Tesla’s Robotaxi Nonevent & GPT-6 Is Here!
In this episode of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, Motley Fool contributors Travis Hoium, Lou Whiteman, and Jon Quast discuss:
- Tesla’s “event.”
- ChatGPT-6.
- Adobe’s new CEO
- 10-year predictions.
- Retail’s health.
- Stocks on the radar.
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 Sept. 4, 2026.
Travis Hoium: Tesla had an event last night, and we were not invited. Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing starts now. Welcome to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. I’m Travis Hoium. I’m joined today by Lou Whiteman and Jon Quast, and guys, we previewed on the Wednesday show Tesla’s event that they had last night about the robotaxi. There’s a lot of hype around this. Lou, not only were we not invited; I don’t think anybody was invited.
Lou Whiteman: No livestream, no nothing. I’m confused here because I don’t want to slam a company for doing a publicity event. Publicity events are very important. But if you want to do a publicity event, you should try to get publicity. You should do a livestream. They hyped this for weeks. There were contests like if you take a ride in Austin, you can get to go. Then night of the event, Elon Musk didn’t even show up. Not only, didn’t he show up, he barely had the energy to live-tweet it. He did like one retweet or so. Why bother? I don’t understand. They basically announced that we’re actually doing what we announced last year, and it’ll start rolling up. This could have been an email thing. This could have been a press release, guys.
Travis Hoium: Jon, is there a more bullish way to look at this?
Jon Quast: I think that we’re talking out of both sides of our mouth here saying there was hyped for weeks, and then yet it wasn’t hyped on the time of the event. I think that they were playing this the way they wanted to play it. Is it even fair to call it a launch? It really isn’t; it’s a slow rollout, is what it is. I actually think it makes more sense to not overly hype this because we are not going out across the country and all cities with a fleet of hundreds of vehicles. If you do hype it too much, then you set the expectations too high and then there’s disappointment.
Travis Hoium: Isn’t that Elon’s been doing for a decade or more, though? The original robotaxi event was in 2024. That was two years ago. They started talking about the robotaxi, I believe in 2018 or 2019, not in its current form, but the idea of the robotaxi and having this fleet. We’re almost a decade after that, and other companies have much bigger fleets. It’s just we are at this point, and the reason that I wanted to bring this up on the show is we are at the point where autonomous vehicles are real. Tesla was supposed to have this huge first-mover advantage. They were supposed to have a huge cost advantage, and once you have both of those things and you have this network effect, now no one can catch up, it seems like they’ve fumbled that.
Jon, are we at the point where they’ve really got to put up, or Waymo is out there scaling their vehicles, and they’re cutting their costs dramatically? The rumors were the hardware costs for autonomous vehicles, basically on top of the vehicle itself went from about $150,000 down to about $20,000. This is the way hardware works. It gets less expensive over time. Yes, they have more sensors. But if the cost differential is very small and coming down, it seems like that advantage that Tesla should have is evaporating in front of our eyes.
Jon Quast: This is why we all drive Nissan Leafs right now because Tesla fumbled its first-mover advantage. Nissan Leaf came out before Model S, and you could say that it had the first mover advantage, but Tesla is the one that won out in the end. Listen, call it what you will, but Tesla understands one thing very well. It understands the psychology of the consumer, not necessarily that the best product wins or the first product wins. The one with the best vibe is the one that wins a lot of times. It reminds me a little bit of the old “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” commercials. What was that actually telling us about the specifications of an Apple MacBook or a Microsoft PC? Really nothing, but one was perceived as a little bit cooler, and I do think that there are people who when the Cybercab is available a lot more. I think there’s going to be a lot of people lining up for the Cybercab because that is the one that they want to ride in over a Waymo. It’s why my 9-year-old counts Cybertrucks on the road, but I’ve never told them anything about Cybertruck.
Lou Whiteman: We still haven’t really explained what the purpose was last night, though. We knew all this before. Congratulations. You didn’t even get your CEO to show up. This would be like Apple announcing a new phone and then saying, the phone’s going to be launched in three days. The phone’s going to be launched in two days. Phone is going to launch in one day. We’re going to do a big event for the phone launch, and then just not talking about it right there. You’re right, Jon, there was the Apple versus PC commercial. Apple took the time to spend money to actually get that commercial out in front of people. My confusion here is that they had this event, but then they hid it, which, as an investor, I don’t know if I should read anything into that or not. It’s funny. The biggest Tesla advocates coming out of this were like, I don’t know why they did this last night. We didn’t learn anything. Stock is down 6% on it. It could turn out being a great product if they get there.
