How do you get kids not just thinking about investing, but actually doing it? In this podcast episode, one Foolish father shares a brilliant approach — turning investing into a game with real-world stakes, and in the process, teaching lifelong lessons about money, patience, and ownership. Plus, we talk incentives, engagement, and Rule Breaker stocks that seem “boring” but have quietly built fortunes.

It’s a Mailbag filled with insights for investors of all ages — only on this week’s Rule Breaker Investing!

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A full transcript follows the video.

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This video was recorded on Jan. 29, 2025

David Gardner: How do you get kids started investing? Not just thinking about it, not just talk, started. One of the great notes I’ve ever received on the topic is my focus this week. If it’s a note I received, that must mean it’s the final Wednesday of the month. It’s your mailbag. Only on this week’s Rule Breaker Investing.

Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. What a fantastic podcast that was last week. Three Fools with Morgan Housel and Randi Zuckerberg. I’m still basking in the glow of it. I may comment on it once or twice more this week, but if you didn’t get a chance to listen, I completely recommend the three stories that we tell together that educate, the three that amuse, and the three that enrich. It is the final Wednesday of the month, so I tend to start this podcast each month. Love these many years by looking back on the month that was for this podcast. This is the fifth Wednesday of this month. That doesn’t happen every month, but we started on January 1st of this year with blast from the past Volume 10. Among other things, I revisited the moment that I first saw the secret to building wealth, finding excellence and holding it. I was looking at a 25-year-old brokerage statement from my uncle, and I realized the transformative power of investing, seeing stocks soar from single digits to triple digits over decades. If you didn’t get a chance to hear that, you might enjoy it.

The second week, January 8th, it was great quotes, Volume 20. Build yourself a great story, rocking some thinkers like Jeff Bezos. I was quoting Confucius, exploring how our choices and our perspectives shape the narratives we live by in investing in business and in life. Then, two weeks ago, Jamey Stegmaier. Privilege of being joined by one of the great game publishers and game designers of our time. Jamey and I discussed creativity, community, and what it takes to turn fun into a flourishing business. That was a fun podcast. It was great to have him back on years and years later. We won’t let that much time pass until the next time. Then, of course, last week, nine stories with Morgan and Randi. I was thinking again about what Morgan said about comedians and how truly genius they are, how they are the artists who see things many of us don’t see.

Then they give us words to use that we wouldn’t have had without them, that make us laugh as we observe what’s happening in our world and just a brilliant insight from Morgan Housel. Then still thinking about Randi’s final story and what motivates her in life, just a beautiful moment at the end of that podcast. But I also want to underline what she led off with, which was giving a speech and getting paid years ago in Bitcoin, which seemed like a crazy decision at the time. But rather than just brag about how much that speech has now been worth to her today, Randi just underlined for all of us the benefit of trying new things. Being out there on the bleeding edge, taking some risks, nobody else, by the way, knows what they’re doing in AI, either. Everybody’s trying to figure out each of the new technologies, genomics, self driving cars, etc. Often, when I speak to younger people who are looking at their first job, I’ll say something like, go to the bleeding edge, go to where the areas of our society are growing the most in the most promising way, the value of doing so.

Well, I tremendously benefited from being right there, Tom and me at the Dawn of the Internet. We learned so much and have been so benefited from that. Whether it’s Bitcoin for Randi, I don’t know. Let’s go with robotics. I think that’s going to be a pretty promising industry going forward. There are just huge benefits. Many more insights from Morgan Housel and Randi Zuckerberg than those, but I particularly appreciated those.

Now, as I shared at the start of this year, the first week of this podcast, my 2025 book, Rule Breaker Investing, is available for pre-order now. After 30 years of stock picking, this is my magnum opus. It’s a lifetime of lessons distilled into one definitive guide in each week, until the book launches this summer, I’m sharing a random excerpt. I just break open the book to a random page and I read a few sentences. Let’s do it. Here’s this week’s page breaker preview. This is a few sentences from very near the end of the book. I quote, “What’s your Motley?” Mine has been the same from day one, and I don’t expect it to change. In Latin, it means ever higher, Excelsior. That’s this week’s page breaker preview. To pre-order my final word on stock picking shaped by three decades of success, just type Rule Breaker Investing into amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com or wherever you shop for fine books. Thank you to everyone who’s already pre-ordered. That means a lot to me. Before we get started, we just have a few mailbag items this week. Some hot takes from Twitter. Let’s kick it off with @Cricket99238 on Twitter X, who sent this in at RBI Podcast. What an incredible episode with three Fools. So much wisdom and knowledge to benefit from.

