In this podcast, Motley Fool analyst Buck Hartzell and host Dylan Lewis discuss:

  • What's behind the sudden interest in China's Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite index and its 20% run in September.
  • Research showing that high GDP growth doesn't always turn into strong market returns for investors outside the U.S.
  • What to look for internationally, and why DLocal is a great small-cap stock to study.

Then Motley Fool host Mary Long catches up with Motley Fool analyst Alicia Alfiere for a look at Bumble, a dating app company that recently changed a foundational feature and is looking for growth in the friendship market.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our beginner's guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.

This video was recorded on Oct. 07, 2024.

Dylan Lewis: When does growth not lead to growth? Motley Fool Money starts now. I'm Dylan Lewis and I'm joined over the airwaves by Motley Fool analyst Buck Hartzell. Buck, thanks for joining me.

Buck Hartzell: Thanks for having me, Dylan. It's great to be here.

Dylan Lewis: I'm really glad I've got you here today because we are going global, and we are going to be talking about some things that you've been following, some articles that you sent over my way, taking a look at the run in China's market recently, as well as some research out that maybe one leading economic indicator, not the best sign for investors, or maybe one that they should be a little cautious of. To kick us off, this is our why now for this conversation. September was truly a magic month for investors in China, Shanghai Composite Index up over 20% in the last two weeks of the month. That run took the index into the positives, brought things back to about two-year highs. What's going on with what we're seeing here in China, Buck?

Buck Hartzell: You mentioned it Dylan, and I would caution people get into China here in just a second. But we're bottoms-up investors here at the Fool. What that generally means is I spend all my days looking at individual companies, and I don't spend much time at all forecasting GDP or looking across different macroeconomic variables. There's a reason for that, Dylan, and it's largely because A, I can't do it. I don't think I can predict these things. There's too many variables that go into it. The other thing is a lot of the macro indicators and things that we see are lagging. They're lagging indicators, when we look at stocks, they're forward-looking vehicles. So, we call them complex adaptive systems, the stock market, so it's forward-looking and that's why stocks go down long before we ever hear about whether we're in a recession or not. Anyhow, with that as a lead-in, we've seen some interesting things happen in China and that market. Obviously, there's a lot of people there. It's a gigantic market and it's been a growth story over the last few decades. The middle class has emerged in China.

But yeah, you're right. Five days up 21%. That's remarkable for a big economy like that. Year to date, I think it's up 12%. But then if you widen your lens, and at the Fool, we generally think in 3-5 year increments around here, we're not like what happened this month or this week or this quarter. Over the last three years, that market is up about 6% in total. Not great returns over three years, but certainly, wonderful returns over the last few days and that's largely because of government speak. They've announced large fiscal stimulus policies to support the marketplace. This is something we saw them do previously and so it's a reaction that say the government saying. Hey, we're paying attention, and we're going to support the economy. We're also going to support our stock market. To me, that doesn't get me particularly excited, but for some investors, obviously, that's in the newspaper, and it's going to have a run on stocks when Big Brother government is supporting us.

Dylan Lewis: When we see a major index move like that. We pay a little bit of attention. I feel like there are some parallel stories happening in China and the United States when it comes to the rate picture, the consumer environment, and really the market participants looking at anything that could stimulate some growth, get consumers a little bit more willing to spend, take the burden off of them as a very positive thing for stocks and for companies in those countries.

Buck Hartzell: Right, it generally is. But there is a difference between the US and China, and I would focus on that a little bit, and that largely, in the United States, about 67% of our GDP of our economic production is due to consumer demand. Consumers drive the day. That's the way it works over here. China it's a little bit different. It's like the government drives the day. The government decides where things get invested, who gets capital, who gets to borrow, and what projects are done, and they do that on a massive scale. They do five-year plans of what their agenda is and it's driven largely by government. Not the same here in the US. It's driven by the consumer, and I'd say that's a big difference.

