The Problem With Weight Loss Stocks

In this Motley Fool Money episode, Motley Fool analysts Rick Munarriz and Karl Thiel and contributor Jason Hall dig into the problems with weight loss stocks. They also look at some investments that can survive near-term potential volatility as well as give a long-term view of disruptors of the future that you probably don't see coming.

They unpack:

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• Three companies that can ride high through what could be a volatile September.
• A reality check for GLP-1 and other weight loss stocks.
• Finding the next great disruptor that could be hiding in plain sight.

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A full transcript is below.

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This podcast was recorded on August 25, 2025.

Rick Munarriz: Are weight loss stocks losing too much weight? Looking for investments that can survive next month's fate? Finding the next wave of disruptors before they appreciate? Motley Fool Money starts now and you look great. I'm Rick Munarriz, and today I'm joined by fellow analysts, Karl Thiel and Jason Hall with a look at what's eating at weight loss stocks this summer. We'll also take a look at some potential disruptors that could be hiding in plain sight. But first, wake me up when September ends. We're into the final trading week of August with renewed hopes for a Fed rate cut next month. However, the economy is still fuzzy, inflationary pressures are percolating, and the stock market upticks keep coming. A lot can go wrong next month, but let's make this a September to remember. I know next month could prove challenging, but I want to go around the room to see if there's a company that you think can overcome any potential market obstacles in September and move higher. Let's start with you, Jason.

Jason Hall: I think a good way to decouple from US interest rate policy is just leave the US. Let's talk about a company that sells primarily consumer staples in Mexico and has what I think is an exceptional and resilient business. That's Tiendas 3B and it's native Spanish. I apologize to all the Spanish speakers for murdering the pronunciation there. It's BBB Foods and it's corporate parlance, it's ticker TBBB. I've been following the business since our friend and colleague Tyler Crowe put it on my radar. It's been a couple of years ago before it went public back in February 2024. I first bought shares this past January. BBB Foods is a very fast-growing operator of hard discount grocery stores in Mexico. It's a business that's like I said, it's pretty decoupled from most of the ongoing cross-border trade disputes with the US monetary and trade policy. However, it has about 400 million in cash and equivalents. Most of that's in Mexican pesos, but a significant portion is still in US dollars. Following the proceeds of its IPO in February in 2024, the US dollar has weakened a lot against the peso. Money is now worth less in buying power. The good thing for BBB Foods is that it's that resilient fast-growing business model is growing fast and management is being savvy with how they're running it. Revenue was up 38% last quarter. Twenty percent of that growth came from new locations they've opened, but that means you have 18% of revenue growth that was left over from same store sales. That's pretty incredible. It's opening stores at a fast rate, about 500 over the past four quarters, just past 3,000 total this quarter. Even at this pace of growth, management, like I said, they're being really savvy. The business is essentially running it right at break-even. Now, that's a great change of pace for investors that are tired of high-growth companies with big losses just hoping of finally getting to scale and things paying off. I think BBB Foods is compelling right now. It's built to operate across economic cycles and really largely unaffected by US economic policy.

Rick Munarriz: Jason, I know this is a small footprint model by which I mean the size of the individual stores themselves, but for a chain that has 3,000 stores and in a business with notoriously low margins still running at break-even, just like how should investors think about when this really scales and leverages and just how big it can get? Is there a US equivalent for this chain?

Jason Hall: Not exactly. Not if it's a publicly traded company that's easy to look at, but other stores you can think about that are somewhat similar. It's a little bit similar like the ALDI business model in a way, smaller footprints, really low prices that are really compelling and drive people in. Here's how these businesses win. You don't have to have giant margins to be profitable. As Bezos is famous for saying, your margin is my opportunity. The way that these business models work is by turning their inventory multiple times, and that way, even though you get those really small operating profit margins, 2 or 3%. If you're constantly turning your inventory, you can still build a really high return profitable business. In terms of scale, again, tiny footprint here. This is a business that can easily 5X, potentially even, they've talked about maybe 30,000 locations over the long-term. There's a tremendous opportunity. You have the tailwind of economic growth in Mexico that's so important. There's a lot of distributors, small retail businesses. You can think about in the US, actually, I think, an interesting cop, like the auto zones of the world, where you don't necessarily get super high margins. O'Reilly is another example, but you're just really good at what you do. You turn your inventory and you have a somewhat countercyclical business, and investors can get wonderful returns over the long-term.

