In this podcast, Motley Fool contributor Jason Hall and host Ricky Mulvey discuss:
- Earnings from PayPal.
- Cooled expectations for Bill Ackman's latest offering.
- And if CrowdStrike is becoming a buying opportunity.
Then, Motley Fool host Alison Southwick and contributor Brian Feroldi finish up their summer school series with a biology class and examine the life cycle of companies.
To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our quick-start guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.
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This video was recorded on July 30, 2024.
Ricky Mulvey: You too can invest in a hedge fund. We'll see if it's a good idea. You're listening to Motley Fool money. I'm Ricky Mulvey. We're joined today by Jason Hall. Jason, thanks for being here.
Jason Hall: Hey, Ricky. Good to be on, bud.
Ricky Mulvey: Let's get to the PayPal earnings first because maybe this ocean liner is turning around. Here's some highlights from the quarter. Total payment volume is up more than 10% to 417 billion just on the quarter. Total revenue for the company is up 8%. In the earnings call, we also had CEO Alex Chriss touting partnerships with Meta, DoorDash, and the Venmo debit card getting launched on the Apple and Google Wallets. There's the menu. Anything really stand out to you in this quarter?
Jason Hall: Yeah. A couple of things really did. First of all, if you think about the part of business that PayPal that users control, there's some positive stuff, and then there's also the things that users don't really pick or choose, like the card processing stuff, it's really positive. We can start with just transactions, and volume was up more than transactions. Transactions are up 8%. That's good. Then when total dollars was up 11% on 8% transaction growth, some of that is going to be inflation, but not all of it at all, it says increased engagement. That's a big positive to me. Then you look at monthly active accounts was up 3%. Total accounts was flat. This is all part of the Chriss game plan. They've deprioritized markets and areas that aren't really profitable, and they're really focused on getting the most engaged users in the profitable markets as engaged as possible, and it looks like that's playing off or paying off. If you look a little bit deeper, where they start breaking out the different segments of the business, Venmo's growing well, but really card processing, which is all about relationships with merchants, and big brands is even growing even faster. I think that's some real positive things that I saw.
Ricky Mulvey: Looking back at the quarter where Alex Chriss came in, this was a little less than a year ago now, investors seemingly got a bathtub of information. He told folks that he was going to focus the company. He used the word focus a lot. Then the acting CFO at the time told investors to expect margins to continue to contract. Then in this report, we got a lift in earnings guidance and "The best transaction margin dollar growth since 2021." Jason, seems like maybe we got a little sandbagging, or should I be less cynical and just accept that maybe the prospects have changed for this business?
Jason Hall: It can be both, Ricky. I think it probably is because I think it's important that the company really needs to set reasonable expectations and you're going through a period of transition where costs may go higher as you refocus the business and shrink certain parts of it. There's nothing wrong with setting that expectation, but at the same time, I think maybe some things have delivered maybe faster than management expected, especially like the card processing, which is a profitable business. Probably a little bit of sandbagging, and I think it might continue to a certain extent as they continue to be conservative. You look at their revenue growth rates that they're guiding for, they're lower than we've seen the past couple of quarters. Maybe it's also good execution too on a strategy that's maybe playing out a little faster than management was expecting would.
Ricky Mulvey: There's a reason I'm not the CEO of a publicly traded company, Jason. That's for the best. I would be horrible at it. [laughs]. But if I were to be the CEO of a publicly traded company, I'd think, you know what? Let's book some wins in the first few months. I don't hate it. As a PayPal shareholder, I also don't hate it. In the first earnings calls, we look back at that, and now in these nine months that Chriss has been here. He called PayPal, "A great company with great prospects", trying to sell it as a growth story. Are you buying that story from PayPal?
