Author: Mihali

Do you already know and understand the boring title of today’s blog? If so, pass Go and (Monopoly-style) collect $200. In other words, you’re outta here. See you tomorrow.

If you don’t… this blog’s for you.

Market caps are the real price tags of companies. The math is simple. You multiply two numbers:

Market capitalization = Share Price x Total Number of Shares Outstanding

Most people only focus on share prices. Like Meta Platforms today, they see: “$752.” But that’s just one multiplicand! How many shares of ownership exist? (Look it up at Fool.com: $META has 2.51 billion shares*.)

Ready to do your first market cap?

$752 x 2,510,000,000 = $1.89 trillion

Meta Platforms, the former Facebook, is a trillion-dollar company. And now you know why. It’s as simple as realizing that every pie slice is a certain size (e.g., “752”), but what’s critical is: How many slices are there? This is where novices fall down. They don’t even know to ask.

Market cap gives you a quick read on every company’s size. You may see two stocks trading at $752 a share, but one may have a $1 trillion market cap, the other just $1 billion. Most people only see the $752, not recognizing that one of the companies has 1,000 times more shares and is thus 1,000 times larger than the other. They’ve never learned market capitalization.

Indeed, when investing greenhorns see “$752,” they’ll often think “too expensive” and opt instead to buy some penny stock trading at 75.2 cents. That’s the number one reason people buy crummy stocks, because they supposedly look “cheap.” Only looking at the share price and thinking “buy low,” they spend their precious savings on junk.

I favor Rule Breakers with a market cap sweet spot of $5B-$25B. They’re still small enough to have big growth ahead, but big enough to actually realize that growth! I would so rather buy a $100 billion market cap, than a $100 million one.

So now you know, please know, your market caps!

(Help yourself out; come join us and play The Market Cap Game Show.)

*All numbers are as of August 26, 2025.

Having spun 57 full revolutions around our sun, I believe I am now sufficiently experienced to reflect on…

… Education.

I received it. I have paid for it. I have watched it, and provided it. Let’s talk about it:

Education.

What we are teaching our children. What we may not be teaching our children.

From our earliest day starting The Motley Fool, it was evident that our key focus — Investing & Money — was even more important because of the dearth of education on these key lifetime topics.

Why aren’t Investing & Money consistently taught or made compulsory at any level, nationwide? Feels outrageous. A huge miss. Very few topics seem more important for our whole lives as well as the prosperity and health of our families and our society than Investing & Money.

“Why do we not teach this to our kids?!” we asked as part of our Fool Community Foundation research. We studied that. We now know:

Because not enough teachers feel sufficiently educated and competent on the subject to teach it.

That is what we’ve learned: We’re not preparing our kids for financial success in their lives because, in essence, we adults don’t ourselves understand this…

Ouch!

Fortunately, there are many ways to self-educate about every Investing & Money topic under the sun. You could use our free resources at Fool.com, you could just Google any term you’re unfamiliar with, you could page around Wikipedia or Investopedia, you could have a chat with ChatGPT. And these are just the free stuff. There are premium experiences around any topic — from picking a better credit card to doing your will — that are very helpful and in some cases entirely necessary. Not the kind of thing you’d ask a school to teach.

In my follow-up to today’s blog, I want to move from Financial Education (my focus today) to a list of a dozen or so other topics that absolutely should be taught in school… but don’t seem to be. Let’s call it not School, but The Un-School.

What topics not taught today in schools should be? What’s the curriculum for The Un- School?

I recently wrote on Why Investing & Money Are Undertaught, closing with a Beautiful Question: “What topics not taught today in schools should be?”

What’s the curriculum for “The Un-School”?

Now:

I’m very interested in what you think belongs on this list — anything I’m missing? Let me know!

The distinction between what kids should learn outside of schools vs. what they should learn in the classroom is subjective. I’m not “blaming” schools. I’m encouraging new thinking, in particular with a focus on the eminently practical…

Each topic could be “plugged in” once a year for one month, and therefore could be covered in full from ages 8-18, which is how they are roughly ordered. (The Un-School could also be done as a “Jan Plan” or summer experience.)

I’m confident that any single one of my 10 topics would, on its own, seriously strengthen our kids’ personal, and the global, future. But fully unleashed, The Un- School revolutionizes education and human flourishing. “That was the most important part of my schooling” will, I predict, be the primary reflection of these students when they later reflect back as adults.

Here you go:

• Nutrition (age 8): Understand how what we eat drives our physical health.
• Mental Fitness (9): Study positive intelligence and looking on the bright side.
• Character (10): Provide or invite some core values, and go in depth on each.
• Money (11): Saving and spending.
• Innovation & Technology (12): Integrate smartphones, social media, AI, etc. into your life appropriately.
• Investing (13): The power of compounding.
• Psychology (14): Covering the most important cognitive biases.
• Leadership (15): We are all potential leaders, but how?
• Parenting (16): Such an important and undertaught topic! And at an important age…
• Success (17-18): This is of course very subjective and very eminently worthy of reflection! So invite presentations from successful adults in diverse fields. Most of all, as our kids graduate and become adults, we want them to succeed. Help them see how.

No large public school system likely can take “risk” at scale launching compulsory Un- Schooling.