Thanks for taking the time to talk through inspirational life stories. A 250 mile race, Cricket writes, is absolutely nuts.[laughs] I agree. Thank you, @Cricket. @AxelDeussen, Axel, I know you’re German, then your last name is D-E-U-S-S-E-N. We here in America might tend to say Deussen, but I’m just going to go without @AxelDeussen reacting to our Great Quotes Podcast. You were rerocking this one from Dibashi’s Jaturgy, “Human beings are a source, not a resource.” That was in our discussion about the phrase human resources. Not a phrase I’ve really liked that much, even though I like the overall concept of treating your employees well. A lot of people just, of course, acronymize it to HR. But human beings are not a resource. Human beings are source. Axel says, I really like this quote. When people work together, it makes a huge difference whether they are perceived as a human being or as a tool, well said. Another theme this past week, this past month for this podcast, was that last week, not only did I have Morgan Housel and Randi Zuckerberg on the same podcast together.

But in a very special and brief moment, I alluded to it being my 500th consecutive weekly podcast. Thanks to my wonderful producers over the years, Rick Engdahl most of all, Des Jones, Heather Horton, the list goes on of people who’ve made a contribution, participated in enabling Rule Breaker Investing to publish a brand new podcast, no repeats, no skips every single week for now 501 weeks. I got some nice notes like @RNCarian12 saying thanks Cal Ripken Jr. Thank you. Fernando Rey Lozano @FReyLozanoCH, sent in, bravo for your perseverance and consistency, and thanks for teaching us how to be smarter, happier, and richer. Hashtag Fool on, thank you, Fernando. Paul Santos @ABSofDoom. You’re my best kept open secret, David. I’m making money just by listening to your podcasts, cheers to the next 500. I don’t know if there will be 500 more. There might be. That’s another 10 years or so. We’ll see. But I sure have enjoyed the first 500, and here we are starting the next this week. Thank you all very much.

Three mailbag items this week. By the way, most of these are about games. One of my reflections, over the years with mailbags, we tend to be delayed by one month. In my mind, I should be getting some phenomenal notes about last week’s podcast, and we’ve gotten a little bit, but most of these are about games. Why is that? Well, because games is my annual December podcast. There’s always a little bit of a lag between what I’ve said and what shows up on the mailbag. That’s just fine. Let’s go to this amazing note from Mark Morrell. Now, Mark, it’s M-O-R-R-E-L-L. I would pronounce that Morrell, but if you don’t, I respect that. I’m doing my best here. This one, Mark is capturing some of my favorite themes all in a single note; investing, games, family, and Foolish wisdom. Let’s get started.

Hey David, I’m a father of two and have opened custodial Roth IRAs for my kids. Every week, our kids have jobs to do around the house for a commission or allowance. For one of those weeks, instead of getting cash in hand, we allot them $20 each to put toward their choice of company from Motley Fool Stock Advisor. What I’ve noticed is that the kids will typically pick companies they’ve heard of before. Rarely do they seem though emotionally invested in their picks, they’ll sometimes just pick something quickly, which I can’t blame them for. They’re only 10 and 11-years-old. Mark writes, as we approach the end of 2024, I had an epiphany of combining the fun of games and investing. Here was the game that I proposed to the kids.

