April 2026 Mailbag: Hacks, Heisenberg, and Helpful Rule Suggestion for Market Cap Game Show

In this episode of Rule Breaker Investing, Motley Fool Co-Founder David Gardner dives into the listener mailbag for tips, tricks, hacks, and even a suggestion for Market Cap Game Show.

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 podcast was recorded on April 29, 2026.

David Gardner: Can a squint at the dinner bill accidentally insult your dinner companion? Should you still buy more of a stock after it's jump 208-250? What kind of Fool are you if your portfolio is built for harbor and part still points toward the horizon, and have I been invoking Heisenberg all these years when I really should have been saying Hawthorne? Can two listener quotes just permanently improve the Market Cap Game Show? We have a motley array of topics all sparked by your notes sent in over the course of April. It's now the last Wednesday of the month, and it's time for your mailbag. Only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.

Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. The end of April is nigh. It's been a really fun month for a variety of reasons, but for this podcast, I've so enjoyed bringing you the four previous episodes. I'd like to review them really briefly as we kick off our mailbag. April 1, that would be April Fool's Day for those keeping score at home. Blast from the Past Volume 12. I kicked off the month by going back into the archives for five past points that I thought were especially worth bringing forward again here in April 2026. We went from James Clear on identity and habits to Shakespeare on serenity in the face of market volatility. I thought the whole thing came together around one especially Foolish idea. That's why we put these three letters in the title, A-B-B, Always Be Buying. The next week was April 8th, Mental Tips, Tricks, and Life Hacks Volume 11, where I presented seven small ideas designed to make your life a little smoother, smarter, and more fun. We ranged from quickly sizing up AI companies to a $10 household fix to a one-afternoon skill you can enjoy for life. Then it was Tax Day, April 15th. Got to know the lingo, volume eight, where I welcomed in three Fool analysts to help break down financial terms for the rest of us. It's always a nice mix of useful. It's a little nerdy, sure, and a little playful, too, especially with the scoring system we used to see whether we were heroes or zeros. We went from depreciation this time around to your retirement smile. Then last week, April 22nd, we brought together three fools. Volume two, I invited two most admired friends, Bill Burke and Mahan Tavakoli, to join us around the virtual campfire. We each told three stories, one to educate, one to amuse, and one to enrich. I thought the result was warm. It was wise. It was joyful. I love those men, and I love that series. I hope you've had fun with me. If you missed any of them, there they are. That was the month that was.

Now, before we kick off the mailbag, I have a short but Motley list of notes and noteworthies for you. I want to mention in the past week, I was on someone else's podcast. A very good podcast. Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz from Bloomberg Podcasts. What a delightful conversation. We started talking about the early days of The Motley Fool, back when stocks were quoted in fractions, not decimals. We started with AOL, little bit of business history. Of course, we got into Rule Breaker Investing. It was over an hour together if you feel like you're not getting enough of me after a full mailbag this week. Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business came out on Saturday, April 25th, Barry hanging out with a Fool. Off the air, he made a real point, very authentic to him, talking about how much his podcast is not about him, it's about his guest, and he's so gracious with his questions.

I also had a lot of fun traveling out to Chicago this past week where I spoke at the Better Investing National Conference. If you've ever been part of an investment club, maybe you were part of the National Association of Investment Clubs. Longtime organization which renamed itself Better Investing in recent years. It was formed 75 years ago by founder George Nicholson, who I believe operated out of the state of Michigan, and maybe like you or like me, George, back in the day was saying, I want to figure out the stock market. How does this work? He began reaching out to other people who lived near him, and they formed a club and began investing and learning together. That's the spirit of Better Investing. It's an organization I've really appreciated. The Motley Fool done a number of things with them over the years.

After my lunchtime keynote in Chicago, I was presented an award, which was a complete shock but just to honor the founder, George Nicholson Junior, who was the founder of Better Investing and the creator of its principles, there's an annual George S. Nicholson award recognizing those inside or outside the Better Investing community who've introduced individuals to the ownership of business through stocks, as well as provided investment education and information to enable individuals to be successful lifetime investors. I was shocked when they handed me the award after my lunchtime speech. I was just there to be their lunchtime speaker, but I really want to thank Mark Robertson, CEO Wayne Thorpe, and others at Better Investing for the Nicholson award. I am not worthy. I'm just a fool. I so appreciate that you did that for me.

