emphasized if you look across the data and you think back through these episodes.
Speaking of re upping, it's worth pointing out every Rule Breaker Investing podcast is available, I hope, forever. This one, by my count anyway, is podcast number four hundred seventy two. But for anybody who found themselves interested in what a given five stock sampler was, what I was saying at the time, or the review of Palooza that we would do one, two, and three years later, all of those are reuppable by you, relistenable at any point.
That's part of the beauty of the Internet and the treasure trove of content that exists, I hope, forever starting in somewhere around the year nineteen ninety five as the World Wide Web started to become popular. So I wasn't just re upping some winners here and again, I hope proving out an important point. You can re up any of these podcasts in the past.
And if you, by the way, do listen to an old one and you pull a lesson that I've forgotten about, a winner or a loser, we have a mailbag, r b I at fool dot com is our mailbag. I always love hearing from you and I feature my favorite letters at the end of each month. So anybody who's wants to spend any time spelunking back through our thirty five stock samplers and pull additional lessons, I'm happy to add them to these ten and a half chapters. Let's move on to chapter number eight.
Chapter number eight is entitled silly fun because it was silly and it was fun. Somewhere around halfway through, I started realizing rather than just say this sampler is finished, we created Foolhalla. You know, kind of like Valhalla, except instead of it being for the Norse gods, I just decided, you know, we should send these five stock samplers off into their afterlife, into into glory.
And so Foolhalla was born, and my producers, Rick Engdahl and Des Jones, honoring that with themed music to to celebrate the ascent of these part of the silly fun of our thirty five stock samplers. Another silly moment, it was April nineteenth of two thousand seventeen, and I picked five stocks.
And anybody who'd been listening for a while got used to me having a a meaningful theme, you know, like five winners in a thinking world or five stocks to feed the bear as I did the ninth five stock sampler in this podcast's history. It wasn't clear at all what united these five stocks until you realized that it was an acrostic. The first one started with the letter a, the second with the letter p and r I l. And so five stocks that April.
And then we found out that there had been the first ever live birth of a giraffe on the Internet, speaking of a treasure trove of content that will exist forever. I think it was that month, and they decided, the owners of that baby giraffe, to name that draft April. And so five stocks for April, the draft was born. So there's the etymology of that five stock sampler title. I also just wanna mention the word review of Palooza.
Of course, we're having our final review of Palooza Ultima this week, but a fun word, we first used it. I was checking February twentieth of two thousand nineteen. Emily Flippen was there reviewing stocks from the previous year, and we decide, let's call this a review of Palooza. Of course, we've done the very first review one year after picking five stocks for the next five years. That was in September two thousand sixteen.
But now I'm starting to get back into history, which is probably not that interesting to listen to. But suffice it to say, it has been a tremendous amount of fun to have brought you each of these samplers. And then if there were thirty of them and we reviewed each three times, ninety review a palooza moments over the course of these nine years of Rule Breaker Investing. Let's move on to chapter number nine. Alright. On to chapter number nine. Chapter over the years.
Again, regular listeners will know that I've been doing this, but over the years. Again, regular listeners will know that I've been doing this, but many may not. Sure. Each of these was picked for three years or in some cases, one or four or five. Sure. These were just for a few years, and I think understandably so.
But the real beauty of Rule Breaker Investing isn't that you picked one year of good stocks into the teeth of a bear market or that you had a good three year run before, during, or after the coronavirus. The real beauty of Rule Breaker investing and investing at large, truly investing is holding things for long periods of time. And so, of course, I'm proud to have said earlier in chapter two results.
Proud to have said that these hundred fifty stocks each averaged a seventy five percent gain against the market's forty two percent gain, but that's only the short term story. And I wouldn't be me if I were just tracking over short periods of time. Of course, every one of these samplers I typed into a spreadsheet, and I continue to maintain that spreadsheet to this day. Some of the stocks have been bought out.
For example, FireEye, which was a pretty poor stock pick of mine got bought out by another stock that we also picked in a different sampler that would be alphabet. Google bought FireEye Mandy in a few years ago. So in the spreadsheet, that all came after the last review of Palooza. But in my spreadsheet today, I represented exactly what the price was and what the performance has been. So I continue to track all one hundred fifty of those stocks. That's my announcement for chapter nine.