Karl Thiel: This may be a hot take as summer finally starts to cool down, but thinking about an uncertain economy and some of the pressures that we might be feeling, I'm looking at a part of the economy that is maybe a little less sensitive to economic activity and also happens to be pretty depressed right now. I'm going to go with UnitedHealthcare. This is certainly a company that's had one problem after the next. It recently hit a five-year lows. The problems include a criminal investigation by the DOJ. There's been a lot of management turnover and certainly not unrelated to those first two things, they've had some really poor forecasting and management around their Medicare Advantage program, which is a pretty big part of the business and it just has a very poor public perception right now, all of which is to say that things could get worse at the company. But there is a reason that Warren Buffett has been buying the stock to the tune of something like 1.6 billion in the second quarter, Michael Burry of Big Short fame has been buying, and there are some other big names that are getting behind this. The fact is that this has become a pretty cheap stock. It's trading at a little under 19 times the current year's earnings projection, which might not sound super cheap, but that's already a very depressed number that's probably likely to come up again pretty quickly as we move into 2026, and they continue to pay a dividend at the same time. This just remains a really powerful company at the center of the healthcare system. There, $400 billion in annual revenue, actually more than that, that's bigger than the GDP of many countries. It insures about one in six people in the US. It's not going anywhere. While the DOJ investigation is serious, past cases of Medicare Advantage billing investigations like this have always been resolved civilly rather than criminally, which is not to say that there couldn't be some really large fines in the future, but I don't think it's an existential threat to the company in any way. Bottom line, there's a lot of reasons for UnitedHealthcare to be volatile, but they are really more specific to the company, and I think a lot of shoes have already dropped. While the economy as we move into the later part of the year could get a little more uncertain, I think UnitedHealthcare gets buffeted a lot less by that than many other companies would.

Rick Munarriz: Yeah, Karl, but sometimes like in Imelda Marcos shoe closet, there are more shoes to drop. Sometimes cheap stocks get even cheaper. Is that a concern?

Karl Thiel: Absolutely. There's certainly things that could happen. I would say, the biggest unknown is probably around some of the investigations. I think of the Medicare fraud investigations around Tenet Healthcare from years and years ago that ended up being this long-term disruption. I don't think that's the case here. I think this looks a little different. A lot of Medicare Advantage stuff in the past, the courts have just said, look, these rules are very vague, so have given more benefit of the doubt to insurers and how they approach them. I'm not worried about that on an existential basis, I think, while cheap stock can always get cheaper, I like the position here.

Rick Munarriz: Like it. I'm going with Trex. Now, there's some pretty good reasons to steer clear of the country's leader in wood alternative decking. Net sales have declined 3% through the first half of this year, adjusted net income is down 19%. There's also the seasonality of the business. I know that it's still hot out there in a lot of parts of the country, but fall and winter are coming, and folks aren't paying a premium to upgrade their outdoor living space as temperatures start to drop. This is something that homeowners do earlier in the year before the weather starts to heat up. Sixty-five percent of Trex's business last year happened in the first half of the year. Now let's consider what might happen in September. The Fed is comfortable with making it cheaper to finance big ticket purchases. I'm not just talking about taking on a new Trex project. The real spigot here is the lack of secondhand homes on the market. US sales for existing homes have fallen sharply since peaking three years ago. Folks don't want to sell their homes locked into lower mortgage rates. It's not a coincidence that mortgage rates were a lot lower three years ago. It's also not a coincidence that Trex posted 10 consecutive years of top line growth of 9% or better until that happened. Trex already sees net sales rebounding in the second half of this year, but that is largely off of big declines in the second half of last year. It's not much of a tariff concern because just 5% of its cost of goods sold, mostly the aluminum and steel that goes into its railings and its fasteners, are at risk. What if the strong possibility of Fed easing in September kicks off a new decade of strong growth? I'm going with Trex.

Jason Hall: Rick, honestly, this was my Number 2 pick for this segment, so I'm glad you brought it to the table. Their big Arkansas expansion, that doubling of capacity is exciting, but here's the thing that I'm thinking about. We just saw AZEK, which owns the TimberTech brand, that's probably the second largest competitor to Trex was acquired by James Hardie. It's one of the giants in building materials, largely for exteriors. There's three things that I see as being likely here. Which of these three do you think is the most likely? Does this raise the competitive bar for Trex? Does it create an opportunity for Trex to take more share if that corporate parent takes the eye off of the decking ball, or does it signify a higher probability that the stand-alone pure play like Trex is a legitimate takeout target by a bigger building products company?

Rick Munarriz: Yes. TimberTech, they're going to have more financial resources on its side, but it doesn't often play out that way. Sometimes with great financial power comes great financial irresponsibility. I'm going with your second scenario here, and I hope Trex doesn't get bought out. It goes without saying that all three of us are long-term investors. Hopefully, you are too. Sometimes the market offers some short-term buying opportunities. Coming up next, GLP-1, more like GLP last. Why are so many of the stocks working on next-gen solutions for weight management taking a hit to the gut? We'll dig in when we come back.