The other thing I'd say is, like, you can make a five-year plan, but as your economy grows and matures and gets more complex, it's much more difficult to do that from a top-down driven standpoint and be efficient with it. My example is, I said this to my kids a couple of years ago, there's a lot of cupcake places around here in Alexandria, Virginia. I'm like, I don't know that we can support all these cupcake places. It turns out that the economy is pretty efficient. There's not as many cupcake places today as there were five years ago here because there wasn't enough demand. The other option, as you could say the government could legislate how many cupcake places you can have per capita in Alexandria, Virginia. I would argue that's not going to be as efficient. It's not going to be as efficient as capitalism and the free flow of money because entrepreneurs get in there and make decisions every day, every second, based on the best returns. Anyhow, government-driven economy, consumer-driven economy, two different things.

Dylan Lewis: You noted that the long-term returns for China have not looked great over the last couple of years. Part of that is, I think, the Chinese government, looking at some of the very big leading private sector companies and being a little bit more restrictive with what they are able to do. That has dampened the growth outlook. It's also had some geopolitical concerns, I think for investors. I feel like looking at China, I am hard-pressed to find an analyst here at the fool that is really excited to put new money into businesses in the country, and the ones that are are still being very selective. What's your take on investing in China right now?

Buck Hartzell: My take is the same as it's been for the last several years. That is, I think it's largely uninvestable for US investors. There's a lot of reasons why, and I'll start with the big ones. But the first big one is it's illegal for us to own stocks in Chinese companies in China. I think it's illegal. But they get around that by they formed VIEs. These are typically shell companies that are in the Bahamas or somewhere in the Caribbean. There's nobody that really works there, and you buy basically an interest in the VIE, which is nothing. It's literally nothing. You don't have an underlying interest in the shares that you're buying in those Chinese companies. You just have a portion of the VIE. If Push came to shove, you'd end up in a Chinese court to talk about your ownership rights of an entity that is a shell company in the Bahamas, when it literally the law is you can't own Chinese stocks.

Now, they want capital from North America, and the government has turned a blind eye to that over the last several years, but that is a big sticking point for me for investing in China, the whole structure, and being illegal. The other thing I'd say is just the regulation that environment over in China is not as robust as it is in other more fully developed countries ad so there's risks that are implied investing in China. The other ones that I would put in there is just like the government rules the day. They decide at the end of the day, who gets money who doesn't, and they can be capricious sometimes. You mentioned some of those large technology companies became pretty powerful. Their owners became very wealthy. Jack Ma is one of those from Alibaba.

They were going to spin out their financial arm, which was Ant Financial. The government said, No, you aren't. By the way, you don't own what you think you own in that. Mom made the decision to speak out a little bit against the government, and then he disappeared for a while. Went undercover and so it's one of those places where government decisions can have a huge impact on either value creation or value destruction. You don't really know which way it's going to go. I'd say China is one of those places it's very difficult for us to invest. The last part I'd make about it is China was on a building rampage for many years, and a lot of their incentives for local governments were to grow GDP and make investments.

Unfortunately, those weren't you know, demand-driven investments. Those were top-down government-driven investments for building all kinds of things, some of which are empty and not even being used now because the goal was growth, not necessarily good efficient growth that's demand-driven. Anyhow, there's some issues, particularly in the real estate markets there in China that that countries needs to work through.

Dylan Lewis: I think one of my favorite things about investing is you could tell me data points, even data points in the future, and I would probably get the other elements that would follow wrong or not necessarily have the complete picture because of the nuance and context that comes in. China's GDP growth, perfect example of that it has outpaced the United States in many years recently. That has not necessarily turned in to great returns for investors. That is, as it turns out, a broader trend that we're observing, and we are observing thanks to some research from Professor Dereck Hosmeyer, at George Mason, the headline here from WSJ. The countries with the highest growth rates in gross domestic product are associated with lowest market returns. Buck, help me make sense of this.

Buck Hartzell: Repeat that. That's weird, right?

Dylan Lewis: Yeah.

Buck Hartzell: The highest-growth countries have the worst returns. That doesn't seem rational. But the fact is it is. I would go further, Dylan, and say, you could probably do a study about this and include individual stocks. Why would some individual stocks that are growing much faster than the average company in the S&P 500 underperform? Well, the reason is the same as countries underperform. Investors know that they're growing more quickly and they bid up the price of those stocks. Just like if they think, hey, China is the biggest market in the world or it's going to be, and they're growing really quickly? We're going to invest in those stocks, and those stocks go up. What happens is, you end up with a long period of time where those stocks aren't great investments.

