In this special episode of Industry Focus: Roundtable, host Nick Sciple is joined by Motley Fool analysts Jason Moser, Emily Flippen, and Dylan Lewis to review some stocks and trends from 2020 and where they see the markets heading in 2021. They discuss the biggest headlines, new trends, important lessons from 2020 for investors, some of their investment mistakes in 2020, their New Year's investment resolutions, some of their favorite stocks for your watch list, and much more.
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This video was recorded on Dec. 23, 2020.
Nick Sciple: Welcome to Industry Focus. I am Nick Sciple. It's Christmas week, and we've got a special edition of Industry Focus to celebrate. We've got all the Industry Focus hosts together to talk about the year that was in 2020, where we're headed in 2021, our favorite stock right now, and more.
It's great to have everybody back together again. How have you been?
Jason Moser: Hey!
Emily Flippen: Hey!
Dylan Lewis: Hey, what's going on, Nick?
Sciple: You know, it's been a crazy year in 2020. I remember distinctly sitting next to Dylan in the office in January, and now I don't know if I remember what the office looks like anymore. How are you all getting used to the work from home? I know, Dylan, we were talking about before the show started, kind of, in a new house. I mean, it's been a wild year to be doing anything; but maybe to be a new homeowner, especially.
Lewis: Yeah, it's been interesting. You know, I've had a little bit of a fun ride with homeownership; we can touch on that a little bit later in the show. But, yeah, I think by and large it has been interesting to realize that, hey, you know, we can keep doing our thing here remotely. I miss the office a lot, I miss seeing all of you guys a lot; kind of the magic gets lost when we're not in the studio, but it's been fun to be able to continue connecting as we're remote via the podcast, via Motley Fool Live, all that stuff.
Sciple: Yeah, I know, but Motley Fool Live has been really exciting this year for folks who are members, to be able to see us live and ask us questions, if you're not, maybe that's something to hop on in 2021. But before we talk about 2021, I thought it would be great to talk about what happened in 2020. And certainly, a lot happened, and it's kind of tough to boil that down to one headline, but I'm going to ask you all to do that.
So, what was your biggest headline for 2020? Let's go in the order that we air during the week. So, I'll let Jason Moser go first on financials.
Moser: All right. Well, I'm happy to lead off here. It probably comes as no surprise, I think 2020 was really the year that the payments companies made their mark. I mean, we didn't have, I think, any real question going into the year, even pre-pandemic, that companies like Square (SQ -2.74%) and PayPal (PYPL -1.45%) had a lot of potential, but what we've seen play out here over the course of this year has been really nothing short of phenomenal. And a lot of that, unfortunately has to do with COVID-19 and its impacts on our economy. But we've said it before, that with everything that's going on, there's going to be a lot of good that comes from this. And I think that the success of these two companies, and others in the space, is going to be certainly a good thing for many years to come. I mean, if you look at some of the numbers that these companies have recorded over their most recent quarters, it's just really amazing.
I mean, PayPal's total payment volume in its most recently reported quarter was $247 billion; that was up 36% from the year ago. And it's working now. That total payment volume is operating on basically an annual run rate of $1 trillion. And so, that's money that's flowing through their networks, whether it's PayPal or Venmo or whatever, Xoom, the remittance company.
Here's another point that I found pretty interesting. They added, in the most recent quarter, 15.2 million net new active accounts, and that puts them now at 361 million active accounts. Now, in line with this user growth, it's worth noting something. And if you go back to January of this year, when they were talking during the fourth quarter earnings call, management had targeted for 2020 to add approximately 35 million net new active accounts, inclusive of acquisitions. So, they are calling for about 35 million net new active accounts in 2020. In this most recent release, they upped that range now to 70 million, so essentially double. And that really is a testament to what's been going on in our economy, over the past years people were figuring out new ways to get money from Point A to Point B.
And then Square was really more of the same, I mean, total payment volume for Square, it's still actually, believe it or not, a fraction of what goes through PayPal's networks, but it's growing quickly, too. Transaction-based revenue was up 13% year over year and subscription- and services-based revenue was up 60% year over year. And really the Cash App, which is driving so much of the engagement for Square. You're seeing the number of average daily transacting active Cash App customers, I mean, the people who are actually using this app on a daily basis, doubled from the same period a year ago. And gross profit was up 212%. So, I mean, we knew going in these were strong companies, we know coming out of 2020, these are just more than strong companies, these are companies that are really reshaping this landscape.
Sciple: Yeah, Jason, you mentioned, kind of, how big PayPal and all those things have gotten this year, maybe think about another thing, I was poking around on DraftKings the other day, PayPal is the No. 1 payments processor on that platform, might be getting a little bit of business boost this year after some elections back in November.
Moser: You know, listen, hey, man! Sports betting is really gaining a lot of steam. And I love to see it, I think it's entertaining, I do it myself, I have a lot of fun with it. And you better believe that sports betting is going to be something that helps drive a lot of the money that goes through these networks.
Sciple: You know, I cannot confirm or deny if I've ever used Venmo to pay off a sports bet, but yeah, that's definitely part of the addressable market. Emily, what do you think about consumer goods?
Flippen: Well, I'm really happy that you started with Jason, because this started on a high note. Inevitably 2020 was a really challenging year for most consumer goods companies. And while there are a handful of companies that I can highlight as having a great year, I think I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that 2020 was the year of retail bankruptcies. The number of shows we had to do in 2020 over retail bankruptcies was much greater than even I expected; I think more than anybody expected heading into the pandemic.
I kind of want to pass the question off to you, Jason, Dylan, and Nick, anybody feel free to raise your hand if you have a guess here. I'm curious how many retail companies, international retail companies, do you think went bankrupt in 2020?
Lewis: I'll throw a guess out there, I'll say 18.
Flippen: That's a good guess.
Sciple: It's over 9,000.
Flippen: [laughs] Jason, do you want to take the over or under on 9,000?
Moser: [laughs] I'm going somewhere in between; I'm going to say 200.
Flippen: Well, Dylan, I think you're the closest, maybe I overshot the expression of bankruptcies. But Retail Dive actually has a running list of 2020 bankruptcies. And there were 29 retail bankruptcies so far this year. Which may not sound as much as 9,000, but when [laughs] you think about a lot of these brands, to name a few, we had J.C. Penney, which was big news, but we also had Lord & Taylor, J. Crew, Sur La Table, mostly recently, Guitar Center. A lot of these brands that many consumers have grown accustomed to just kind of being there, aren't going to be there; at least not in the same quantities that they were previously anymore.
