Investing After Cloud Outages

In this podcast, Motley Fool contributors Travis Hoium, Lou Whiteman, and Jason Hall discuss:

• Cloud outages.
• GM's results and the future for electric vehicles.
• The rise of the co-CEO.
• Walmart's iPhone growth.

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 Oct. 24, 2025.

Travis Hoium: AWS went down. GM reported a great quarter, and Apple is back. Motley Fool Money starts now. Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money. From Fool Global headquarters. This is Motley Fool Money. Welcome to Motley Fool Money. I am Travis Hoium joined today by Lou Whiteman and Jason Hall. Let's start with the big topic of the week. That was AWS going down. This happened on Monday morning. It was down for a few hours. It seemed like the world stopped, especially if you're trying to do some investment research or access your brokerage, in some cases, one takeaway could be that Amazon showed just how much of the Internet it runs. This could also force customers to consider, do you want to be multi-Cloud? Do you want to diversify away from AWS? Jason, how are you thinking about these big shutdowns and how it impacts companies you own?

Jason Hall: I think it's a big deal, but it's just becoming more of the status quo, and the aggregate outages are really far fewer from these Cloud-based services versus when enterprises try to self manage applications. But the difference is it's become like a community event now instead of just now my company's email is broken. I have to call my customers and ask them if they've sent me an email to find out if something's going on. Maybe that's better, but it's just different.

Travis Hoium: Lou, this is something that we deal with every once in a while, but it's always shocking when Amazon and AWS are the one that's involved, because it's such a big deal. There's so many companies that are built on AWS.

Lou Whiteman: If you want the bullish take here is we found out just how critical AWS is to everyone's infrastructure, just how big a market share they have. But, I don't think it's a big deal until it becomes a pattern. Even with CrowdStrike, where you did see a stock reaction, and it's notable Amazon's stock didn't really react to this but even with CrowdStrike.

Travis Hoium: Shares were up, I believe. Even during the outage.

Lou Whiteman: The recovery was pretty quick with the shares. Look, every one of these is different, but scarcity matters. There's only so many of these big Cloud things. I don't know if anyone can really say, well, this can't happen to us. It's also really hard to shift things. Which is, you don't want to change unless you have to. If this becomes a multiple occasion thing where Amazon just becomes unreliable, I think that's a different story. But for now, we're one off, I think we just grin and bear it and it doesn't really affect the company's business.

Jason Hall: I think the last time Amazon had a big outage like this was maybe 2016 or 2017. That's a long time. But I did a little bit of research and basically, about twice a year, we see one of these outages, but I don't think we really tend to remember them. Remember back in 2020 and 2021, Fastly and Cloudflare both have outages. We're talking, basically half the Internet was down around the world, and most people still, you look back now, we don't even remember they happened. Again, they're going to happen, but to Lou's point, are they, systematic from the same enterprises, then there's a problem. I think it's just more of a symptom of how the world runs now.

Travis Hoium: I want to get your stock takes in just a second, but I want to start with how companies might be thinking about this because I look at, there's basically three major Cloud providers with Microsoft and Azure, Amazon, and AWS, and then Google, Alphabet and GCP. Does this push more companies toward redundancy, multi-Cloud? This is something we've been hearing about for a long time. I think that would be one of the bullish cases for the smallest one, which is Google, Ironically. I was trying to look back how often search goes down because search is built on the same infrastructure as GCP is. It's not very often, and it's like an hour here or there. But could that be something, Jason, that is a little bit bullish for some of these other Clouds, or is it just, you know what, this is the cost of doing business?

Jason Hall: I think it's mostly the cost of doing business. The bigger bullish reality is just the pure demand. We still haven't seen everything shift to the Cloud, and then you factor in AI, and as more companies are going to be adding AI into their enterprise, these different applications, there's just a massive tailwind still for the Cloud to continue to grow. Oracle is a good example. Obviously, it's tied a lot more to AI than Cloud, but how many people forget that Oracle existed until about six months ago, and now everybody knows that Oracle is one of the growing Cloud complex, I think areas where there's probably a lot of opportunity or like the sales forces, where there are niche companies that do a thing that are also big Cloud companies where companies they do want to diversify their Cloud, and that's ways that they can do it.