Weight loss, weight loss, don't tell me. Shares of Viking Therapeutics fell 35% last week on disappointing clinical trial results for potentially promising oral weight loss drug. However, even the two companies with viable and by most accounts successful, weekly injectables on the market aren't panning out as investments. Eli Lilly has surrendered a quarter of its value over the past year. Novo Nordisk has been cut by more than half. Patients are losing pounds. Investors are losing pounds, euros, and dollars. What's going on, Karl?

Karl Thiel: A lot of this is just a classic case of expectations getting ahead of reality. I'm going to say two contradictory things about the drugs that are already on the market. You know of them as Ozempic and Mounjaro and a couple of other brands. One is that they're pretty great drugs already, and they might be hard to improve upon. The second is that they don't work for a lot of people over the long haul. After about two years, as many as 75% of people are off these drugs often due to just the grind of side effects. Nevertheless, this is a duopoly that's expected to be a $70 billion market this year, so there is a mania to come up with something better or get in the game if you're a newcomer. One obvious advantage would be to offer a pill instead of what are now weekly subcutaneous injections. That's what you've been hearing about recently, and that's to a significant extent, what's been a drag on many of these stocks. It's why people were disappointed in what Viking had to say, even though they had great efficacy results, they simply had more side effects and discontinuations than investors expected.

I think that there is too much focus on these oral drugs right now. Subcutaneous injection is very easy and painless once you know how to do it and you only have to do it once a week. Yes, there are people who have needle phobias who will just never do it, and yes, people will say that they prefer a pill, but most studies show that people who are on injections are actually pretty content to stay there. The expectation has continued to be that people will start on injectables and then maybe move to orals for maintenance. You might not find that people are certainly willing to take on more side effects to move to an oral drug. The last point I'll make about this is that it's often forgotten, there is already an oral semaglutide on the market, that is an oral version of Ozempic/Wegovy. It's Novo Nordisk's Rybelsus and is not a very popular drug because it's difficult to take and it has slightly more side effects than injected semaglutide. I think that's a warning to companies about how they need to approach this. They need to be looking for drugs with the best adverse event profiles, not just oral at all costs or maximum weight loss in minimum time. So far, all the orals, Viking, Novo, others have been marked by higher side effects than the injectables. People keep plugging away at it, but I think the next generation needs to really focus on side effects. With all that said, I think Viking and its results have been interpreted a little too pessimistically. I think there's a lot of things they can do with how they ramp dosing, etc, to maybe have this turn out to actually be better than the other orals that are coming out to market. There are some other people working in the area that could still improve. But bottom line, it's back to what I said at the beginning. We already have great drugs. They're a little hard to improve on, and for some people, that's just not good enough. Unfortunately, that's how it is in the pharmaceutical industry.

Jason Hall: Karl, one of the things that stands out to me is that, first of all, when we see disruptors, it's weird how the financial profile works out for investors. Let's be clear. Novo and Lilly shares are down a lot now, especially Novo Nordisk. But if we go back to the beginning of 2019, because it's before both of those were approved for treating weight loss, but they were being prescribed off-label. There was a period where investors knew that it was coming and they would be officially be able to be prescribed for that. You go back to 2019, Novo's shares are up about 153%. Lilly's shares are up. There are six backers since then. Investors have made money, but it got me thinking about one of the hardest things about investing in big trends and that's finding ones that are both durable, which we're starting to see right now, what's the durability of this one, and can generate meaningful value on a per share basis for investors and for the companies involved. There's a couple of trends that stand out. Right now, drones are huge. It's expected the drone market is going to be a $95 billion industry in less than a decade, so even bigger than the GLPs are right now, but so far, every dime earned by any investor on drones has been on speculation, not the financial results of the business. Another example, 3D printing, for example, go back 15 years ago. You remember that was going to be the next biggest thing. Everybody's going to have a 3D printer in their home. All these industrial uses for 3D printing, all that stuff. Man, a lot of people lost money. 3D systems, I think, is the gold standard of bad investments in that space. Revenue peaked a decade ago at over 650 million. Revenue is fallen substantially for that. The stock at that peak was $90 a share in that exuberant phase. It's about two bucks a share today. We look at the EV space. There's Tesla and then nobody else, essentially. Even Tesla's stock has been a tough volatile investment over the past five years because none of the other disruptive bets have happened yet. I think the point is, I'm not going to even talk about solar. That makes me hurt a little bit to think about. But the point is investors, the hard work of analyzing opportunities is tied to not just assuming that a big multibillion dollar trend is going to pad shareholders pockets.