And you'll hear a lot of investors say that the pandemic killed these businesses, we've been really up front, not just on Industry Focus, but at The Motley Fool, that this was a long-term trend, the pandemic just accelerated something that was happening to these businesses to begin with. So, again, 2020 was not the best year for retail companies, it was the year of bankruptcies. Fingers crossed 2021 is a bit better.
Sciple: Yeah. So, I'll go and hop into my energy topic here, because we're going to, I guess, just pour on the doom and gloom. So, my headline is, "It's Happening," and that's kind of three sub headlines for that. No. 1, it's happening when it comes to bankruptcies in the shale patch. We talked about it for the last several years, when you look at a lot of these oil and gas companies, for every barrel of oil or equivalent amount of gas you are pulling out of the ground, they're actually losing money. And this has been going back to 2016. Even among some of the large oil companies. And we had been expecting for a number of years there to be a round of bankruptcies due, particularly this year as there was a big wall of debt coming due, coming back from the last downturn in 2016.
So, if you look just through the first three quarters of 2020, you are looking at $89 billion in bankruptcy debt through the first three quarters of 2020. You compare that to 2016, which was the previous largest full year where you've seen in recent years, $82 billion in the industry. For the first three quarters of this year, you had more bankruptcy debt than you saw in the entire industry in the previous peak back in 2016.
Again, you see a lot of these names folks might be familiar with, Chesapeake Energy, a big name early on in the shale boom, was kind of this face of this growth of shale production in the U.S. Diamond Offshore, a significant offshore producer. Hi-Crush, which is a sand provider for the shale patch. Just all that due coming this year, in a year where, because of the pandemic, international travel being shut down, much of the economy slowing in a significant way, energy demand really through the floor. And so, we kind of expected these bankruptcies to take place, and it really happened this year. We've seen lots of companies announce cutbacks on their expenditures on oil and gas, just saw a record writedown from Exxon. So, really a lot of those bills are coming due in shale.
On the other side of, kind of, "It's Happening": If you look at renewable energy, the first half of this year, renewable overtook fossil fuel generation in Europe for the first time ever. The IEA [International Energy Agency] put out a report this year that it expects 90% of new electricity generation produced in 2020 to be renewable power. That puts renewable power on a trend to displace coal as the largest producer of energy in the world by 2025 based on their projections.
So, you're seeing, kind of, this inflection point as these oil and gas companies that we had expected to declare bankruptcy, that happens; and this huge growth in renewable. And we've seen that in the market as well. There's clearly been a lot of investors running out yelling, "It's happening!" This is the turning point.
Just to give you a few names: Enphase Energy, up 486% this year. Solaredge, 225%. Brookfield Renewable, up 63%. Vestas Wind Systems, one of the largest wind power producers in the world, up 102%, and that's without getting into the electric vehicle craze that has been absolutely massive this year.
So, whether you look at bankruptcies or this rise of renewable, it's happening in energy.
Lewis: Nick, I'm glad that you were a little buffer between [laughs] the consumer goods and tech discussion, because I would have felt like I was gloating a little bit recapping what happened in tech this year. And it's hard. I think the tech industry and a lot of people that have been heavily invested in tech are probably enjoying some pretty nice returns this year. My headline for our space here is, "A Decade of Change in Just a Couple of Months."
And this is something I can't take credit for, this was floating around the internet, a lot of people a lot smarter than me probably put it down first, but I think it does a good job of capturing really what 2020 did. And it kind of hits on what Emily was kind of getting to earlier with some of the declines that we've seen in the consumer goods space, where a lot of the megatrends that we've been watching for a long time, e-commerce, digital payments, things like gaming, things like the move to the cloud, and more reliance on software as a service. All of these things were items that we were tracking and things that we expected to continue to take a larger and larger share of things over the next five, 10 years, and what we saw was gas just getting dumped on that and have them turn into wildfires very quickly.
And a lot of companies have benefited really dramatically from that, and digital businesses, in general, have done really strong, because they've been able to deliver their products as they normally would. But I think it's worth noting that a lot of the companies that are in the consumer goods space or maybe typically are thought of as retail, still put up some good years, they were the companies that tended to have those tech investments in place already.
So, Domino's Pizza, a great example, a company that has continued to hum along, been a market beater this year. They've invested so heavily in their online operations. Wayfair, another business -- I don't need to gloat when it comes to Wayfair, I think Jason can do that for us. But you know, that's a business that was well positioned and has just continued to be a great performer; probably one of the best performers on the market this year. They are companies that have heavily invested in their tech, heavily invested in making their products as easy to consume as possible, and it's paid off for them.
Sciple: Yeah, the other one that comes to mind for me, Dylan, is Peloton, right? I mean, like, you talk about a time that's better set up for a digitally connected exercise company that caters toward upper-class folks being at home more often. That's pretty much the perfect storm for a company like that.
Lewis: Yeah. And you know, that was one of those stocks, when it came public, I was like, you know, I don't know if I buy the thesis here. And I was certainly wrong, you know? [laughs] And 2020 was one of those things, you couldn't have quite anticipated it, but it seems like there was enough there already that there was going to be a solid customer base for them.
Sciple: Right. I mean, and you're there to capture that opportunity. One of things I've thought about this year, I don't know if you all have thoughts on this. But if this pandemic had happened in 2010, would we be talking about Skype the way we're talking about Zoom (ZM -1.90%) today?
Moser: I'd say it's distinctly possible. I mean, just because I don't know there were any other real solutions out there. So, you know, this time around there were plenty of solutions, it's just they all kind of pale in comparison to Zoom. I mean, that phrase they kept mentioning in their S-1, "It just works." "It just works," you know, there actually was something to that. Because when you try to use a lot of these other platforms, they're a little clunky, they don't always just work, and they're not integrated so seamlessly into email and other things that we're using on a day-to-day basis. So, that's an interesting question.
Sciple: Yeah, and today it doesn't matter, in the universe that we live in, where we exist, it did happen, and Zoom has really captured this trend in a way that, you know, my grandma knows what Zoom is, and I'm sure everybody here's grandma knows what Zoom is, and you're not going to unring that bell.
So, that's 2020, obviously a lot has changed, probably things are going to continue to change. What is something that you're watching in your sectors going into 2021? I'll start with you again, Jason.
