March 2026 Mailbag: Habits, Hacks & “Boom”

In this episode of Rule Breaker Investing, we explore the following topics:

• Listeners who tracked the data on our Market Cap Game Show strategies
• A thoughtful challenge from Professor Jason Corso on whether Rule Breaker Investing is built on habits, recipes, or something closer to an algorithm,
• A clever Google News hack that lets you see the world through another country’s headlines
• A “Bam!” vs. “Boom!” breakdown of locker room acoustics.
• Does the Snap Test apply… beyond stocks?

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 Mar 25, 2026.

David Gardner: What do you do after the madness is over? Well, college basketball fans in the United States of America don’t have to ask that question yet, but Rule Breaker Investing fans, especially your host this week, I’m left a little bit wondering, what’s next? I had so much fun now with two-time Market Cap Game Show world champion Emily Flippen and her competitors this month. I hope you did, too, and yet a few of you still wrote in. We’ve got a mailbag. It’s the March 2026 mailbag only on this week’s Rule Breaker Investing.

Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. What a month it was. That final World Championship last week, spoiler alert if you haven’t listened to it yet. The big news is not a spoiler. Emily won. Emily won very handily. She is very good at the Market Cap Game Show, and it’s always a delight for to be around and witnessing people who are very good at the things they’re good at. Emily Flippen is good at a number of things that I’m aware of, and one of them is the Market Cap Game Show. I hope it’s not really a spoiler to say, if you’re planning on listening and you hadn’t yet, that Emily will win the game.

But the main purpose of the game, as I think we all know by now, is for each of us to learn and get better seeing the big picture of the stock market. My favorite way to boil down a big stock market into little pictures is to study the market caps, the market capitalizations of the companies that make up the market. It’s fascinating to me to note, for example, that Marriott International is about six times larger than Hyatt Hotels. One wouldn’t necessarily know that unless one looked at the stock market. It’s also interesting to me to note Airbnb is almost as large as Marriott International right now. That’s something you can hold in your back pocket as an investor. You can pull it out of your back pocket at a corporate offsite. Quiz your friends. Bar bet. Market caps are great for that. They’re also a really fun way of addressing the market at large. The market very volatile over the course of March. It was fun just to be talking about individual stocks that make up that market with Andy Cross, Lauren Hurst, Bill Barker, and Emily Flippen. Thank you for joining with us.

I always spend a little time at the start of each monthly mailbag saying what was the month that was going through the podcasts and what we explored together. There’s no need to do that this time. We had three consecutive Market Cap game shows. We do that every March. That’s what we do on this podcast. If you love the show, I hope you do, you’ll have to wait till late June.

That’s the next time we bring back our game show at the end of June, September, and December, and then we make March March Market Cap Madness. Thanks for being part of it this March. I like to go to hot takes from TwitterX to kick off every mailbag. I’ll just go with one this month from Matt Hard. Long-time fellow. Fool Matt is $307fool on Twitter. Matt wrote, this is right about this time last month. What a spiffy day for Axon Enterprise Ticker symbol AXON up more today than the first time I bought shares after hearing about the company on Rule Breaker Investing in April of 2020. Matt says, special thanks to April the Giraffe, right there, he’s calling out that it was a five-stock sampler. It was Five Stocks for April, the Giraffe. I won’t go into explaining why it was called that. Long-time listeners will know the inside joke there. But anyway, Matt, you listened that day, and you bought Axon Enterprise, and that makes me really happy to hear. Matt closes his tweet by saying, and I’ve added ownership many times at higher prices over the last six years. Isn’t that a beautiful demonstration of Rule Breaker Investing? First of all, finding a Rule Breaker, finding a company that meets my six traits in the first place or most of the six traits, and then adding up over the course of time, not being afraid to think, wait, if I paid $17 for that stock or $37, I shouldn’t pay $47, should I? I had it back at $17. A lot of us fail to add to winners over the course of time. Not to say you’ve made a mistake if that ends up being a big winner. Anyway, what a wonderful buy you made in the first place, but I really appreciate Matt’s approach, and for many of us, as fellow Rulebreakers, adding up to the stocks that are winning for us over time, for me, anyway, has accelerated my market beating returns. Matt, good on you, thank you for sharing that.

