August 2026 Mailbag: The Scores We Keep
In this episode of Motley Fool Rule Breaker Investing, Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner reads listener letters, including:
- A middle-school teacher wrestles with what happens when the measurements meant to improve education begin defining it instead.
- A father investing for his daughters wonders whether "Add Up, Don't Double Down" applies to index funds.
- Rule Breaker songs.
- Spiffy Pops shared between old friends.
- The Fool who originated Pet Perks returns with an audio reminder that some of life's most valuable moments can be hiding inside the everyday hassles we're tempted to hurry through.
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A full transcript is below.
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This podcast was recorded on Aug. 26, 2026.
David Gadner: For the past three weeks, Authors in August has handed the microphone to three remarkable thinkers and their books. This week, we hand it back to you because what good is a provocative idea if nobody provokes it back? What happens when a middle school teacher takes Thi Nguyen's warning about scorekeeping straight into his classroom? Can you add up to an index fund? What songs belong on the Rule Breakers soundtrack? Then near episode end, the fool who originated our Pet Perk series returns by audio with a favorite pet perk of his. One I suspect will raise a smile, have more than a few of you nodding along. Authors in August may be ending, but the conversation certainly isn't your reactions, your questions, your stories, your mailbag only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.
Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing, the month that was. Well, it was our ninth annual Authors in August. We had three authors, three special podcasts. Let's briefly review where we've been this month on August 5th. It was Thi Nguyen and his book, The Score. Our games philosopher, one of my favorite returning guests, Thi Nguyen, joined me to explore what happens when the scores and metrics meant to help us navigate life start quietly determining what we value.
The Score on August 5th, then on August 12th, I welcomed in a 40-year AI pioneer who helped us think about how to live and work alongside increasingly intelligent machines, when to trust them, when to question them, and how to make sure AI exercises our brains rather than making them lazy. It was Vasant Dhar and his wonderful book, Thinking With Machines. Then finally last week, August 19th, Dave Ulrich, The Why of Work. One of the world's leading thinkers on organizations and human capability joined me for a wide-ranging conversation about what makes work worth doing, and what decades spent studying people and workplaces have taught Dave about meaning, about leadership, and bringing out the best in others. Looking back now, what strikes me about this ninth Authors in August is how much these books ultimately ask of you and me, of us, the reader? Because none of them is simply dispensing knowledge to be absorbed, each, in its own way, challenges us to exercise judgment to recognize what we truly value (week No. 1) and to decide when technology deserves our trust (week No. 2).
Then last week, to think about why we spend our days doing what we do. These are books that hand responsibility back to you and me, to the reader. Maybe that's what made this such a rule-breaking authors in August. The future keeps arriving. There are more metrics, more machines, more systems designed to make decisions easier for us, and yet becoming smarter, happier, and richer has never meant outsourcing your judgment. It means developing it, knowing what you value, thinking for yourself, putting your time and talents toward things worth doing. That's not a bad three-part takeaway from three very different books. My thanks again to those authors for spending their time with you and me this August.
We have five mailbag items this month. Before we get started, just a quick minute about The Fool Community Foundation. This is such a passion project for me and for many other Fools. I'm chair of The Fool Community Foundation, and I want to mention something new that I want to put in front of you while classrooms are still getting settled in these few days and weeks. We're building something called the Freedometer. It's a free investing simulator for high schoolers, and it does one thing really well. It shows a 16-year-old what their life looks like if they start investing at 18 instead of 28. Most people don't skip investing on purpose; they just never picture themselves as the person who invests. We’re not building the Freedometer alone at The Fool Community Foundation; teachers around the country are testing it in their classrooms, telling us what doesn’t work, and helping us fix it. We're taking applications now for the next group of founding teachers. If you teach, or if you know a teacher who'd be great at this, send them to foolfoundation.org/teachers. That's foolfoundation.org/teachers. Thanks.
