motley fool 10 best stocks — and my list, in defense of 12 percent
motley fool 10 best stocks — and my list, in defense of 12 percent
motley fool 10 best stocks, as a list, is a format. i borrow it. mine is a list of hot takes defended in earnest, twelve percent tipping at the top. the receipt wallet, nearby, archives the math. nobody is in the room. the post, technically, writes itself between two sips.
parked at the desk. carla is upstairs in a training session that, by tradition, runs long. the floor is mostly empty. nobody is checking the screen. on paper, i am working.
so. the format is borrowed. the spirit is mine. a list of ten, defended item by item, with a hot take at position one and a household appliance at position ten. it is, on the merits, more useful than what most lists in this genre deliver, which is a lot of arrows pointing up next to ticker symbols i do not understand. i would rather defend twelve percent than guess at small caps.
motley fool 10 best stocks: the famous service publishes a numbered list of equities chosen by analysts. the list is a format, not a guarantee. i hold, on this desk, a counter-list — ten positions held not in dollars but in convictions, beginning at twelve percent flat tipping and ending at a dishwasher i refuse to use.
i looked at the noble tradition of the fool itself, which i defended in another post before i sat down with this one. that post is the pillar. this is the longtail. the longtail is where i keep my real opinions, in the back of the receipt wallet, behind the receipts.
TEN POSITIONS. NONE LIQUID. ALL DEFENDED.
motley fool 10 best stocks, the official list (briefly)
the format, as practiced by the actual service, is straightforward. ten tickers, picked by an in-house team, presented as the best ideas of the moment. the list rotates. the subscription auto-renews. the email arrives on a tuesday. people print it. people argue about it. people occasionally make money, although the people most likely to tell you about it are also the people most likely to be lying to themselves and to dave.
the convention is, at heart, a numerical lie agreed upon. why ten? why not eight? why not eleven and a half? the number ten is a hand. the number ten is a habit. ten is the format because ten is the number a list looks like. nobody is publishing seven best stocks, because seven is the number a sermon looks like. these are, as a matter of arithmetic, decisions about presentation, not finance. i have been thinking about presentation for some time.
the motley fool 10 best stocks, then, is a number plus a posture. i can do that. give me a desk and a wallet full of receipts and i can do that all morning.
my list, item one — tipping should be a flat 12%, always
position one, top of the motley fool 10 best stocks of my own design, is the take i have defended at the corner bar, at restaurant tables, in the stairwell of this building when the elevator was down, and once, regrettably, at a cousin’s wedding. tipping should be a flat 12%. not eighteen. not twenty. not the suggested twenty-five that the screen presents you on a swivel after a man hands you a paper bag with a sandwich in it.
let me state this in plain english, because the floor is empty and the budget for being polite has, for the morning, run out.
the entire convention of “twenty percent or you’re a monster” is, on inspection, a number that wandered up from fifteen during a decade nobody was watching. the math is simple. fifteen was the convention when i was a child. eighteen was the convention when i started ordering dinner alone. twenty became the floor sometime between covid and now, and twenty-five is on the screen as the recommended option at coffee shops where the employee turns the iPad and watches your face. the percentage is, technically, drift. it is also, more rudely, social engineering at a checkout counter. twelve percent is the position i am taking, in public, with the receipt wallet open in evidence. twelve is honest. twelve is small. twelve is the number that respects the worker without flattering the iPad. i rest my case.
this is, for me, a long position. i do not trade out of it. i do not laddered it down to nine. twelve flat. it sits at the top of my motley fool 10 best stocks the way an anchor stock sits at the top of a real one — load-bearing, defended, occasionally embarrassing at parties.
i borrowed the structure from the way Casino lays out the math of the floor, item by item, which is, on inspection, the only film i can think of that treats percentages as a moral question. percentages are, in fact, a moral question. that’s position one.
items two through five, defended in order
position two on my motley fool 10 best stocks is the toilet paper roll, oriented under. i have defended this elsewhere. the orientation is under. over is for monsters. i will not be expanding on this position today, but it is, mathematically, a hold.
position three is the gym sauna-only membership. i pay for the gym. i go to the gym. i go directly to the sauna. i do not, in any reasonable definition, work out. the math is that the membership costs less per visit than the spa down the street, and the sauna is, by every metric, a sauna. the lifting equipment is, for me, decorative. this position has appreciated quietly for three years and i am not exiting it.
