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Motley Fool Issues Rare “Home Run Buy” Alert

What's the current teaser pitch circulating from Motley Fool Stock Advisor?

I’ve had a bunch of new questions about this almost evergreen Motley Fool ad for their Stock Advisor service, so I thought I’d share some answers with you here — partly because this is a stock that I write about a lot for our paying members, since it’s a substantial part of my portfolio, but I haven’t shared my thoughts on it for “free” members in over a year.

So what’s the stock?

This is one of the Fool’s “home run” or “double down” alerts — an ad that’s not dated, but that makes the point that the relatively few stocks that get recommended by both of the Gardner brothers at the Motley Fool are unusually great stocks (the brothers are David and Tom, who together founded the Fool and run both the company and the flagship Motley Fool Stock Advisor). This is what they say about that “indicator”:

“It’s rare that David and Tom formally agree on the exact same stock – it’s only happened 23 times over the entire history of Motley Fool Stock Advisor.

“But when it has happened, the results have been spectacular:

“Netflix is up 12,862% since Tom agreed with David on it in June 2007

“Tesla, which received the “Home Run Buy” sign in November 2012, is up 835%

“In fact, across the 23 stocks David and Tom have agreed on … the average return is an astounding 912% … crushing the S&P 500 by more than 11x!”

So what’s the latest “home run” stock?

Here are the clues:

“… neither David or Tom would ever describe this stock as a ‘sure thing,’ but the details behind this tiny little internet company are impressive:

“It’s smaller than 1/100th the size of Google.

“Each one of David’s and Tom’s recommendations of its stock is crushing the market.
Its young CEO has already banked $575 million on this stock since its IPO.”

That’s a poor choice of words, I’d say — “banked” implies that you’ve made a ton of money and put it in, well, a bank, at least metaphorically. That’s not what this “young CEO” has done, he just owns a lot of the stock because he founded the company, and has seen it increase in value dramatically as the stock has risen. He’s “betting on” the company to the extent that he hasn’t sold all those shares, but he also isn’t buying — and has, in fact, sold thousands of shares that he’s been granted by the company as compensation over the years.

What does the company do?

“This company stands to profit as more and more people ditch cable for streaming TV….

“… sits in the middle of the advertising market, which is more than 10X bigger than the online streaming industry….

“In an interview with Tom Gardner and his team, this company’s CEO called the current moment ‘the most exciting in the history of advertising.'”

And we get a reiteration of that “he’s got skin in the game” idea:

“this CEO is putting his money where his mouth is.

“He’s betting his fortune – $575,715,640 to be exact – on what he’s calling cable TV’s ‘ticking time bomb.'”

So yes, this is, of course, good ol’ The Trade Desk (TTD).

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And we’ve seen the Motley Fool recommend and re-recommend this stock many times over the past couple years — I first nibbled on the shares back in the fall of 2017 when Tom Gardner was pitching the shares, and it was the best teaser stock of 2018.

The Trade Desk provides a data-fueled programmatic ad-buying software and access to purchasing (and monitoring) ads for the “open internet” (as opposed to the “walled gardens” of Google and Facebook), and they’re growing in all the areas that other advertising folks are growing, with huge volume in things like in-app advertising and mobile video, but they are also growing very fast in streaming — placing ads in services like Hulu, which they think is a major growth area (the argument being that advertising dollars will grow in importance for streaming services as they compete and as customer acceptance of higher and higher subscription fees to fuel content creation will be limited). Their customers are major advertisers and ad agencies, and they place themselves in the middle as a disinterested gatekeeper — they don’t own the content, and can provide data to help advertisers automatically place their ads alongside the best content.

They’ve grown like mad since I bought shares, though there have also been some meaningful dips along the way — I haven’t added to my position for about six months, and it’s now a top ten holding in my Real Money Portfolio so I’m unlikely to increase that allocation… though I still like the company a lot, and have resisted the urge to take profits.

Here’s what I wrote about this company to the Irregulars in my Friday File two weeks ago, after their latest earnings report:

The Trade Desk (TTD) beat the analyst expectations for both revenue and earnings this quarter, but not in a hugely dramatic way and still showing evidence of the fact that the growth is slowing down a bit as they get bigger… which is a natural and expected occurrence.