At the end of every year, we will compare the performance of our stock picks. If their performance is better than the SMP 500, I will give them an extra $20 to spend how they please. If their performance is better than my Roth IRA, Mark writes, they will get $75 to spend how they please. Then he provides his first year’s results. For the Morrell family, here are the results from 2024. S&P 500 +23.3%, daughter, +51.67%, son +56.2%. Then, of course, how did dad do with his Roth IRA? Me up 51.81%, meaning for those keeping score at home, which I hope we all are at this point, Mark’s son won $75 for beating both the market and his dad. Mark’s daughter. Were you listening? Mark’s daughter was up 51.67% crushing the market. He was up 51.81%, so tragically, heartbreakingly, Mark’s daughter received just $20. Now, $20 more than she would have gotten otherwise, but just $20 off 14 basis points. Mark goes on, some of their big winners were Tesla, Netflix, and Spotify. I only proposed the game in November, but since then, the kids have been much more engaged with understanding and assessing their picks. My daughter was initially upset since she only lost by 0.14 points.

But I reminded her that she crushed the S&P 500, and she should be proud of beating the average by more than double. My son was super pumped the last week or two of the year and kept wanting me to check every day until New Year’s Eve, when the final percentages were locked in. I took out the cash and handed it over to their smiling faces. My daughter came to terms with her loss and has even said that she wants to be more cautious about choosing for 2025. I told them about how the market typically goes up two out of three years and how this year was particularly good. They asked me what I thought the market would do in 2025, and I gave them your famous line, “I think it’s going up.” I also mentioned that they have to be prepared for the market to not be as good and that since we are invested in more volatile stocks, they should expect our performance to be better than the market in good times and for it to be worse in the downtimes. I am so excited, Mark concludes, and optimistic about their investment futures. I told them they’re investing way before anyone in our family history.

They were impressed to hear that and are motivated to win in 2025. Cheers to a new year, and thank you for all your wisdom and love of games, Mark. Well, Mark, thank you so much for this note. Sometimes I break up notes like that and comment on them throughout. I might have lobbed in a comment or two, but really, I wanted to park my talking points till after because there’s so much goodness in what you’ve just shared with our Rule Breaker Investing community, with so many Fools listening in from around the world. I really want to underline what I’m seeing in your note. In fact, I think I have, and this is the bulk of this week’s podcast. I think I have seven things that I want to speak to, maybe a minute each briefly that I see in your note.

The first is the power of starting early. Mark, your kids aged 10 and 11 are investing before most people even hear about the stock market. That’s building not just financial literacy, which by the way, it is, and they’re very lucky to have a dad who’s keyed into that, but also you’re setting them that mindset of long term thinking. Which is going to compound, by the way, just like their investments. There is such power in starting early. Point Number 2, games and incentives to drive engagement. The genius of turning investing into a game with tangible rewards, $20 for beating the market, marking $75 for outperforming Dad, that is a perfect blend of fun and learning. You’re basically gamifying the process while you reinforce some key principles like accountability, benchmarking, and also goal setting, if you will. I love that you’re gamifying the experience for them in order to engage them. Let’s go to point Number 3, the emotional lessons we learn from our investing. Your daughter’s disappointment. By the way, we had an offline conversation. I with my producer this week, Heather, we talked about, would we have not given our daughter the $75 because she missed by 14 basis points, less than one fifth of 1%.

I find myself enamored of your discipline, and I think it’s great to stick to your guns. There’s a wimpy part of me that might have given her something anyway, but I think there’s such strength in setting rules and abiding by them. Yes, just like sports games where a team heartbreakingly loses on a final shot by a final point, that’s all real. I would say her disappointment after narrowly missing the $75 prize is just a wonderful moment to discuss how investing involves emotions. What was her takeaway? Well, you said, to be more thoughtful, more cautious, more thoughtful around her picks for 2025. That to me, highlights a lifelong lesson that you’re teaching about patience.

There’s something there about humility and continuous improvement. That’s point Number 3. Point Number 4, the role of ownership in personal connections. When kids are allowed to pick the companies that they’re going to invest in, that you invest in for them that they recognize, Tesla, Netflix, you mentioned Spotify. They’re naturally going to become more curious and more engaged about the stock market. I would especially see about those companies. It’s probably not time to go over financial statements yet, dad, but there’s a real window in to learning more and more about the businesses themselves, how these companies make money, eventually starting to introduce numbers like revenues or market cap with a game show, if you like, that’s a great opportunity that role of ownership because they know the companies they’re owning. That not only engages them, it will, of course, accelerate their learning. Ownership engagement, learning, I would say, a perfect trifecta for raising better investors.