As long as we're talking about the spread of financial literacy, how can I not think about the Fool Community Foundation this week? Investing is, after all, the single most powerful driver of long-term wealth, and yet millions of Americans and even more people worldwide start too late or never begin at all. The Fool Community Foundation is rolling out our fredometer. If you go to fredometer.org, you're going to see prototypes of the lessons that are being coded as we speak.

I'm really excited because we have a partnership with Next Gen Personal Finance. We already have a distribution channel to reach 5 million high school students annually, starting this September. This is a rare opportunity for us to pair investing education with national distribution at scale. I wanted you to know about that because you can go and kick the tires, go to fredometer.org and begin sharing out financial literacy with those around you. You'll see the lessons. You'll see the Foolish voice, a lot of the fun, getting people started investing. That's how The Motley Fool started. I hope we never end, but if we ever do, that's how The Motley Fool will end, as well, because that's what we stand for the spread of a love of investing, whether it's better investing or here next gen personal finance. Thank you to each of those.

One last note for now, just to mention that May is my birthday, and each year, you give me a gift, what you have learned from me via this podcast. This will be the 2026 edition. This year, I actually turn 60. That is the big 60. I recently became a grandfather in my very late 50s. Some turning point moments for me here in 2026. But if you ever feel like you've learned something from me and you'd like to share that back as a gift, drop us a line rbi@fool.com. In fact, the subject line, this will help us out so we know which ones to include in that podcast in a couple of weeks, the subject line, why don't you make it “What I have earned. “If you type that in, that'll find its way right to me. In a couple of weeks, I will present those back as my annual gift back to you on my birthday of the best lessons we’ve learned together. What have you learned from David Gardner coming in May because we are doing that, and I'll be traveling, we're doing that a little early, so please get any responses if you'd like to be featured on that podcast. Get them in right away. Thanks.

Rule Breaker Mailbag item Number 1 of seven this month, David, I'm a regular listener. I really enjoyed last week's Three Fools episode. While I could relate to many of the stories, Mahan's Squinting Eye story hit home specifically. I want to pause it there for this note from Irvin, and just recall what happened last week. One of our nine stories around the campfire was my friend Mahan Tavakoli talking about being a young trainer teaching a class. In this class into this classroom, the evaluator walks in. Mahan is teaching. He's a young guy teaching students, and the evaluator is now sitting in the room. He said, Of course, my attention, rightly and wrongly, goes right to the evaluator. He forgets about his students, and he realizes he's teaching toward the evaluator. The problem is the evaluator started looking grumpy. Then Mahan said he kept looking worse.

He decided, Mahan did to call a break for his students so he could go over and talk to that quality assessment person. Just quoting Mahan's sum from last week, he said, I told the class members to take a break, set them up so they could have conversations with each other because I said, I have to walk up to Jake and ask him, What the heck's going on? What am I doing wrong? He walked over to Jake, and he said, What's up? Jake says, B, What do you mean What's up? Mahan said, Well, what am I doing wrong? He said back, you aren't doing anything wrong. Everything's fine. Mahan said, Why? Because your face, your contortions, you were looking pretty displeased back here. Jake said, Oh, my God. I'm so sorry, Said his evaluator, I forgot my glasses. I can't see the front of the classroom. I'm squinting to see what's going on. Sounds like it's really going well, by the way. I just don't have my glasses. That was Mahan's story reminding us that a lot of the time in life, we think it's about us. It must be something we're doing wrong. We don't realize it has nothing at all to do with us.