Jason Hall: I think so. Really, it starts with the industry itself. E-commerce continues to expand. We know that's a big growth factor for PayPal. Then you think about person-to-person transactions as that continues to be a growth business. Definitely is. The tides, the tailwinds, however, you want to describe it, the currents, are certainly growing faster than the economy, so by those measures, PayPal should be a growth company. The great prospects, we're starting to see signs that that's certainly the case. I think we can also say there's just a little bit of a turnaround here. This was a struggling, flawed, directionless company nine months ago. Even with that said, Ricky, the markets still pricing in probably more risk and weak prospects and probably some concerns about execution risk. Sixteen times earnings, less than 14 times free cash flows. One thing you can certainly call it, you can call it a cheap stock.
Ricky Mulvey: Fair enough, Let's go to an IPO from Mr. Bill Ackman, who you may have seen him on the X platform. He also runs Pershing Square. He's been looking to raise funds for Pershing Square USA, which would be a closed-end fund. Originally looking to raise up to $25 billion so all investors can get in on these hedge fund strategies, Jason. That 25 billion became two billion.
Jason Hall: Not great Bob.
Ricky Mulvey: Bob?
Jason Hall: Not great Bob.
Ricky Mulvey: We're calling him Bob now?
Jason Hall: No, great Bob, it's the line from, you're killing me here. It's from Office Space. Not great Bob.
Ricky Mulvey: Sometimes I get hit with these 1990s, comedy references that I haven't seen in a minute. You know what? You're killing me, Jason. How about that?
Jason Hall: I am. I'm aging myself. I'm dating myself here.
Ricky Mulvey: Before we get to what's killing Bob, let's get to what a closed-end fund is because it's a little different from a traditional IPO. What is a closed-end fund that Ackman's raising here and maybe why would he want to use it?
Jason Hall: The short version is a closed-end fund is like a bucket of money. That's the equity. That's when you IPO, you raise that equity. That's generally all the equity capital that this individual vehicle ever raises. Every once in a while, they can do secondaries, but it's really difficult. Generally, they don't. It's like a private equity that retail investors can invest in because they also take on debt, they can do things like preferred shares, which are really more like debt than they are like stock, even though it's called preferred shares. Of course, when you do that, you can boost returns. You can also compound your losses as well. At the end of the day, a close end fund is just a bet on the manager, like a Bill Ackman, that they're going to take that capital, they're going to invest it well, and they're going to make money for everybody.
Ricky Mulvey: We had this IPO where there are some lofty expectations on the part of Ackman, where a lot of folks, some of them are big hedge fund managers, but a lot of those investors are just like you and me Jason, throwing a couple bucks into the market every week here and there. But now the expectations for this fund have been slashed by more than 90%. Why do you think expectations have changed so much for this IPO?
Jason Hall: I think the expectations may have just been messed up from the beginning. You hear about the investment banks that are running these IPOs, that it's their job to market and really try to create the biggest pool of money as you possibly can for the IPO. But it's also on the founder, the CEOs of the companies, in this case, the fund that's going public, to push, and Ackman has a big public profile. He's got a big profile on social media. When you're going public, retail investors really matter because the bottom line is that Pershing Square, they have access to all of the institutional investors, all of the high-net wealth folks already, so they're creating this vehicle as much to leverage access to retail investors, that's us, as anything and also to create a vehicle that's liquid because it trades on the public market versus investors in Pershing Square and these other funds, which your capital can be locked up for years at a time. I think two billion dollars is going to be a big disappointment. There's not going to be a getting around that. But I think if they got five or six billion, that probably would have been very fine because setting an unreasonably high bar and then seeing a much smaller number that's truly bigger than any of the IPOs that you've ever seen for a close-end fund, much less it would be one of the biggest IPOs we've seen this year, full stop, would have been a success.
Ricky Mulvey: Bill Cohan and Puck also reporting that maybe some investors were upset because there was a shareholder letter where they were saying which entities were involved into what commitment maybe before the checks had cleared, and that's not something that's going to make your potential investors super happy.
Jason Hall: When you're Seth Klarman at Baupost, who's notoriously private, you're not happy that this information is out there.
