The Fed Keeps It Steady

In this podcast, Motley Fool host Ricky Mulvey and analyst Nick Sciple discuss:

• Takeaways from the Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee Meeting.
• Netflix's $320 million movie, The Electric State.
• Brad Jacob's venture, QXO, acquiring Beacon Roofing Supply.

Then, Fools answer listener questions about industrial stocks, quantum computing, and biotech.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. When you're ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy.

A full transcript is below.

This video was recorded on March 20, 2025

Ricky Mulvey: The Fed kept it steady. You're listening to Motley Fool Money. I'm Ricky Mulvey joined today by Nick Sciple Nick, good to see you.

Nick Sciple: Great to be here with you, Ricky.

Ricky Mulvey: The Federal Reserve yesterday voted to keep interest rates steady at four and a quarter to 4.5%. The market took this with a sigh of relief as the message from Chair Jay Powell seemed to be inflation still sticky, inching down a little bit. He called the labor market imbalance, and the economic outlook is more uncertain. When is it ever certain? But now you have tariffs into the mix. When you reviewed this press conference, what were your big takeaways?

Nick Sciple: Not a lot of surprises. Again, the Fed staying the course. Big thing jumped out to me. The FOMC, Federal Open Market Committee downgraded their outlook for economic growth to 1.7%, down from the last projection at 2.1%. At the same time, you have the inflation outlook up to 2.8%, up from the previous 2.5%, a little bit of a stagflation angle may be materializing. That said, Powell said a good part of the increase in inflation expectations comes from tariffs. Not a super big surprise there, but interesting that that's factored into their rate decisions. I think good to see that the Fed holding steady in an uncertain environment.

Ricky Mulvey: You got a question about tariffs, and basically saying, how do you create any certainty or projections around this when they're going in, going out? You can't make a long-term prediction about inflation with these tariffs that seem to be off and on. Nothing really here that surprised the market, it seems. Why do you think the market was so relieved by the Fed's lack of a move here?

Nick Sciple: I think the big thing is despite those increasing inflation expectations, the uncertainty we're seeing in the market, the Fed still expects two rate cuts this year, which maybe that's a relief to folks that they are maybe seeing some of the economic data coming down the line, seeing those concerns about stagflation and maybe questioning whether we still see the Fed's state pat. That lack of a change probably gives a little bit of opportunity for a relief rally.

Ricky Mulvey: Then Powell told reporters that he believes the chances of a recession were, "extremely low. If you go back two months, it has moved up, but it's not high." Do you agree with his assessment? Disagree? We can play the is a recession coming game a lot. Is it even worth it for individual investors to try to play that game?

Nick Sciple: For me, personally, I do tend to agree with him. I think the uncertainty around tariffs and other public policy have led to fears of the negative vibe shift if you will. But I think the underlying economy really hasn't changed nearly as much as people's emotions around the state of the economy. The state of public policy has changed. I think for an investor who's going to buy and hold stocks for the long term, I really don't think this type of thing is worth paying attention to. The folks, they're sussing out between, hey, they changed this word in the statement, that they added this word over here. I think it's a recipe to put a lot of work in and get very little results, especially for an area of the market that's among the most paid attention to events that you'll see come down the pike. I think in these situations, it's better to look for opportunities to take advantage of the market's myopia, the markets focus on today's headlines rather than trying to predict where the market's going to look next. I think there are some opportunities out there in the market today.

Ricky Mulvey: You can find a lot of major investors calling for recessions basically on a every month timescale, going back almost as long as you want, and occasionally, they get it right. Story I want to talk about with you is what's going on at Netflix because this past weekend, Netflix released The Electric State, and at $320 million. It is one of the priciest movies ever, theaters included, and the most expensive direct-to-movie streaming release ever. I watched it the way Ted Sarandos intended, which is on my phone while I was walking on a treadmill and then a little bit at home while I was looking at my phone and then having it as a second screen experience just so I could really take it in the way that I think Netflix wanted me to watch it this movie. I did it for about an hour, Nick, before I eventually tapped out, said no moss. Is this a movie you plan on seeing? Is this going to go on in disciple households in between March Madness games?