Point Number 5, you’re teaching through market context. Yes, the market historically rises two years out of three, and you’re also warning them to expect some volatility and less favorable years because if it goes up two years out of three, the market goes down one year in three. I don’t think that’s going to happen this year. I think the market’s going up this year. We’ll go to that in a sec. But what you’re doing is you’re framing for them investing as a journey. It’s not a one year sprint, and that’s going to instill resilience. That overall market context, using the S&P 500 as your benchmark, teaching that, which, again, a lot of people don’t even know what the S&P 500 is. I’m not talking about kids, I’m talking about adults. What a wonderful context you’re setting for them and their understanding. Point Number 6, let’s go back to that line. I think the market’s going up this year. I don’t know if it’s my famous line, I appreciate you calling it my famous line. It is my market timer line that I give every year. Every year, I predict the market’s going to go up. As I’ve often mentioned in the past, that means I’m right. Two years out of every three, most market timers don’t get it right much more often.

Fifty-fifty flip in coins. I feel really good about my market timing record over the years. I’m glad that you too think that the market is going up, and obviously, part of what we’re doing with that line is bringing some playfulness. I would say that right minded, optimistic lens to our view of the world at large and the markets, and you’re sharing that playfulness and that optimistic lens with your kids through those discussions. So it’s a great reminder. We don’t predict short term market movements. It really doesn’t matter that much. Most of all, what matters is optimism and belief in progress, which is going to fuel their investing success. Rule Breaker investing, what is the number one trait of the Rule Breaker stock? It is to be a top dog and first mover in important emerging industries. I think of the six traits of Rule Breaker stocks, that is the most important. That is the stocked pond you want to be fishing in. If you train your kids, and I’m not just talking to Mark now, I’m talking to everybody. How about not just your kids. If you train yourself to stay focused on what are the companies that have real world impact for good that you can see operating at scale today, they may or may not be profitable yet, but they’re doing something that really helps that’s noticed. If you snap your fingers, my snap test, I’ll be sharing more about that in my book coming out this fall, but if you snap your fingers and those companies disappeared, lots of people would notice, lots of people would care.

Those are the companies, the Rule Breakers to stay focused on in our investing and our investment research. Funny, the seventh and last point I want to pull out of Mark’s fantastic note is that new family legacy you’re talking about in investing. That line mark about your kids investing way before anyone in our family history, you’re underscoring how this isn’t just a financial exercise. Not to make too big a deal of this, but am I right? It’s actually a cultural shift. You’re basically changing your family’s financial narrative, you’re setting up these kids, the 10 and 11-year-old to win in ways that prior generations couldn’t have. The earlier that we start our compounding clocks, the bigger the numbers go over time. Warren Buffett has made more money in the last 20 years of his life than the first 70 years of his life. While that may sound very distant to a 10-year-old, it will become increasingly true and they will recognize the truth and the beauty of that over the course of their lives. Here’s the good news.

It gets better and better as things get bigger and bigger. Now, volatility counts, too. When the world’s largest market cap, NVIDIA loses one sixth of its value in a single trading day, those are really big numbers, and for people who have a big holding, they experience not a spiffy pop, but they experience a spiffy drop. You have to acknowledge as your numbers get bigger, in that one year out of three, when the market declines or your stocks underperform, you’re going to get hit harder. You have to be resilient, you have to be willing to be persistent, which is stealing from my final point this week. But this was Mailbag Item Number 1. This was my real focus. Mark Morrell, what you are doing with your kids, you’re showing all of us the way toward being a better parent, a better teacher, and somebody who is giving a gift to the next generation that we all can learn from. Mark, I would love for your example, the game that you created to be copied by as many people listening to me right now who have kids, nephews and nieces, or grandkids. What a wonderful way to set incentive. You could use Mark’s dollar amounts or choose your own adventure, but the gamesmanship and how you set that up and what that’s going to mean year after year going forward is really special. It is my honor that you wrote in this week to feature that on Rule Breaker Investing. Before we go on to Rule Breaker, Mailbag Item Number 2, I want to mention we did do a podcast, one of our 500.