On to Rule Breaker Mailbag Item No. 1. Hi, David. My name is Matt, and I'm a middle school English teacher and board game lover living outside of Raleigh, North Carolina, and Matt has to insert this hurts me just a little bit as a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he has to insert “Go Pack.” But anyway, it's Matt's note. I have to honor it. My dad, he goes on, introduced me to The Fool as a preteen. The brokerage account he started for me would eventually fund my graduate school education. I am grateful to you and The Fool for the wise investing values and recommendations, and that's very you to say, Matt. I know we're both grateful to your dad, since he's the one who really made it happen, and that's awesome.
Matt goes on, I'm writing to say I thoroughly enjoyed your conversation with Thi Nguyen, which solidified my own musings on value capture in education. As I started teaching last summer, I quickly discovered the extent to which organizations gravitate toward what is quantifiable and what is observable from afar. I entered the discipline, excited to boost kids' sorely needed grammar, their spelling, their vocabulary skills, which seems to be atrophying, Matt writes, at an accelerated rate in the age of spell check and AI searches. Yet he goes on, these areas are entirely neglected in our curriculum because our end-of-year test is multiple-choice. Since the school and its teachers are evaluated exclusively on these scores, our administrators have understandably optimized for them. This results in a completely different educational experience than I or previous generations received, for better or for worse. Discussion with Nguyen about grade point average and law school rankings validated my experience and led me to the following conclusion. When we game the system for the sake of test scores, we drain more joy out of learning than we realize. Matt concludes we're lawmakers and administrators really trying to restrict creativity and increase student stress levels when they instituted these tests? Probably not, but the convenience of the pass-fail metric is too sweet to give up so we deal with the consequences. Fool on, Matt.
Well, first of all, Matt, thank you for writing in, and there's a lot to chew on there. There is a distance problem. You mentioned things that are quantifiable and what is observable from afar. That's a pretty terrific formulation. The farther away a decision maker gets from the classroom, let's say, it's the principal or the district, or the state legislature, it does seem to me the more necessary that a metric becomes because the metric is what travels, and that's obviously one of Thi Nguyen's key points and what you're reflecting back. What gets measured may become what gets taught. There's that old saw in business. If you can't measure it, you can't manage it, or what gets measured gets managed. I'm sure a lot of us have heard that line before. You're offering a darker corollary. What isn't measured may eventually stop getting done. Grammar, spelling, vocabulary. I hope not, but perhaps even curiosity, creativity, intellectual courage.
A beautiful question for all of us, occasioned by that thought, is this. What valuable thing in your own work or life, dear listener, are you neglecting simply because nobody is keeping score of it? Let me go on, Matt, to say, the good news here is you are in the room. Yes, you, as their teacher, can see the things the standardized test cannot. I don't think your job is to rebel against the man, rebel against the scoreboard. Your students do need to do well on that test, as you know, your school reasonably cares whether they do, but I do think you're close enough to see what the test can't see. Maybe part of the calling of a great teacher is to honor both, to prepare kids to succeed on the score that somebody else has created, but quietly keep your own richer scoreboard of what an educated young person is becoming.
I'm thinking about business. A CEO sees the big picture like employee turnover statistics. But then at a lower level, a good manager knows why Sarah is thinking about leaving. The statistic can tell somebody something's happening across 10,000 employees, but the person close to the work can tell what it means. I don't think either should replace the other. In fact, Dave Ulrich last week gave us a related idea. He said, organizations ultimately depend upon leaders understanding what actually motivates individual people, not merely the aggregate workforce. Here's one more beautiful question I'm going to give you, Matt, and you can ask it of yourself. What are the three things that you hope your students leave your classroom with that will never appear on their standardized test? If you're able to answer that question and then arrange a process, a framework, some time, or even some metrics toward your own goals for those students, that is a powerful way to supplement with what really matters to you, what your students are learning in the classroom.
I realize a lot of teachers feel pressure to teach directly to the test, describe the world as time-strapped, and they have a hard time just covering the material that will be the subject of the test. But I hope all teachers, hearing me in a sense- we're all teachers, aren't we, might ask ourselves that question again. What are the things that I hope my students leave my classroom with, my kids leave my family with that will never appear on the standardized metrics and tests in the world at large? Something to think about.