Nick Sciple: We'll see. If it's at the top of Netflix and there's nothing else that's out there for us to watch, maybe we'll check it out, but really hasn't necessarily been on my radar, but it's certainly been on the radar lots of Netflix viewers reportedly did 25 million views over its first weekend, which pretty good, but by Netflix standards, maybe not quite up to snuff.

Ricky Mulvey: Yeah, that's quite a bit for a movie that costs more than 300 million. I also wonder if we're getting to an end of an era with the way Netflix is spending on movies and granted, they have a few big-budget releases coming up. You have a Greta Gerwig Narnia movie coming out next year that's importantly going to have a few weeks on IMAX screens. You also have I believe a Guillermo Del Toro Frankenstein movie coming out on the service, which I'm sure is expensive, though probably not as expensive as The Electric State. Do you think we're at the end of an era of Netflix spending hundreds of millions of dollars on these single-tile movies that they seem to have had little success with?

Nick Sciple: I don't. I think Netflix is playing a completely different game than everyone else. They're really focused on getting viewers to watch and keep watching and Electric State did that, 25 million views in its first weekend. For Netflix-style streaming, these costs are going to be inflated relative to what you'd expect from a traditional theatrical release because there is no back-end deal to compensate the actor, director, or producer based on the share of theatrical profits. Netflix has to pay a cost-plus model where they pay everybody up front. As you say, they have started experimenting with some back-end models, limited theatrical releases. The big one will be the Narnia movie coming in 2026. But I don't think that's something that we should expect to be a wholesale shift of Netflix's model.

Maybe you see it for some of these potential franchise movies, which Narnia could be, and that's an area where Netflix really has struggled to create franchises like you see other big media companies able to create. If you think about Marvel or Star Wars, that sort of thing, maybe as they try to create those types of franchises, you see more theatrical releases and that sort of thing. But I don't expect long-term Netflix to wholesale change its model. I think there is a role for Netflix movies. That agreement with Adam Sandler, those types of movies, I don't think are going to go away anytime soon.

Ricky Mulvey: Happy Gilmore 2 coming soon. I was getting some previews for that. I need you to watch The Electric State and come back to me and say that no one is revisiting this strategy though. [LAUGHTER] I heard how bad the movie was, and then I started. I'm like maybe it's not so bad. Then as we continued on, it almost felt like Chris Pratt is playing a prank on me and the rest of the viewers with his lack of interest in the movie. We'll do the movie review podcast later. A report from Ampere found that Netflix's original films have a quicker decay rate. This goes into what you're saying with their difficulty creating franchises will set Squid Games and Stranger Things aside.

They found that basically, the original movies start with an average of about 30 million views, but then average about nine million views one year later. The acquired hits, on the other hand, they start at 20 million but average 12 million a year on. You're looking at a decay rate to basically a third and then a little more than half. Netflix right now has licensing deals with Universal, Sony, Warner Brothers, and Paramount. After my trash talk for this movie that I couldn't make a better movie, but that made me sad watching it. Do these critical misfires sort of just not matter if Netflix is the clear winner in streaming where all of the other hitmakers are selling their goods to?

Nick Sciple: Yeah. Well, listen, I think part of the reason these acquired titles perform better, again, comes back to the difference between Netflix's marketing strategy, distribution strategy, and what you see from traditional movie-making. When you release a movie in theaters, about 50% of the production's cost tends to go toward marketing. Say that $300 million movie we talked about earlier with Electric State, you would have spent $150 million on marketing for the traditional movie release, and that obviously creates a halo effect where people are seeing this everywhere, seeing commercials about the next Sonic movie. I don't know about you. I never saw a commercial for Electric State. That marketing halo creates a, I guess, perception by the viewer that I think allows those license titles to have a little bit more, I guess, heft on the platform than the Netflix titles where the promotion really is let's put it at the top of the queue. Let's put your favorite actor's face in the thumbnail and try to get you to click. Now, that's super successful for the business that's able to get Electric State to be Number 1 on the platform.