Lou Whiteman: Honestly, redundancy to me, it's one of those things that sounds better on the PowerPoint than it does in real world. Say you were a multi-Cloud operation, and that meant yesterday. Earlier in the week, half of your systems didn't work, instead of all of your systems didn't work. Does that really make you more productive?

Travis Hoium: If you're a single Cloud, you can at least blame it on Amazon.

Lou Whiteman: If anything, it might make it harder to unwind if some things work and some things don't. I think. Like Jason said, there's a ton of demand here. If I'm an IT person, I'm probably more focused on pricing and using these companies against each other to get better pricing than I am just trying to say, well, I need a third just to make sure only some of my systems go down if AWS goes down.

Travis Hoium: Jason, let's talk about how companies stocks respond. We're investors. Is this the thing where you should maybe rethink your thesis behind Amazon and AWS, or is this something that we're going to completely forget about? Because I just go back through, I've been doing this for a long time, and there are these seemingly terrible events that happen in the moment, and then you suddenly look back and companies like Netflix and the Qwikster Debacle fade into history. Is that what's going to happen with outages like this?

Jason Hall: Yeah, I think this is one that we're going to look back and we're going to have forgotten about it, even probably a year from now. You look at the CrowdStrike outage back in 2024. Beyond a few examples of customers that were out for weeks, most of the customers were back up and running by that afternoon and things were back to business as normal. But what I like to look at is, does it create a competitive opportunity? Because they really are the biggest player. AWS is the biggest player, but there's two other really big players and a bunch of other smaller players maybe that are more niche. There's already a lot of competition here. I think it's the ones that become so dominant that maybe they lose their edge where it creates risk. I don't think we see that for a company like AWS. In a way, this is maybe thesis confirming how important AWS as a business and how profitable it is.

Lou Whiteman: Two thoughts here. For one, I think, if anything, there's a bullish argument out of this, as we said before, the world is reliant on these Clouds. That's good news for the Cloud providers. I think it's also bullish for all the security and support companies that make them work. I think as an investor, if anything, you lean into this. The real question for me is, and guys, I don't know the answer here. It feels this is important enough that it needs to be regulated. But I don't even know how that would work. You could regulate on price, but that's not going to solve anything. I don't know how you do a regulatory scheme to try to force redundancies or to avoid accidents because accidents are very hard.

Travis Hoium: Isn't the market going to at least partially take care of that?

Lou Whiteman: Is it? We just said, I don't think it's going to on the one off.

Jason Hall: I think the market, to a certain extent already has. I think there's a lot of redundancy that is built in, and this was just a really rare, weird one off where this was a system that hadn't been fully restarted in something like three years, and it got through some of their built in self checks. These things are the exception. I think if we start trying to regulate around the exception, everything gets more expensive and innovation gets slowed down.

Lou Whiteman: I think you're right. What I worry about is, as these things make the news, the urge to regulate comes in, and that might be the pushback to the bull case on this.

Travis Hoium: The takeaway here is we need to do a hard reset of these servers every once in a while, is that it? [laughs]

Lou Whiteman: Not during business hours?

Travis Hoium: Not during business hours. Let's have these overnight.

Jason Hall: Yes. Tell me when it's not business hours for AWS.

Travis Hoium: That's true. Let's move on to earnings, and for disclosure for everybody, we're recording a little bit early this week because the Motley Fool has a big event called Fool Fest later in the week. We're recording on Tuesday. We don't have numbers from Tesla yet, but we did get numbers from GM this morning. GM is an interesting one because nobody seems to like GM in the investment community, yet they're a growing company in electric vehicles. They reported eight percent volume growth, so they are seeing some growth despite some challenges that they have with some of their engines and some of them are expensive vehicles. But Lou, what did you take away from this quarter, because this seemed to be about as good as it gets for GM?