Before we move on to Rule Breaker Mailbag Item No. 2, I have to read Matt's postscript because this is the gamer portion of the note. As a gamer, I have to reflect this. Matt, thank you. He closed out by saying, Well, I'm here. I can't help but pass along a game recommendation. As a fellow Stratamatic baseball childhood devotee. That means, Matt, both you and I have played a lot of Stratamatic dice baseball in our youth, you go on to say, There's a game called Dead Ball baseball with dice that, in Matt's opinion, is the ultimate, customizable tabletop baseball simulation experience. He goes on to say he's created an entire fictional league with the game, which has provided hundreds of hours of joy. That makes me smile, Matt. You also mentioned, Matt, you've designed a card game of your own. It's called Insurgent Algeria. It's published by Catastrophe Games. You mentioned it tackles an understudied or underappreciated Cold War conflict with a simple ruleset you put into the game. You close by saying it would be an unbelievable full-circle moment if it appeared on Games, Games, Games.
Let me just say, Matt, I love that full-circle ambition, and congratulations on designing and publishing your own game. That is awesome. Insurgent Algeria probably won't make the Games, Games, Games podcast this year, just because for that annual podcast, as you might know, I generally need games that have reached really broad distribution, so it needs to be easily clickable and findable with dozens of copies on Amazon. It turns out people listen to these podcasts, and they actually go out and buy the games. We have to have fairly widely distributed games. I will say, though, that yours, at an earlier smaller stage, having looked at it on BoardGameGeek, I see the people who have played it have rated it very highly. I'm happy to give it a plug right here, one gamer to another Matt. Thank you for your note. Keep up the great work.
As a gamer, certainly, but even more as a teacher. This one comes from Logan, Logan Callanan Attebery. Logan, thank you for this. Hi, David, thanks for writing the Rulebreaker Investing book. I'm about halfway through it. Logan writes, and already, it's a top five investment book for me. Thank you so much, Logan. You go on to say, I read about 20 or so a year, so I'm especially flattered, and you are way out reading me out there. Keep up the great work. Logan goes on, I am wrestling with something. Chapter 2 created a lot of friction for me internally. But ultimately, I believe you are right in this add up concept.
Now, I'm going to pause it right there and briefly explain Add Up for new listeners or people who haven't come across Rule Breaker Investing. Habit No. 2 for the Rule Breaker Investor, which is Chapter 2, as well, is entitled Add Up, Don't Double Down. My intent with that is to get stock market investors, when it's time to add new money, money that you've saved, and you're thinking maybe I won't buy a new stock, maybe I'll add to one of my existing position, one or more of my existing holdings, which ones should I add to? In my experience, most people tend to add to the ones that have not done very well. They think about rebalancing, or they think if I liked it at 20, I should really like it at 12. A lot of people, in my experience, put money toward the ones that aren't doing well, and so they double down, as the phrase goes. I, of course, believe as a Rule Breaker, especially for Rule Breaker stocks. Doubling down can make sense in other contexts, but this is Rule Breaker Investing, and I think I've always been much better rewarded by adding up by looking at the ones that are doing well, reminding myself of the answer to the timeless question. What do winners do? The answer is winners win.
Logan, as you encountered Chapter 2, you found yourself somewhat challenged by this because perhaps, like many worldwide, you had been adding to the ones that had been going down. Logan goes on, then, I have been doing the opposite. I have been doubling down for a decade. It has been a course correction to be sure. Would you or your team share your perspective on the scenario I present you with? I know it's different than what you emphasized, but curious if this concept transfers to the index fund space. Logan goes on. We've been investing in custodial accounts for our two daughters, and my strategy has been to use various indices through our bank, Schwab. Logan lays out SCHG. Well, all of the tickers start with SCH, because they're all Schwab funds. There's G, B, D, and Y. Some of those, for example, are large-cap growth, or the B is broad market. The other two are about dividend payers, both domestic. That's the D and international, which is the Y.