In fact, I’m checking it. It was January of 2019, January 2. Anybody who’d like to go back, we did a Get Your Kids Started Investing podcast. Wherever you find your podcast, or you could just Google it, get your kids started investing, Rule Breaker Investing podcast, you will find that. You’ll hear one hour. I’m joined by a few Foolish guests and bright lights, people who actively work with kids and give some best practices in terms of how to get kids started investing for opening an account to how to oversee that. I’m not sure we had that much gameification in there, though, and I appreciate what Mark just threw down this week. But there’s more for you if this topic is important, January 2, 2019. Onto Rule Breaker Investing Mailbag Item Number 2. This one’s from Mike Hoffman. Dear David, I’m a long time listener as a lifelong gamer. I really enjoy your games podcasts. While I enjoy board games, I find them difficult to arrange. Mike mentioned. I think he means get enough friends together to play a board game together. He goes on, almost all of my game time is now spent on PC games that I can either play solo against the computer AI or cooperatively online with my nephew and brother who live in another state. We are most recently deep into the PC strategy game Old World. I would love to have a portion, Mike goes, of each game podcast you do devoted to PC games or even give them their own episode. I’ve been a Motley Fool subscriber for many years and can safely say it has made me smarter, happier, and richer, keep up the great work. Mike Hoffman. Well, one gamer to another, Mike, thank you very much. I have done my time hours and hours on PCs playing games over the years.

Certainly, back in the day, I literally was playing Pong when video games first came out. That was before personal computer games, but whether I think about some of the early sports games that I would play that were just data on a glowing screen before graphics showed up or blocky graphics like Temple of Apshai or later, how about civilization, which, by the way, I think it’s coming out of Civilization 7 this year, Sid Meier, one of the world’s great living game designers. I do love me some PC games. Yet, if I spend too much time talking about games, I may confuse my Rule Breaker Investing audience.

I’ve generally tried to salt in games here and there. Yes, we have our games podcast. For example, last month, my favorite games of 2024, my recommendations for people to give us gifts. Or forget about gifts now that we’re in 2025, just find a new game to play. It’s right there for you. That was Volume 6. I’ve those about once a year. I had Jamey Stegmaier on this month, more games. Yet, if I start straying too much into PC games, this could become the all-games podcast, and maybe some smaller group of you would like that from me. If you really feel passionately about that, maybe I will go there at some point. But for now, I enjoy keeping it to board games for the most part. Why? Well, because I really enjoy getting together with people around a game table. Virtually, every game today, any big tabletop board game of consequence probably has an electronic version. For those who don’t know about Board Game Arena, BGA for Dad in the World Gamers, a lot of people will know BGA, but in my experience, most people don’t. That’s a site that has a lot of the popular games that we play today over our tabletops.

They’ve been digitized, and you can now play the electronic version. You can play, for example, a game like Ticket to Ride or Katan online today. You can play those hundreds or thousands of times, a lot more than you could ever get people together around a table. Also, when you do play digitized board games, the computer does the shuffling for you. If there are cards, it keeps score. For the most part, you can much more quickly play a lot of games if you’re playing online today than if you’re not. But truly my own pleasure is to play games with humans face to face around a table, which I do a few times every week and have for decades. That’s where my own passion lies most of all. But I will say that I do love me a lot of video games. These days, I play more on consoles, I play games like Diablo 4, Dragon Age Veilguard, which came out later last year. I tend to often love the role playing games and fantasy role playing games. I think the game I probably play most of all on PC on my Mac almost every day is Hearthstone. The magic, the gathering collectible card game, digital, of course, offered by Activision Blizzard, which by the way was one of my favorite stocks before Microsoft eventually bought it. That’s a little bit of my own PC gaming history one gamer to another. But you know what? We can’t always get our nephew and our brother around a game table. That’s why I so appreciate your point about the benefits. I haven’t played Old World, but about the benefits of playing online games. Certainly Jane McGonigal, who’s very eloquent on this, has written books, given Ted talks about this, about how games can help save the world. When we start playing games online, we meet people in other states or nations. We start friendships with people we would never otherwise meet. We’ve done that a lot in my family. We have friends that we only know through the online medium. That’s certainly always been true of Motley Fool discussion boards for me, as well our forums over the years. How many people I’ve gotten to meet that I never ever would have if it was all about face-to-face and the same zip code?