Ricky Mulvey: I would imagine. Bill Ackman, this is not the first Pershing Square offering to retail investors. There's one that's on the Amsterdam Exchange, and the public shares have been out there for about 10 years now. They've delivered, and we're going to include reinvested dividends here, they've delivered an annualized return of 8%. I'm also seeing this around X where there's the chart of Cathie Wood's Ark Innovation Fund and how it has underperformed US treasuries over the past five years. It's the hottest take right now. Part of my brain goes is this just like the Madden curse happening in investing? What's going on here?
Jason Hall: [laughs]. I love that you brought that up, the uninitiated Madden football game. If you're on the cover of Madden, you're probably going to have a terrible year, maybe even get injured, and it feels that way with these big-named, big-brand investors that whenever they reach the pinnacle, things are not going to go great going forward. But there are three main takes that I have. Number 1, investing is really hard. If you look across actively managed equity funds, the majority of the fund managers underperform the index year in and year out. It's like clockwork, the majority underperform. My second take is, please refer to what I just said. Investing is hard. For the pros, it's even harder. They have a lot of additional pressures. They're not just managing their own money, they have clients with big money that are pushing on them. The quarterly spotlight. Then you have investors pulling money out, and now you have to go liquidate things that you wanted to hold because investors have taken that ability away from you. Maybe you have a lot of capital that flows in, and now you have to figure out where to invest it in the market. That always happens when the market's hot and there's less great ideas and great places to invest your money so that compounds the difficulty for that business. The third one, Ricky, I think this is so important, incentives really matter. If I'm Cathie Wood, you know what I'm making a ton of money on? Just the assets under management fees. Just that 2% or a half percent or whatever it may be, I make more money there than I do on performance incentives. It's one of the only jobs on Earth where you can consistently and regularly do a bad job for many years, don't lose your job, and get very wealthy.
Ricky Mulvey: That's a little bit of a negative place. I want to move on to what may be an opportunity for our final story, and that's CrowdStrike, which will make sense in a moment. CrowdStrike having another tough day after Delta announced that it's lawyering up to seek damages from CrowdStrike and Microsoft over its thousands of flight cancellations. CNBC reporting that it cost Delta an estimated $350 million to a cool half-billion dollar. Why do you think the market's reacting so strongly to Delta hiring a lawyer here? It seems like a lot. [laughs].
Jason Hall: I think because it has taken as long as it has. We're over a weekend of this story, and it's the thing that you would have expected to see within a matter of days. It's easy to forget that if you're somebody like Delta, you want to have everything lined up that you can, and you want to have talked to multiple firms probably at this point to make sure you find the right law firm to partner up with. I think that's part of the reason we're seeing the stock really take this next leg down. I want to say this to CrowdStrikes, this is one of my highest conviction holdings and has been for multiple years. Think about the big tailwinds, industry leader by a mile, etc. The stock has been really expensive for a long time that's kept it on my watch list. Even after this sell-off, if we think about this where we are with CrowdStrike, I think investors should still be careful and slow play this. It still trades for 17 times sales, Ricky, for context, Microsoft trades for like 11 or 12 times sales, Adobe trades for less than 11 times sales. You look at cash flows, it trades for 55 times cash flows, so it's still not cheap. Can the growth rate support that valuation? I think if you asked me two months ago, I would have said yes. But now there's another little thing there you have to think about beyond just the litigation risk with Delta because there's a lot of us that wonder if this is less about CrowdStrike's poor process of QA and sending out this product, and now it's about, well, Delta's apparent lack of ability to update their computers in a reasonable amount of time. Of course, that's what the lawyers are going to decide about.
Jason Hall: But what we don't know, Ricky, is, what other customers are we not hearing from that are seriously considering other choices out there. SentinelOne, for example. Microsoft is another one even though their reputation may not be great right now either. But also, we don't know what is CrowdStrike going to have to do in terms of pricing actions to make sure they don't lose customers. How is it going to affect their growth rates? This could be an opportunity. Investors don't have a lot of exposure, Ricky, I think there's a clear case that maybe taking a position right now makes sense. But if you already have a lot of exposure here, I think it's still wait and see.