Lou Whiteman: It's as good as it gets. Sure. I think, some of this, who knows how much of it is, just trying to get ahead of things. But look, one real take, and we already knew this going in, is that the EV momentum is dead. That GM told us that $1.6 billion charge related to underused or unused EV capacity, they're going to assemble about one-third of the EVs this year that they once forecast they would, Travis. It's easy to blame the tax credit expiring, but the point is we needed the tax credit, that demand has not materialized absent stimulus the way we had hoped. That's not to say it's dead, but it is, I think it's just the state of play right now, and it's good for GM because they have all those ice vehicles, but this is a high CapEx, low margin industry. The cost of switching out and changing plans on the fly is in the billions. It's a risk to lean to old fashioned ice vehicles, but I think it's the right move.

Jason Hall: I think the things that we talk about like range anxiety and some of those things are maybe not really stated the right way. I think this is just a great big change management reality for the auto industry, which is already a tough, cyclical, brutal, largely zero sum industry. Change management. The bottom line is like, if you want people to change, the incentives to make that change have to vastly outweigh all of the perceived negatives. We know those for EVs. They cost more for the range that we get, it takes longer to charge. People don't know where to go plug them in versus going to a gas station. All of those things are realities for the industry. There's just, we're past the early adopter stage. What GM's doing, Travis, is the smart thing for GM to do to lean in where it can make the most money right now and have that money ready when the time comes for the change and be willing to be as nimble as it can for a big company in a really tough industry.

Travis Hoium: The other reality is the vehicles that sell the most and make the most money are massive vehicles, and those make the least sense to put massive batteries in them. You make them much more expensive, you make them much heavier. If you're looking at making a Tahoe or a suburban, which is really where GM is making its money, that's a really hard transition to EVs. If you're making a small car, much easier, but GM doesn't really care about small cars these days in the US, anyways. Lou, I wanted to touch on their recurring revenue SuperCrews. They still talk about OnStar. Can we get rid of the OnStar brand? I want to lobby for that. But two billion dollars in revenue, five billion dollars in deferred revenue, so revenue that they'll be earning over time. That seems to be a growth business. This was always the story with Tesla. That, sure we're going to sell cars, where we're really going to make money is as basically more of a SAS company in that recurring revenue model, but GM's actually building it, and I think that's a little bit surprising for people who don't follow this all that closely.

Lou Whiteman: Two billion today, they're still saying 20-25 billion by 2030. They see this as a huge growth opportunity. I think they're doing it the right way. I think the wrong way, and some automakers have played with this is to begin charging us for things that we've gotten for free.

Travis Hoium: BMW got in trouble for that with heated seats.

Lou Whiteman: Or if you want to use your air conditioner, pay a buck. That's not going to work. But if they can succeed in building some of these driver assist and tools that we actually want to use, not that hot spot in your car, which, come on, with what they're charging for that, that didn't work. But that is the way about it. I'm a little skeptical about that target within five years, but it's certainly an opportunity.

Travis Hoium: Well, when we come back, we're going to talk about the new trend about moving to co-CEOs, something we're seeing more and more in tech. You're listening to Motley Fool Money.

Lou Whiteman: I should say, I'm old, and every fiber of my being wants to hate this. I want the Harry Truman Buck Stops Here. I want somebody who is.

Travis Hoium: You want someone to blame.

Lou Whiteman: Right. That said, CEO has become this strange catch-all title that means different things to different companies. It is just too big of a job for one person. Every good company has responsibility sharing, whether or not they label it like that or not. In a sense, this is just relabeling. The CEO job is really one person can't do it. There's not enough hours in a day. Most people, it's the rare exception if you are good at everything the CEO requires, so you should lean into strength. I do note that Spotify, Netflix, you still have a founder who is a North star, and maybe that helps make this work, the founders still involved. That's dangerous. We saw with Starbucks, we saw with Disney that having someone in the boardroom meddling isn't good, but maybe the solution is to have a Northstar, to have a board that's actively engaged and pointing in the right direction, and then break down the CEO role among people doing what they're good at.