Obviously, I want to double underline the power of what you’re doing, and the games enable all of these things do, I think, make us all, I hope, smarter, happier, and richer. Well, I’m not sure about the richer part. I don’t really play games for money, but I guess some people do poker. Before I get to my final mailbag item, I want to put in a plug. We have a wonderful feature at fool.com for members only. Some of you will already know this Mike McMahan. That’s Motley Fool Live. Motley Fool Live is like a television channel on our fool.com website, a TV channel with hours and hours of programming each weekday for members only. A great reason to sign up for Motley Fool Stock Advisor or any of our Motley Fool services is to gain access to Motley Fool Live. Increasingly, what we’re calling Fool 24, we have our analysts there answering your questions, focusing on different industries, sharing insights about retirement investing. It’s a wide and motley variety of hours of programming that we’ve been adding to in recent weeks. In fact, earlier this week, when NVIDIA melted down briefly in a single day, who is there but my brother Tom Gardner with some of our AI stars at the Fool answering member questions, I would say speaking to anxiety, which we’ve often tried to do a lot over the years at the Fool, especially whenever the market drops. Fool 24 and Motley Fool Live are some of the best excuses for you to get started with The Motley Fool today. Join us. We’d love to have you Motley Fool Stock Advisor. You can join us at fool.com/signup, that signup, all one word, lowercase, no punctuation, no hyphen, just fool.com/signup. Onto Rule Breaker Mailbag Item Number 3. This one is not a write in. This one is just something I wanted to say at the end of our 501st consecutive weekly podcast. First of all, I really appreciate the Twitter hot take speaking to persistence, perseverance. I think that’s so important for all of us, not just one week’s podcast to the next, whether you’re sick or not or whether you don’t have anything to say or not, you just keep going. But that, of course, works even better when it comes to investing, and truly playing the long game.

Keeping your money 100% invested as I have your whole life long. Of course, there can be reasons, especially as you approach retirement, not to have that be the case, but through thick and thin, good and bad markets, stay invested, ride that roller coaster, as I’ve sometimes said. Because the stock market roller coaster is different from every other roller coaster in the world. Every other roller coaster gives you a wild ride and then drops you off where you started. The stock market gives you a wild ride, but the amazing realization you have near the end of it, as you get off that roller coaster car is that you are way higher than where you started. You were up on mountaintop. You have an amazing view of where you’ve been. The stock market Rollercoaster. Yes, you’re going down some of the time. When you do go down, you go down faster, then you go up. But the stock market roller coaster goes up 9-10% annualized year by year over the course of your lifetime, which is why persistence and perseverance count for so much. Rule Breaker Mailbag Item Number 3 is just a quick window in to the crazy AI sell off day we had earlier this week, in a small moment, at the end of that day I wanted to share.

Most of us who follow the market know that the world’s largest public company, NVIDIA lost over $500 billion of its market cap by losing one sixth of its value in a single day of trading largely driven by DeepSeek, a Chinese AI firm revealing that it had used a much lower hardware budget to generate pretty impressive artificial intelligence. I didn’t look deeply into the myself. But so many eyes are trained on NVIDIA anyway that it was a magnet day for the stock market. But near the end of that day, each day I get a little automated mailing from my team at The Fool that lets me know any spiffy pops that happened for all of the Motley Fool stock recommendations day by day, that day.