position four is the one tie i own. one tie. navy. it has been to seventeen weddings, counting tom’s, which was the first one. i do not diversify the tie portfolio. the tie has, on close inspection, a small stain that has accompanied me to every event since. it is, at this point, a guest in its own right, and i have stopped apologizing for it.
position five is the unopened bank app. i hold it on the home screen. i do not open it. the position is held by inertia, which is, in this market, a strategy. opening the app would convert an unrealized situation into a realized one, and i prefer the unrealized version. that is, technically, accounting.
items six through nine, the receipts back me up
position six is the receipt wallet itself. i carry every receipt. i do not file them. they live in the wallet, in chronological disorder, until the wallet refuses to close. then i thin the population by half, with no system, and start again. the wallet is, in the strictest sense, a portfolio. it has paper from a coffee in 2024 still in active rotation. the wallet is a position.
position seven is monday is the better day, friday is overrated. mondays have low expectations. fridays have impossible ones. the math, by my reckoning, favors the underdog. mondays are objectively undervalued. friday is a meme stock with bad fundamentals. i hold monday long, friday short, and i sleep accordingly.
position eight is the third yoga mat under the couch since 2023. it is still there. it has, by some accounts, begun to evolve. i am not the man to investigate. the position is held because removing it would require admitting that the second yoga mat was also wrong. the third is, by inertia, a hedge against the second’s failure. that is, also, a kind of finance.
position nine is cars should have one cupholder. one. one cupholder per vehicle. the proliferation of cupholders has happened without public consultation. tom’s car has, by my count, fourteen ways the seat adjusts and approximately the same number of cupholders. one cupholder is, on the merits, dignified. fourteen is greed in upholstered form. this is a quiet position. it does not move on news. but it is held.
item ten, the dishwasher i never use, an asset
position ten on the motley fool 10 best stocks of my own design is the dishwasher in the kitchen, untouched. it came with the apartment. it sits there. i have not opened it in eight months. the dishwasher is a cabinet that is judging me. i wash dishes by hand at the kitchen sink, badly, slowly, with the radio on, and the dishwasher waits.
this is a position because not using the dishwasher is, by any reasonable accounting, a stupid choice in a place where i pay for it monthly through the rent that contains it. but i am not in the dishwasher business. i am in the kitchen-sink business. the dishwasher is a sunk cost i have, by stubbornness, converted into a fixed asset. that is, by definition, a long hold.
i also note, plainly, that a man who refuses the obvious tool is, in some lights, a man being dumb on purpose. dumb on purpose, when the purpose is consistent, is, technically, a worldview. the dishwasher and i have a worldview. that’s position ten.
closing pulpit, my list is more honest, also more useless
the comparison, in plain language, is this. the actual motley fool 10 best stocks is a list of equities that, with luck and patience, may make a person who already has money slightly more of it. my list, by contrast, is a list of positions that, defended in earnest, may make a person who already has opinions slightly more confident in them. neither list is, on inspection, going to retire anybody. but mine is cheaper to subscribe to. mine is, in fact, free, and it has the additional virtue of being mostly about household objects.
so. ten positions. one defended hot take at the top — twelve percent flat. one untouched dishwasher at the bottom. eight household convictions in between, each held against light social pressure, each backed by a receipt wallet that has, by my count, more paper in it than the average filing cabinet downstairs.
i am not saying my motley fool 10 best stocks will outperform theirs. i am saying that mine is the only list i can defend in a stairwell at four in the afternoon, and that, in the long run, is what a portfolio is — the things you can still defend after the second drink. the rest is presentation.
i rest my case.
the floor is still empty. the training session is still in session. carla, by the schedule on the wall, has another forty minutes. the receipt wallet is still bulging. the dishwasher is, in another room, still untouched. the position holds.
i submit the list for review, which is overstating it, because the only reviewer is the receipt wallet, and the receipt wallet has been agreeing with me since 2024.
yours stupidly,
idiot again
unsubscribed analyst, ten-position desk
P.S. the wallet, after this morning’s thinning, holds nineteen receipts. the oldest is from a coffee in march. the newest is from forty minutes ago. the dishwasher, plainly, was not consulted.