Jason Hall: I don't think it's always the case, but it does seem like we've seen maybe a little bit better succession planning from the companies that have co-CEOs, not always. For every KKR. You've got Joseph Bae and Scott Nuttall, they're co-CEOs. Since 2017, they were co-presidents before they became co-CEOs. Joseph Bae built their Asia Pacific business. Scott Nuttall has had a lot to do with finance and leading the company public. They replaced co-CEOs that were there before them. A company like that it works really well. Then you've got Boston Omaha. They're co-CEO structure obviously was not functional. You say what you want about their business model, maybe being the real problem there. But it doesn't always work, but I think when it does work, maybe it works really, really well.

Travis Hoium: I think the Spotify example is really interesting because I listened to an interview with Daniel Ek recently. The new co-CEOs, and Ek actually all share in office and have for years. Jason, it does seem like that building this relationship, this partnership at the top of the company, it is like being co-founders of a company. Maybe you're going to take the head PR role and do the interviews. But I'm going to do tech stuff in the background because that's not your expertise. Maybe that is why it makes sense, why it's successful in some of these instances where they know exactly what the deal is, and there isn't this GE power structure. That's the one that I always go back because there was three people there when Jack Welch left vying for that role. One of them won. They all ended up being pretty terrible CEOs. The other two left because they were like, if I'm not going to get this job, I'm going to go somewhere else.

Jason Hall: But I think the key really does get back a lot to what Lou was talking about is the complexity, particularly of modern businesses that do a lot more things. Look at Oracle, for example, over various years going back over a decade, they've had it. The new Oracle, one of their co-CEOs, basically built their cloud business, which is very different from the legacy of Oracle. Sometimes it really does make sense, but I think you're right, Travis, it gets back to culture. The companies that have the right culture is where it really, really matters the most. They can leverage and they can lean into this sort of thing. Lou.

Lou Whiteman: Leaning into my grumpy old man from the top, it all works when times go well. The interesting thing is, say Spotify has a terrible, I don't know, tech meltdown or a terrible quarter. Or Oracle, all these investments didn't pay off. Then, is it two people in collaboration, maybe with the board saying, here's what we're going from here, or is it whispers in the Wall Street Journal, it was the other person's fault? This all works so well when things are going well. I am curious if things go south if it looks so good then.

Travis Hoium: The successful ones we're talking about, Lou, are also companies that have gone from founder to co-CEO. What's the succession plan after that?

Lou Whiteman: Look, I think having the founder around helps a lot. Because that is the adult in the room or the referee. But yeah, when the founder goes away, even if the two CEOs are there, if you lose a referee, does that change the power then?

Travis Hoium: It'll be interesting to see if this becomes more common in corporate America, but it does seem to be a direction a lot of companies are going. When we come back, we are going to do stock market Jeopardy. You're listening to Motley Fool Money.

Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. Today, we're going to play a little game that I like to call Stock Market Jeopardy. I have four categories, and we have three questions under each category, 100, 200, and 300 points. We're going to go snake style, guys. Jason is going to start first, and you either get the question right or wrong, so you can't jump in afterwards, even if you know the answer and steal the points. Maybe a little different than Jeopardy, but hopefully this will be a fun little game here. Jason, you are going to go first. First, the four topics are the market, IPOs, founders, and fun facts, this is obviously about investing. Where do you want to start?

Travis Hoium: What topic and what number do you want to go with?

Jason Hall: Let's go with fun facts for, you pick the number, I guess.

Travis Hoium: Let's start with 100.

Jason Hall: Okay, let's do that.

Travis Hoium: What is the biggest electric vehicle manufacturer globally through the first three quarters of 2025?

Jason Hall: What is Neo?

Travis Hoium: Believe the answer is BYD.

Jason Hall: It's BYD. It's absolutely BYD.

Travis Hoium: 1.6 million vehicles to 1.2 million at Tesla. I just think it's interesting how we're in the US here. We don't talk about these Chinese manufacturers. They are dominating the EV space right now.

Jason Hall: Well, BYD is dominating it because they're making EVs for less than 10 grand.