Travis, to your point, I think the bigger fear is, is that, and maybe this is what they’re acknowledging. I don’t think events work anymore. Events were really cool when nobody had cars on the road, and they were just giving you CAD/CAM images of how cool this was going to be. Right now, I can go out my door and see this in practice. For someone to do a PowerPoint presentation about how cool their service is going to be, that might work for kids, but that’s not going to work for investors. What does Waymo have 4,000 something? I was just out. I passed three or four of them on the road. I think what’s going to impress investors now is, Jon’s right, when that day comes, if they’re out there in force with fleets in the thousands all over the U.S., they might have the better cooler product and might win. But until then, I don’t think that these events serve a purpose. I think they’re just reminding us of the fact that they are behind.
Travis Hoium: Jon, let’s go to the business model, too, because Tesla is still a $1.2 trillion company. It’s part of the Mag Seven. There’s a reason that we’re talking about this company specifically. If you look at what the story was for Tesla five years ago, I remember listening to those conference calls, and Elon Musk and team, that entire team where it’s basically laughing at the entire industry going, you guys are all going to be licensing FSD in the future. You just don’t realize it yet. Here we are in 2026. Not only is no one licensing FSD, doesn’t seem like anyone is interested in licensing FSD, and everyone else is launching vehicles that are at the very least Level 2 autonomy, where you have this driver assist system a little bit like FSD is today, or going all the way to Level 4, which in even Level 3, which is what companies like Mercedes have, I think BMW is launching some of those features. These features are really starting to roll out in consumer vehicles on top of the Zoosks of the world, the Waymos of the world, May Mobility is another one that’s around. It just seems like the thesis of five years ago is just not playing out the way that you would think it is still a cool vehicle. My kids also count Cybertrucks, but that doesn’t mean that they’ve sold a lot of them.
Jon Quast: I think that mind share is important when it comes to long-term market share. But to your point, Travis, I heard someone say recently, for every mile of road, there’s two miles of ditch, and so I do want to stay out of the ditch on both sides. The ditch on one side is to say that Tesla is the clear market winner, and there’s nothing you can do about it, and to your point, that’s how the executives were talking about it five years ago. The other side of the ditch that I want to stay out of here is that Tesla is irrelevant because Waymo is ahead. I think it’s incredibly relevant. Maybe it doesn’t license its full self-driving software to the other car companies. Maybe they do build out there. In fact, I think that’s even more likely that each of these companies is going to have its own driver data that it can build its own models off of. I think that’s perfectly reasonable. But there will come a time when things are solved on the regulatory front and we can actually sell to everyone everywhere. That is really the big difference when you talk about an iPhone event. What were the restrictions on selling an iPhone? None. You could sell to anybody anywhere. Right now, you can’t sell a self-driving taxi to anybody anywhere. There are rules when those regulatory hurdles are cleared, that is, when I think that this becomes a lot more meaningful. Who is taking Share?
Travis Hoium: Maybe that’ll be a good time for an event.
Jon Quast: There you go.
Travis Hoium: A lot to talk about with Tesla, but I think this is one of the more exciting spaces because we are seeing more of these autonomous vehicles all over the place, and it is going to be a huge market. It’s just a question of how are investors going to be able to make money on it? When we come back, we’re going to talk about the launch of GPT-6. [LAUGHTER] More on that in a moment, you’re listening to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing.
Welcome back to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. Jon, we’re not getting GTA 6 quite yet. I am excited to talk about that in a couple of months. But GPT-6 or at least the first version of that is now starting to roll out at least to some enterprise customers that was announced yesterday from OpenAI. Interesting from the release, and here’s the quote I took from it: “It can take care of tedious tasks like filling out online forms, updating customer records in a CRM, and organizing your calendar.” Jon, we were promised AGI, and we get a bot that can fill out forms for us. It’s definitely going to be more powerful than that, but is there really a there there for investors?
Jon Quast: I think it’s hilarious. The whole artificial general intelligence conversation, the AGI, this is, of course, different from just regular AI. AGI is basically AI is smarter than humans in all domains and connect domains together, really think like people, but better. OpenAI President Greg Brockman is saying, welcome to the AGI era and saying this could be AGI. Same Altwin saying, maybe someday we’re going to look back at this and realize this was the moment. Listen, I’m sorry, if it’s AGI, we’re going to know it when we see it, and to me, that’s a tell that this ain’t it.