Dylan Lewis: You're basically talking about 2020:2021 here with tech and high-growth businesses?

Buck Hartzell: Yes, absolutely. Now, that is absolutely true. We didn't see it just 2021. We saw it 1999 and 2001. Where we saw that was the .com bubble, but tech stocks they went up to unreasonable levels of valuation. Then we had a long period. Microsoft for one of those companies back then, one of the great companies in the world, that company went nowhere for a decade or more. Even though the business was growing, sales were growing, but multiple is so high in the early 2000s that it took a decade to work off all that and then grow again. It's been a wonderful investment since then.

But anyhow, yeah, so those countries, whether it be China or India or all different countries that are growing quickly, doesn't mean that their stock markets are going to do the best. India is one I mentioned, they were actually one that did have positive returns among those, and there's been a lot of changes in that marketplace which make India an attractive place, I think to be an investor. There's a problem, though. It's really difficult for US foreign nationals to invest in India. It's hard for us to buy stocks in India, and that's unfortunate because I think that economy is coming along in the right direction.

Dylan Lewis: I 100% follow you on the high growth expectations and maybe countries and companies within them not necessarily being able to live up to those. We are also looking when we look at international companies at businesses that are subject to currency effects. And countries that are big exporters benefit tremendously from a weak currency, currency strengthens, puts you in a spot where you are making everything a bit more expensive on the global stage. We saw that play out with some of the currency moves in company valuations in Japan just back in August, that strengthening Yen, meaning that exports wound up being a bit more expensive, really hurting some of the growth prospects for Japanese companies, even though in a broad economic sense, not a bad thing that the Yen is maturing. I think mostly my take on all of this buck is, it is darn hard when you are looking at the swirling economic indicators to do anything that is thesis-driving with it.

Buck Hartzell: Yes, I don't think I can do it. I don't think I can look at an individual marketplace and say. Hey, I'm going to invest in Japan this month, next month. Oh, yeah, it's a great idea to rest in Europe, next month, we're going to Canada, or whatever else. I don't think that's a great way and a winning way to invest. I think the best way to invest is have a process that looks at what are the great companies out there and invest in those companies and just like the countries. Price matters. Even the greatest company on Earth is a bad investment done at the wrong price. We see that happen all the time. I'll give you one example that's recent, eBay is a company that everyone has heard of. They're the online marketplace. Buyers and sellers come together. They've updated their model a little bit, so it used to be all used things on eBay and now it's not the case. Most of the things that are sold on eBay are actually new. But anyhow, over the last 12 months, when we take a look eBay, the stock is up 52%, Dylan. How did revenues, do you think do at eBay over those 12 months?

Dylan Lewis: Just based on the premise of the question, buck, I'm going to say that they were not, like, lighting the cover off the ball or absolutely killing it.

Buck Hartzell: I think you're right. I mean, it's a pretty mature marketplace. It's one of the largest in the world. Actually, revenues were up two and a half percent.

Dylan Lewis: Wow.

Buck Hartzell: The question is, how can you get a company that grew their revenues only two and a half%, much lower than some of these high-growth companies. Yet the stock was up over 52%. By the way, that doesn't include dividends over the last four quarters dividends were $1.04. I didn't include those. I just look at the stock price. It's actually higher than the 52% by a bit. Show do you think they could do that?

Dylan Lewis: Got to be earnings power.

Buck Hartzell: I'll tell you what, they've done one thing that's remarkable. They have a great business that generates a lot of recurring cash flows, Dylan. What they've done is they've eaten themselves. eBay has bought back their stock to an incredible tune. If you look at the last five years, so the most recent quarter and you go back to 2019 for the same quarter ended in June, their diluted share count is down almost 42%. They bought back 41.6% of their stock in five years. Their share count went from 838 million shares down to 489 million in the most recent quarter.

What happens, even if you're not growing, when you shrink that share count, your earnings per share goes up nicely, even if you're only growing two and a half percent. They didn't need to leverage their balance sheet in order to do that. They didn't have to borrow billions of dollars. They just used the two to two and a half billion in free cash flow that comes in every year. Back like a lot of their stock. Here's the key at attractive prices. That can do a lot for investors.