Let’s move on now. We’ve got five items for this month’s Rule Breaker Investing Mailbag. Item Number 1. _Rule Breaker Investing _Mailbag item Number 1. This one from Rich Kaplan. Rich, thanks for writing back and helping close the loop with your No, Dear David, I’ve diligently listened to all this year’s March Market Cap Madness game show podcasts. During the championship game between Emily and Lauren, you referenced that previously someone had suggested the strategy of just disagreeing to the contestants stated market cap. I, Rich Kaplan writes, I had made that recommendation based on a gut feeling, having listened to many Market Cap game show episodes over the years I never actually kept track. I did so this time.

Let me pause it right there and say, first of all, thank you, Rich. I couldn’t remember who it was, who had written in. I definitely remembered your note and your point. It was very relevant to the month of March for this podcast, so I did reference it. I’m going to talk about that more in a second. But I really love that you let me know that you came back to close the loop. Here comes the second and final paragraph of Rich’s mailbag note. “The results surprised and disappointed me. My previous suggestion to just disagree with the contestants’ stated market cap range did not end up making the expected difference. Three contests, 24 questions where agree or disagree were the options. The results were disagree, correct, 13, agree, correct, 11.” Basically, Rich concludes a coin flip. Best Rich Kaplan. Again, Rich, thank you so much for the idea in the first place, and then for keeping stats over the course of March and then reporting back at the end and helping us all become a little bit smarter, happier, and richer. In this case, I’ll say, for me, anyway, smarter and happier. I’m happy that the game isn’t broken or easily seen through by a mental trick that you are presenting here.

Let me just say a few things in response. First of all, I love that you care. Thank you very much for listening in to all three shows, and thank you, especially for keeping the data. I was not keeping that side track. We don’t have any advanced analytics as they do in basketball or baseball these days, so I’m benefiting from the hard work of somebody else, and I love that you kept that data. You were net net, right. Disagree did win more often than not, 13 out of 24 times. But as you point out, that’s not that much different from a coin flip, and probably that doesn’t a winning strategy make. I also don’t want any mea culpa from you because I love that you were thinking about in the first place and it’s also important to point out. I tried to make light of this last week, back to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which reminds us that the act of observing something can change the nature of that thing itself. Let’s put it out there, Rich, when you first wrote in some months ago you put it out there, and I’m pretty sure some of our contestants were already thinking about your theory that to disagree wins more often than not. You changed the nature of the experiment simply by wondering out loud via this podcast, whether that was the right strategy. Second, as I think you probably heard, just before the World Championship last week, I had that conversation with our contestants. We were all conscious of that. It’s likely there were a few wider than regular market cap ranges put forward under this notion, Rich Kaplan’s notion that it’s generally smarter to disagree.

Let’s be really clear. We affected, you affected. I did, too, the experiment itself and that in no way takes away from your initial theory. Then finally, I just want to ask you back. This can be rhetorical for now, Rich. This also goes out to everybody listening, especially if you listen to one or more episodes this month and played along with us. Do you see any ways that we can improve the Market Cap Game Show? The game itself has improved by adapting to good suggestions made by people over time. Sometimes it’s not a change in the game rules, but just how the episode might be presented. Perhaps the MC himself could do a better job in some way, shape, or form. I remain very open as always to people writing in and letting me know how to do it better. It is a true joy to bring a game show to this podcast several times a year, and we’ve now done over 30 of them. I think we’ve gotten generally better over time, but I’m asking you, especially you, Rich Kaplan, since you spent three good solid hours listening to the Market Cap Game Show this month, are there ways you think I could do a better job before we get the band back together and jump started again in late June of this year? [email protected] is our email address. Anybody who’s appearing on our mailbag this month already knows that. New listeners, you should know we always have an open email box inviting your thoughts, [email protected]. Thanks, Rich.