Travis Hoium: This number is their fully electric vehicles, did not include the hybrid number as well. It will be very interesting to see what happens with China and that manufacturing, because they could potentially take over the market, especially in places like Europe, unless they put huge tariffs like we have in the US. That's why a lot of these vehicles aren't making a hurty the US. Lou, you are up next. Where do you want to go? The market, IPOs, founders, or fun facts.

Lou Whiteman: Go big or go home. The market for 300, Travis. [laughs]

Travis Hoium: How many companies today are worth over $1 trillion?

Lou Whiteman: Seven.

Travis Hoium: You are close, and you may have been right a few months ago. But the number is 11 right now.

Lou Whiteman: Oh, wow.

Travis Hoium: You have Tesla jumping up in there. I believe Oracle was close. But yeah, $1 trillion.

Lou Whiteman: It's a new baseline. [laughs]

Travis Hoium: I remember growing up, it was $1 million was a lot of money. That's a million times a million. Lou, we're going to go snake order, so you get another crack at it here. Where do you want to go?

Lou Whiteman: I'll do fun facts for 200.

Travis Hoium: When did Netflix launch its streaming service? I'll give you a three-month plus or minus here.

Lou Whiteman: Oh, you want month, not just year?

Travis Hoium: Not just year. That's a little too easy.

Lou Whiteman: Not for me.

Travis Hoium: [laughs] Maybe I should give you a six-month plus or minus.

Lou Whiteman: End of 2026, December, November 2026.

Travis Hoium: You get it right. It is January 2007. I assume you meant 2006, not 2026.

Lou Whiteman: Oh, yeah. [laughs] I'm looking into the future. Sorry.

Travis Hoium: Jason, you are up next.

Jason Hall: What are the topics left?

Travis Hoium: We still have 300 under fun facts.

Jason Hall: Let's do that.

Travis Hoium: All right. Renewable energy and nuclear energy accounted for what percentage of US electricity supply? Of course, this is coming from the EIA, so the data is very old. This is from 2023, but it should directionally be correct today. This is up your wheelhouse. You should get pretty close here. Nuclear plus renewables as electricity supply.

Jason Hall: Oh, wow. This is actually a little harder for me because the percentage that's nuclear, I can't remember off the top of my head. I'm going to say 35%.

Travis Hoium: I'll give you this one. It's 40%. Plus or -5%. They're almost exactly 2020.

Jason Hall: Because it's amazing how much renewables has grown.

Travis Hoium: Exactly. Yes. You get the next one. We have the market, IPOs, and founders.

Jason Hall: Let's go with IPOs.

Travis Hoium: Do you want 100, 200, or 300?

Jason Hall: Let's go big. Let's go 300.

Travis Hoium: How much did Walmart raise in its IPO in 1970? How much money did they raise?

Jason Hall: $15 million. Probably half that. Let's go 15, '70.

Travis Hoium: 1970. Lou, do you have a guess?

Lou Whiteman: I'd go under.

Jason Hall: It might be a six-figure amount. No it's more than that.

Lou Whiteman: Yeah. At 7.5 million.

Travis Hoium: Lou's really close here. It is $5 million.

Lou Whiteman: Oh, wow. Really low.

Travis Hoium: I'll be generous and give you some points there, because I would have been way off on that one.

Lou Whiteman: Money was still worth something in 1970, Travis.

Travis Hoium: That's true. The stock's done pretty well since then, too.

Jason Hall: Well, Walmart it was just a department store back then, too. It wasn't what we think of. Even close.

Travis Hoium: They didn't have the supercenters.

Jason Hall: Right. No groceries. Just stuff.

Travis Hoium: Lou, you are up.

Lou Whiteman: We haven't done founders for 100. Let's hit founders.

Travis Hoium: Okay. This one you should get. Who founded General Electric?

Lou Whiteman: Founded General Electric. Thomas Edison, right?

Travis Hoium: There you go. You are correct. I thought that was a fun one. If you didn't know that General Electric a name that we know today, but that was Thomas Edison, inventer of the light bulb, that was his business. Then Nikola Tesla was Westinghouse. Companies that are still around one, successful, at least until the end of 2005 or so.