But I think it also means once it's no longer at the top of the Netflix queue, you're just not getting that same engagement. At this point, Netflix is able to get the benefit of all that marketing spend without having to spend it. They're able to just pay the licensing fees to these companies. That's a benefit of Netflix's positioning in the market, and they're able to generate more viewers for the same content than any of these other streamers are on their own platform. I think Netflix is in a good spot playing a different game than other folks on the market. I do think long term, there is potential, as I mentioned earlier, for Netflix to begin experimenting with some of this more aggressive marketing and theatrical releases. The first example we'll really see that is the Narnia movie in 2026. But again, I expect that to be limited and targeted as opposed to a wholesale change in how Netflix sends its content out to viewers.

Ricky Mulvey: Netflix would carefully say, this is not a change in strategy. It's a one-off thing. Filmmakers don't get any ideas. We don't want to really do these theatrical releases. However, this is a breaking of a rule that they have held for years. Nick, this is also a space that I'm conflicted about as an investor because I love movies. I love going to the movies. I love box office watching. I love seeing what's going on in the entertainment business. I was doing some comparisons with just looking at companies and ChatGPT and I realized the entire global box office in 2024 was $33 billion. That's a lot of money.

It was less revenue than an oil exploration company called Canadian Natural Resources Limited for the amount of attention we spend on box office versus Canadian Natural Resources Limited, or the entire global box office revenue plus video streaming, what you spend on Netflix Max, Disney Plus, we'll throw a Prime in there. That's about as much revenue as Home Depot makes for as much attention we give Home Depot. We talk about them on the quarterly calls, but there's not the type of interest in what's going on with these companies. One thing I'm trying to do as an investor is not just include the Lynchian thing, see what draws my eye, but also focus on where people are really spending money. Any parts of the economy, for the vegetables portion of this show, deserve more attention from investors even though they may be a little less fun to follow.

Nick Sciple: You mentioned Canadian Natural Resources. I think that's one of the highest quality oil and gas business out there in the market today, one of those companies that because of the uncertainty around tariffs and trade and headlines, I think, there were some opportunities to buy Canadian Natural Resources at a pretty attractive price the past couple of months. I think Jim Gillies has been on here with you before talking about aircraft leasing and company AerCap. It was just St. Patrick's Day on Monday. That's probably my favorite Irish company out there, and I think it really plays a critical role in the market. I've talked about medical aesthetics as well. This is a multibillion-dollar business that I think long term has got a lot of growth ahead of it. You know, it's really easy to pay attention to these content media businesses because we're all consumers. But there's lots of areas of the market where there's potential for success as an investor, and I encourage folks to look all over the market.

Ricky Mulvey: With that, let's get to this story about the acquisition of a roofing supply company. Brad Jacobs has a new venture, QXO. He's been in waste management, logistics, that kind of thing. Now he's doing a building products distributor. They've acquired Beacon Roofing Supply for $7.7 billion, 11 billion if you want to throw the debt in there. Nick, when we were shooting around stories this morning, you said this was one that caught your attention. Why is that? Why do you want to keep an eye on what Brad Jacobs is doing?

Nick Sciple: Brad Jacobs is the roll-up guy, and he is making the first step into his next big roll-up. As you mentioned, he's been involved in the early '90s, started rolling up the garbage industry, the waste industry with United Waste Services, left that business. From 1997-2007 started rolling up the equipment rental industry. Built United Rentals into the largest rental equipment company in the US. In the 2010s, rolled up the logistics industry with XPO, and now has multiple multibillion-dollar spun-off businesses, RXO and GXO.