Lou Whiteman: To me, it’s a tell they still want to do an IPO, but maybe I’m too cynical there.
Travis Hoium: That’s probably true. It does seem, Lou, to be back and forth between all these different companies. We can bring Google and Gemini into this, as well. They keep pushing forward with their flash models. That’s what I use a lot because it’s just very quick and it doesn’t cost me anything. It’s included in whatever Google things I’m paying for. But it seems like the push for all of these companies, and even with this one is on that enterprise side, and that seems to be really telling that that’s where the money is for these companies. Also, I have to wonder, as all of these companies try to IPO, how much money is there for them to grab if they’re all going after that same enterprise customer, the same coding applications? It just seems like there’s a bunch of money chasing one pot at the end of the rainbow.
Lou Whiteman: Exactly.
Jon Quast: It’s interesting that you say that, Travis, because actually this GPT‑6 isn’t great at coding compared to other AI models that are out there. In fact, if I recall, barely better than GPT‑5. It’s not really excelling in the coding aspect. It’s excelling in some other areas, but to your point, if you’re going after enterprise, that seems like something that maybe you wanted a step improvement in.
Lou Whiteman: We’re an investing show. I’m not going to pretend to understand. You don’t want me judging which of these models is best and which one is bleeding edge and which one can be your imaginary friend. But, Travis, to your point, we do need to see revenue here, and I don’t think I’m numb from every six months, another one of these companies saying, ours is the best thing in the world, and nobody can stop it, and we’re visionaries and gurus or whatever. What I know is is that increasingly the enterprises are finding ways to not use the frontier models, these bleeding-edge models to generate the productivity they want, Travis, just like what you’re saying. The flash models work good enough.
I am going to go out on a limb and say that for all of the attention that these new model releases get, they for the businesses, don’t really matter. I think that as these things get better, as they get maybe closer to imaginary friend status, there’s going to be even less need to pay up for the most amazing thing because all of those trailing models are going to continue to get better, as well. I think that both things could be true. GPT‑6 could be the most amazing thing out there, but yet, not a reason for an enterprise that is already set up and Claude to shift. Lesser model at cheaper prices, the meta model, feels like a better model right now than Bleeding Edge is a premium in terms of generating revenue, and that could be a real problem for some of these companies that are focused on the bleeding edge.
Travis Hoium: A couple of data points on that, Duolingo, at least for a while, a year or two ago, was the biggest user of tokens from OpenAI. They talked on the most recent call about how, you know what? We are now using high-end models for certain things, but most of our work is being done with much less expensive models, open-source or open-weight models. We’re really optimizing that cost. That’s not going to those frontier models. The other one is Uber. Uber is one of the companies that say, hey, we blew through our budget early in the year. But now they’ve said, hey, we’re actually doing more with AI, but we’re spending the same amount.
I think this is going to be something we’re going to have to really keep an eye on a second half of the year into 2027, how does the spend for those enterprises go? Because it seems like it went astronomically higher in early part of 2026, may not be on the same trend over the next 18 months. Lou, I quickly want to touch on the change with at Adobe. This is something that we’ve been looking for over the past couple of months. But Adobe is one of those stocks that’s been beaten up. I think it falls into that value territory for a lot of investors. Really intriguing. But they did announce a new CEO stayed in house. What do we need to know?
Lou Whiteman: The market doesn’t like this, apparently, down 7% today after the news, but all software stocks are down today, so I don’t know how much you’ll read into that. The stock’s been on a slide. It is up 35% since July 1, but it’s been cut in half over the last five years. Pick your time stamp. This, to me, full disclosure. I bought into this at near its lows on the I thought the AI is going to eat its lunch was overstated. I am all for it going up from here and not down. The CEO transition looks routine, and I think it’s good that there is like, the question has been answered. Someone who has been on the job 20 years decided to retire. I think that’s fine. Timing isn’t great, but I don’t think there’s controversy here. CEO’s a new person, looks like a caretaker, but I think the business works.