Of course, NVIDIA, as I would say, had a spiffy drop that day. But what did spiffy-pop, and before I even say the answer, what is a spiffy-pop for new listeners here at the start of 2025? Spiffy-pop is a term that we invented to describe when a stock that you own goes up more in a single day then you paid for it way back when. It rose more for its one day dollar gain than your cost basis. There were a few of those that happened on that big NVIDIA sell off day, but I want to, in particular, underline one of them. It was my brother Tom Gardner and a stock that Tom picked, still active on Motley Fool Stock Advisor. Maybe you own it too. I hope you do, dear listener. He picked it on December 19 of 2008, Cintas, ticker symbol CTAS. The recommendation price now split adjusted years later. In fact, more than 16 years later, we’re still holding. Tom’s recommended price was $4.43. On Monday of this week as NVIDIA lost a sixth of its value, Cintas went up $5.19, which is greater than $4.43 hour cost, and that, my friends, is a spiffy-pop. Now, Cintas, again, he recommended it at $4.43. It closed Monday at 202.5. It’s been a phenomenal investment. But why am I underlining this? I want to underline this to remind you that as much as we get excited about new technologies as rule breakers, and I sure do, and I think you should too. New technologies are where most of the value creation going forward is, for those of us who are looking to squeeze as much juice out of what the market fruit will give us.

If you’re trying to maximize the fruits of the stock market, you should always be focused on the rule breakers of your time. Yet, not every company is an AI robotics genomics-driven company. Cintas, based in Mason, Ohio, was founded in 1929. It literally had this name. Any kids cartoon fans out there, it was literally called the Acme Industrial Laundry Company, and it was founded by Richard “Dick” Farmer and his wife, Amelia. Farmer, they collected old used rags from factories. They laundered them and they sold them back to businesses. Today, Cintas is a worldwide leader in uniforms for employees of many different types. Whether you walk around day to day with a mop cleaning restroom supplies or you’re a first aid professional or you work with fire extinguishers, you are using their equipment. Often you’re wearing their products yourself if you wear a uniform at work. Cintas, with $10 billion in revenue in the most recent year closed has $1.5 billion in net income. For net profit margin fans like me, that means their net profit margins are 15%, they make 15 pennies of profit on every dollar of sales. I’m here with Rule Breaker Investing Mailbag Item Number 3 to remind you that not everything needs to be highly volatile or highly tech driven.

There are so many great American companies, and outside of America, there are some wonderful worldwide businesses that are persistent that just get greatness done in very modest ways, day after day, month after month, year after year. Some of them sound pretty boring. I look back over our history of rule Breaker stock picks. These are all active picks we still hold at Motley Fool Rule Breakers. But I see Trex, the maker of outdoor composite decking is a 20 bagger for us. I see Copart, which for years has been a global provider of auctions online for vehicles. That’s right, used cars. That’s been a 30 bagger for rule Breaker members.

Even something as simple as a burrito made a better product than the ones I grew up with Chipotle Mexican Group, CMG, the ticker symbol. Chipotle, not an AI company, not a self-driving car company, has nothing to do with the future of MedTech, Chipotle has been a 50 bagger for us at Motley Fool Stock Advisor. It’s a reminder that goodness and leadership exist in many different businesses, and let’s not ever get too focused on any one stock or any one industry. I want to close out with just some of my favorite quotes about persistence, because that’s really what we’re talking about. When we talk about my brother Tom picking Cintas below $5 a share, and it rising more than $5 a share on Monday, you’re only going to get these kinds of spiffy-pops if you buy to hold. I think about that classic Vince Lombardi quote, this may not be verbatim, but it’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get back up. Or another great line. This one comes from sports. I’m not sure who, but winners are losers who didn’t quit. I think about Winston Churchill. Well, it’s at least described to Winston Churchill his famous line that success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm. I can certainly relate to that with so many bad stock picks and recognizing we need to lose to win as Rule Breaker investors.

I’ll just close it out this week then with my favorite quote of all about persistence. This one from President Calvin Coolidge, not a great president, but a pretty great line that I hope you’ll appreciate as well. Nothing in the world, Coolidge said, can take the place of persistence. Talent will not. Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not. Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb, Coolidge said. Education will not. The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan, press on has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. Fool on.

David Gardner has positions in Netflix and Tesla. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia, Spotify Technology, Tesla, and Trex. The Motley Fool recommends Cintas and recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft, short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft, and short March 2025 $58 calls on Chipotle Mexican Grill. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.