Moser: Yeah. Well, let's jump into the exciting world of big banks, guys. I mean, that's what everybody wants to talk about, right? JPMorgan, Bank of America, the sexy world of banking. Honestly, it could get a little interesting though. And you know, my partner in crime on the Monday's show, Matt Frankel, and I, we've been talking about this a lot throughout the year. And so, something to keep in mind is that with everything that's happened during this pandemic, and things that banks have had to do, they've had to reserve a lot of money here. They've had to put a lot of money aside to really protect themselves against defaults and bad loans and delinquencies and whatnot, because the economy has taken such a hit.
And to put a little context on it. I mean, JPMorgan, for example, has reported close to $34 billion in reserves as of their October call. And so, what ultimately happens here is, they're basically protecting themselves, just in case. But if we run into a situation here, as it appears, obviously, we have a vaccine that's now been approved and that's rolling out, and there will be, I think, more. And it does also appear that there's got to be some type of stimulus that is announced here sooner or later to help people try to get back on their feet a little bit.
It's distinctly possible that these reserves, they may have over-reserved, in other words, there may not be the level of delinquencies and write-offs that they thought there could have been. And so, when banks start recognizing that the economy is improving and things are getting better, they'll start releasing those reserves, because they don't need them. And what that ultimately does, it flows down to the bottom line for banks and earnings. If that does happen, we may see a point where these banks are dealing with a very, very difficult time just in low interest rates really wringing out as much profitability as they can, but if we see these reserves released, and that really helps add a little tailwind to that bottom line, you can see some multiple expansion there in banks, thanks to some inflated earnings there due to these reserve releases. So, I'm definitely going to be keeping an eye on that here.
In the first half of 2021, I think they're talking about seeing some of these charge-offs and delinquencies maybe peaking, and then toward the back half of 2021, you'd see some of those reserves start to come down a little bit as they release them, but it would definitely something to keep an eye on, and we'll be talking about it on many Monday shows to come, I'm sure.
Sciple: Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how all these play out for these different businesses, because we kind of got, when you look at the vaccine, kind of the best-case scenario. I mean, if you don't underwrite this, as this is what was going to happen in your projections for almost any business, I mean, you're being pretty aggressive. So, it's going to probably work out to be good for investors.
Moser: I think so.
Sciple: Emily?
Flippen: When I look at the consumer goods industry in 2021, there's a lot of great tailwinds that were coming out of businesses that did survive 2020. The businesses that succeeded had amazing years. And that's going to set up a really tough comparable landscape for 2021 naturally. I'll use one example that we've talked about on the show before, which is Dick's Sporting Goods, actually. If you looked at Dick's Sporting Goods last quarter, they acquired 2 million new customers. That was a 70% increase year over year. And more than 70% of their sales are done through these membership customers. So, customer retention, not just for Dick's, but for any consumer goods company that's surviving 2020, is going to be vitally important to make sure their comparable sales increases in 2021 are not going to disappoint investors.
For reference, Dick's Sporting Goods had a 23% [laughs] comps increase last quarter. That's unheard of for companies like Dick's. I would bet, if I was a betting woman, that they have negative comp growth next year, not just Dick's, again, but many of these companies that survive. I would put a lot of emphasis, if you're an investor and you're watching these reports, these quarterly reports come in, throughout the second half 2021. If there is a company that is [laughs] growing comps on top of already really impressive comps, that to you should paint the picture of what's going to be a really great long-term successful retail winner, because it tells you as an investor that they retained the customers they acquired during the pandemic.
Sciple: I'm excited to see what the comps are for some of these travel folks in 2021. When you talk about the vaccine, again, like, can you imagine, comps are going to be, like, for Las Vegas or, like, Miami properties come summer 2021; it's going to be insane.
Flippen: [laughs] One can only hope.
Sciple: Yeah, yeah. We'll see. So, my big thing to watch for 2021 is just energy policy. We just had an election here in November. This has kind of been a big topic going back the last four years with the Paris Climate Accord and those sorts of things. Biden has, on his website, talked about requiring aggressive methane pollution limits for new and existing oil and gas operations; that's been kind of a recurring thing we've seen in the shale patch for a long time. Massive amounts of flaring of natural gas. If companies are required to figure out how to do something with that, there's certainly some impact that can have on natural gas prices, as well as the cost in extraction for some of these companies. He's also talked about investing $400 billion over the next 10 years into public investment in clean energy; that's a significant impact when it comes to renewable energy operators, utilities, things like that.
He has also talked about requiring public companies to disclose climate-related financial risks and greenhouse gas emissions in their supply chain. Again, you see this continued growth in ESG investing as you heighten disclosure requirements for some of these companies, certainly affects the ability for capital to flow to them.
And then just more broadly, how does this new administration impose these types of restrictions, where you want to push more of the economy toward renewables, in an environment where an economic recovery here in the U.S. and oil and gas jobs are a significant part of, at least when it comes to high-wage jobs for folks who aren't highly educated in the U.S. There's this tension when it comes to this policy clearly wanting to push more toward renewable energy and the need to protect these jobs as the economy tries to recover. I'm interested to see how things get navigated, both in terms of those things and then also how anything gets navigated through Congress in 2020/2021. So, I'll be paying attention to that, seeing what happens.
Lewis: Yeah. I think for me, over in the tech space, I'm kind of looking at things similarly to Emily, where I'm really curious to see what happens with the year-over-year growth rates for some of these businesses, particularly the ones that have had a lot of growth pulled forward in a really dramatic way. If we wind up in anything that looks like a quasi-normal 2021 at some point, you know, what does that do to our growth expectations for these businesses, what are we looking for in terms of year-over-year growth, particularly in the software space where valuations are already very high to begin with and have been stretched even more because these companies have performed so well.
So, I mean we might see some odd stuff going on, especially in e-commerce, but I think we just kind of need to [laughs] go in with some expectations that we're probably going to see some weird earnings numbers coming in from a lot of businesses in 2021. And it might be a good year, just to reemphasize, you know, look at the underlying business metrics, the key business metrics for a lot of these companies, look at the things that are the lifeblood of the business, like users, customers, retention rates, because those are going to give you a pretty decent signal of what's going on with the company, even if the top- or bottom-line numbers look a little weird.
Sciple: Absolutely. So, we'll see what happens in 2021, whether these are the big stories we end up following or whether there's another global pandemic or something that totally steals all the headlines, but that's something to pay attention to.
Talk about the craziness of this year for 2020, just go back to that, what was the biggest lesson you took away from this year as an investor, Jason?
