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Even artificial intelligence, as with every other innovation in history, can become overvalued, right? I think AI is going to create things we never thought possible. Illnesses and disease solved. So many complex things that we haven't been able to figure out in human history, we will actually be able to figure out with AI. But there will also be so much competition.
That was Motley Fool co-founder and CEO Tom Gardner. I'm Motley Fool producer Matt Greer. Now, we caught up with Tom in September for our second quarterly call. Tom talked about the current stock market. He talked about what investors should do about it. And he shared five investment ideas. Enjoy.
Tom Gardner, co-founder and CEO of The Motley Fool. And my goal in our conversation today in The Quarterly Call is to make it worthwhile to have a notebook and a pen and to give you some ideas that you can actually reflect on and use in your portfolio. I'd like to start by reminding us what we talked about in episode one of The Quarterly Call, which is let's not be speculative.
We pretty much should not do this at any point in the market cycle. But in the late stages of a market cycle where we've had a great bull run, I mean, the S&P 500 is up essentially 35% since 2008. mid-April. And that's an unbelievable rate of return over a handful of months.
So this is a time to take stock of where we are with our portfolio and make sure that we're not reaching in a speculative way to try and pull forward returns. If you're going to be speculative, you're going to be aggressive, you're going to be bold. Let's do that at the market bottom. when everyone's scared, then you can start to add risks in, right? Because you're getting better prices.
This is not the time to increase your risk. It's time to reduce your risk. And we mentioned in that first call that options, very risky the way many retail investors use them, right? Leverage, margin debt, nearing all-time highs, not a good idea. We also talked about low-priced stocks under $10 a share. Not a good idea for most investors.
Occasionally, you might find a great company with a share price down below $10 a share, but for most people, no, let's not do that. And then finally, I'm going to add to the category of speculation that we see happening in the US and around the world is a lot of sports betting. And start using your GPT to prompt away and really look at the odds of sports betting.
If you're going to do it, it should be a light entertainment. And for most people, it's better to just stay away from it altogether. Enjoy the sport for what it is, right? But obviously, some people get into trouble in sports betting. You just have to put that warning out there that it's not a way to build your financial future. So we want to move speculation offline.
you know, the menu right now. There are times to go for it. This is not one of those times. It's clear that we're at richer valuations in the market today. And that means we should be taking a pause and making sure that we're ready should the market decline. There are a number of factors to look at when we look at the stock market's valuation today. It's worth taking some time.
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