Anyway, Logan says, monthly, I have been investing new money into whichever of those four is the lowest amount. Based on the Add Up, the mental model applied to indexing, I guess I should add to the biggest historic gainer, which Logan mentions happens to be SCHG, the Large-Cap Growth index fund. Would you apply that principle to this account and strategy, as well? The money, of course, is mostly long-term in purpose, maybe for a car purchase or home down the road, and ideally, it sits and grows for decades as they head into the workforce. No pressure on this, and of course, we won't take any of this personal financial advice. Just made me think as we were doing some long-term thinking and knew you would have an interesting perspective.
On a side note, we do invest in individual equities for our portfolios. We have some fun successes. Over the past few years, Logan cites Cisco Systems as one example, getting more and more comfortable with individual stocks as a larger percentage of our assets. Thanks for what you do, signed Logan Callanan Attebery.
Well, let me start by saying, Logan, great job saving. Great job establishing those custodial accounts for your daughters, playing the long game for them, letting that money compound over time. I and my siblings were so greatly benefited by parents who did exactly the same thing, so congratulations. It's not always easy to do. At different points, it may be harder to save. A lot of us have a hard enough time saving for ourselves, let alone for our kids, so congratulations. Now, you're asking whether Habit No. 2, which I invented to speak to investors about individual stocks, whether that is appropriate for index fund investing, and let me just first talk about individual stocks. I particularly find Habit No. 2, add up, don't double down, very helpful for individual stocks, and that's because to me price appreciation isn't just a stock going up, it's actually information. It's telling you, it's showing the market's reaction to the company you're now a part-owner of. As prices appreciate, what the market is saying is, "We see you. We're watching you, Company. We like what you're doing. We like your profits. We like your prospects. We appreciate your stock, and therefore your stock appreciates." That is basically how the stock market works.
So price appreciation is information, and when I'm given that information and I have new money, you can see why I prefer to add up, because price drops are similarly information as well. While there are cyclical stocks that rise and fall and rise and fall, and other types of stocks, you know that I'm focused on Rule Breakers, the ones that I hope go lower left to upper right over time, that go up over time. Price appreciation is information, and the reason I invented the habit, or have abided by it ever since my father said to me when I was 18, "David, don't throw good money," that would be your new savings, "after bad." In other words, don't add to your losers. Add to your winners. What we're doing with that habit is we're counteracting the human tendency. I would say the majority of us probably have to think when we see something that's gone up, "I guess it's already gone up too much. I shouldn't add money to that one."
Again, while that can be true of some stocks, for Rule Breakers, I think it's generally the opposite of true, and why it's such an important habit for me. Now, let's go to the main point you're asking about, and that's mutual funds. Does this work for mutual funds? When you have four Schwab index funds to choose from, you mentioned you've been adding to the one with the lowest amount when you have new money each month. By the way, I'm wondering why you would add to the one with the lowest amount of money. I guess that's a form of rebalancing. But I would think with your mutual funds, you might have a goal or a strategy. Maybe it's to equally balance 25% in each of those four different funds for the overall account, or maybe you're trying to put more toward growth and not as much toward dividends.
So the first thing I would check is do I have an overall strategy of allocation? Why have I picked those four funds? There's a lot of overlap, by the way, from some of those funds. I think between the large-cap growth and the broader market index fund, you're double-holding big companies like Apple or Nvidia, which is not, by the way, a bad thing. But it does remind me as well that for a lot of mutual funds, the ones that are market-cap-weighted, you should also realize that when a big company, let's say Amazon or Microsoft, when these companies rise in value, they actually start to weight the fund toward those companies. If you're still with me on this, in a way, your fund manager is adding more to the winners as they become larger and larger allocations within that fund. In practice, in part, what's happening with those index funds is they are adding to the winners, or the winners are becoming larger portions individual stocks within that fund.
I guess I would just close by saying I don't think there's any right or wrong answer here. I'm glad you asked the question. I do want to say back that I really think of this habit as applying for individual stocks, and I wanted to make sure you knew the why behind the habit, not just what the habit is but why I think that way. We form habits most of the time so that we start to mechanically do better things if they're good habits than we would have if we weren't in the habit. But I also want to say that habits are just habits. It doesn't mean they're rules. It doesn't mean you blindly follow them all the time. It means you use your own judgment, you look at nuance, and you realize there are exceptions sometimes to the rules. I want to close by saying that was a wonderful non-answer to your question, and it's because I don't think the question has a definitive answer. It's more that I wanted to provide you thinking around the answer to help you, I hope, arrive at your own best answer. I want to close out by saying thanks a lot for writing in and for your kind words about my book. In fact, I hope you'll share that book someday with those daughters of yours, and thank you for writing in. Fool on, Logan.