The shares were initially a little weak in the pre-open trading thanks to the flat forecast for the second quarter, though they did raise their expectations for the full year. When a stock is trading at this kind of nosebleed valuation, you really need to shock investors with growth to keep the shares going, and we had gotten used to that because TTD had been in a habit of offering very conservative guidance that led to some dramatic “beat and raise” quarters in the past, but this “beat” was more subdued and that might well have been what got the worries started. Expectations matter.

But that was just the initial reaction to the numbers before the market opened on Thursday… the reaction a little later became much more dramatic, which means, to me, that maybe investors started to freak out about CEO Jeff Green’s comments on the conference call about spending more money to grow market share in programmatic advertising.

Why? I don’t know. Perhaps those who were clambering all over this as a oft-repeated recommendation of the Motley Fool thought that TTD had somehow magically become the only ad-tech company around, or was going to get a pass on taking over the world. That never happens, or if it does happen it’s an accident… and, well, investors are freaking out this week in general and this is a stock that has quadrupled in value over the past year (and more than doubled just since January), growing the stock price far faster than the underlying company could grow the business, so volatility comes with the game. When a stock doubles in a couple months, you attract investors who are expecting dramatic things every time a new quarter is released, and this quarter, while very good, was not at dramatic in the context of TTD’s past performance.

Still a great company, still a pretty insane valuation if you use the PE ratio for this year or next year, and being worthy of that valuation depends on rapidly rising revenues from their advertising partners as programmatic advertising takes over more and more of the market (most of their customers are ad agencies, though companies also run their own advertising campaigns)… and the challenge is still probably mostly competition as they try to take leadership of the “open internet” and wrest power away from both their smaller ad-tech competitors and the huge “walled garden” marketplaces (Facebook and Google, mostly).

The Trade Desk is growing fast, the market it operates in is growing fast, management is incentivized to grow and they’ve built something gigantic very quickly, and to some extent it could be built on quicksand. This is a technology company that provides a service to a relatively small number of advertisers… if a better product comes along, they can lose.

I don’t think they will, and I love their continuing push to integrate the “open internet” with their shared cookies, which seems to be getting some traction with big advertising groups and networks, but I am, of course, watching the stop loss trigger point for these shares because it’s a momentum stock with a crazy valuation, and big sentiment swings can easily cut the shares in half even without a major failing or a “miss” on the part of the company. Because we have to be prepared for volatility in stocks that have surged this much, the stop loss trigger is way down near $135 a share now… I don’t expect we’ll hit that, there was no actual bad news in this report, just a fear from investors that growth won’t be as fast as they hoped, so I think I’ll just be watching for a while.

The key reasons to hold on, I think, are the excellent management team and the massive size of the market, combined with the clear scalability of the business (which is mostly providing software subscriptions and access to data)… the cost of providing the platform for their actual product offerings is fairly low, giving them a gross margin of 75-80%, but we really want to see whether they can continue to grow profitably without having to invest too much more and more in sales or overhead — and so far they have. This quarter they spent a little more, and it sounds like they want to spend still more on expansion if they can find things to spend that money on, so the company will probably want to continue to be evaluated as a revenue growth company and not an earnings growth company, which will offend some folks, but it’s clearly working pretty well.

They’re still tiny relative to the addressable market, but they have pretty quickly sucked up a lot of the oxygen in the programmatic advertising market with their relationships with large advertisers and their strong customer retention, so they may well be able to continue leading… and they don’t need money, which is a competitive advantage over some of the smaller upstarts — they are profitable and can self-finance this continuing aggressive growth, particularly into Europe and Asia, even if they choose to reinvest those profits instead of reporting them.

I really like CEO Jeff Green and his vision, and that’s a subjective determination but it’s also not a small thing — confident leadership with a bold vision of the future is part of the difference between Netflix and Blockbuster. It doesn’t mean they’ll keep winning, and the stock price could certainly fall if they have a bad quarter (it has in the past), but for me this has been a hold all year simply because it is already such a large part of my portfolio… if I did not own any shares, I’d probably consider a small nibble here after this dip if you’re interested in the five-year story.