I leave it to the edge cases, and the dreamers. Let’s talk.

Fool HQ once had a summer investing intern named Igor. Igor was a very talented Russian American who brought along his own investing smarts. I wish every 19-to-20-year-old was as thoughtful, as energized, and as wise beyond his years about money.

I asked him, “How’d you get started, Igor?”

“I had a mentor who got me started investing. He was a guy a year ahead of me at college… The funny thing is, he’s no longer investing!”

His friend had exhibited two distinctive tendencies with his investing, Igor conveyed: The first was he loved to find very early, so-called “development-stage companies.” These are companies that not only don’t have profits, but in some cases they don’t even have revenues. His friend’s passion about these kinds of companies had inspired him to teach others — like Igor — about investing.

The second was he loved to go almost all in when he invested. He was a so-called focused investor. He had very few companies. When he found something that he liked and he believed in, he would pile what you and I might think of as an alarmingly high percentage of his money into those few ideas.

I replied, “I’m not surprised that your mentor is no longer still in the game.”

Play that approach forward a bit — that system — and it doesn’t take too long to see what happens. Highly focused development-stage investors might get it right a few times… but when they get it wrong, they lose a lot of money. And when they’re specifically targeting early-stage, development-stage companies, it’s highly likely that a few of those aren’t going to play out so very well. Which means: They’re no longer investing.

Which is a shame! Because you have to love the passion. Young people are so advantaged in that the wealth they’re building will compound their whole lives long.

Picture a four-quadrant matrix where the vertical Y axis labeled “Company” goes from “development-stage” to “mature.” The X axis, labeled “Investor” goes from “all-in” to “diversified.”

Where is Igor’s mentor plotted?

Ah, but now we’re talking STYLE-BOXING. That deserves its own blog.

So, back to that 2×2 style-box explicated in the story of Igor’s friend: Its Y axis (labeled “Company”) goes upward from “development-stage” to “mature,” and its X axis (labeled “Investor”) goes rightward from “focused” to “diversified”…

Igor’s friend was a “focused investor” investing in “development-stage companies,” otherwise known as a recipe for disaster. There are other choices in that matrix. For instance, there’s a ton of money in big index funds today that track indices like the S&P 500. Those are obviously “diversified” investors — highly so — concentrating their capital in “mature” companies. That’s the very opposite of the matrix from Igor’s friend. On the other hand, venture capitalists invest in development-stage (or at least, earlier-stage) companies, but they diversify. That’s the box I identify with.

But that’s just one type of style-box.

You can invent your own. Morningstar did, and became a billion-dollar enterprise, in part, because of that. Famously, Morningstar created a 3×3 matrix for stock funds, gauging the size of market cap on one axis (small, midsize, large) and what it terms a fund’s “investment style” on the other (“value,” “blend,” or “growth”). While I often inveigh against “value vs. growth,” we certainly can’t argue with the overall helpfulness of Morningstar’s innovation. It’s ubiquitous, and has made the whole complicated world of investment choices a lot more intelligible.

As I say, you can invent your own style box. An entire industry of business consultants has done it, and the cliché is that often you want to be in the upper-right box, “the good one.” The Myers-Briggs women did it, building an industry of their own premised on 16 personality types.

And in my own way I have done it too, a simple 2×2 matrix that explains simply and clearly what makes the Rule Breaker investing approach tick, and why it wins. Creating simple style boxes is a worthy and illuminating exercise! So put on your Morningstar; summon your inner Myers-Briggs. And tune in next time for the secret style box of Rule Breaker Investing!

(Any guesses, dear reader, as to how my two axes are labeled?)

Rule Breaker Investing is about the unknown. You’re trying to piece together where the future is headed. The future is unknowable! Thus, by definition you’re making stuff up. You’re imagining, later hoping. It’s fundamentally more art than science… more poetry, than rationalism.

Now, I love both art and science. I hope you do too. People who only orient toward one are missing half the picture. We need to integrate these things, and see each for what it is:

Art is rooted in the unknown. Artists can perhaps copy forms — follow someone else’s map, if you will. But they are ultimately judged and valued by their ability to navigate us to new places.

Science is rooted in the known. You are still trying to discover, but in a completely different way: Asking the best questions we can, we gather what data we see, and form hypotheses.

G.K. Chesterton had this right. In his book Orthodoxy, Chesterton sided with art. He wrote, “The poet [here, artist] only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician [here, scientist] who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”

The logician investor seeks precision: numbers, searchable data. The numerical. A very left-brain approach to investing. These are the people who screen for stocks, who use numerical parameters. Maybe algorithmic-driven.

That’s not what we’re doing at Rule Breaker Investing. We’re looking CEOs in the eye. We’re looking the future in the eye as best we can — as best we can piece it together — and we know we’re going to get it wrong a substantial amount of the time. Again, if you have your math right, you’re never wrong. But even if you have your art right, you can still be wildly wrong.

So yes, for me, this unknown quality feels more like art, with its concomitant risks. We’re splashing paint on a canvas, as opposed to coolly, even coldly, pushing an abacus.

Ultimately, the greatest investors see and integrate both.

But most present-day investors that I encounter need more art. They’re only intending science.