Moser: Let me see here, the biggest lesson. You know, for me, it was to never underestimate the power of the entrepreneur and their ability to adapt. COVID, I think, we all probably underestimated it at the very beginning. I mean, it took everybody by surprise as to exactly the response that we saw in March and April and shutting everything down. And just it was something none of us [laughs] had ever really experienced. And to see so many businesses suffering from that, and then to see the lights come back on, and to see that they had come up with new and clever ways of doing business.
I think the food service industry is probably the easiest example. I mean, all sorts of folks relying on that digital presence, where you could order online and just go pick up and whatnot. It's just been really impressive for me. I know a lot of people out there are still having a difficult time, but you've also seen a lot of new ways of doing business. And kind of going back to what Dylan was talking about earlier with bringing forward so much of that transformation, that digital transformation of a decade into essentially a couple of months, I mean, that's just been nice to see. Again, I feel like we see some good things that come out of this, some new ways of doing business and folks really got out there and put their minds to work and came up with just some new innovative ways of doing business. And I think we've benefited as consumers and certainly investors have benefited too from being invested in those companies.
Sciple: Yeah, I think the best example is the vaccine itself, right? You go from a virus nobody had ever heard of, to now you have what appears to be a very effective vaccine, just by everybody deciding, hey, we're going to -- everybody with any expertise in that field, all got to work on the same problem at the same time, and it's incredible how quickly we can make progress there.
Moser: Yeah, the first thing that came to mind with this was just that old Austin Powers scene from the first Austin Powers movie where he comes back from being frozen, he's like, "Yay! Capitalism!" And it just goes to show you -- I mean, listen, that's something that just never had been done before. And then let's not forget the lessons that they've learned from developing this vaccine in such short order, I think those are lessons they're going to play out over the course of the coming decade and beyond, that have the potential to help us in all sorts of ways as a global society. So, again, I think there's going to be a lot of positive stuff that comes from this.
Flippen: [laughs] Jason's was so insightful, I'm almost afraid to give my big 2020 investor lesson here. It was, I've learned a lot. Let me say, I've learned a lot in 2020. But for some reason, when you posed this question to us, Nick, this was the first thing that came to mind to me. So, I apologize [laughs] in advance for my answer. But it's actually the power of the retail investor.
Up until 2020, I had spent very little time thinking about how retail investors engage with big companies, for the most part institutional investors have always been the main shareholders, and have really driven large changes in price. And while we at The Motley Fool, obviously, serve the little guy, in the sense that we communicate, we talk to, we talk with individual investors, they're not the people that are driving investor hype, right, they're not the ones driving stock prices. And for some reason, and correct me if this impression is completely wrong, it felt like 2020 just flipped that on its head. Suddenly, it felt like the moves that we [laughs] were seeing in the market was being driven by what was a herd mindset among retail investors. Some of the companies that come to mind are, like Kodak or Hertz, even Tesla which institutional investors do play with. Those combined with the fact that I cover the cannabis industry, in which institutional investors can't play for the most part, it was amazing to me to see the power of the individual [laughs] investor in 2020. If you had told me any of these crazy stories would have happened in 2019 as a result, I would have said you're crazy.
Sciple: It's the year of WallStreetBets, is that the takeaway ...?
Flippen: The year of WallStreetBets. That's great. That's it. [laughs]
Sciple: Yeah. You know, I had heard of WallStreetBets before this year, but it was kind of a place you went look around, it's like, hey, man! You believe that's a thing. But yeah, now I think it's another one of those things, you think everybody went, you know, now your grandma knows what Zoom is, now the guy who has only ever, you know, used paper spreadsheets probably knows what WallStreetBets is now, you know, it's wild.
Lewis: Nick, what's the thing for you this year? What has 2020 taught you as an investor?
Sciple: Yeah. So, the one that's taught me really is, things can change quickly, life moves pretty fast -- if you want to use the Ferris Bueller line or whatever. You know, kind of, going back to what I said earlier, I remember being in the office in January, turning to you, Dylan, and being like, yeah, you see this virus thing, yeah, it's probably going to be like Ebola a couple of years ago, everybody will freak out, then everything will go back to normal. A month later, the stock market is down 20% and we're all deciding to lockdown. Then I remember, a few weeks after that, the whole mask thing had become a consensus. And then there's questions around how quickly that's going to happen.
And then we had the vaccine overnight, and everything kind of quickly returned. And I felt like this year, more than ever, has reaffirmed this idea of always thinking long-term, because if you're always paying attention to the quick changes in the news or who's going to reopen when or what have you, you're going to lose the forest for the trees and probably make some poor decisions in the midst of all the fire going on.
But I think if you focused on the long term, you could see some of these businesses that really were going to be in a strong position going forward or actually maybe benefited from some trends that really sold off in March.
So, like, the analogy I was trying to think of, is you ever see, like, a dancer and she's spinning around and she has to keep her head on the one spot so she doesn't get dizzy. I feel like you need to try to do some of that when it comes to investing, when it comes to paying attention to the long term, because if you try to pay attention to all this stuff going on, you're going to get confused, you're going to get dizzy and you're going to fall over.
Lewis: You need like a little serenity plaque on your wall, something you can stare at. Nick, if I were to guess, it would probably be that Tua Tagovailoa picture behind you, huh?
Sciple: Yeah, you know, just a picture of Nick Saban, you know, just stare into him, yeah, exactly. I don't know, something like that.
Lewis: [laughs] I think, for me, with 2020, the main takeaway was to be humble. And you know, I personally had the best year I've ever had in my brokerage account, and put up returns that I probably wouldn't have dreamed of. And that's just because I'm really overweight tech, I own a lot of software companies. And the sector absolutely exploded this year. I mean, I was right in some of the core thesis, you know, elements that I had when I was looking at the major trends and saying these are companies that are going to benefit. I couldn't have told you that there was going to be a light switch that went off and immediately made those the most relevant and really the only way for us to continue doing what we're doing.
And so, I think if you had a really great year in 2020, that's excellent, that compounding is going to work in your favor for a really long time, but just realize this was something [laughs] that not a lot of people could have really seen coming. And don't expect what you enjoyed this year, if you did wind up enjoying really great returns, to necessarily continue.
And I think just on a personal note, you know, we're incredibly fortunate in that we're able to continue working, what we do here at the Fool didn't wind up getting interrupted too much, but there are tons and tons of people who have done all the right things, and gotten advanced education or found a job that they really enjoy, and been in a spot where they thought they were pretty well set up, and just by virtue of the industry that they tended to operate in, you know, might be out of work right now. And so, if you're in a spot where you're doing OK and maybe even doing very well, just realize that there's not a lot that separates you from being in the other position.