Ricky Mulvey: I don't own any CrowdStrike, but it's one that is moving onto my watch list, I would say.
Jason Hall: Good idea.
Ricky Mulvey: Jason Hall, appreciate you being here, and thanks for your time and insight.
Jason Hall: Good to be on. See you next time, Ricky.
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Up next, Brian Feroldi and Alison Southwick close out their summer school series with a biology class, looking at the life cycle of companies.
Alison Southwick: It just so happens that a business has the same number of stages of development as a frog, so this is how we're going to torture this metaphor. Let's go. We're going to start with the egg phase, by which we mean start-up.
Brian Feroldi: This is a really critical stage. A business is just formed. It is in the start-up stage, and it is very common for new companies to enter this stage. What they're trying to do in this stage is they are trying to create a product or a service that the market accepts, so-called developing product market fit. Now, it's very common for companies in the stage to have no resources at their disposal, so they're going to outside investors, perhaps venture capitalists, perhaps even the public market, to raise capital because these companies often have no revenue, or if they do have revenue, it's teeny, tiny, and nowhere close to covering their costs.
Alison Southwick: Let's move on to the next stage of a business's growth. A tadpole stage, if you will, of hypergrowth.
Brian Feroldi: This is when a company has established product market fit. Whatever product or service it launched to the market, the market is adopting it very, very quickly. It's very common for companies that are in this stage to have extremely fast revenue growth, often triple-digit revenue growth. However, every other number on their income statement often looks awful. For example, it's common for companies that are at hyper growth stage to have negative or very low gross margins at the best. Their operating margins are terrible. They're losing money, and the pace of their losses are actually increasing over time. Financially, the only thing that looks good here is the sales growth rate.
Alison Southwick: Then where is the value derived from? Is it going to be pretty similar to when it was a start-up?
Brian Feroldi: It's absolutely very similar to when it's in the start-up phase. The management team here matters hugely because they are just trying to get this product market fit and establish a toll hold often in a growing market. But their value really comes from the sales growth that the company is having, and oftentimes in this phase, while the company is not making money by any stretch of the imagination, their gross margin is often positive and increasing quite rapidly. When you can see that as an investor, that should give you confidence that eventually with time, that company could or at least have the potential to make a profit.
Alison Southwick: What about the traps or pitfalls of investing in a company that is in the hypergrowth state?
Brian Feroldi: All the same traps and pitfalls of really the Stage 1 really apply here. Companies in Stage 2 are losing money. They're losing mandate money intentionally. What they're betting that they'll be able to grow so quickly into the opportunity that's ahead of them that they will eventually be able to cover their losses completely as the product or service takes hold. Now, that can be the right strategy to pursue, especially if it's a new and developing market that does not have a lot of participants in it, but it is a high-risk bet because that company is dependent on outside capital from investors and debt in order to just survive.
Alison Southwick: What tadpole company comes to mind for you?
Brian Feroldi: One that many people have heard of is Rivian, the start-up electric car company trying to take on Tesla. Rivian sales growth is very, very high right now, triple digit, but every other number on their income statement looks awful. While they raise, I think, $12 billion from their IPO, they're going to need every penny of that to just survive.
Alison Southwick: The next stage of growth for a frog is tadpole with legs. I didn't know this was one that existed, so we're also learning something about real biology. Yes, tadpole with legs. For our business metaphor, this is the break-even stage of a business growth.
Brian Feroldi: If a company survives a start-up phase, survives the hyper-growth phase, the real next milestone for the hit is for them to stop losing money. Not make a big profit, but to just stop and stem the losses. Companies that make it all the way to Stage 3 and hit the break-even phase, that is a monumental achievement because they've actually proven to investors that their business model works, and they can start to fund their own growth.
Alison Southwick: Where's the value then derived from when I'm looking at a tadpole with legs break-even company?