On to Rule Breaker Mailbag item Number 2. This one’s also a return engagement. Because back in October of last year, we heard from Jason Corso. Jason is the Toyota Professor of AI at the University of Michigan. I suppose I should say, Go Wolverines because we’re still in March. It’s still pretty mad, and that’s a pretty darn good basketball team. I’m not even sure you’re a basketball fan, Jason, but you are a professor at the University of Michigan, so go Wolverines. But you wrote in back then. It was a really thoughtful question. I went back and listened to it again. It was about one of my six habits of the Rule Breaker investors, specifically habit Number 2, which is add up don’t double down. Jason’s point, I think this is worth revisiting was that while the habit makes sense directionally, add up don’t double down, there are many different ways to implement it, and those different implementations could lead to very different outcomes is what Jason Corso was suggesting last October.

In other words, he wasn’t necessarily questioning the habit, he was questioning the precision behind it. How do you actually do this in practice? I remember responding at the time by saying, I’m going to paraphrase myself here that this is not meant to be a rules-based system. That’s not what Rule Breaker Investing is at its heart. After all, it’s Rule Breaker Investing. It’s not a rules-based system. These are habits, not requirements. When you’re in those gray areas, it’s less about the stocks recent movement add don’t double down. It’s less about the stock’s recent movement. I was saying more about whether the business itself is becoming more of a Rule Breaker or less.

That was the exchange five months ago, and now Jason is back and he opens this follow-up note this month with a line I really appreciate. “I’ve learned you’re a stickler for precision in language. I love it, and let me challenge you a bit.” I’m going to say back right at the start here, Jason, challenge accepted, and thank you, because what he’s now asking, I’m going to quote him briefly here. "Is whether what I’m offering as habits are really enough, or whether what he’s actually looking for are something more like recipes. This is his word, recipes or even also in his words, full out algorithms. That’s where we’re going to pick his note up.

For this week, Jason writes, let’s look at the denotations of some key words. He’s using Oxford Languages via Google search. We’re going to talk right now about habit recipe and algorithms. Put on your gesture shaped thinking caps, fellow fools because we’re about to do a little bit of a deeper dive into language. Ultimately, I hope tricking out a really important point. Jason, first of all, defines habit this way, a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that’s hard to give up. That’s habit. Next, he contrasts that with recipe. The recipe is a set of instructions for preparing a particular dish, including a list of the ingredients required, something which is likely to lead to a particular outcome. That’s the definition he gives of recipe. Also via Google Search, here’s his definition for algorithm.

Again, contrasting algorithm with recipe and habit. He defines algorithm, a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem solving operations, especially by a computer." Jason has three points to take up, and this is probably the most substantive mailbag item this week and I do think it’s worth I hope you’ll feel the same way this little bit of a deeper dive. Well, Jason, you introduced three points, having laid down our definitions. The first you write, although I call the principles of my method habits, you think some are more like recipes. Again, a recipe, a set of instructions for preparing something versus that habit, which is a settled or regular tendency or practice. Jason, you write, there must be more recipes you’ve accumulated. You do point to in your note, which I’m not reading in full, you point to how I’ll sometimes say, well, add up, don’t double down, but what does up mean? It means has the stock been up over the last six years? Do I mean up that way or just over the last six months?

I think in my response some months ago, I said, I tend to look at the nearer term performance. You’re pointing out even there, that feels more like a set of instructions than a settled or regular tendency or practice. I guess I want to say back to your point Number 1, that I’m going to reinvoke the Curse of the Black Pearl here, specifically Barbaros’ classic line, which I know I referenced in my book, Rule Breaker Investing, which is the code is more like what you’d call guidelines than actual rules. That classic line from Barbosa reminds us of one of the keys to Rule Breaker Investing. We are definitely not algorithms. By your definition, this is not a process or set of rules. While I do have instructions that are a little bit different sometimes from the habits that I propose, I do think that Rule Breaker Investing is more about guidelines than actual rules.

That speaks to your second question, where you basically say, is an algorithm in this space even feasible? Jason says, I’d probably argue that if an algorithm existed for Rule Breaker Investing, it would have been discovered and depending on the individual, it would either have been protected like gold or shared openly and broadly. I obviously took the latter approach. Jason says, I imagine, however, your gut has the algorithm, your brain has a mix of the recipes and the habits. To that, I just want to say a brief thought on algorithms or rules, people who proceed by rules as they make their way through their investment lives. I think algorithms, if they actually work, if computers can automatically trade inside of a second sometimes, or if somebody can program a computer to beat the market, it’s very likely that gets arbitraged away over time. It’s like our previous mailbag point, where if somebody points out that the way to win the Market Cap Game Show is to disagree more often than not, once everybody hears that and knows that, that approach gets in my words, arbitraged away. I would also say recipes can degrade over time. But the reason I favor habits, just to reassert why I think the book is written that way, I think habits endure because they shape our judgment. We’re not trying to eliminate judgment like we do when we’re just giving AI or computers a bunch of rules. We’re not trying to eliminate judgment. We’re trying to train our judgment, and maybe the best training of all is to recognize when we should adapt and when we should just stay grounded. Stay the course.