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David Gardner: On to Rule Breaker Mailbag Item Number 3. Now, on last month's mailbag, one of our longtime correspondents started helping us build out a Rule Breaker-inspired Spotify song list, and Ken in Springville, Utah, brings some serious moxie as he makes more contributions to our Rule Breaker Spotify song list. "Hi, David. During your July 29th Rule Breaker Investing episode, you included some suggestions for a Rule Breaker playlist which caused the wheels in my head to start turning. Here are some further suggestions broken down into RBI-related subcategories. Please feel free to use as little or as much of this list as desired. I've been a Fool for many years, listening and enjoying your podcast every week. Keep up the great work. Fool on, from Ken."
Thank you, Ken in Springville, Utah. Now, I counted it. Ken has 39 tracks, and they're broken down very thoughtfully. They're curated into little Rule Breaker-y categories. I am not going to share all 39 here, but I am going to share nine along with the categories Ken puts them in, and my talented producer, Bart, will be including the full list in the show notes for this week's podcast. If you find yourself wanting to build up even more Rule Breaker tunes and surround yourself with your AirPods or your headphones, or just out there in nature, if you just want to make it ring, you want to make it sing, Ken in Springfield, Utah, has our back. Here are nine examples of songs he would add to your Rule Breaker Spotify playlist.
For brand-new investors, “Don't Be Afraid” by Boston. “Go Your Own Way” by Fleetwood Mac. For watching investments compound and grow, he includes among three others, sure, “Celebration” by Kool & The Gang. For spiffy-pops, Ken has six songs in mind. I'll just call out “Can't Help Falling in Love” by Elvis Presley. For paying our capital gains taxes, Ken has just one. That would be “Don't Fear The Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult. Let me see. A few others here. Selling stocks, Neil Sedaka, “Breaking Up is Hard to Do.” For the inevitable market downturns, Ken suggests, he's got seven different songs in this list. I'll just call out “I'm Still Standing” by Elton John. When deciding to buy a new stock, “How Will I Know” by Whitney Houston. Two more. How about before you figure out your Sleep Number, She & Him. Now, I needed Bart, my much more knowledgeable producer about music, to explain to me that Zooey Deschanel is the She in She & Him, and while She & Him have done a few, I think it's holiday albums, “If You Can't Sleep” might not be on one of those. Maybe one of their more obscure hits. But for Rule Breakers, for people trying to figure out our Sleep Number, “If You Can't Sleep” by She & Him. The last one I'll call out just for overall optimism, for our optimistic Rule Breaker attitude, Ringo Starr, “Life Is Good.”
Again, all 39 songs broken down into 16 different categories are yours if you just click into this week's show notes. Let me also mention Ken was not humble bragging. He was not hotdogging it when he said this, but he did include it in his note that he had pulled these songs just from the letter A-M portion of his iTunes song collection. So there's probably a lot more out there than just these. We've ignored the N to Zs. Ken, thank you so much for the fun, and Fool on.
On to Mailbag Item Number 4. Andrew Gibson writing in, "David, I received a phone call from a dear friend of mine who's been retired now for about a year. We used to talk about your podcast when we were on the railroad together. On this most recent phone call, we started talking about the stock market for a while, and he noticed that Palantir had increased 29% that very day, which was more than our original purchase price two years ago. We both bought in using the principles," Andrew writes, "that I learned from you over the years. I exclaimed, 'We have a spiffy-pop, Blake.' He asked, 'What?' I replied, 'You didn't read David's book that I bought you, did you?' He laughed it off. He'd been caught. Long story short, he shared his history of stock picking, which began 32 years ago. He jokingly said that he would've been better off if he'd listened to Fools a little more carefully, and maybe The Fool a lot sooner as well. We discussed notable winners. We quickly realized that the Motley Fool picks and Rule Breaker picks were the most successful. I asked him if I could share the news with you, and he said, 'Sure. Tell David thank you.' Seems like a lot of the thank yous go unsaid, so I'll make sure they reach you, my friend. Cheers to you and spiffy-pops. Fool on, Andrew Gibson."