Back to your note, mailback item number one, Irvin, you wrote in response to that story from last week. You wrote, I experience a version of this often. I'll sometimes go out to dinner with a colleague or friend with the agreement that I'm going to pick up the tab. However, if I've forgotten my glasses, I end up squinting intensely at the bill just to read the total. My dinner partners end up misinterpreting this, thinking I'm upset about the price, or that they ordered something too expensive. They start offering to split the bill or apologizing, never realizing I just can't see the number. From now on, Irvin concludes, I have a great story, Mahan's to tell them, to put them at ease while I squint and pay. Thanks again for everything you do. Thanks from Irvin. Well, Irvin, thank you for this wonderful note, a great kickoff to this month's mailbag. I think a lot of us can relate. I think Mahan's story, really all nine stories, I hope everybody enjoyed. Last week, but I love that that one jumped out to you, Irvin, and for very understandable reasons. Fool on, my friend.

On to Mailbag item number two. Hi, David. Hope you're well. Thank you for creating the audiobook version of your book Rule Breaker Investing. I don't Read Well. Thus, the audiobook really helped. I've listened to it twice. I need to listen again, at least another two times as I pick up further points on listen. Well, that's very kind, Sanjay. Thank you. Excellent book. It's confronted me on how I have invested in the past, Sanjay Writes, and I'm trying to change my habits. I want your guidance in developing one of my new habits. I'm a Motley Fool Stock Advisor member here in the U.S., and recently, you made a recommendation on March 19 for a stock at $208.04, so 208 at publication. Now the stock is at 250. Now, I already own that stock. For that re recommendation in March, I wanted to buy more stock, but I didn't have the money at the time. Now I do have the money, yet, as I mentioned, the stock price has increased. It's gone 208-250. I've been questioning whether I should still purchase it. I'm trying to change my former habit of waiting to buy on the dip. But the market is so volatile at the moment, I'm not sure what to do. It passes your SNAP and cola tests. Thus, I am confident in the company. Please advise, how should one develop purchasing habit if the stock you want to buy jumps 5% or 20%, regardless of how much you like the company. Regards Sanjay.

Sanjay, a very understandable question. I think all of us have been in situations like this before. You already know, if you're a long-time listener to this podcast that one of my watchwords is dips, wait for dips. I don't like waiting for dips. I don't counsel people to wait for dips. Maybe for some contexts, and certainly for some people, that can make sense.

But this is Rule Breaker Investing. When we're talking about looking at Rule Breaker stocks, which is a very rarified group of stocks. Basically, the top dogs and first movers in important emerging industries, what I've been talking about and picking for the last 30 years, waiting for a dip doesn't make a lot of sense to me. There is a section in that book as you re-listen, Sanjay, that I'm going to share with you in brief again right now. It's called Buying in Thirds. I really think that's a good approach for this particular stock for you, assuming you want to add to it, assuming you want to own it. But just this approach, overall, I hope is helpful to every listener, especially those who are on the fence about whether to jump in on a new stock they're looking at, especially one that seems to have risen or not. Buy in thirds, I've often said, I did this with my first big stock, America Online when we launched the Motley Fool back in the mid early actually 1990s. Take the money that you would commit to that stock and split it in thirds.

With your first third, you're just going to buy that right now. Right away, no questions asked. You've already said it's a company you already partly own. It's one you admire, passes the SNAP test and Cola test, a few other things you find in Rule Breaker Investing the book. I think, buy some now, right away, no questions asked. This is a great company or one that you're interested in holding. That's why you're writing in. You still have two-thirds of your money, though, that you were going to put into this initial buy. You still have two-thirds of it left. Let's let a month go by, or if you like, a quarter. After that month or quarter goes by, Buy with your second third. Whatever the price is, might be up, might be down. Buy with that second third. Then, guess what? I think you already know it's coming. The third third is going to go in after one more month, or one more quarter, or whatever your time increment of choice is. Whatever the price, you're going to buy that third third.

Now you have basically dollar-cost-averaged your way into a position that you may never have ever bought in the first place if you'd had to put it in all at once. I hope you find that helpful. Many Motley Fool members and fans, Motley Fool co-founders like me have found this helpful in the past, especially with very volatile stocks or at a time you might have questions. There's a win-win psychology in closing on this one that has always comforted me during this process of buying in thirds. Because in my mind, Sanjay, we win either way, because if the stock just keeps rising like a rocket from that first third that you bought, it never looks back. Here's what you can say to yourself, Well, it just kept going up. I'm so glad I started getting invested when I did. If on the other hand, the stock goes the opposite direction, it drops, maybe even nose dives for a little while, you can then think, well, it was overheated. It was due for a breather. I'm glad I didn't put all my money in at once. With each succeeding third for a dropping stock, you're, of course, getting a better and better price.

