Tyler Crowe

Welcome to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing.

I'm your host, Tyler Crowe, and today I'm joined by longtime Fool contributors, Lou Whiteman and Matt Frankel.

We're going to be getting into short sellers, specifically short selling research firms after the court decision that came down on Citron Research earlier yesterday.

We're also going to look at investor questions related to real estate on the private side, not necessarily REITs that we normally talk about on a publicly traded entity show.

But first, we're going to start with Dollar General.

And I wanted to bring this one up specifically because it's been like a turnaround story for several years.

It's not the most headline-grabbing company, but during the 2010s, Dollar General was one of the best-performing stocks.

It handily beat the S&P 500.

Companies that we think of now, like Mag7 companies, like Microsoft and Alphabet, Dollar General was beating it.

That kind of came to a crashing halt right around 2022 as some trouble started to pile up for various reasons.

And the company's been trying to get its act together for a while now.

And today, this morning, it just reported earnings and the numbers said they beat expectations and raised guidance.

And yet the stock is down about almost 3% as we're taping this.

So Matt, was this a good result or was it just kind of beating bad expectations for what is now kind of a downtrodden stock?

I feel like the three of us have been in the same experience here for a while, where I've been to a few value investing conferences over the past few years.

And I think I've heard so many dollar general pitches at these value investing conferences.

I feel like I could set my watch to it and almost do the whole pitch by memory now.

It all had struck the exact same chords.

It was like,

Former CEO Todd Vezos is now back in charge again after that 2020-2010 kind of run-up, and he's the one in charge again.