Sciple: Yeah, life moves pretty fast, to kind of bring them together. And you could end up in a different situation here pretty quickly, who knows how quickly things can change?
OK. So, talking about your biggest lesson as an investor from 2020, what did you get the most wrong in 2020, Jason?
Moser: Honestly, I never saw the recovery from the bear market like we witnessed. I mean, I was fully prepared for a down year with a lot of bad news in the markets. And I went back to the services that I run here at the Fool, and I read some of the letters that I had written to members, just helping to ease their minds and keep focused on that long-term goal, like we always talk about, and it really -- at the time, it did feel like we were all preparing for just a really bad year. I mean, this was going to be just a tough year, and you better buckle up, because it's going to take a while. I mean, this was happening early on.
And there was a Goldman Sachs study that I had found early on that talked about how event-driven bear markets, like the one that we witnessed, on average result in 29% declines. And I think we saw somewhere in the neighborhood of 32%, 33%, 34% something like that, so that was pretty close. And then it said that, typically these types of bear markets, then they typically regain their previous levels within 15 months or so. And so, that all kind of just led me to believe, well, it's going to be a tough year, but just stay focused, there's probably going to be a good opportunity to buy some of your favorite companies here. We'll just stay focused, we'll be patient, and then, boom! It was over, [laughs] everything just changed and we got back to normal. And then the market just kept chugging. And it seemed to defy all the data. But here we are.
And so, it just to me -- I mean, we took advantage while we could, but boy! I just never saw that coming.
Sciple: Yeah, I'd tell you, I was trying to be judicious during the sell-off, and like, you know, be purposeful about deploying my cash. And that ended up being, yeah, the wrong decision. If you just went all one big wad in March, that ended up being the right way to go. No one would ever advise you to do that, but you know, hindsight would tell you that was the right thing to do.
Moser: Yup!
Sciple: Yeah, it's wild. And for anybody listening, you still shouldn't do that, just because it was the optimal because of the way things worked out, there are a lot of ways things can go, you know, this is just one iteration of the way things did end up going, but yeah, it's wild.
Emily?
Flippen: [laughs] You asked the question, what did you get most wrong in 2020, and I think the better question is, what did you get right? Because I don't think there is a single thing that I expected for 2020 that came to fruition. But one thing in particular that dramatically went wrong was my thesis on Peloton, actually.
This was a business that I was inherently skeptical about even pre-pandemic. I have to say, I think I'm scarred. I have a little bit of post-traumatic stress from my investment in Fitbit. So, when I hear a tech company come out and say, we're going to be fitness tech. I'm like, man! I am still holding my shares of Fitbit, right? Like, I have lost so much money on that investment, what makes you different? And there are so many buzzwords in Peloton's story that brought me back to the Fitbit peak hype days, that I thought the same was true for Peloton.
And really every quarter, even during the pandemic, I recognize which is unusual, has been absolutely amazing for Peloton. The engagement that they've had with the people they brought in has been spectacular. I would have never thought there was so much demand for at-home exercise equipment. I'm still not sure if I'm sold, I tend to believe that we as a species don't like exercise all that much. And I have to wonder how many people [laughs] -- I mean, look, obesity rates are greater than, was it, 50%, 40% in the United States right now? So, while there's definitely a need for, say, exercise equipment, I'm not sure that the engagement levels we'll see with people will still be so sustained heading into 2021. But if 2020 is any indicator of how wrong I've been [laughs] about Peloton, I will certainly be wrong heading into 2021 as well.
Sciple: Yeah. I mean, good on Peloton, if you told me coming into this year that Tesla was going to be up 7X during a global pandemic, where at one point they were involved in a lawsuit with the state over whether they keep their factory open, I would not have believed you. But I think this is a lesson, and sometimes the things you pay attention to aren't what other people pay attention to. So, I was looking into the year, this idea of more competition coming on in Europe, all those sorts of things, as you know, environmental regulations over there encourage that to happen. That actually did happen. When you look at the Renault, Renault Zoe is the No. 1 selling EV in Europe. Volkswagen has overtaken Tesla in Norway, Germany, those sorts of things.
But setting new records as they expand into China, starting production in their German factory this year, split their stock, have got inclusion in the S&P 500, five straight quarters of profit. You know, part of that is due to regulatory credit sales, but it works for accounting purposes. And they've joined the S&P 500, I think they just sold another $5 billion in stock. And if you look at where the stock is trading now, their ability to continue issuing stock to support their growth opportunities going forward. I mean, [laughs] I think Jim Chanos said it himself, he's been short the stock for, I think, five years, that it's impossible to short today. I don't know how the company today, if they can continue issuing stock and fund their growth operations going forward, I just don't know how you make much of a bear case today. At some point perhaps sentiment changes, but until then, I just don't know how you can make a bear case for the company.
Lewis: Yeah, you know, what's interesting with both of those is, I don't know if either of you have positions. I mean, Emily, you had kind of sworn off Peloton, but I'm assuming that there wasn't a financial stake involved in that at all?
Flippen: [laughs] There was not a financial stake involved in that call. And I'm really eating my words now, because as we're stuck here at home, right, not being able to go to my gym and it being way too cold for the Texan in me to exercise outside, I've made jokes many a time, my jeans no longer fit. So, I am this close, and I'm holding up my fingers, you know, very close, a centimeter away, from buying some at-home exercise equipment. And if I did buy that, I trust that I would continue using it next year. We'll see. But I would trust that if I did, I would.
Lewis: And Nick, do you have any position in Tesla, positive or negative?
Sciple: So, I've had a put position at one point, that's going to go to zero. I will never have a position in Tesla ever again. [laughs] Way too hard, way too hard. You know, you got to realize the game you're playing, and if the market is playing a totally different game from the one that you understand, you should just watch.
Lewis: Well, and I think with both of those, I mean, Emily, you didn't understand something and had no position; Nick, you didn't like something that you saw, but you put yourself in a position where worse case it was going to zero, right, you didn't have unlimited downside.
Sciple: Oh, absolutely. [laughs] I don't know how you could, yeah, I don't know you could short Tesla stock, I just don't know how you could do it, or any story stock, for that matter, right, because at some point, maybe the story changes. But that's a tough bet.
Lewis: Yeah. And I think I just bring up this point, you know, there is the often-quoted line, there are no called strikes when it comes to investing. And in Emily's case, missing out on Peloton, it was something I missed on that too, you know, it was the thesis that I had sworn off and just not really understood what was going on there. But there are a lot of other winners that I was able to invest in, not everything is going to be a winner. But Nick, in your case, maybe you lost some money on Tesla, but that's why we invest in many companies, right?