It turns out that I was right to be a little nervous about the run up into earnings last week, and the better short-term decision would have been to take a little profit off the table, but that kind of short-term sentiment-based trading is usually a mistake (which is why I try to resist it, not always with success). I don’t think The Trade Desk is done growing… the stock got a little too high in expecting another dramatic “beat and raise” this quarter, but the company itself is still doing the right things and still showing strong performance in every real way. It’s not cheap, it’s not an easy buy even at $180, but if they keep doing things right they’ll keep growing into that valuation and moving the yardsticks, so it’s not likely to ever be cheap enough to be “easy.”

Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green is great at telling his “story”, and is a good salesman for the stock — and, yes, he still owns a huge stake and it’s worth something like a half billion dollars. If you want to see his sales pitch, he also appeared on Jim Cramer’s show on CNBC following the earnings dip — here’s an excerpt of that video:

Trade Desk CEO: We bring money into China instead of bringing it out from CNBC.

Whether it will work out, well, we’ll see — I give this one a lot of rope, but these days it also trades at more than 50X forward earnings, and the growth is widely expected to “decelerate” (they’re still seen as doubling revenue from 2018-2021, but spending heavily and not quite doubling earnings in that time). On the other hand, apparently the Fool keeps trotting this out as a favorite for their Stock Advisor subscribers, a group that I think numbers close to half a million people now, so that probably helps with the “buy the dip” response from investors whenever things get a little less rosy… at least for now.

How about you, dear readers? Willing to gamble on a stock that has already risen so fast? Think the next leg up is coming soon, or that the shares will come back to earth? Let us know with a comment below.

Disclosure: Of the stocks mentioned above, I own shares of The Trade Desk, Google parent Alphabet, and Facebook. I will not trade in any covered stock for at least three days after publication, per Stock Gumshoe’s trading rules. Current positions are updated regularly in the Real Money Portfolio.

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41 Comments
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coolsoupy
May 24, 2019 1:25 pm

I still have the “only stock that I will need for the rest of my life” I was the fool not htem _ WHOLE FOODS

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Rob
Member
Rob
May 24, 2019 1:25 pm

TTD also recommended by Michael Robinson’s Nova X report. I think he recommended fairly recent at around $135. Very impressive move to date.

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popeye47
Guest
popeye47
May 24, 2019 1:38 pm

TTD is a little rich for my blood.
But you were wise to enter a few years ago.

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Sital Johal
Sital Johal
May 24, 2019 1:50 pm

Travis,
Unbelievable!
I was going to ask you about TTD yesterday as it is also one of my major investment, and I knew you own it as well. You must have read my mind!! So far I’m pretty happy with it and like to keep adding on major dips.

Thanks,

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Isaac
Member
Isaac
May 24, 2019 3:23 pm
Reply to  Sital Johal

What’s a good entry point for TTD?

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bknysand
Member
bknysand
May 25, 2019 11:32 am
Reply to  Sital Johal

I have the same question – what is a good entry price for TTD at this point in time?

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tevanj
Member
tevanj
May 24, 2019 3:41 pm

I have heard a lot about these walled gardens but does anyone know if the Trade desk’s customers can advertise on google and facebook using the Trade Desk.

combine
Member
combine
May 24, 2019 4:17 pm

My only question (but not for TTD only) is if I should sell it in the near future and replace it with some more “safer” or conservative stocks, to survive the widely broadcasted crash coming this year.

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Randell
Member
Randell
May 24, 2019 7:07 pm
Reply to  combine

I am no expert but have read a lot of expert opinions. The common thread in relation to your question is usually sell enough to get your original stake back and let the rest ride or take your profits and leave the original invested amount ride. Either one is good as it is the ‘bird in the hand’ result i.e. not left hoping you’ll get the ‘two in the bush’ later, which has the risk of losing the lot.