Dylan Lewis: Buck Hartzell up here, I think a lot of folks have looked at some of these emerging markets that we've talked about as potential growth opportunities and kind of exciting places to be watching for the market. We are saying, hey, just because there is GDP growth here does not mean that there is something investable right off the bat. What should investors do with this information? Aside from just having it in the back of their brain when they're looking at companies?

Buck Hartzell: The big lesson about this is price matters. The other thing is, there's risk sometimes that you take on when you invest overseas, some that you can't be aware of or know or forecast. Taking those two things into account, there's one area, and I think if we widen our lens and we go back decades and stuff, one of the things that we know as investors is that small-caps tend to outperform large caps. But recently, that's not the case. Large caps have been on a big run here in the United States, and small-caps have underperformed. We also know that typically when there's rate cuts, which we just had a 50 basis point rate cut, small-caps generally benefit disproportionately. They do better than large cap stocks. That has not been the case most recently. As an investor it makes me interested in small-cap stocks. That's a place that I naturally gravitate to when I see that, small-caps are probably cheaper than large caps, cheaper than they've been in maybe 40 years.

I think that's a good place for investors to look. Warren Buffett said, I was at the annual meeting this past year and one of things that he said if he had a million dollars, a person asked him a question, they said, if you got $1 million, you said you could earn 50% a year. Would you look at small-cap stocks, and how would you do that? He said, basically, I would get familiar with every small-cap stock. He didn't go on. He was insinuating that he would buy the best of them, and he would do 50% a year. That's Warren Buffett. I respect his opinion. He's a pretty smart person. I'll throw out one example of this in a small-cap stock that I think is valuable and interesting in a lot of ways. But it also gets some international exposure because we've been talking about, it's nice to get exposure to some of these growing economies and those types of things.

The company is DLocal. Ticker is DLO, and this company provides payment services. They're a small-cap company, they're about 2.5 billion dollar. But the interesting thing is, they decided to go into very difficult markets to do transactions in. They build up the infrastructure. You got to know the regulations, all the currencies, do all that kind of stuff. A lot of the big tech companies here, particularly in the US, and they deal with five of the six largest tech companies in the world. They didn't want to mess around with payments. That's not their business. They sign up and they use a company like dLocal to handle all that for them. It's a business in a box. They can transact and do all those kind of transactions. For that, D local collects a fee, and this is a company that's been free cash flow positive from their very early days. They make plenty of profits. There's something interesting that's going on right now. By the way they're found in Uruguay, which is interesting because not many tech companies out of Uruguay. They hired a new CEO, and his name is Pedro Arnt and he came over from Mercado Libre.

I think a lot of people in the Foolish universe are familiar with Mercado Libre. They are a great payments company. Out of Latin America, they rule that market. They also have an eBay equivalent, so they have a marketplace as well. But any how, they're a huge company, and he was there a longtime CFO, 15 years or so as the CFO at Mercado Libre. He knows how to build business in payments and build scale. When you look at businesses, there's three things. You have to found a business and run it well. The second one is, you have to scale the business, and the third thing is you have to run it at scale. Those are three different skill sets. He has the ability to do all of those. I think he's a great addition, and it's an attractive company that's also buying back their stock, which plays into the eBay example we just showed, but it's a smaller, it's a fast growing company, but they also find their stock attractive, and they're buying it back, and that benefits us as passive shareholders, our share of the Pi grows with each buyback. I would say if you're interested in some international exposure, you want to look in the those small-cap cheaper areas, but also have the growth and exposure to multiple markets they're now going into Africa, which is a very difficult place to transact, and they're figuring that out. DLocal is an interesting company to look at.

Dylan Lewis: Getting up to speed on every small-cap may be a little bit daunting, but you gave our listeners here a nice primer on one in particular. I appreciate it, Buck. Thanks for joining me today.

Buck Hartzell: You're welcome, Dylan, thanks for having me.

Dylan Lewis: Quick reminder before our next segment. Motley Money is currently in the running for Signals Best Money and Finance podcast. Voting is open for the next week, and we'd love it if you can weigh in and help us take home the trophy. We'll be sure to drop a link to where you can vote in the show notes.