Sciple: Well, like you, I'm having my best year ever this year. I'm not bellyaching too much.
Lewis: There you go. [laughs] And because I'm having my best year ever, my thing I got most wrong is money related, but not individual stock related. And there are some individual stock things I could bring into the mix here. But early in 2020 I wound up buying a very rundown rowhouse in D.C. And I think that this was the thing I was most wrong about in 2020. [laughs] I thought it would be a really fun experience to kind of go through, renovate, and kind of oversee this project, then have it become a place that we were going to be for the foreseeable future, me and my girlfriend. And we kind of got through some of the planning phases, got a good sense of pricing, got to the point where we really felt like we had a good grip on it. And partially we had the benefit of, you know, the pandemic and understanding that work from home, flexible work arrangements, all these things can become a much bigger part of what the next couple of years look like.
But we realized this wasn't necessarily what we wanted to do. And I think, you know, real estate transactions are a lot different than buying and selling stock. And it's nice to be able to just pay your commission or enjoy commission-free trades and be able to wipe your hands of something; a little bit more complicated with real estate. But I was lucky enough to kind of have put myself in a position where there was a decent margin of safety with that.
And so, I was able to kind of walk away; find a buyer and walk away unscathed, which was great. There was a very good lesson to that, that kind of ties into that idea of humility for me. But I would just advise, anyone who's thinking about doing a full gut remodel renovation project, think twice. [laughs] Because that was probably what I got most wrong in 2020.
Sciple: So, like, what was the moment where you were just like, oh, crap, this is more than I want?
Lewis: I think when you start contextualizing things outside of what the immediate market allows. So, like, within the D.C. market, understanding the core mortgage plus renovation that you would roll into a refi is one thing, and you're like, oh, well, yeah, I'm stacking that against other townhomes in the area, and that makes sense. But then you take that step back and you're like, well, wait a minute, if I'm looking just at what that money does in general or what I could be doing with that money instead, is that really what I want to do? And that was kind of the "aha!" moment for me. I was like, you know, I think we would be OK with selling this, coming out ahead and then renting and being able to enjoy more flexibility, possibly explore other places at some point, if that's something that's in the cards for us, because we have that flexibility with the Fool.
Moser: I thought it was a pipe burst. I mean, I thought you had some plumbing crisis that just made you say, no way, man, I didn't realize this was part of the deal. I mean, homeownership with a good home is difficult. And renovating is, that is a lot of hard work.
Lewis: Yeah. And you know, I think it's an easy thing to romanticize. And I would [laughs] caution people against doing that. And you know, [email protected], [laughs] if you ever were getting such and talk through it.
Moser: HGTV romanticizes it every day, Dylan, every day.
Sciple: All right. We've got two topics left before I ask you for your favorite stock. Right now, I want each of you to give me one New Year's investing resolution for 2021. Jason?
Moser: I'm just going to come up with a new compelling basket idea. I really actually like doing that. It's something that gets me -- it sort of divorces me from my services a little bit, gives me a chance to maybe learn a little bit of a new circle of competence, so to speak. And so, along with the healthcare basket and the war on cash basket and the AAA basket, I want to come up with a new compelling basket idea to kick out there for investors as we kick off the new year.
Sciple: I like that. I got one recommendation for you. I want, like, a "kids these days" basket. I want it for, like, the Gen Z and Millennials and what's called kids these days, and you got to give me stuff that the kids these days are using.
Moser: Man! Listen, every day I look at investing through the lens of my two daughters. They are freshman and sophomore in high school. And it is eye-opening to say the least.
Flippen: I think that's a genius basket idea. That's so much better than my resolution. Again, I really shouldn't be going after Jason here; it's disappointing people. I know my New Year's investing resolution, as lame as it is, is just to add to my winners. I swear I'm like a kid in a candy shop sometimes, with companies you spend all day, at least in our jobs. I'm researching companies, learning about businesses that whenever I have the opportunity to buy, I just want to go after the new shiny object. And oftentimes, that means that I'm not putting money into companies that have just been stellar performers.
I was looking over my portfolio today, and I'm a one-time buyer of Shopify. And it's one of the best-performing stocks in my portfolio. There are so many businesses, that despite succeeding, right, I could have simply [laughs] invested more money into Shopify and probably been better off. So, hopefully, more of a narrow focus for me in my individual portfolio heading into 2021.
Moser: Emily, hand over my heart honesty, I almost went with that. That's a great one, I think.
Flippen: [laughs] You have the more exciting one; you left me the boring one. I appreciate it.
Moser: No, man! Adding to winners is just watching that money turn into more money; that's exciting.
Lewis: But Emily, I think you're hitting on something that's just like so hard to do. And it's like, you've already got the position, you feel like you've kind of checked it, and you know, you're like, all right, I can move on to the next thing. But you know, so often the best stock to buy is the one you already own.
Flippen: Yup! Balance everything; your money is worth stuff, right? So, when you look at your portfolio and you're allocating cash, don't value a new position over an old one, ask yourself, do I really like this new company better than anything I already own? If the answer is "no," buy what you already own.
Lewis: The other piece of advice I'll give related to that is, don't let spite get in the way of that. Like, if you're mad at yourself for not having bought, and it's been like a year since you've added that first position and you're like, huh! You know, I'm supposed to buy more there, don't say, all right, it's been a while the stock has gone up. You know, if you still want to buy, buy more of it. Don't let that resistance get in the way of making what will ultimately probably be a good decision.
Sciple: Yeah. I'm really not that more original on top of what you and Emily have said, Dylan, mine is just keep it simple. I think my biggest mistakes this year, and I don't know if there were mistakes, but more kind of mistakes of omission, of looking all, you know, where is this because of what has happened with COVID, where is this new opportunity now that I can go find a stock and show my, you know, incredible stock picking skill out there? When really the investments that I've done the best with are companies that already had a basic thesis on them coming in and there was a value opportunity created because of the kind of volatility I just went and bought into them. Companies like Pinterest, Match Group, companies like that.
I think a big thing that this year has, kind of, revealed for me is -- and this has always been true in the stock market -- is you don't get any bonus points for originality, you don't get any bonus points for a degree of difficulty. Just because it's a 10 out of 10 difficulty dive, you're going to get paid the same, you might even get paid less in the stock market for doing the higher degree of difficulty move. And so, I just want to keep things simple, stick to the stuff I know in 2021 and avoid some of those mistakes I made last year.