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chaszz
Member
chaszz
May 25, 2019 10:06 am

I am under the impression that everyone is too nervous about volatility now for a big crash; that the big crashes generally come when everyone is confidant the market can only keep going up. Is this just folklore bunk, or does it have some basis in reality?

sooku
Member
May 24, 2019 9:36 pm

My understanding is that it’s not just a product, it is an advertising service with offices in several countries, and they can translate the advertiser’s goals into actual ads. That should make the business less sensitive to new “products”.

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maddogdne
May 25, 2019 4:34 am

$TTD long: I bought my shares back in Nov 2016 for $22.55, and haven’t sold yet. But all analysis aside, all crystal-ball exercises accounted for, I would sell it in a millisecond [that I could respond so quickly!] if it breached the Tradestops VQ SSI into the red zone. It has never done that. When/if it does, I will be out the next morning – on a very nice gain, thank you.
Keep up the superb work, Travis – I can’t possibly tell you how valuable your commentary is, week after week.

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chaszz
Member
chaszz
May 25, 2019 9:59 am
Reply to  maddogdne

Maddogne, if you are a Motley Fool member, does the Tradestops warning come at a decisively quicker time than an email from the Fool telling you to sell?
Or, does the Fool sell signal not come at all after a Tradestops sell signal?
If so, which service was correct?
Thanks.

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Charles Zigmund
Member
Charles Zigmund
May 25, 2019 12:39 pm

Thanks. I’d like insight insight into Motley Fool’s methods. Did they ever bail on Whole Foods?

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lindacampbell
lindacampbell
June 1, 2019 6:46 pm
Reply to  chaszz

Hi chaszz, I belonged to MF years ago & don’t recall ever receiving a sell alert. So, yes, Tradestops’ warnings are quicker than nothing! I joined Tradestops in 2016 and Dr. Smith’s 2 newer programs so I’m a committed fan. Yet, I’ve learned it can be costly to go with speedy warnings at times. An example – In one portfolio, I’ve owned 4 figure shares of the REIT, ARCC, for years. By Dec.2018, my cost basis was $12.13. During that month, Tradestops issued a sell alert @ $14.80 through late March, 2019. If I had sold, I may have lost about $1K in dividends & on rebuying would have started a new cost basis @ nearly $5 per share more @ $17.14. So, yes, Tradestops warned me, but I ignored them to avoid portfolio churn, fees, loss of dividends and higher cost bases.

All that said, ARCC only has a 9.2% VQ ratio so it only had to drop that much to go to sell mode. Maddogne’s example of TTD receiving a Tradestop sell would mean the stock dropped 41% since its equity risk is that much. In TTD’s case I might sell. I don’t believe there is a perfect system out there and that investors
need to consider each stock on its merits. However, I’d never want to be without
Tradestops!!

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lindacampbell
lindacampbell
June 1, 2019 5:47 pm
Reply to  maddogdne

Hi Maddogne, Congrats on your great buy & gain with TTD!

FYI- I’m referencing your example RE TTD and Tradestops’ red zone in a reply to Chaszz below. Perhaps you might share your experiences with Dr. Smith’s work
too.

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krinkle
May 18, 2020 11:38 pm
Reply to  lindacampbell

I also have used Tradestops. I respect Dr. Smith’s work, however, I think Tradestop is best for new investors, or for those who don’t enjoy following the markets (or their portfolio) on a daily basis.

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lindacampbell
lindacampbell
June 1, 2019 5:51 pm
Reply to  maddogdne

Maddogne, Congrats on your outstanding TTD trade!!

FYI- I’m referencing your comment about TTD & Tradestops in a comment to chaszz. Perhaps you have additional views?

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Sital
Sital
May 25, 2019 1:08 pm

Sometimes I find MF will have contradicting opinions on the same stock. Don’t know what to believe!