Brian Feroldi: If a company is actually generating a break-even profit on the bottom line and is no longer dependent on investors and bankers to finance themselves, revenue growth is often very high here. It might not be triple-digit like it is in Stage 2, but it's often in the high double digits. Oftentimes their gross profit is growing extremely rapidly, and it's very common for those companies to have established some type of moat at that point. Perhaps it's a network effect, perhaps it's a switching cost, and they might even have a brand name that is starting to gain cache in the market. If a company can make it all the way to Stage 3, that is a major achievement.
Alison Southwick: What are the traps or pitfalls of investing in a break-even company?
Brian Feroldi: Well, oftentimes, if a company gets to this stage, the market that it's competing in is likely to be more established than it was just three or four years ago, and if that company failed to create a moat for itself or a competitive advantage, it's very common for big companies to pay attention to that market, to launch knockoff products of their own, and if that company has not built a moat for itself, those profits, which it worked so hard to achieve could soon evaporate.
Alison Southwick: What's a good example of a company like that?
Brian Feroldi: A company that recently crossed into the break-even stage was Monday.com, ticker symbol MNDY. They recently started to generate an operating profit, which again is a major achievement.
Alison Southwick: Our next stage of growth is froglet. I also didn't know that this was the stage of growth for a frog. Froglet or in business terms, operating leverage.
Brian Feroldi: This is a company that has gotten past the point where it is consistently making an operating profit, and now the management team focuses its energy not on growing the top line, but on growing the bottom line, so it has these assets, and it's trying to maximize the profitability of these assets. Revenue continues to grow for these companies, but importantly, thanks to operating leverage, profits are growing even faster.
Alison Southwick: What metrics would you be looking at?
Brian Feroldi: Well, all the standard metrics you want to be looking at, revenue growth in particular. But this is when I start to pay particular attention to margins. If you're confused what margins were, listen to an episode we did about a week or two ago when we talked about some of the numbers. But by and large, during this stage, a key sign that accompanies in the operating leverage stage is that all of its margins are ticking higher over time. If revenue is growing at a 10% rate, thanks to margin improvements, profits should be growing at a 15 or even 20% rate.
Alison Southwick: What's a trap to avoid when investing in a company in this phase?
Brian Feroldi: Well, because a company is growing its profits extremely rapidly and its profits aren't fully matured, it's very common for these companies to have very low earnings. Their earnings is artificially low given the potential of the business. Now, if a company's earnings are low, that means its price-to-earnings ratio looks artificially high. Again, the earnings has not fully shine through, so it's very common for investors to look at companies in this stage and say, that P/E ratio is 50 or 100, or 500, it's overvalued. But in reality, that means that you're just using the P/E ratio too early.
Alison Southwick: What's a good example of a Froglet company?
Brian Feroldi: A company that is recently going through the operating leverage phase right now, and it's been through this phase before is Amazon. Amazon, in the wake of COVID, really over-invested in the business. Built way too many centers, hired way too many people, and during that phase, its profitability actually tanked because it had so many more investments than it did the sales to support them. More recently, management team has focused on pulling back on the spending and matching supply and demand, so Amazon's profitability should grow much faster than revenue over the next couple of years.
Alison Southwick: Congratulations, company. You have gone through many stages, and you are now a frog, by which we mean you are in the capital return stage of growth.
Brian Feroldi: This is Phase 5. This is the stage that every business aspires to get to. This is a phase when a company's business is fully built out, its profitability is fully shined through, and management can actually use the profits that the company is generating to reward shareholders. Capital allocation becomes key in this stage, where management teams actually have profits, and they're using those profits to buy back stock or pay a dividend or pay down debt, or make an acquisition.
Alison Southwick: What metrics matter when you're looking at a frog?
Brian Feroldi: If you're going to be investing in a company in the capital return phase, which by the way, is the phase exclusively that famous investors like Warren Buffett invest in. The things that matter here are really the valuation that you're paying upon entry, the returns on capital that a business is generating from its investments, and then the capital allocation decisions of the management team. Those are what really create value for companies in this stage.