Coming up next on the show. Can you find friends on a dating app? Platonic friends, that is. My colleague, Mary Long cut up with Motley senior analyst Alicia Alfiere, for a look at Bumble, a dating app company that recently changed a foundational feature and is looking for growth in the friendship market. Who are some of the leaders that you admire and what qualities do they have? They probably take risks, lead by example, and plunge into life with determination. For those who approach life with a palpable passion, there's the Range Rover sport, the vehicle that redefines sporting luxury. A well appointed cabin brings a sense of occasion to every drive, and its cocoon-like interior makes for an engaging and supportive journey. The Range Rover Sports cabin is a sanctuary with active noise cancellation filtering out unwanted sound and its configurable cabin lighting curates the mood of every journey. It's optional PM 2.5 filtration reduces odors, bacteria, and allergens, while CO_2 management enhances the wellness of everyone on board. Its optional 22 way adjustable, heated and ventilated electric memory foam front seats with massage function, bring a hint of refinement to every exhilarating drive. Visit landroverusa.com to configure your Range Rover sport.

Mary Long: Alicia, Founder and CEO Whitney Wolf Hurd or founder and one time CEO. Former CEO Whitney Wolf Hurd stepped down as Bumble CEO a little less than a year ago. She was like a massive part of the Bumble story. Why did she hand over the reins?

Alicia Alfiere: Well, so she founded Bumble back in 2014 and when you think about it, her journey of just about 10 years, had to have been massive and exhausting. She took a company public. She ran this public company for several years, and she stepped back. The reasoning for this was that she wanted to focus more on the big picture of Bumble than on those day to day things. She became the executive chair of the board.

Mary Long: This past April, Bumble relaunched its app, and it made some tweaks to what was it? Signature move that women make the first move on the app. Made some tweaks to that. That's still mostly the case, but per management, the thinking here was that for some women, having to make the first move felt more like a burden than it did an opportunity. It's still early, but do we have any insight into whether that change has led to increased engagement on Bumble, whether that's helped them or hurt them?

Alicia Alfiere: The company said in their latest earnings call that they believe that the relaunch created a better experience for female users. That's really important because this company built its flagship app, that's Bumble with women specifically in mind. The company says, it believes it saw better engagement, more matches coming up for women and more users with high quality profiles but, we don't have user metrics like we might normally see in a social media platform. Where we see hours spent on the platform or something like that. We do have stats on paying users, which has been going up for bumble as well as its other apps like Badoo. But average revenue per user or ARPU is declining on a year to year basis for Bumble as well as its other apps. Some of this is driven by different geographies, but some of it speaks to some of the other issues that Bumble is having.

Mary Long: Maybe let's talk about some of those other issues, because when we were going back and preparing for this call, you flagged a particular one for me about product market fit and how Bumble's maybe lost its way there a little bit. Can you walk us through that?

Alicia Alfiere: Definitely. In the last earnings call, the company was talking about a few different problems that raised concerns for me. One of them was the intent of its users, that sometimes there was this mismatch of intent. Well the whole purpose of a dating app like Bumble is to find someone who's like minded in terms of what they're looking for in a relationship. Again this is where product market fit comes in. It means you are finding the right solution at the right time for your consumer. You have to know your market, you have to know your target demographic. If you want to eat the world, as it is if you want to take over the world, then you're likely going to need more than one product to do that for something like dating, because again there are all different intents. But if you're trying to solve a specific problem, you do need to make sure that you match those users up with their intent and make sure that people find what they're looking for. Otherwise, you're going to have an issue in terms of people wanting to pay for your app, to go from the freemium to the pay version.

Mary Long: Ahead of this conversation, you had told me that you believed in the long term viability of the online dating scene and dating apps in general. But that this was maybe a situation where potentially you have an opportune industry, but some troubled companies. Are there any dating apps that really seem to be getting this right right now?

Alicia Alfiere: Well, you say right now, that's the key part. I think it's pretty tricky right now. There have been several articles that I've read over the last year or more that have talked about how younger daters specifically are tired of apps and want to meet people in real life or IRL, if you're an old millennial like me, I believe the industry over the long term, I believe in its viability because it's really hard to meet people organically as you get older. Not just significant others, also friends. Think of the last time you tried to broaden your circle of friends if you are past your 20s. It gets really difficult. In terms of other players. Match Holdings is a big one. They have a lot of different apps, including plenty of fish and Tinder and Hinge and they've had some ups and downs too. What's interesting with them is they talk about their individual apps and I think this is the solution where you know you have different dating pools within the market and you're trying to grab each of them. For example, Tinder, monthly active users declined in the last quarter, but that was mostly because the company is purposefully calling users that aren't actually looking to connect, and they think that this is going to help in the future. Then Hinge whose tag line is something like, the app that's built to be deleted I think.