We're playing the long game. I'm still tracking. You should be too. With every review of Palooza, including this one at the top of this week's show, I said, you don't think we're just playing for three years. All of these stocks are stocks that we keep holding on to in real life. You should too if you own them, and I even mean the losers too. I often hold on to my losers because if they really lose, they become irrelevant.
Of course, anytime you feel you could invest your money better, it's fine to sell a winner or a loser. I have no problem with selling, but most people do it far too often. So a reminder with chapter nine, we're playing the long game here and I'm still tracking. And so on to chapter ten. Chapter ten, he's into chapter nine. I'm still tracking. You might wonder, well, how are we doing? And I'm really excited to let you know the updated numbers.
These are just under the assumption that you continued holding. You should have continued holding if you own these stocks these stocks all the way through. You didn't sell the day we ended the three year contest. You just kept holding. So some of these stocks, the initial ones picked in September of two thousand fifteen, next year that sampler will turn ten. We're still holding. I hope you are too.
And here is the numerical performance across these hundred fifty stocks accounting for everyday since each of them was picked. The stock market averages over this roughly six, seven year period or so a one hundred two percent gain. So you can take all hundred fifty of these stocks and see their performance overall against a one hundred two percent gain, and they're now up one hundred sixty eight point four percent.
In other words, what used to be thirty three percentage points per stock beating the market has now grown just a few years later to sixty six percentage points and fun moment just this afternoon, the combined points of alpha. If you multiply how much we beat in the market by all of the stocks, as we went to record today, that number hit ten thousand and ten. So we closed out our five stock sampler experiment with those three year games with plus four thousand nine hundred points of alpha.
Really proud of that. Very happy to let you know it's now just over ten thousand points a few years later, and that is not surprising. That is exactly my experience as an investor. In the same way that a lot of these stocks I was picking in two thousand five or eight, but only for you free on this podcast years after that. They did beautifully from two thousand five to fifteen.
Well, those same stocks are doing beautifully, enough of them from two thousand fifteen to two thousand twenty five that were even higher and that's exactly what compounding returns will do for you. So I'm gonna call chapter ten, the crazy fun new overall numbers. And it's a form of crazy fun that again, anybody who's truly investing that is in it to win it for the only term that counts the long term.
Anybody who's doing that should experience this, and I predict five or ten years from now if this podcast is still going, we can look back at these hundred fifty. I'll have them in my spreadsheet, and they'll be up more than ten thousand points of alpha where they are today, which is already so substantially better than what most people expect from stock picking, which is that you wouldn't be beating the market at all. Alright. Chapter ten and a half.
Chapter ten and a half is just a half chapter. I don't know what we'll do next to this. We continue to talk stocks a lot in this podcast, and I love stock picking in games even though I'm not doing it personally, directly, professionally anymore. I would be loath to start samplers when I myself don't fully have my eye on the ball, but I do have a lot of friends who do.
You hear from them regularly on this podcast whether they're Motley Fool employees or outside investors, business people, authors. So there certainly is potential to restart a new game, and I thought a lot about that in the last couple of years. And I imagine we will do something at some point. I could also imagine some periodic review of Paloozas of these one hundred and fifty stocks to detail some of their movements, maybe clump them up in a couple of times a year, look back.
Because while it's exciting to celebrate three year performance and be right there in the game, we're really playing the three decade investing game. I hope you are too. And so it grows more and more valuable to look at how these stocks do and what numbers they can generate and what stories they have to teach us. So there it is.
We can now turn the last page on this week's podcast, our review of Palooza Ultima in ten and a half chapters from themes and stock picks emerged performance, and that performance was tracked transparently and regularly over many years, and that continues. And we often were losing to win. I shared the names of some abysmal stock picks of mine earlier in this podcast, and yet you see the overall numbers now.
And all of it was conveyed orally through this podcast from one week, one quarter, one year to the next. Some of you been there been there with me all the way through. Now you know the final accounting, and some of you join midstream, and some of you are just hearing this for the first time.
But these thirty five stock samplers, I don't think could be a better advertisement for what I've said and taught and picked and reviewed and shared via this wonderful platform of Rule Breaker Investing and the numbers and this is no surprise. This is logic. This is what you should expect. This is what happens, what has happened, and what will continue to happen over the years tripping over ten thousand and ten points of alpha.
The very afternoon we recorded this Ultima podcast is the very sort of fairy tale ending that we can only dream of until sometimes our dreams come true. So to the next ten thousand points of alpha with your rule breaker investing stocks. Fool on. 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.