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wade3
Irregular
May 27, 2019 1:35 pm

MF also appears to have hundreds of new niche portfolios, of which I regularly get “groundfloor” offers to join, of course at a special rate which is still extremely expensive, especially compared to their core one, of which I’m a member. I guess that’s the price one has to pay to be part of the “…Next Amazon!”or “…Next Netflix!” or “…Next…”

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RockLady
RockLady
May 27, 2019 5:59 pm

I’m a MF subscriber and I paid too much for NHR. TTD is a good pick and so is SHOP. However TTD is not a part of NHR round 2 investments. NHR picks are stocks to hold for a min of 5 yrs and they will be volatile . MF invested 300k in this round. Seven stocks got 8% and eleven stocks got 4%. PAYC, SHOP, ALGN and ANET are a few of the 8%. NVEE, IONS, CPF, OAK and SAVE are a few of the other group.

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Sital
Sital
May 28, 2019 1:27 pm
Reply to  RockLady

I bought SHOP a couple days after their IPO and have been adding to it during major dips. It has done very well for me.
MF has Double Down Buy Alert for 2019, is that regarding SHOP? It is on the top of this thread.

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Sital
Sital
May 29, 2019 12:14 pm

Thanks for looking into it Travis.

Glenn
May 28, 2019 1:10 am

I bought TTD pretty early @ $49. It was at the time a spec stock for me and my biggest regret-Not Buying More-. Only 40 shares (currently showing up 299%. (Remember it was a Spec. at the time. Thought of adding many times, but every-time look at New Share Cost Vs Original and find it hard to bring myself to paying today’s prices
Anyone else had this Dilemma?

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Nina
Guest
Nina
June 4, 2019 3:40 am

Is there any stock that is even close? to TTD? Should I buy it now? I heard zen desk is recommended. I am confused?

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chaszz
Member
chaszz
June 4, 2019 10:00 am
Reply to  Nina

Shopify seems to be the one they are highest on right now.

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hunter007
November 10, 2019 12:22 pm

Recent insider sale, not much, but in case you’re wondering.

The Trade Desk Inc (TTD) CFO Paul Ross Sold $546,028 of Shares
CFO of The Trade Desk Inc (30-Year Financial, Insider Trades) Paul Ross (insider trades) sold 2,682 shares of TTD on 11/05/2019 at an average price of $203.59 a share. The total sale was $546,028.

The Trade Desk Inc provides technology platform for ad buyers. It provides a self-service platform that enables clients to purchase and manage data-driven digital advertising campaigns using their own teams. The Trade Desk Inc has a market cap of $8.67 billion; its shares were traded at around $192.75 with a P/E ratio of 93.13 and P/S ratio of 16.21.

CEO Recent Trades:

President and CEO, 10% Owner Jeffrey Terry Green sold 5,000 shares of TTD stock on 10/21/2019 at the average price of $201.25. The price of the stock has decreased by 4.22% since.
TTD 30-Year Financial Data
The intrinsic value of TTD
Peter Lynch Chart of TTD
CFO Recent Trades:

CFO Paul Ross sold 2,682 shares of TTD stock on 11/05/2019 at the average price of $203.59. The price of the stock has decreased by 5.32% since.
Directors and Officers Recent Trades:

Chief Marketing Officer Susan Vobejda sold 1,754 shares of TTD stock on 11/05/2019 at the average price of $203.59. The price of the stock has decreased by 5.32% since.
Chief Legal Officer Vivian Yang sold 3,405 shares of TTD stock on 11/04/2019 at the average price of $205.5. The price of the stock has decreased by 6.2% since.
Chief Technology Officer David Randall Pickles sold 10,000 shares of TTD stock on 10/15/2019 at the average price of $209.32. The price of the stock has decreased by 7.92% since.
Chief Legal Officer Vivian Yang sold 2,142 shares of TTD stock on 10/11/2019 at the average price of $200. The price of the stock has decreased by 3.63% since.
For the complete insider tradingHey everyone. Insider sell as of late. Not much, but here is the sale.

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frankjp
February 6, 2020 6:34 pm

Travis mentioned that stocks that both Motley Fool brothers agreed on (only happened 23 times total) have been extremely successful. I’m very curious what those stocks are. Maybe the most recent are ones are only available to MF subscribers. But I’d be happy to know about some of the earliest ones (and if possible, at what point in time they recommended them.

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twizz32
twizz32
August 2, 2020 5:40 am

Does anyone know what the Blast Off stocks are that MF is recommending?

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