Now here in the 2020s, taking on the $800 billion building products distribution industry here with QXO now making its first acquisition Beacon Roofing Supply. This is a man who has created billions of dollars by rolling up industries, and I wouldn't bet against him doing it again, neither would Lots of investors already. When this is just a shell company before they've even made their first acquisition, they've raised about six billion dollars in the public market. So lots of folks behind Mr. Jacobs are willing to back him. He said he plans to expand the business to more than $50 billion in annual sales with this acquisition of Beacon Roofing is about 20% of the way there. Beacon does about $10 billion in annual revenue, the first step and what could be another multibillion-dollar value creation story for Brad Jacobs.

Ricky Mulvey: There is some drama in here perhaps more interesting than the drama between Chris Pratt and Mr. Peanut in The Electric State. But here, Beacon Roofing did not want to be acquired and even adopted a poison pill strategy when it got one public offer from Jacob's firm QXO. A poison pill strategy is when a company sees that it's about to be acquired and then releases a bunch of shares to dilute everyone and become more difficult to be acquired. That can devalue your stock, hence the poison pill part. What changed here? They went from we really don't want to be bought to, yeah, sure, we'll have a new owner.

Nick Sciple: Well, I don't think it's that QXO increased its tender offer by 10 cents, although I think that is something. The big thing is the uncertainty in the market that we really alluded to off the top of the show, increased tariffs and potential concerns around maybe where the building products industry might go. If you're the management of Beacon, perhaps you look at that and say, man, it would really be nice to have an all-cash offer here today, and I think that's probably made them more willing to come to the table than they had been at the start of the year.

Ricky Mulvey: As we wrap up the show, anything else on this deal that you want to hit?

Nick Sciple: To fund the acquisition earlier this week, QXO raised about $800 million in stock in a private placement. That private placement was funded at $12.30 per share. Today, post the acquisition last I looked were about $13.40 or so with the official announcement out there in the market. For me, I think I think the shares probably are going to trade down into that $12 range closer to the private placement.

Nick Sciple: Level before we start closing the deal. For me, if I was interested in this QXO story and potentially opening up a starter position, I would wait for shares to get a little bit closer to that 1,230 private placement that we had earlier this week. That probably gives you a fair idea of what reasonable value would be for the company today.

Ricky Mulvey: Nick Sciple, appreciate you being here. Thank you for your time and insight.

Nick Sciple: Happy to be here as always Ricky, until next time.

Ricky Mulvey: Incoming transmission.

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Ricky Mulvey: Up next, we're taking on some of the questions you emailed us about industrial stocks, quantum computing, and biotech. If you've got a question for the show about investing, personal finance or companies, send us an email at podcasts@fool.com. That is podcasts with an s at fool.com.

Mary Long: It's Mailbag week on Motley Fool Money, and to wrap us up, we've got a bunch of questions about the less discussed parts of the market. Where aren't others looking? Where is the potential for great as of yet untapped opportunities? We rounded up a number of our analysts to answer your questions about some lesser known sectors in the stock market. First up, we got a question from Nkap80, who wrote in from X. They say, even though this sector is rarely discussed on the podcast, I would be interested in listening to your thoughts on the elongated slump in the biotech world. With even the large pharma companies like Pfizer, Merck and GSK struggling to hold their ground, will this ship ever turn? Find the answer, we turn to Motley Fool, senior analyst Karl Thiel.

Karl Thiel: It has been a really difficult few years to be an investor in this sector. I think it's a story almost of a perfect storm of things coming together that unfortunately has not abated yet. You can say that things got too high back in 2021, when the biotech market peaked. What you had was a long period of essentially zero interest rates, putting all money toward risk. When your money basically earns you nothing in a bank account or a CD or something like that, and you want some returns, you have to turn to something riskier. That favored tech, and it certainly favored biotech. There was a period where it seemed like over half of all IPOs were biotech related, often companies that were coming out with nothing other than pre clinical information they definitely did not deserve to be public company. There was just a lot of trash basically soaking up a lot of capital. It was no surprise to see things correct from there. Now, have things gone too far in the other direction? That remains to be seen. There's still some difficulties.