Mary Long: Designed to be deleted.

Alicia Alfiere: Yes. They're doing pretty well. So 24% increase in paying users, 19% increase in revenues per paying user. The company is saying that, the marketing here has been resonating and they're also creating interesting tools to push users to have the behavior that's going to work for that app. The thing that I found interesting is they have this your turn limits feature. The idea behind this is that it's supposed to be helping to drive better conversations among users and hopefully increasing your chances of having a chat turn into a date and they do this by having a limit. I don't know what the limit is, but let's just say it's 15 conversations. Once you get to 15 in order to start another new chat with someone that you find interesting, you have to close another one.

Mary Long: You had mentioned earlier that Bumble's foray into this friendship space and expanding beyond the dating area. They seem to underline this as a big growth area for the company. Do you have any color on how Bumble BFF, and they also have a separate app for it Bumble For Friends, how either of those ventures are playing out?

Alicia Alfiere: It appears to me that they're still building this out and Bumble mentioned recently that they purchased, I believe the app is called Geneva, which is a group and community app that helps people connect through shared interests, and that can hopefully help the company to build out this ability to create community, and the company is looking to release this increased capability from Geneva later this year. Hopefully we'll see something like that. But for me, I thought that this part of Bumble could really represent a great growth opportunity because regardless of your relationship status, I think most people would like to have another friend in their lives. I don't know anyone who's told me that they have their fill on friendship. Maybe there are people out there, and I think if that's you, that you have won. [laughs] But most people, I think most people could be interested in the ability to make a friend especially someone that already has a shared interest and meeting them through an app or online first, could really take a lot of the pressure out of a first meeting with someone. Could really lessen that pressure, if you already know. Mary also likes to write. Now when we meet up for coffee, we could hang out and talk about what our latest writing project is. So that could be really exciting, I think for the company.

Mary Long: The friendship space is really interesting to me because I think that this, as you said, is a genuine problem that's playing out in a lot of places especially cities. The loneliness epidemic that we started to really hear about in COVID, I think that that continues and is really real. Bumble and other dating apps might tell you explicitly or implicitly that these apps are a way to combat that epidemic. I'm going to close this with an existential question, because I started to see even in Denver, I get ads on Instagram all the time for something called Time Left, which is a French start-up, which yes, uses an algorithm, but you don't spend much time on an app. Ultimately, you fill out a few questions, and it immediately puts you at this table with allegedly like minded people, and you pay $12 to meet those people in person. That is a tech offering, but it really underscores the immediate in person meeting in a way that dating apps haven't quite figured out how to do. Anyway, the existential question that I want to close this on is, this is a problem. I see and respect the tech companies that are trying to address it. But is this perhaps a problem that technology can't solve?

Alicia Alfiere: Loneliness is a tricky problem. Let's be really philosophical. It is part of the human condition. I don't know if technology can solve it or solve part of it, but I would really like it to be something that technology can help us solve. There are so many examples of how technology can bring us together and help us find our people, the people with similar interests and like-minded souls, and that would be really wonderful if Bumble or another company can be able to create that community for people. Whether you're going to a new city or you have a new hobby, or you're lonely, or you just like people in general, I think that would be wonderful. As to the company that has you pay $12 to meet people in real life. I hope they can ensure that it's going to be a good or at least interesting experience.

Mary Long: I have tried it out and I will table that for another day, or perhaps I'll fight with the podcast. But my review if anyone listening is, has also seen these Time Left apps and has debated. I thought it was worthwhile. But more to say there. Another time, Alicia.

Alicia Alfiere: I love that.

Mary Long: As always a pleasure.

Alicia Alfiere: It's a pleasure to be here.

Dylan Lewis: As always people in the program may own stocks mentioned in the Motley Fool, may have formal recommendations for or against, so fire selling thing based solely on what you hear. I'm Dylan Lewis. Thank you for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.