For me, I’m looking at business trading at 11 times expected earnings before the fall today and asking, is AI going to eat its lunch? Maybe over time, but I don’t think people like Dan Boyd behind the glass and all the people who use Adobe products professionally are in any hurry to say, Oh, let’s just code something up and do it again. I think there’s more stickiness here than we think. It’s not a whole higher. I’m glad it’s now in the rearview mirror, and I am hopeful that just quarter to quarter, we can see the sky isn’t falling. If so, did I mention 11 times expected earnings?
Travis Hoium: Jon, I do think that valuation story is really important, but also the question for Adobe is more about what do their business model look like in the future. If you go back 15 years, that was really what the innovation of the outgoing CEO was, hey, we got to go from selling a box in Best Buy to this subscription as a service model that really turned around the company is a caretaker CEO the right choice in that environment where disruption could be on the horizon?
Jon Quast: We’ll see when Adobe reports earnings next week, but I’m suspicious that it’s the wrong move. The guy that they passed over is David Wadhwani. He is the guy who is in charge of Photoshop, Premier, Acrobat, Firefly, basically the things that generate most of Adobe’s revenue. I think what the market is reacting to today is he’s actually unexpectedly leaving the company, saying that this is a time for a fresh start, new opportunity. He said, this is a rare moment when technology changes, not just what we build, but how companies are built. To me, it sounds like there is somebody running out to vibe code up a competitive product, and I do have suspicions that Wadhwani is headed for an AI company to better compete with Adobe after being passed over.
Travis Hoium: Definitely one of the most fascinating companies to watch because when these AI products came out, it was those images that were really captivating that caught a lot of people’s attention. But like Lou said, a lot of people that use Adobe’s products are not going anywhere. Interesting place for Adobe to be in. When we come back, we’re going to look in our 10-year crystal ball. You’re listening to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing.
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Travis Hoium: Welcome back to Motley Fool Hidden Gems. In the segment, we like to have a little bit of fun. I wanted to look in our crystal ball. We’ve talked about a couple of big things that are happening in artificial intelligence, in autonomous vehicles. I want some 10 year predictions from Lou and Jon, and we can go through how we’re thinking about these things when we’re looking for investment opportunities because this is the time horizon that we like to look at as Foolish investors. Lou, which company is going to have the most autonomous miles driven per year, 10 years from now, 2036, Tesla, Waymo, or you can take the field, but you have to pick someone else if you’re going to take the field.
Lou Whiteman: I’m going to push back on something Jon said earlier. He was saying that he thinks that individual automakers are all going to have their own technology. I think that the long history, whether it’s technology or parts in the automotive industry, is that just normalize, commoditize, and move on.
Travis Hoium: That would be like the modular business model, for example, the level 1 solutions today. Most of those come from Mobileye.
Lou Whiteman: Something like that. Look, and I know this isn’t the same as wiper blades, but I think there’s just a long history of innovation turning into commoditization in this business, and I am not going to assume otherwise. I didn’t know I had to pick someone in the field. I was going to say the field for that way, but I don’t think it’s going to be Tesla. I think I would take Waymo over Tesla here. I think I’ll take the field. If you make me say GM, I’ll cringe, but just because they’re bigger, and I think they’ll stay bigger, yeah, something like whether it’s Mobileye or Nvidia or someone, I think that this is going to just be like right now everybody buys their turbochargers from the same place. Basically, one company. I think that 10 years from now, we’re going to have a similar situation with the technology inside the cars, too.
Travis Hoium: The idea here is that instead of each individual automaker developing autonomous driving technology, you have one company develop it and then sell it to everyone else. That’s the modular business model. A couple of names there. It would be Avride, WeRide. One of those is owned by Nebius, and one of them is publicly traded. I always get them mixed up, but there’s Pony AI. There’s a dozen or more companies that fall in that category. Jon, what do you think is going to be happening with autonomous vehicles 10 years from now?
Jon Quast: Assuming no regulatory burdens or barriers, I would say Tesla. I think that everyone listening is going to be like, this guy just loves Tesla. I don’t own Tesla stock. I don’t plan to buy any right now, but I do see the case here that they’re going to have the most autonomous miles because they’re the ones that can scale manufacturing to the Cybercab faster than competitors, in my view. I would say that 10 years hence, if there is a regulatory green light, then they’re the ones that are able to get it out there. Plus, they have the resources to potentially subsidize those vehicles, whereas maybe competitors don’t. We see that right now with AI companies. You’re not paying the true token costs; AI companies are subsidizing those to a degree to get you to adopt. I could see the same thing happening with Tesla, and I would see the incentive to do so.