Lewis: There are no style points, Nick. [laughs]
Sciple: Yeah. I mean, you get this idea, like everybody, oh, I'm going to do this deep dive, and, oh, I read this footnote in the 10-K that nobody else read, that can work. But sometimes there are things that are much easier than that that are right in front of you, companies that you already own. Another example, you know, Emily talked about adding to your winners. I didn't add to PayPal this year, and there could not have been a more obvious beneficiary from us being on lockdown than PayPal and I just didn't do it, because I already had, you know, a good amount of stock and just it's too obvious, right? And that was a mistake.
Lewis: On my end, because I had the house stuff going on, and the plans for renovations, I actually have not bought a stock in the last nine months. And so, I am sitting on a lot of cash, and once we close, I'll be sitting on even more. And so that will be kind of the time for me to put some serious capital to work. And so, the New Year's resolution for me is to put that capital to work and do it in a nice systematized way and [laughs] not just go blowing it like I just got my allowance, you know, and I'm in the candy store.
So, you know, I think for me, that's revisiting a lot of ideas that came up over the past year on IF and in various Fool services. I have a watch list [laughs] that is long and it's been dispiriting to see it continue to get longer because I haven't made any purchases. And so, I'm excited to start putting some of that money to work.
Sciple: All right. Well, our last segment, maybe we can give you a short list to go for those purchases. Jason talked about putting a basket together, I guess you could call this a basket. What's your all favorite stock right now?
Jason, what's your choice for a favorite stock right now?
Moser: See, I like that, you guys are doing the work for me here. We just came up with this basket. Boom! Resolution taken care of; I'm all for it.
I'm going to go with a company that Matt and I spoke about on a recent episode of the Financial show, nCino, ticker is NCNO. And this is a new IPO from just July of this year. They've reported two quarters' worth of results so far. And everything seems to be headed in the right direction. It's certainly a company that is growing very fast. But they are a business that offers a SaaS model, a subscription model, and it's an operating system for banks. And it offers these banks customer relationship management, and customer onboarding, account opening, loan origination, deposit accounts, workflow, instant reporting solutions.
I mean, this is really a one-stop shop operating system for banks. And it is one that's gained a lot of traction. They now have about 20% of the banks domestically as customers. And you may have heard of one of their biggest customers, probably their biggest customer, I guess, Bank of America. Anytime you get Bank of America on board, I feel like you've probably done something well.
And the interesting thing here with this business, it's built on Salesforce architecture. Salesforce actually owns 12% of the company. And so, I like Salesforce a lot, so anytime I see that Marc Benioff is involved, it gets my attention. And in this case, it's something where they really are benefiting, it sounds like, from Salesforce expertise to at least some degree. But it reminds me a lot of -- you guys I'm sure all remember that business Ellie Mae, the mortgage software provider that was acquired a little while back, but a business that a lot of us liked at the Fool. And it was a very similar style offering, in that it offered a very simple solution that covered all the bases. And there are certainly regulatory issues that have to be adhered to. So, over time you can develop some network effects, some switching costs, which could down the line lead to some pricing power. You've got a co-founder still involved with the business.
It is a young business, a small business still, in terms of revenue. It's trading right now at around 40X sales, around 73X gross profit. There's really no bottom-line profits to speak of, but this is a neat business that I feel like is not going to go anywhere. I mean, they really have developed a solution that a lot of banks are buying into and it's one that I'll be having on my on my radar here for the coming weeks and months, and hopefully that valuation gets to a point where I feel a bit more comfortable, or if I can just get to a point where I'm highly convicted on the business to make valuation a nonissue.
Sciple: Yeah, that's a recurring question this year, you know, am I confident enough to get the right valuation, but clearly lots of potential for this business and lots of others in this tech space this year.
Moser: Yeah.
Flippen: Well, I'll give you a company that I am highly confident on, even at today's valuation. Very few companies that I can look at in the market today and say, I have a little qualms or hesitation, and this is one of them. I'm also excited, because it's not a consumer goods stock. So, I get the opportunity to highlight some of the other work and research that I do across The Motley Fool stocks and services.
So, the company I'm talking about is DocuSign, the ticker is DOCU. Everyone is nodding, so I'm taking it that most listeners will probably know what DocuSign is. But they may associate DocuSign with just e-signature solutions. They're the platform that you use when you need to sign something digitally. But DocuSign is so much more than that, and they're being valued today like an e-signature solutions company.
People identify Adobe or HelloSign as competitors, when in reality they're competing in the contract life cycle management market, what they call the agreement cloud, where they really have no competition, to be honest, if they do, it's extremely fragmented.
I'll take a little bit of a personal anecdote here, before I came to the Fool, I was doing energy project finance modeling. So, I spent my days reading contracts -- and Nick is smiling, because he's a lawyer, so he knows -- spent my days reading contracts across different offtake agreements related to energy projects. And then I would build models based on the terms created in the contract. And reading the contracts was just complete drudgery, it was a new form of torture, I spent at least 50% of my time reading legalese that was hundreds and hundreds of pages long.
Some of the new initiatives that DocuSign is getting into is DocuSign Analytics and DocuSign Insight, where their AI and their software will parse contracts and immediately bring your eye to special terms and clauses that could be important to things like modeling, but more often to be important to things that are unusual. So, when you as a consumer or you as a business are taking a look at contracts that can be hundreds of pages long, you can use the AI to automatically pull out terms or clauses that may be unusual for your specific needs. That level of applicability I'm so enthused about, because I believe it cannot just be necessary for jobs across many industries, but I think it can replace jobs themselves. I mean, that's how much time and energy and money that DocuSign can save for businesses. That's on top of the offerings that they have for things like mortgages, real estate, even food and drug companies that are dealing with, obviously, a lot of regulations in the space.
So, there's a ton of specific services that DocuSign is looking to serve for each individual industry, that I believe makes them have an addressable market that is much [laughs] larger than today's current valuation. So, I'm enthused about it, it's one of my favorite companies now.
Sciple: So, hot-seat document review lawyers.
Flippen: Exactly.
Lewis: [laughs] Yeah, that's a friendly name to throw out there, Emily. I'm a shareholder, I think Jason is a shareholder.
Moser: I am. [laughs]
Flippen: I'm preaching to the choir then, [laughs] maybe I should have gone with Chewy again.
Moser: No, no, no, no. Well, I mean, I like Chewy too; don't get me wrong.