Jason Hall: Completely unrecognizable from what they were.

Travis Hoium: But Westinghouse has gone through a crazy transition. That was a business that I remember reading Built to Last, and that was one of the comparisons was GE was successful and Westinghouse wasn't in the same way.

Jason Hall: I'm contractually obligated right now, Travis, to mention the current owner of Westinghouse, which is Brookfield.

Travis Hoium: That's right.

Jason Hall: Fifty-one percent owner.

Travis Hoium: Lou, you have one more.

Lou Whiteman: Markets for, what do we have left?

Travis Hoium: You have 100 and 200.

Lou Whiteman: Two hundred.

Travis Hoium: What was the most valuable company on January 1st, 2000? I'm asking this because I want to test whether you listened to previous Motley Fool Money episodes. [laughs]

Lou Whiteman: Me with my ego, only if I'm on. 2000.

Travis Hoium: End to the .com bubble.

Lou Whiteman: Microsoft.

Lou Whiteman: I have an answer, too, here.

Travis Hoium: Okay.

Jason Hall: I think it was Cisco.

Travis Hoium: Believe it was General Electric.

Jason Hall: Was it GE? Okay.

Travis Hoium: Yeah. Jason, you are up. We have one left markets, two IPOs, and two founders.

Jason Hall: Let's do founders.

Travis Hoium: You want 200 or 300?

Jason Hall: Oh, we got to go big here.

Travis Hoium: How many original founders did Facebook have?

Jason Hall: Five.

Travis Hoium: Oh, you got it. Can you name more than two of them?

Jason Hall: Yeah. Two of them are twins, so that's easy.

Jason Hall: You got the twins? You've got Zuckerberg. The other names are eluding me right now.

Travis Hoium: The twins, not founders. They were in the movie.

Jason Hall: I thought they were considered.

Travis Hoium: The Winklevoss, they sued.

Jason Hall: The Winklevoss wanted to be twins or wanted to be founders, but that's right. They weren't.

Travis Hoium: You have Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum, and Chris Hughes. A couple of those have gone to do some interesting things in the academic world, too. Moskovitz still involved in Asana, although he stepped down as CEO. But good job, I would not have remembered that there was five. I think it's Jason again.

Jason Hall: Let's go IPOs, what are the.

Travis Hoium: We got one and 200.

Jason Hall: Let's go 100. When did Google IPO? As a bonus, what was the stock price before Google shares at the IPO. This is one that I remember, so that's why I'm adding the price here, and it looks like Lou might remember the number 2.

Jason Hall: Man, was it 2006?

Travis Hoium: No. I'm not even going to give you close enough. August 18th, 2005. What was the share price number?

Jason Hall: I have no idea. I'd just be guessing.

Travis Hoium: Lou?

Lou Whiteman: Wasn't it 85?

Travis Hoium: Eighty five dollars. I don't know why I remember that, but it was one of those weird facts in history that I remember Google's IPO being $85 a share. Lou, you're up.

Lou Whiteman: What's left?

Travis Hoium: IPOs for 200. You have 200 for IPO.

Lou Whiteman: IPO for 200. Let's do it.

Travis Hoium: When did Nvidia IPO. I'll give you a plus or minus three months, so a six month window.

Lou Whiteman: Once again. It was right around the crash. The fall of 1998, you want a month. October 1998. It's close. Is it?

Travis Hoium: I'll give you that. That's three months.

Lou Whiteman: Early '99.

Travis Hoium: It's January 1999. As a bonus, what was the offer price, and what would one stock of Nvidia be worth today?

Lou Whiteman: Lord, I don't know. Geez, $10 a share. That was the thing back then. Maybe.

Travis Hoium: That's close too.

Lou Whiteman: Really? That's how they used to do it.

Jason Hall: After splits, it'd be like quarters. I think was? Was it $12?

Travis Hoium: Twelve dollars a share.

Lou Whiteman: Today, it would be worth 100,000.

Travis Hoium: I don't know. $112 share at IPO would be worth $85,000. Just a crazy return for Nvidia. Lou, you were up.