Alison Southwick: What's the trap or a common pitfall for companies at the stage?
Brian Feroldi: There's a lot of ways that big companies can go wrong. They can get hubris. They can make a terrible acquisition. If a company is truly very strong and very big, the way that it gets screwed up is by a terrible management team making very poor allocation decisions. If one company makes a mega acquisition of another company, that can be a very poor sign.
Alison Southwick: What's an example of a company in the capital return phase?
Brian Feroldi: No better example that comes to my mind would be Apple. Apple for the last 10 years has used its gargantuan cash flow to buy back stock and pay a rising dividend. Those capital allocation decisions have created huge value for its shareholders.
Alison Southwick: All right, Frog, you did it. You became a full-fledged frog, but I'm afraid there's only one stage left, and that is death and decline. Yes, it's true for frogs, it's true for business too. The final stage of a business's growth is decline.
Brian Feroldi: Unfortunately, this phase can actually be very slow and very drawn out. The decline phase can actually last for a couple of years. During this phase, a company's revenue is consistently lower than the year before. That's often triggered by a technological disruption or a business model disruption, and many times these companies can look very profitable, their valuations can look cheap. But if that company is in a permanent state of decline, it's eventually going to go to the bankruptcy. Its stocks eventually going to be worth zero, and this is a very dangerous phase to invest in.
Alison Southwick: Where's most of the value derived from when looking at these companies?
Brian Feroldi: Well, as Warren Buffett famously says, if you find yourself in a leaky boat, energy devoted to attaching yourself to a new boat is more productive than trying to plug the holes. This is exactly what Warren Buffett did when he bought Berkshire Hathaway, the struggling textile manufacturer. Berkshire Hathaway, the business was actually in a permanent state of decline, and rather than reinvest in Berkshire Hathaway, he took the cash flow from that business and bought insurance companies, and built Berkshire into the company that's in today. If you are a management team in this phase, really saving your cash, paying down your debt, and trying to go into the survive phase is absolutely key.
Alison Southwick: What are some traps or common pitfalls of investing in companies that are in a state of decline?
Brian Feroldi: Oftentimes when you look at a company in this stage, by any valuation metric that you can come up, it often screams at you that it's cheap. The price-to-earnings ratio can be in the single digits. The dividend yield can be in the high single digits or even low double digits. The share count can often be declining. You could have said this about Radio Shack or Bed Bath & Beyond, so any of these companies that are eventually heading toward zero, they can look optically cheap from the investment perspective. But again, if that company's earnings are permanently heading toward zero, there's no valuation you can pay cheap enough that would make it work in the long run.
Alison Southwick: We did it. That was biology class.
Brian Feroldi: We did it.
Alison Southwick: I hope that our listeners learned something about frogs and the growth of business. [laughs]. Wait, but we do have one last piece of homework for our students today.
Alison Southwick: Because you can get more investing insights from Brian Feroldi by visiting longtermmindset.co and you can also follow him on all the social platforms. He's got great game on LinkedIn. Brian's created a ton of really helpful visuals and infographics designed to help you level up as an investor. Send him a friend request. See what happens. You might become best friends.
Ricky Mulvey: As always, people on the program 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 anything based solely on what you hear. I'm Ricky Mulvey. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.
Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Randi Zuckerberg, a former director of market development and spokeswoman for Facebook and sister to Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Alison Southwick has positions in Amazon and Apple. Brian Feroldi has positions in Alphabet, Amazon, CrowdStrike, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, PayPal, and Tesla. Jason Hall has positions in Berkshire Hathaway and CrowdStrike. Ricky Mulvey has positions in Meta Platforms and PayPal. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Berkshire Hathaway, CrowdStrike, DoorDash, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Monday.com, PayPal, and Tesla. The Motley Fool recommends Delta Air Lines and recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft, short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft, and short September 2024 $62.50 calls on PayPal. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