Sciple: Yeah, I'll hop in with mine. So, my stock pick is Match Group. Ticker MTCH, about a $40 billion company. There aren't really a lot of companies out there you can look at, and I think they're kind of inevitable, and I think Match Group is one of those.
For folks who aren't familiar, Match Group is the largest operator in the world when it comes to online dating services. $40 billion valuation. When you look at significant competitors, there aren't really that many meaningful ones. You've got Spark Networks, which trades on the American stock exchange on ticker LOV. They're the parent company of ChristianMingle, Jdate, and Zoosk. Their market cap is $125 million compared to $40 billion for Match. You've got privately held Bumble, valued at about $8 billion valuation, rumored to come public in 2021, some smaller Chinese operators. But for all intents and purposes, Match Group controls every platform of significance in the space.
So, their legacy company Match, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, Meetic. Those are some of the older platforms. Tinder is the one that folks are probably most familiar with; that's the No. 1 dating app in the world by downloads. Also, the No. 1 grossing app in the world just in general. Their other platform that's really seeing significant growth is Hinge. Hinge is a platform they acquired in 2018. At the time downloads were decelerating on that platform. You look this year, downloads up 82% year over year through the third quarter, average revenue per user [ARPU] up over 100%, direct revenue up 200% year over year in the third quarter. If you look at direct revenue for the business, that's generally memberships for its different services, that's growing at a 23% compound annual growth rate going back to the past five years. Just really strong positioning in the market.
The thing that gets me excited about them is, folks should go read, if you haven't, the Tyro Partners dating market paper. It came out late in 2019. I had them on the podcast at the beginning of this year. The most bullish chart I've ever seen, ever. I've pointed it out, like, a gazillion times, if you follow me on Twitter. But if you look at -- there was a study that came out of Stanford that had data going back to 2017. It shows how couples met by year. And there's this red line on the chart that goes straight up starting in 1993, and that's how folks meet online.
If you just take some conservative estimates, today probably around two-thirds of folks are meeting online. And that's without the pandemic, [laughs] clearly, kind of disrupting what is traditional dating. If you aren't an online dating adopter today, coming into 2020, you certainly are today. It makes Match Group one of those few companies that you could think of as a stay-at-home stock and a reopening stock as more folks return to the market, go back to dating, things like that.
The other thing to mention is there's been this massive growth in more folks meeting online. But if you look at markets outside the West, say, the Middle East, some places where traditionally dating has been less liberal when it comes to gender dynamics, online platforms are particularly popular there, as it allows women to take more autonomy over their dating life. And so, that's a huge trend for them as well outside the U.S.
So, when you look at Match Group today, 65X earnings, not cheap at all. But valued at $40 billion today, you view it as essentially this is a company that has control over how couples meet going forward, they're the dominant platform. You ask me what that's worth? It's worth a heck of a lot more than $40 billion. [laughs] You ask about willingness of people to pay? Predominantly the folks paying on these platforms are men. Pulling the number off the top of my head, women are something, like, 25 times more likely to get a match than a male. So, predominately the payers on these platforms are males.
I tweeted about this a bunch of times, but when you think about what thirsty dudes are willing to pay to have access to women to date, there is no limit, and I think that's probably the case for Match Group. So, valued at $40 billion today. I don't know what the valuation is, but I think it's a heck of a lot more 10 years from now.
Lewis: So, Nick, I might be stealing one from your sector for my stock. You know, this is industrial, it's a little bit tech too, but this is a company I've talked about plenty, both, on the podcast and on Fool Live, and that is Axon Enterprises. This is a name that a lot of people probably know by its old name, TASER. And I'm sure a lot of people are kind of looking at software companies right now, and saying, you know, these valuations seem a little stretched, I'm a little bit worried about their ability to grow into the valuations that they've got right now. I think that this is, one, just a great business, and two, a really nice way to continue to play on the benefits of the software model and the cloud model with a little bit more security and maybe not as stretched the valuation.
And so, this is a company that's known for their legacy Taser business, but really the bread-and-butter for them now is their Axon Body cameras and their Evidence.com cloud storage business. And so, they provide body cameras to law enforcement, they also maintain the cloud storage of the footage that's collected on those body cameras for continuity and to make sure that that's accessible. I think this is just one of those win-win businesses. You know, we generally see better results all around when we have accountability, and this is something that offers accountability, also offers protection for law enforcement, because, hey, you know, it's an indisputable record of what happens. And I think everyone is happier when that's the case.
A couple quick things here on the business. 60% gross margins, 13X sales are the current valuations. So, it's not too, too crazy given what we're seeing there in terms of software. And yet, I think about 70% of their revenue is subscription based. High 20% year-over-year growth rates. They're only about an $8 billion company right now.
I don't expect them to double in the next year, but I think this is going to be one of those really great compounders over the next couple of years. It's a great win-win business. And I think, crucially, no one else plays in the space. They don't have a major competitor. They're locked in with law enforcement and they have, you know, some long-term agreements in place. So, not a business that's going to go anywhere anytime soon, there's really no one competing with them. I've owned it for a long time and have been a very happy shareholder. I don't think that run is going to end anytime soon.
Sciple: You got some fans here too. Axon is probably the most recent stock that I've bought. So, I think we're all on board.
So, there's your basket, folks. You got nCino; that's NCNO. You've got Match, MTCH. You've got Axon, AAXN. And then, Emily, I'm dropping Emily's favorite...
Flippen: DocuSign.
Sciple: DocuSign, DOCU. There you go.
Any last thoughts before we let folks head back for their, you know, Christmas Eve celebration? You know, I'm sure everybody is listening to this around the table, so.
Lewis: [laughs] Well, I would just say, you know, we say it all the time, but you know we love getting ideas for the show. And so, if you have specific themes that you want us to unpack with episodes in 2021, write in [email protected]. I think, in particular, we've heard your feedback on "Wild Card Wednesday" and we're going to be bringing some more healthcare conversations into the mix. But one of the easiest ways to guarantee that we're talking about stuff that you're interested in is to drop us a note or hit us up on Twitter @MFIndustryFocus, and just make sure that we're hearing you.
Sciple: All right. Yeah, and one quick reminder for folks, there will be no Industry Focus shows on Thursday or Friday this week, as we'll be taking some time off to celebrate Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. But Jason will be back on Monday to update you with everything that's going on in financials.
Until then, as always, people on the program may own companies discussed on the show, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against the stocks discussed, so don't buy or sell anything based solely on what you hear.
Thanks to Dan Boyd for mixing the show. For the whole Industry Focus team, I'm Nick Sciple, thanks for listening and Fool on!