Lou Whiteman: What I got.

Travis Hoium: Market or founders.

Lou Whiteman: Give me founders.

Travis Hoium: Who were Tesla's founders for 200.

Lou Whiteman: It was not Elon Musk, and I don't care what he said. One was Martin Eberhard and I don't know the name of the other one. But I'm not going to accept Elon Musk.

Travis Hoium: Yes. The other one is Marc Tarpenning but Elon Musk was not a founder, so that's a fun fact for history if you weren't familiar that Martin Eberhard was really, I think, the one who was really credited with starting Tesla. Jason, your final question is, what is the biggest company by market cap, and as a bonus, what is the market cap? This is just for 100 today.

Jason Hall: Today.

Travis Hoium: Yep.

Jason Hall: Did Nvidia jump back to the lead? 3.8 trillion.

Travis Hoium: Nvidia is correct. $4.4 trillion. Our winner today-.

Jason Hall: Shows you how long it's been since I looked at Nvidia's market cap.

Travis Hoium: Yeah, but they're way up there. Seven hundred points for Jason, congratulations. You are the winner. I'm surprised you're both positive, so that's good market knowledge for both of you.

Lou Whiteman: I'm going to go back and argue that 2,000 market cap, but we'll do that next week, anyway.

Travis Hoium: When we come back, we are going to get two stocks on our radar. You're listening to Motley Fool Money.

As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about. The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows the Motley Fool's editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. Apple was one of the companies in the news this week. Shares surged after the company or at least an analytics firm told us that the iPhone 17 is outselling the iPhone 16. Lou, is this something that, are we back in a big upgrade cycle for Apple? Are they going to be back to growth? Netflix is another company that reported earnings this week, and the shares were down initially. The results weren't great, but what did you see from the quarter Lou?

Lou Whiteman: To be clear, they did miss on earnings, and they missed pretty bad on the headline number, but a lot of that was, it was a $600 million settlement of a Brazilian tax dispute. They had mentioned this as a risk, but they hadn't included in their guidance. I think most of the miss was that. It's not like an ongoing problem. Bigger picture, look, the percentage of time we're spending watching Netflix versus other TV continues to go up 8.6% in the most recent quarter from 7.5% a year ago. Stranger Things is coming up, Knives Out. They have other franchises coming up. I don't think the sky is falling here.

Travis Hoium: This is also a company that's entering a little bit more mature phase. Growth is going to decelerate. But at 53 times earnings, it's an expensive stock, so it's understandable that the market is expecting a lot from Netflix right now.

Lou Whiteman: Absolutely. It's hard to know what to make out of this. I'll be honest, I'm surprised the market moved the way it did, because, as you say, this is one Chinese data analytics firm, not to say it isn't true, but I think we'll see. This is just one report. Also, it's worth noting that while they talked about US and China sales, collectively up about 14% over the iPhone 16. They said sales were up 50% in China. China is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there. That's good because Apple has struggled in China, but it doesn't necessarily speak to broad strength. Guys, my hot take here is that we don't have a supercycle. The iPhone has become the same as the dishwasher or whatever appliance in your kitchen. You replace them when they break and you don't replace them before. I don't think the 17 changed that, and I'm not going to buy a supercycle until I see more.

Jason Hall: I think what's more important to see from Apple is really figuring out what role artificial intelligence is going to play in its ecosystem. The reality is that we're all using AI more now than we did a year ago, and that's just going to continue because it's a change management thing where it's just simple and easy, and it's just going to become more. I think as time passes, Apple is at risk of losing the next generation of users. Maybe forever. The wall garden ecosystem that Apple's built has been incredible as a way to derive a larger and larger share of profits from the way people use their smartphones. But that mot might actually be the wall that keeps new users out of the Apple ecosystem.

Travis Hoium: Would that be bullish for Google, then, Alphabet?

Jason Hall: Maybe. I mean, I think probably so. I maybe even Microsoft to some degree, depending on what happens, but I do think we're just going to see maybe more of the share of the profits for how people use their smartphones gets spread across more companies. When we look back five years from now, that's probably what we see.