Rick Munarriz: I guess you can't spell trends without ends. When we get back from the break, we'll have some surprising takes on September 2035. Stay with us. It won't take long.

Disruptors can be disrupted, and sometimes the disrupted becomes disruptors. Jason's comments in the last segment has me thinking that sometimes the next wave of wealth-altering disruption comes from either an unexpected industry or an unexpected company. Let's look out 10 years from now. What's an unlikely company that you think has the potential to be a disruptor in 2035, Karl.

Karl Thiel: I'm going to go with one that's only at seed stage right now. It's a placeholder company for a concept. I don't know nearly enough about this company to have any confidence that it is going to be a winner or even around in 10 years. But I'm going to say, Familiar Machines and Magic, which was recently founded by Colin Angle, who was the previous leader of iRobot. The reason I just think it's interesting is because he's an interesting guy who has a very pragmatic view toward robots. I think, actually going back to what Jason was saying, this is an area that could become very big and yet not produce real winnings for investors because it spreads out in unexpected ways. I think that they might be anticipating one of the expected ways, which is just, don't try to do a robot that does everything, try to do more simple robots and leverage the things that we already do well. Specifically what they have said they're doing and they're in stealth mode. Specifically, they've said that they're trying to make a home health robot that is a companion that's leveraging AI capabilities we already have around chatbots and robotic capabilities that we already have. I just like that approach and I would add that this robot is going to do specific things. It's not just going to be a cute companion that rolls around on a tabletop. I think there is disruption waiting to happen here, and I think it might not come from do everything robots.

Rick Munarriz: I'm going to go with Disney, and I get it. The stock has been a market laggard over the past few years. It's posted organic double-digit revenue growth just once over the past 20 fiscal years. It's had some recent misfires at the Multiplex with high profile movies. A lot of investors will dismiss it as a Mickey Mouse company in more ways than one. That being said, Disney has never shied away from burning its own boats. It was one of the first major studios to make its content available on digital platforms, and last year it became one of the few to do so profitably. When the pandemic hit, Disney turned many of its planned theatrical leases into a way to boost Disney+. It consistently raises the bar with theme park technology, rewriting its own playbook for gated attractions. Last week's launch of ESPN as an over-the-top platform is disruptive to its legacy networks, but it's the courage it needs to make sure it doesn't become time's capsule fodder. How will Disney disrupt in 10 years? Content is king, and Disney is the Lion King of content. Right now, AI is seen by some boobirds as a threat to content creators, but in the future, it will be a way to amplify strong IP and storytellers. The Disney I grew up with leaned on theatrical releases and then spacing out home video releases from its vault. Today, there are more revenue streams to paddle. If AI opens even more possibilities to cash in on strong franchises, who's the leader of the band? M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E.

Jason Hall: Rick, I might be putting good money after bad here, going full circle here and bringing 3D printing back in. But I want to stick with the theme of big trends, not always working at how we expect. In this case, Lennar, which is one of America's biggest homebuilders. Lennar sold about 70,000 homes last year. Essentially, 100% of those were stick-built traditional lumber assembled into walls and ceilings and roofs and then covered with plywood and siding and drywall and shingles done by skilled laborers. But right now, they're doing something different. Back in 2023, they built a 100-home community in Texas. Partnered with a company called Icon and 3D printed the houses. They're working on a 200-home community next. The homes require significantly less labor, a dozen less laborers to build. This labor is an ongoing challenge for this industry, and they're far more energy-efficient too, the materials costs are higher. A decade from now, I think it's going to be the big players like the Lennars that are leveraging disruptive technologies like 3D printing to improve their own business models to meet demand. You can think of it like companies like Apple and Microsoft that learned, you have to disrupt your own legacy, big winning products if you're going to remain relevant for the long-term. I think this is one of the areas we might see 3D printing with the big homebuilders like Lennar that adopt that technology.

Rick Munarriz: Yes. I'm circling August 25th, 2035 on the calendar to see if any of us, or maybe even all of us, were right. Karl and Jason, thank you for making this Monday mischief managed. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. Don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards. It's not approved by advertisers. Advertisements and sponsored content are provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. For Karl Thiel, Jason Hall, and the entire Motley Fool Money team, I'm Rick Munarriz. May your days be funny and your life Motley Fool Money.

Jason Hall has positions in BBB Foods, Trex, Walt Disney, and iRobot. Karl Thiel has positions in Apple. Rick Munarriz has positions in Apple, Novo Nordisk, and Walt Disney. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Apple, BBB Foods, Lennar, Microsoft, Tesla, Trex, and Walt Disney. The Motley Fool recommends Novo Nordisk, UnitedHealth Group, Viking Therapeutics, and iRobot and recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft and short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.