Certainly, interest rates have gone way up. That's been a huge headwind to the sector. I'm not just talking about the aforementioned trashy companies. I'm talking about companies that are well along in their research and development of some very innovative products, but are having a hard time raising money that they need. That's just how the sector works. It takes a really long time, and it takes a ton of money. There was some hope when it looked like interest rates were going to go down. They did go down slightly, but when they were going to go down more substantially, now that is certainly uncertain at this point. Then on top of that, now we've more recently thrown in a lot of other factors. We have factors like significant cuts in research funding to things like NIH, which just to pick an example of something that I think a lot of people who follow the sector, at least, know Vertex Pharmaceuticals. It's a company that's famous for its cystic fibrosis drugs. Well, the only reason that we even know that cystic fibrosis derives from the CFTR receptor and could target drugs to it is because of NIH research.

That's where that came out of. With major cuts to NIH funding, that's certainly a damper on things. You could say that that takes a while to play out, but you're already seeing people being cautious about grants and what things they write. On top of that, I think there's a lot of questions about how things are going to get paid for, whether there's going to be cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. There's a fair number of headwinds going on right now. The way I look at it at this point is there's a decision to be made about whether we want medical innovation or we don't. I think we do. I do think that capital will flow back into it. It's never really dried up completely.

The very best ideas do still attract capital. Stuff does still advance, and so all of that is good. I think it will get better, but it's really hard to put a timeline on it. If you are an investor in the sector, I would say to probably lean toward pharmaceutical companies like you mentioned, where I think there are some pretty attractive values, and obviously those companies tend to be profitable and they're not going anywhere. In more of the biotech space, I would say, think about companies that have already launched products or that are going to imminently or that have an absolute ton of capital. I think if you look at those categories, there are some really attractive names out there. There are probably some fantastic returns to be made among riskier companies that are still going through the clinical process and don't necessarily have as much cash, but it just gets a lot more uncertain from there.

Mary Long: A similar question came in from another user on X, who wrote, huge fan of the show. I listen every week. I'd love to hear about some of your favorite industrial or manufacturing stocks, especially ones that aren't often mentioned. Which businesses are quietly doing great? I love these types of stocks. Thanks. For the answer, we turn to Fool contributor Lou Whiteman.

Lou Whiteman: The challenge with industrial stocks is they are by their nature, cyclical. You want to find stocks that have a proven track record of performing through multiple business cycles over time. One of my favorites is TransDigm Group, ticker TDG. TransDigm is an aerospace component supplier that is up more than 5,600% over the past decade and shows no sign of slowing down. Here's the thing about TransDigm. Despite being mostly just a spare parts business, it has a long track record of generating software like 50% plus gross margins. How's that possible? Simply, pricing power. If you are Delta airlines and you need one part in order to fly 300 people from Seattle to Atlanta, you are not price sensitive when you need to get that part.

For nearly 20 years now, TransDigm has been buying up great businesses, generating cash with those businesses, and then using that cash to acquire similarly positioned businesses. It's a great, quiet, under the radar performer that's been a huge market beater. Another company, a little more speculative, but I like a lot is GXO Logistics, ticker GXO. They're in the business of automating and managing warehouses and supply chains for big companies like Apple, Nike, and Boeing, all customers. We saw during the pandemic how important proper supply chain management is, and GXO should be a beneficiary as more commerce moves online and creates new shipping and return management problems for big retailers to deal with. They're still in their early days. It hasn't really taken off yet, but I think there's a lot of potential to grow from there, just in response to how the economy is changing.