Lou Whiteman: Can I break in, and I’m honestly curious what you guys think, a related question? Those miles, do we think that the Cybercabs or the autonomous vehicles are going to drive the most miles, or do we think it’s going to be individually owned vehicles in 10 years?
Travis Hoium: Just to that point, they basically had an inquiry yesterday, I think, a form that you could fill out saying, hey, I would like to be a fleet owner of cyber or something like that.
Lou Whiteman: In 10 years, do you think most people don’t have a car in the garage? I’ll say no on that in 10 years. That’s why I’m curious.
Jon Quast: I don’t want to give up my manual transmission, so I’m definitely going to keep the car in the garage, but it’s a great question, Lou. It’s a great framing. I don’t know what the majority of people are going to feel about that.
Lou Whiteman: I don’t either. Maybe eventually, but 10 years seems really short for me to think of the world changing that dramatically. We’ll see.
Travis Hoium: Here would be my prediction is I think, so we have me, my wife, three kids, and a dog. It’s probably unlikely that we give up all vehicles. But I would love to live in a world where we have one large vehicle, a large SUV or a van, whatever it is, for driving the family around, and then that’s it. If I need to get somewhere or if my kids need to get somewhere, there’s an autonomous vehicle that can just pick us up within a minute or two. That might mean that people still have vehicles in their garages, but there’s fewer of them. Well, we’ll see.
It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out, and there’s a lot of bets to be made, whether you’re looking at Tesla or a lot of other opportunities in the industry. Who is going to be building the best AI model? I’m talking about the frontier side of things. Is that going to be Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, or the field? Again, I’d like you to take somebody, but I don’t necessarily know who would be that player Nvidia, maybe, something like that in the field. But the idea here would be not everyone is going to be on that bleeding edge 10 years from now. Companies are going to eventually capitulate and tap out. Lou, who do you have winning this race?
Lou Whiteman: I have no clue, but I’m going to take you through my logic here and explain why I come to where I do. I don’t think most of the revenue is coming from the bleeding edge, as I said before. That makes me think that the best AI model, I don’t know who’s going to be around to fund it, if that’s what you’re focused on. I think the AI model providers in the future, are going to be the Googles and the Metas and the ones that have other businesses to support it. I don’t think both Anthropic and OpenAI are around as independent companies in 10 years. Maybe one of them and it’s hard to see.
Travis Hoium: You think they go public in the next year or so, and then they eventually get bought out either under distress or for some other reason?
Lou Whiteman: Or strategically, yeah. I just don’t think that there is going to be enough revenue for the bleeding-edge models for this to work as a standalone business. I’m guessing the dominant AI vendors are going to be if not the established companies we know now, but other companies as part of a more diversified business model instead of just a standalone science lab.
Jon Quast: Travis, I’m going to answer this. It’s going to sound like a cop out. It is not intended to be, but who’s building the best AI model 10 years from now irrelevant because honestly, I mean, as soon as you build the best AI model, someone’s coming along beside you with something just as good for these companies that are focused on this, really your lead.
Travis Hoium: Well, that’s where we are today, but it’s got to think that in the future, like, none of these companies are making a profit on building that leading edge model. Eventually some of them are going to tap out, but who’s going to be le like, trying to push that bleeding.
Jon Quast: Sure. I mean, yeah, I would say that Alphabet is definitely still in the mix. I would be not surprised if Meta was still in the mix. But which one of those two, if it’s a two-horse race, I mean, how much of a lead is either of them going to have? Not for very long, I would say. Now, that’s it. I do want to circle back to something that I didn’t mention here with the update of OpenAI’s GPT-6. There is something interesting about this new model. You’ve heard about DeepSeek and how it was able to basically make allegedly reportedly this incredible model on only a fraction of the compute power. What it allegedly did was distill from the frontier models to create what it had. Basically, it’s not training, it’s just looking at the reasoning that the AI is going through and then taking that and putting it into its own model. Apparently with GPT-6, what I’m seeing is that the chain of thought is not as easy to follow, so it may not be easy to distill that for these cheap models that are coming in and trying to take the share. That is something interesting to watch. It’ll probably be somebody building the best AI model who also is investing in the best compute.