There are obviously reasons we want to change how we’re thinking about investing at different points. There are also benefits to stay grounded in the things that we believe. What I’m really trying to do with Rule Breaker Investing, whether it’s this answer on this podcast or the book, Rule Breaker Investing is I’m trying to help my readers and my listeners come to that golden mean where on the one hand, they understand the time tested principles which I want to be habits for you and for me. I want them to be habits. Yet, sometimes we need to evolve and adapt them based on present circumstances or what’s likely to work going forward. This might be one of my shaggiest dog meandering answers I’ve ever given to a Rule Breaker Investing Mailbag item, but I feel like you put your finger on something really important.

What are we talking about when we talk about rules and breaking the rules? I appreciate the language you brought of habits, versus recipes, versus algorithms. I’ve tried to do justice to those things. I like all of them. I like recipes in life, and if we can find computer algorithms that help us do things better, I’m a big fan of those, but I do believe in the end that the choice of the word habit, which is a settled or regular tendency or practice. It doesn’t mean rigidly you always do the same thing every time, but it does mean that I want most of us as Rule Breaker investors to really internalize those six approaches that I lay out in Part 1 of the book, the one we’re talking about this week, once again, is add, don’t double down. I’ve already used that earlier in a different context. I’ve already talked about the benefits of going opposite the crowd in responding to Matt Hard’s hot take from Twitter. I’ve underlined, I’ve lionized his decision to add to Axon Enterprise over time. I think that is very Rule Breakery. I think it goes against most people’s instincts, so I want us to make that a habit, and I think we’ll be better investors when it is a habit. I absolutely want to add that I do think sometimes you can’t just be guided by a habit. You have to think about the recipe or algorithm underneath.

An example you gave was when you asked me, should we add to a stock that’s up over several years, or is it more like several months? I said in my own answer months ago, and I still would agree with it. It tends to be over the last several months, but we’re looking more at the business than we are the stock, especially if it’s ambiguous. Finally, third, Jason, I want to appreciate your point here about H-index, which is a concept some of us will know. Many won’t we’re all going to know it in just a few sentences. Third, at The Fool, do you all have a notion of H-index? Jason, of course, again, a professor at the University of Michigan writes in academic writing, the H-index is a popular, although often debated measure of one’s so called impact. It’s calculated as the number of papers one individual has published that have been cited at least that number of times.

To give an example, if author X has published 50 papers, and 20 of those have each been cited at least 20 times then author X’s H-index is 20. I’ll just extend that example. For instance, if you and I had written 50 academic papers ourselves, but so far we’d had six of our papers cited six or more times our H-index would just be six. That’s the concept of H-index, which is a fun thing to think about. Jason goes on to connect that to stocks in the Motley Fool. He says, I would imagine those who love numbers like you would construct a similar measure about stock recommendations. Let’s call that an F index. I want to know the respective F indices for fool recommenders for obvious reasons. He signs his note: Best, Jason. Well, let me speak to that briefly. You know, as an inveterate board gamer, who loves the app BG Stats. That’s downloadable on the App Store. If you’re a gamer, it enables you to record the file scores of games you’re playing, who you played them with, where you played them. It’s basically a database you can create if you want to track your own gaming. People do this with their health. That’s probably healthier. I do it with board games. But anyway, the BG Stats app has this kind of index for our play of games. If over a given year you have played three of your games three or more times, then your H-index as a gamer is three, and sure enough, that’s exactly the term the BG Stats app uses. I can see that my own H-index for my board games in 2025 was nine. That means I played nine of my games nine or more times. I did not, though, manage to play 10 of my games 10 or more times.