Mary Long: Listener Mike McDowell wrote into our email with a question about how the AI boom might impact quantum computing. I was in a co working space with senior analyst Tim Beyers when this one came in, so I grabbed him to answer part of Mike's question, which paraphrased, was, hello. I listen to your podcast, and I'm curious about your thoughts on quantum computing stocks. I'm no expert in computing or data centers, but it seems to me that the recent run on quantum computing stocks was fueled because of the amount of data that can be processed through this technology. It's so much more efficient than what our data centers can currently do. A problem, though, that was recently brought into perspective by Jensen Huang is that quantum computing is completely different from the system in which we operate today, and it's many years away from being widely used. My question, what advice do you have for investors who are interested in quantum and itching to invest in this space? Any companies that are interesting? What's the next stock to be looking at in regards to the AI Quantum Boom? Thanks.

Tim Beyers: I'm afraid, Mike, that Jensen Huang is right, that we are a few years away. We're probably not as far away as Jensen makes it out to be. Having said that, he's not wrong. It's a completely different paradigm. There are completely different things that need to be put in place in order to seize quantum at scale. Having said that, there are companies that are investing in this and trying to make it a bit more accessible in the nearer term. The two biggest ones are companies you know. One is Alphabet, the other is Microsoft.

They won't be the only ones, by the way, but they are most likely to put serious effort. They have real reasons to want to do this, Mary. They have a lot of data center infrastructure, they have a big investment in AI, they do want to create efficiencies at scale, and they benefit greatly when they do introduce efficiencies at scale because they are such scaled up companies. For each of them, they are making two different types of investments in quantum. I hesitate to say, if you don't own one of those two, you may want to consider owning one of those two. If you already own both, should you just be content with that, or should you add a little more? It depends on what your strategy is, what position size you have, if you already have big positions in both those stocks, I'm not so sure I would add there. But those are two you'd really want to pay attention to. The one thing I wouldn't do, Mary, is try to add a specialist ETF in quantum because that's going to give you a lot of small cap companies. I'm not sure I would be investing in a bunch of very tiny quantum companies because they just don't have a lot of capital right now, and they have a very long way to go. Maybe there's a home run in there.

I'm not saying there isn't but it's still super early. There's a lot of infrastructure that has to be put in place to give you just one example. In order to do quantum at scale, you're going to have to operate a lot of the equipment at absolute zero, and I mean absolute zero temperatures. How many companies do you know that have the infrastructure to be operating their data center or a significant portion of their data center at absolute zero temperatures? The answer is not that many. It's just this is where Jensen Huang is right. The infrastructure around quantum compute is just going to be different. It's going to have to be built differently and executed differently. It's probably for the moment, the domain of the biggest companies in the world and the two biggest that have the most to gain right now are probably Alphabet and Microsoft.

Mary Long: Okay, Tim. While I have you, I'm going to ask a follow up on Mike's behalf. You talk about it being too early to invest in smaller companies that are already in this industry. When do you know that it's no longer too early?

Tim Beyers: This is a super interesting question. One of the ways you might know that we're getting traction is the overall cost. One way we know for sure that things are moving directionally toward mass adoption is we don't have to operate at absolute zero anymore. Maybe we don't need the same giant refrigeration units that we have needed in order to operate quantum at scale. Things like that. If the requirements in order to operate quantum start to change, like the physics of it start to change through different types of breakthroughs, that'll give us some indications. But right now, I would probably, and I don't have firm numbers on this, Mary, so don't take this as gospel. But I would guess that the cost to implement a unit of quantum is very high. What you want to see is the cost of a unit of quantum to come down materially.

One way that we'll know that's happening is when the requirements for the infrastructure to support quantum to start changing to more common components. When data center compute became a lot more widely available, it's when things like open-source came into the market. Common components, off the shelf commodity hardware could be moved into data centers because we had common open source software that was orchestrating a lot of it, and so the cost of a unit of compute went through the floor. Cloud computing became a lot more economical, and we started adopting it at scale, and we never stopped.

Ricky Mulvey: As always, people on the show may have interests in the stocks they talk about. The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards and are not approved by advertisers. The Motley Fool only picks products that it would personally recommend to friends like you. I'm Ricky Mulvey. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.