Travis Hoium: That would be a logic for some of these current leaders to widen that lead by making it more difficult to distill things like that. How are we shopping in the future? The reason that I wanted to bring this up is I spent a lot of time thinking about where is Shopify going from here? Where’s Walmart going? Amazon? OpenAI is building these products. Some of the things that came out yesterday with the GPT-6 launch was just talking to the AI and going, make a reservation for me, buy this product for me. I’m not ready to do that yet, but Jon, when you look out 10 years, how are we shopping in the future? Is it similar to today? We have Walmart, Target, those companies still doing fine. Is it an incremental change from today? Amazon is doing fine. Or is it we are using AI? Maybe OpenAI is a winner, Shopify I think would be a winner in that world. How do you think about the future of shopping?
Jon Quast: That example from the launch video for OpenAI just shows me, like how different those people live compared to most people. I mean, to need a reservation for dinner, I mean, it’s just not something that hardly ever comes up in my life. But agentic commerce definitely is the future. I think that if you look at these Walmarts, these Amazons, Shopify I even like the website is not anything of a competitive distinctive anymore. All retail companies need a website. I think that all retail companies are going to integrate with agentic commerce systems. Then it becomes the other side of that. Your financial technology companies, the ones who are sending the agents to your platform. I think those are the ones to watch. Honestly, I would say that Coinbase is a dark horse here, the way that it is investing in agentic commerce. That’s a really interesting one to watch.
Lou Whiteman: Just funny, and again, not to sidetrack, but the whole make a reservation for you, the computer will do that. I just looked it up. Apple has been promising that since June of 2012 was the first time they did a demo on that, which again, yeah, so great. Wow, innovation. It’s great. We’re a decade into this innovation. How’s shopping going to work? I will say, and maybe I’m just being an old and maybe I’ll change it a time. But the idea of a bot helping me with search is very, very intriguing. The idea of a bot making the purchase and things just showing up and I get to find out what it got is dystopian to. That is the difference. My guess is that all of these demos, just like the Apple demo back in 2012 spoiler, look, guys, the demos always overstate it. It’s going to be 10 years from now is going to be some version of today with different tech tools to guide us.
I mean, look, the idea, if you would have told me 20 years ago that I could get on a computer and seamlessly search through thousands of products instead of having to just go see what they have at the local Target, that would sound like innovation to me, but it’s still all the same players plus a few more. I’m guessing it’s going to look the same thing. I think Shopify will have a huge part. I think Walmart will. I think Amazon will. OpenAI of the ones you said, I mean, maybe, but it’s just a different version of the same. It’s not going to be a dramatically different as the futurists and the demos might say.
Travis Hoium: I think what you’re hearing here from a theme from a lot of these things with artificial intelligence is it’s looking a lot more like a sustaining innovation than a disruptive innovation, which tells you that a lot of the existing players are going to be the winners in the future, so we’ll see.
Lou Whiteman: Well, just as a closing pot, I think as investors, this can be useful to go back, I mean, I don’t mean to dunk on Apple here. Apple has done amazing things, but to go back a decade, look at what was promised and look at how it turned out in reality and then try to use that filter on what’s being promised today. You don’t get kind of too ahead of yourself as an investor. I think that there’s logic there.
Travis Hoium: When we come back, we’re going to get to the stocks on our radar. You’re listening to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing.
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Before we get to stocks on our radar, I did want to touch on some of the retail news that came out. Jon, Lululemon reported earnings yesterday, not good. Sales were down. Same-store sales were down 5%. The stock is down almost 20% in trading today. What did you see there, is there a theme that we can see across retail and sporting goods right now?
Jon Quast: Well, Lululemon has a Lululemon problem, plain and simple, and the numbers back that up. According to the Census Bureau, clothing sales in 2026 are up nearly 6% compared to 2025. That’s actually a pretty big number. Now, you look at Dick’s Sporting Goods. It has a foot locker problem, not anything else. Again, the data backs us up. Sporting goods sales in the U.S. up 10% so far this year compared to last year. The consumer is spending, and this isn’t a case of consumers trading down from brand names to off-brands necessarily. You look at American Eagle, starting the year off with 10% growth, Abercrombie is riding a 15 consecutive quarter streak of growth. You look at something like Yeti, and I know this is way out of this range here, but Yeti is expecting seven to 8% growth this year, and that is definitely a high end of its market. It’s definitely a Lululemon problem. I think that if you look, it’s struggling in the Americas, not the rest of the world. To me, that says, I have a brand that’s recognizable enough to go global, but competitions coming in on my home turf and stealing share.