That was already all there in the book in the first place, Sanjay I know you'll come across it again, but that would be my suggestion for one way to solve that problem you're talking about, forming a new habit of buying things on the way up, not waiting for dips. I hope that was helpful, Fool on. On to Rule Breaker Investing Mailbag item Number 3, thank you for writing in, Paul, this one's short and sweet. David, agree that these clean, dirty slide switches are fine inventions. Now, I have to pause it right there for people who don't know the context. If you weren't listening to my mental tips, tricks and life hacks, you may have missed me talking about this magical $10 device. You can buy one on Amazon. You stick this magnet to your dishwasher, and it has a little toggle. You can slide a toggle across two words. One says clean. One says dirty. When you slide that toggle, you can indicate to other members of your household that the dishes in the dishwasher are clean if you've set it to clean or dirty, of course, if it's the opposite. For me, that has been an incredibly simple, beneficial, very small life hack that I'm deeply grateful for and shared earlier this month on that podcast. That's what Paul is talking about, fellow fools, when he says, David, agree that these clean, dirty slide switches are fine inventions. Paul goes on, but at our house, we need another tip to help us remember to slide it. Seems like rote memory would be good enough, but alas, that's not always the case with a smiley emoji, fool on, signed Paul. Well, Paul, that's excellent. I think what you're saying is we now need a clean, dirty switch for the clean, dirty switch. In other words, the invention has worked beautifully right up until the moment that humans get involved. I do appreciate your note. You've identified the eternal flaw in every one of my life hacks, and that is still requires a life or at least a memory. Thanks for writing in, Paul, fool on.

ADVERTISEMENT: Have you ever gazed in wonder at the Great Pyramid? Have you marvelled at the golden face of Tutankhamun or admired the delicate features of Queen Nefertiti? If you have, you'll probably like the history of Egypt podcast. Every week, we explore tales of this ancient culture. The history of Egypt is available wherever you get your podcasting fix. Come, let me introduce you to the world of ancient Egypt.

David Gardner: As I get ready for Rule Breaker Mailbag Item Number 4, I find myself reaching into my bag of jelly bellies, thinking once again that their jelly belly flavor, buttered popcorn is truly unnecessary. I believe it's unnecessary. It does not need to be in any jelly belly bags. I don't know what they were thinking at jelly belly headquarters, but buttered popcorn. Come on, have the real thing. This is unnecessary. Onto Mailbag item number four. This one sparked Big Joy. Thank you, Brandon, David. I can't remember whether you recommended it or whether it was one of your guests on the podcast, but thank you for the board game recommendation of magical athlete. I have a family of six Brandon Wrights with children, ranging from 18 down to 7, including one pretty low-functioning special needs child. Everybody has had a blast playing that game. Whenever we get done, they just ask to play it again and we laugh and laugh as we play it. Our family likes to play games, but this one has been better than most, and we appreciate the recommendation. Fool on. God bless you, Brandon. That's a beautiful note.

As I mentioned, you've sparked Big joy for this Fool this day. I probably never get to talk about board games as much as I'd like to on this podcast. But as many of my fellow Fools do enjoy board games, I'm worried that the majority of my audience probably wants me to talk more about investing more often than board games. But the few times I get to fit it in during the year. In this particular case, Brandon, as you'll remember, it was our mental tips, tricks, and Life Hacks podcast earlier this month. But, I just figured, why not stick in some board game recommendations into that particular podcast? Darn it, some people actually listened, acted on and it brought joy to them and their family. I'm really happy to know that $27, which is how much this game costs on Amazon, was, in your case, well spent, Brandon. This game plays three to six players, the more the merrier generally with race games. There's something about dollar per entertainment hour.