Speaking to your ideas around The Motley Fool and stock picking, I will say for Fool One members, and people who use our premium rankings, you can find various stocks of the services that you’re tracking, and one of the columns we have in the database we have for our members is the number of times that stock has been recommended. We’re not actually creating an F index per se, but I can see, for example, Tesla has been recommended by various Fool services 73 times over history, whereas The New York Times has been recommended 10 times. There’s probably an F index that one could derive from that. I’m not sure it would be the best approach. I’m not sure the stocks that we recommend the most are the best ones. It would be interesting to test that out scientifically. But let me just say, as one nonacademic to somebody of high academic standing, that’s the best I got for you. Jason Corso, I really want to thank for taking the time to write in, provide some important definitions that give us a framework for our thinking and help me think better about how I think and how we all invest, Jason Fool on.

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David Gardner: On to Rule Breaker Mailbag Gem Number 3 of five this week. This one from Jeff Coshell. Thank you, Jeff. I learned a new trick today and thought it might be interesting to other fools, too, Jeff writes. Maybe it’s even interesting enough for a future Mental tips, tricks, and Life hacks Episode. I’m going to pause it right there for a sec. You’re reminding me of one of our favorite episodic series for this podcast. It is Mental Tips, tricks and Life Hacks. I was checking. We haven’t done one of those, a new one since 2024. It’s been more than a year. I commit thanks to your note in this mailbag, Jeff, that we’re going to have a mental tips, tricks and Life hacks episode in April of this year, just a week or two away. It’s time to get back to one of my favorite long-running episodic series.

Anyway, here is one submitted by a listener, in this case, Jeff Coshell. Jeff goes on the Google News Homepage. Is localized to your home country. I think I knew that. I many of us know that. By the way, I use Google News a lot. I’m sure I’m not the only one this week. Jeff goes on the CE ID Parameter. That’s the country Edition ID, CEID is part of the mechanism that implements that localization. When you direct your browser to newsgoogle.com, you may be directed to a URL that shows the country edition ID for your locale, and sure enough, having tested this out myself, yes, that’s what I see. I’m a US reader, and I’m reading in English, so I see a US EN CEID on my Google News. Jeff goes on. It’s interesting to see what tops the Google News page when it’s localized for your market, but in other countries. Jeff goes on to giving specific instructions about how to do this. I’m going to summarize those in a second. But I’m just going to cut it off right there. First of all, thank Jeff for what is a good mental tip trick or a life hack, I might say, in this case, trick. You can trick your browser to think that you are from India, if you’re from the US or vice versa. That you’re reading English. But you’re going to see how Google presents news to people in India reading in English, rather than for those of us in the US who are reading in English. Now, I’m not a news junkie myself. Jeff, I suspect you’re more of a news junkie than I am. We have some people listening right now who really love the news.

This trick for your browser is worth diving into. I can imagine this might spark a good thesis or maybe essay for students or people who are interested in studying different cultures and how we all see the same news from different angles, different parts of the proverbial elephant. Jeff closes his note with very specific instructions around URLs and how to type in codes, but I’m just going to say it this way. Any fellow fool listener who’s interested in checking this out and who didn’t know how to do this before, I found you can use this search term on Google to find a link to give you all of the country edition ID codes and all that you’d ever need to if you want to swap in different countries or different languages to see how Google News presents the news there. Just search this term on Google. Search API. That would be one word Search API, Google News portal CID. If you type in that search string, search API. Google News portal CE ID. You will see and find full instructions for how to test and learn for those interested. Thank you, Jeff. It’s a motley array of mailbag items this month.

Let’s move on to Mailbag Item Number 4. This one from a guy I Mike. We don’t know each other, Rick, K, but you, too, may be increasingly the getting older, get off my lawn guy that I’m hoping not to turn into, but I might be, since I love to do pet peeves podcasts, and we did one last month, Pet Peeves Volume 9, Rick. Thank you for writing in. You wrote. As with your irritation, David, with overloud and the unnecessary closing of overhead compartments by riders of the Acela train, in my local gym, Rick writes, Lifetime Fitness, there’s constant slamming sounds of locker doors by conservatively, 50-75% of members using the locker room. The doors close with a noticeable bam if pushed and allowed to close on their own, but with members forcefully closing the doors, Rick lets us know the bam turns into a boom. No accident that this sound doesn’t seem to bother anyone, as most members wear earbuds or headphones to listen to their smartphones and to disassociate themselves with the immediate environment. With the acceptance of loud talking, while they converse with another person on their smartphones, while nearby members can’t help but hear them, such external sounds have become acceptable, and the notion of respecting the use of public space is your problem, not theirs.