Travis Hoium: It will be interesting to see if they can get back to a little bit of growth and then what role services play in that? Because they're obviously leaning into that. This week, they signed F1 to a massive deal. Now, those of us who want to watch F1 are going to have to pay up for Apple TV. Something that they're pushing into other areas, but a lot of them are just add-ons to the iPhone. We like to end the show with stocks on our radar, along with some questions from our producer Dan Boyd. Jason, you are up first. What's on your radar?

Jason Hall: Tiendas 3B, if I can murder it with my Spanish pronunciation. It's BBB Foods, which is a hard discount grocer in Mexico has about 3,000 stores. I think they can probably 5X that store account pretty easily. You look at the growth rates, and it's incredible. Revenue was up over 30% last quarter in their second quarter, and about half of that is comps. Generates positive EBITDA, decent margins. I think it's the perfect blocking and tackling business. The trading for a reasonable valuation. Dan, if you're listening, buddy, I know you are, we're so caught up in the tech movement in AI today as investors, markets like Mexico that, I think, over the next few decades are going to be massive sources of economic growth are where investors should be looking for opportunity, and I think BBB Foods is one of those stocks.

Travis Hoium: Dan, what do you think about BBB foods?

Dan Boyd: Hey, Jason, all good points there. You've almost convinced me, but I do have a question for you. Do you go to any of the discount grocery stores here in the States?

Jason Hall: Aldi, I think is a good example to a certain degree. This is basically a blocking and tackling business. I think Aldi, Trader Joe's, to some degree. They're a little more upscale, but those models are very popular in the US.

Travis Hoium: I do like Trader Joe's. They got great snacks. Lou, what's on your radar this week?

Lou Whiteman: Dan, we talked earlier about Thomas Edison's company. Unfortunately GE hasn't gone as well since Thomas Edison left the CEO role. For years, many of us rambled on about the quality of the assets hidden away in the train wreck that has become GE. Now, thanks to a three way split, those assets are free from all the baggage, and sure enough, they are performing. GE Aerospace, the massive aircraft engine business. They posted earnings this week, beat and raised up their guidance. The story here is the aftermarket, spare parts. Airlines can't fly if the engines don't work, and it turns out that's a pretty good competitive position to be in. I'm not going to channel Ron Gross here and say it's firing all cylinders, because as we all know, turbine engines don't have cylinders. But GE Aerospace stock is up 55% over the past year, I think the momentum can continue into 2026.

Travis Hoium: Dan, that's the nerdiest joke that I've heard in a long time. But, Dan, what do you think about GE?

Dan Boyd: I do love a radar stock pitch that involves the word train wreck. That's always going to at least get my attention. GE, I guess airplanes got to have engines. They got to go.

Lou Whiteman: It's the best way to do it.

Travis Hoium: Dan, what's going on your watch list? Food or airplane engines.

Dan Boyd: I don't know. I feel like if we're talking long term here, I mean, airplane air travel isn't going anywhere. But if we're talking more short term, I think that we're going to see an uptick in discount grocery stores if people have a little less money to spend. I'll go BBB today.

Travis Hoium: Congratulations, Jason Hall wins the radar stocks today for Lou Whiteman, Jason Hall, our production leader, Dan Boyd, and the entire Motley Fool team. I'm Travis Hoium. Thanks for listening to Motley Fool Money. We'll see you here tomorrow.

Dan Boyd has positions in Amazon and Walt Disney. Jason Hall has positions in Brookfield Asset Management, CrowdStrike, Nvidia, Starbucks, and Walt Disney. Lou Whiteman has positions in Boston Omaha, Cloudflare, KKR, and Walmart. Travis Hoium has positions in Alphabet, Cloudflare, Fastly, Spotify Technology, and Walt Disney. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Boston Omaha, Brookfield Asset Management, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Fastly, KKR, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia, Oracle, Spotify Technology, Starbucks, Tesla, Walmart, Walt Disney, and Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies. The Motley Fool recommends GE Aerospace and General Motors 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.