I run in my head sometimes maybe you do too, dear listener. You go to a movie, you pay like $18 at the Metroplex. You think, two hours, $18. That was $9 of entertainment per hour. Now, I said $18 at the Metroplex, but the reality is, you may well have bought food at the Metroplex, Stadium's two. That can get pretty expensive all of a sudden, especially if it's not just you. You've got a family of five. You're re-mathing it. You're adding up the full ticket. Maybe you Ubered over, you're adding up the full ticket. Of the amount you spent on that entertainment, you're dividing it by the number of hours, seeing your dollars per entertainment hour. Another thing I love about tabletop games is a game like Magical Athlete, $27. Let's just say six people around the table, a single hour playing that game once you're down to $3 in sum per entertainment hour. Yet, you're going to play that over and over again. The games that we love that keep coming back to the table, those are unbelievably great investments in entertainment, compounded further when we share that with family and friends over the years, those things compound together, our enjoyment of each other, which is my main reason, my main excuse for throwing down a game at a table. It doesn't have to be an amazingly complex game, even though I love terraforming Mars. I love games like Arc Nova. If you give me something memorable, fun, something that we'll be telling stories about in later days, something that has us laughing together. Thank you, game designers worldwide. I have hundreds of your games in my house. I love games. I know you do, too, Brandon. Thank you for sharing that, Foul on.

On to Mailbag item number five. Hi, David. I'm writing today April 1 appropriately, I might add. Good point, Vince Grey. It is April 1, April Fool's Day when you wrote, because I'm not sure what Fool am I. To refresh my foolish friends, I've written the Mailbag over the years. A few years back. I was a solid Rule Breaker. I had over 600 positions, mostly growth-oriented stocks with nary a dividend to be had. Vince Wright's portfolio yield was 0.35 %. But I was nearing retirement. I'm over 69-years-old today. I've watched my portfolio get cut in half in the year 2022. Join the club, by the way, Vince. I was right there with you. He also inserts parenthetically, and I'm happy to say I'm right there with you, too. It's recovered since, thankfully, did not want to watch that happen, though, again. I made a first cut reduction to just under 200 stocks in 23, 24 and then further whittled to under 100 in 2025. I also raised some cash, split my portfolio in two, a growth portfolio and a dividend portfolio as best I could, I gravitated my family's Roth assets to growth, and then the others, like our traditional IRA and our taxable brokerage accounts, toward those dividends and cash side of my financial life. In so doing, Vince goes on, I went risk off selling some Rule Breaker stocks like Nvidia, Intuitive Surgical. Taiwan Semiconductor, Nebius, and Rocket Lab. USA. It was painful to watch them subsequently rise. But there were others HubSpot, Duolingo, Adobe, and Intuit that fell. I'm now sitting at 55% dividend, 30% growth, and 15% cash. I wanted to assess my decision, albeit at a very early point. I've now looked at my year-to-date results. The dividend portfolio is down 2.15% as compared to the S&P 500, negative 7.05%. The growth portfolio is down 18.74%. This is as expected, as was hoped for, because the goal of the dividend portfolio is just to provide more stable returns. The Rule Breaker growth portfolio is there to exhibit more volatility, but hopefully reward patients with much higher returns in the long run. As I said earlier, too early now to call this game but back to the question hand. What Fool am I? Now that I've restructured my investments. Am I no longer a Rule Breaker? A Rule Breaker forsakes perhaps, or a split personality, part Rule Breaker and part money maker. Or maybe I had to break some rules as retirement beckons, a Rule Breaker if you will, Fool on, Vince Grey.

First of all, hey, Vince, always good to hear from you. Again, let me try out this concept for you and all others listening. How about this? You're a harbor and horizon fool. This works because for me, we're talking about two parts of your financial life. There's the harbor part. That's the part of your portfolio built for steadiness, income, and sleep. Then there's the horizon part still pointed toward growth, possibility, and longer-term upside. That feels true. I would also say kinder than calling you a Rule Breaker forsaker. You haven't forsaken Rule Breaker investing. You've life staged it. You've acknowledged now at the age of 69 inch, your risk capacity, Vince, your risk tolerance may not be exactly what they were when you were happily running 600 mostly growth positions and watching the whole thing swing around sometimes like a chandelier in a hurricane.