A little cranky there, Rick. Nice. Yes, he closes this tone deafness is just symptomatic of the disassociation so many have by being plugged in almost all the time. I see members swimming with earbuds on. I see smartphones in use in the hot tub and the sauna. People seemingly cannot set aside 10 minutes just to be with their own thoughts, let alone joining others in their space in communal conversation and contact signed Rick K. Well, Rick, first of all, let me say back, bam to boom is excellent taxonomy. That is real field research on your part. That’s a man who’s spent time in the lab. Yes, I think you’ve identified something broader than just locker doors or in my own cranky case, a ella compartments. We’re living in a world where sound is increasingly optional if you’ve opted out of it. If I’ve got my airpods in, well, your boom is no longer our problem. Well, it’s not my problem, and my boom, I might not even be noticing.

Maybe the closing thought here is this, Let’s all try to be a little more aware of the shared spaces we’re in. Not perfect. I know I’m not. Just maybe a little less boom or even a little less bam. If all else fails, we can always invest in you with me here, Rick, quieter lock hinges, whether we’re talking about the cela or lifetime fitness, quieter lock hinges, which now that I say that out loud, that might be the next rule breaker stock.

Finally, this month, Rule Breaker Mailbag Item Number 5, short and sweet from Paul Dent, thank you for this, Paul, David. I’m sure I’m not the only one saying this, but you passed the Snap test. Can’t live without my weekly Rule Breaker podcast Fool on Paul Dent. Well, let me say closing, Paul. I know you can live and any other fellow human who might share such foolish sentiments. Even if you’re a big fan of this podcast, I know you can live without a weekly Rule Breaker podcast. But I want to thank you for listening, and I thank you, Paul, for writing in. Thanks for letting me be part of your week, my producer Bart Shannon and I, and a motley cast of Fools, whether they’re in-house employees or authors in August, may conspire to bring you what we do here every week, and I’m deeply grateful for it myself. But most of all, for those who listen, and you mentioned the Snap test. Not everybody will recognize that reference. Let me just explain it here to close. The Snap test is something I devised in the 1990s and first wrote about in our book Rulebreakers, Rulemakers in 1998. I basically said, and I repeat this in my book Rule Breaker Investing from a few months ago. I basically say, if you were to snap your fingers, Snap and the company that you’re researching, the stock you’re looking at, Snap disappeared.

Overnight, as you snapped, would anyone notice, would anyone care? It’s really fun to think that something I dreamt up in the 1990s, such a simple way of thinking about investing feels just as relevant today in the 2020s. Not only that, but some Disney history has happened in the meantime. I recounted this briefly in my book Rule Breaker Investing. I’ll just excerpt that now here to close because there’s a little bit of extra Foolish fun to the snap test and what’s happened with it in the meantime. I’m quoting here from Chapter 4 of my book, and I quote as a lifetime stock picker, I do better when I listen for that snap, when I respect what the test teaches us. In short, by companies that if they disappeared overnight, tons of people would notice and many would care, those are the stocks that will do best in our portfolios over long periods. I had no idea when I first wrote up the SNAP test that in 2018, Disney would release Avengers: Infinity War with a real-world snap that seared this concept into our collective memory, the villain Thanos. Do you remember this spoiler alert, having obtained the six Infinity stones snaps his fingers at the movie’s cliffhanger conclusion and disintegrates half of all life in the universe. Ironically, I had picked Marvel stock for Motley Fool Stock Advisor, partly using the snap test, and that was June 7, 2002. More Happy Irony. Disney snapped up Marvel, seven years later, making my $1.78 split adjusted cost for Disney stock, a huge winner still holding. When Thanos snapped, for the whole world to see, he echoed something I’d conveyed 20 years earlier, which led many investors to the stock that spawned him. Snap.