Lou Whiteman: Spot on. I mean, I think I’m not going to say that the consumer is healthy. I think there’s better ways to look at the data on that, but there’s a real danger in finding patterns in individual retailers. As Jon said, there’s others. Lulu has a real Lululemon problem. There’s a common theme here with Lulu and on and some of these. Hot retail is dangerous. Hot retail is hot until it isn’t, and you have to really call that right. You can make a lot more money on the trendy retail while it’s going up. It is a better investment than slow and steady. But when the air comes out of that balloon, it’s really hard to refill it.
Travis Hoium: So is this something where the way to play it as investors is just to stay away, Lou, or is there an opportunity here to buy some of these more value stocks? Because if consumers are spending, some of these companies are still growing, not every company is dropping 5% or losing customers the way that Nike is.
Lou Whiteman: Expectations matter. I mean, I don’t think Lulu is going away. It’s down almost single digits to earnings. It might be a TJ Maxx from here. I don’t think someone should buy in, saying it’s going to go back to where it was, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be a winning investment. My answer is to stay away, though, as retail fashion trends are really hard to get right.
Jon Quast: I will say, if you were looking for a chance with On Holdings, this is still a really good growth stock, but the valuation is now down 70%. If you were waiting for the air to come out of the balloon a little bit, I mean, this is a good business still growing nicely, and now it’s finally trading at a price that makes sense for a shoe stock.
Travis Hoium: I also got to take a look at Yeti. So thanks for bringing that one up. All right. Let’s get to stocks on our radar and bring in Dan Boyd for his thoughts behind the glass. Jon, you’re up first. What he got?
Jon Quast: I got Reddit in this ticker symbol RDDT. Listen, I’m not a huge fan of the social platform, but I do like the business. This is a platform where people go and they share information. They start little communities. For two years now, it’s maintained a growth rate over 60%. A couple of things are happening. There’s more users, and monetization is going up. Advertisers getting increasingly used to the platform. It’s Reddit Max product is automating ads, and actually, this product grew over 150% recently, so that’s a big deal. Higher revenue leading to higher profits. Operating cash flow more than doubling. The net margin here at 30%, that’s really good. No debt, great cash position, buying back shares, and now trades for only 20 times forward earnings. This is starting to look attractive here.
Travis Hoium: Dan, are you a Reddit user?
Dan Boyd: No, I am not. It’s just ads. This is the money that Reddit makes?
Travis Hoium: Well, they make money from Google paying them to get their data into artificial intelligence. If you do a Google search and you see those AI overviews, a lot of those are coming from Reddit.
Dan Boyd: Yeah, no, I don’t care about this company. One day.
Travis Hoium: Jon’s starting out behind the eight ball. Lou, what do you got for us this week?
Lou Whiteman: I’m still trying to lose, but I’m channeling old economy run here, Dan, so hopefully that works. Dan, I’m looking at CECO Environmental, C-E-C-O is the ticker. What do they do? They provide air quality, wastewater management, energy transition, all products to large corporate customers. These are big things. Thank air scrubbers for power plants. Also when we’re making EV batteries, all of the toxic wastewater and things like that, making sure it doesn’t get into the environment. Stocks up 50% over the last year, Dan. I think there’s still room to run. We know there’s growing demand for power and energy thanks to data centers. I mentioned the battery production, semiconductor manufacturing. They’re involved in a lot of red-hot markets. It’s not a value stock. They trade at almost 30 times earnings, but they have a $1.8 billion backlog, a clear path to three billion in annual orders compared to two billion now, and we’re getting towards 20% EBITDA margins, manufacturing at scale. I think this is a winner from here.
Travis Hoium: Dan, I didn’t have air scrubbers on my bingo card for the show today. But what do you think?
Dan Boyd: I feel like the regulatory environment is probably not great for this company at the moment, but that thing tends to be cyclical. I also like that this is a 60-year-old company who’s been listed for 40 years, Travis.
Travis Hoium: Make it official, what’s going on your watch list?
Dan Boyd: Oh, I’m not going on Reddit. Let’s go CECO.
Travis Hoium: Congratulations to Lou. For Lou Whiteman, Jon Quast, and Dan Boyd, behind the glass. I’m Travis Hoium. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you here tomorrow.