Again, harbor Part of your portfolio is now designed to keep you steadier, calmer, better funded in the here and now and horizon. Part of it is still pointed toward the horizon, still doing what Rule Breaker stocks do best, which is, look scary at times and magical over long periods of time. That doesn't sound to me like you're abandoning Rule Breaker investing, Vince Grey. It sounds like you're making your portfolio fit your life. That, by the way, is one of the most mature things an investor can do. There's a hidden lesson in here for the rest of us, and that is that sometimes the most Foolish thing we can do is not to cling to yesterday's allocation out of pride or maybe apathy. It's actually to ensure that your portfolio, dear listener, fits who you are actually right now. That might entail some micro tweaks, might be sometimes some macro tweaks like Vince has made over the last couple of years. Anyway, thank you for sharing Vince Grey. I bet a lot of listeners can relate.

On to Rule Breaker Mailbag item number six. This one comes from Thomas writing in from New Zealand. Dear David, I'm not going to attempt my New Zealand accent, by the way, Thomas, Dear David, first-time writer, long-time listener. I'm sorry to read this, Thomas, too cheap to subscribe to Motley Fool services. Appreciate the Rule Breaker investing podcast. I enjoyed your Rule Breaker investing book. I write for a moment of your time to clarify something that you have repeated, but not accurately. Thomas goes on, I feel you have confused the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle that you cannot know the position of an atom until it is observed. The more fitting term for what you were describing may actually be the Hawthorne effect. That's the idea that when people know they are being observed, they change their behavior. Example is helpful. Thomas goes on. I referring to the Market Cap Game Show, an RBI listener observed that responding outside the range was a surefire strategy for playing the game. You let your opponent state their market cap range, and we heard, if you say outside, it was being posited that will work more often than not. That's what Thomas is referring to. He goes on to say, thus, observing a behavior as you rightly described changes it.

Moving forward. I just want to say back to you right here, Thomas. I said, once I'd put that forward to both of my contestants that somebody said it was the percentage move to always disagree, it may have effectively changed their behavior. Therefore, introducing an outside observation had just changed the nature of our experiment. Thomas goes on in his note. That is actually the Hawthorne effect. Behavior observed is behavior changed. I know you care about being accurate in your language, so I thought I'd pass that along, keep up the good work. Thomas, let me just say, first of all, thank you. That's exactly the note I appreciate. You were thoughtful, you were specific, and you aimed at making the show and me more accurate, and that is a gift. Thank you.

I think your main point is right. I've looked it up. I have been using Heisenberg too loosely over the years, when what I often meant was something much closer to, as you say, the Hawthorne effect. Let's clean that up. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is a physics principle. At a very high level, it tells us that there are certain pairs of properties. Most famously, we could go with position and momentum. Where something is positioned, and what its momentum is, you cannot know both of those things exactly at the same time. That's not merely because our measuring tools are imperfect. It's actually built into the nature of the system itself. That is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the Hawthorne effect, by contrast, as you mentioned, is behavioral. It's the idea that when people know they're being observed, they often change what they do. For something like the Market Cap Game Show, that is, indeed, Thomas much closer to the phenomenon I was trying to describe. That's Hawthorne, not Heisenberg. If I've been standing in roughly the right neighborhood all these years with the wrong house number, thank you for helping me find the right door. Thomas, Fool on. Hawthorne, Heisenberg, and the Market Cap Game.

Speaking of the Market Cap Game Show, Rule Breaker Investing Mailbag item number seven, last one up for this week, and I'm going to call it right now Spoiler Alert because this mailbag item is going to change the course of the future forever. I have not one but two notes that both speak to the Market Cap Game Show and both make the same new suggestion. That suggestion is going to make our game better. I'm here to tell you, thanks to the April 2026 Mailbag, notes from Russ and Walter. Every future market cap game show has just improved. Let's do it. Here comes Russ King writing David. I'm a longtime Fool One member and a longtime weekly listener of your podcast. I'm very glad you're doing a 10-year review of your five stock samplers. The samplers were my favorite episodes, Russ writes, and there's a lot to be learned by looking at them 10 years later. By the way, that's what we're doing next week, Russ King and everybody else. I'll mention that right at the end, but it's our next 10 years later episode to start May. Anyway, Russ goes on, an idea for the Market Cap Game Show. When a contestant chooses outside the given range, how about giving them a chance to win two points if they're willing to specify higher or lower? Zero points if they specify the wrong side of the range, and of course, zero points if it was actually inside the range. But several times, Russ goes on, your contestants have admitted that they got the point for guessing outside the range, but in truth, they were thinking it was outside the range in the opposite direction.

This would keep a lopsided game interesting longer, as well, Russ notes, because a couple of double-point risky guesses could get a contestant back in it. It gives a comeback opportunity. Fool on, Russ King. Coincidentally or not, I will let the listener be the judge. Was this mere coincidence that I would also get this note from Walter D Sharon, physical therapist? Thank you for this note. Walter, Hi, David. Here's an idea for the Market Cap Game Show I've listened to, enjoyed and played along. Walter writes with every episode since its debut. When a contestant guesses outside the range, they could have the additional option of testing their confidence that the true market cap is outside and higher or Walter Wright's outside and lower. They could still guess outside the range with no commitment to higher or lower. If they're right, they get that point just like it is now. If they, however, are confident that it is outside and higher, they could take some risk for potential reward. If they commit to higher and are right, they're awarded a bonus point for a total of two points. If they commit to higher and are wrong, they're penalized one point for a total of zero points for that guess. I have two reasons for suggesting this Walter concludes. One is that when playing along, I always find myself saying to myself. Again, Walter is somebody who's played this game every single time more than 30 times now over years and years, he finds himself saying outside higher or outside lower. It seems like a natural inclination. Walter adds the second reason for this, is that when a contestant says, as they now often do outside, I think it's higher. But then it turns out the Market Cap was outside but lower. They're getting a point for that, but they're actually further from the true Market Cap, and therefore more in error than if they had said inside the range. I look forward to the Rule Breaker Investing podcast every week. Thank you, Walter D Sharon, PT.

There you have it, fellow Fools. I'm not yet sure of the exact rules change we will invoke. For instance, my own instinct is to make it maybe a half point either way, so you get a half point for being right. You lose a half point for saying it's outside the range high, and it's not. You'd lose a half point in that case. I'm okay, by the way, with a game that's scored with half points. I actually think it's Foolish. I really do appreciate that both of these notes arrived within just a few days of each other, largely suggesting the same smart thing. Russ and Walter, you have just made our game smarter. People will no longer get rewarded for saying outside the range and being effectively more wrong than the brave contestant who put forward a decent range in the first place. As Russ notes, it also adds a little bit of spice, it puts some comeback ability into the game, a little extra as well, to think about. Walter and Russ, thank you both for being longtime listeners, Walter. You mentioned you've listened to every single Market Cap game show. Therefore, you will know that this show has been consistently improved by Rule Breaker Investing podcast listeners suggestions over the years. The Market Cap Game Show does not resemble what it started out as. I'm obviously receptive to new ideas. We've ended up with a better and better game thanks to this community's collective brilliance. There we go. It is your April 2026 Mailbag for Rule Breaker Investing, a month that gave us squinting, clean and dirty complications, harbor and horizon portfolios, a little Hawthorne now over Heisenberg and an even smarter Market Cap Game Show to come.

The next one will be second to last week of June. Next week, it's 10 years later. Ten years ago, next week, I pick five stocks I thought would beat the market, and it's now 10 years to the week later, did they? Why? Or why not? Come learn with me as Rule Breaker Investing looks at what for us is a beautiful and almost standard time frame. It's a 10- year hold. That's a time frame, by the way, that few others seem to document or score or reflect on or experience. Come break the rules with me next week. It's 10 years later, five winners in a thinking world. Fool on.

David Gardner has positions in Duolingo, Intuitive Surgical, Nebius Group, and Rocket Lab. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Adobe, Duolingo, HubSpot, Intuit, Intuitive Surgical, Nvidia, Rocket Lab, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: long January 2028 $330 calls on Adobe, long January 2028 $520 calls on Intuitive Surgical, short January 2028 $340 calls on Adobe, and short January 2028 $530 calls on Intuitive Surgical. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.