Well, Andrew, thank you. By the way, never met you, but Blake, thank you too. I love the image of two friends who used to talk investing together on the railroad, now one of you retired, still talking stocks, and suddenly realizing, "Wait. Wait a minute. That stock just went up more today than we originally paid for it." That is my favorite term probably in my Rule Breaker Investing book. It's right there in the glossary as well. Ten pages I really enjoyed writing at the end of that book. That's what spiffy-pops were invented to celebrate, when you make more money in a single day than you originally paid for that stock. Andrew, you're right. A lot of the thanks in this world, I think we can all recognize, do go unsaid. So I appreciate you taking the trouble to pass Blake's along. I'm delighted we played some small part in your investing journeys, and even more delighted that the two of you are still sharing the journey with each other. Thanks so much for writing in, Andrew and Blake. Fool on.
Let's move on to Item Number 5. Thank you for taking the time to submit this voicemail bag. Let's roll it.
Ben Adams: Hi, David. It's Ben Adams here, U.K. Fool, and I hope you don't mind me saying co-creator of the Pet Perks podcast idea. I've decided to contact you with an idea for what I consider to be a pet perk in my own life. I've given this some thought, and I've decided to nominate the school run, and I feel like I'm going to need to explain this immediately because as anyone who has ever done the school run knows, in that moment while you're doing it, it's an absolute nightmare. It's incredibly stressful to get the kids up and out the door on time, and the traffic's always chaos. But I know that one day my children won't need me to do that school run with them, and I know that I will be able to look back and be glad that I was able to do that when they did need me. I know that I will look back on that time with my kids, and ultimately, I will miss it. Thanks, David. Let me know what you think.
David Gardner: Well, first of all, Ben, I really love your point, which I'll speak to in a sec, but I want to thank you because I'm doing this week's podcast from London. My wife, Margaret, and I are here in London just before going to Dublin, where I speak at Investicon, which is a wonderful conference of lots of Foolish Rule Breaker-y Irish investors that I'm delighted to speak at a little bit later this week. But I got a chance to spend a couple of hours together with Ben Adams because I reached out to him as he was the progenitor, he is the inventor of the idea that this podcast should have an episodic series called Pet Perks. Longtime listeners know I've done any number of pet peeves episodes. Ben, some years ago, said, "Well, what about the opposite of pet peeves, David? What about pet perks, the little things we should appreciate that make life better?" Ben, thank you for this submission. It's a reminder to all listeners, if you would enjoy dropping an audio file our way, we love that. Audio mailbag, we did it once last month. We're doing it once this month as well.
But beyond this submission, Ben, what a lovely time it was getting to know you and your world a little bit better. Thank you, friend. Some thoughts back. First one is that scarcity creates value in this world. I think we understand that instinctively. As investors, we recognize that if there's only a few of something, it's probably more valuable than if there are tons of that thing. But I think we're often not as good recognizing that in life experiences and in time and the ways we live our lives. It's easy to look at a hard good and say, "There's only a few of that left. It must be quite valuable." But that school run that you're talking about, while it feels during those years infinitely recurring, a Groundhog Day moment, day in and day out for parents and kids, stressed, getting them dressed, fed, and off to school, turns out it's not infinitely recurring because one morning it suddenly isn't. I think this hits home for a lot of us, and we don't always recognize the value of some of life's greatest assets until they're no longer available to us, and one day, without much ceremony, you make that school run for the last time. Ben, maybe the Rule Breaker-y thought here is simply to recognize what I might call the spiffy-pops of life while they're still happening, and that's exactly what your pet perk does.
The ordinary Tuesday morning, the same route, the same kids in the passenger seat, the conversation that may seem completely forgettable, and someday you'd give almost anything to have one more of them. Ben, thank you again for reminding us that a pet perk doesn't have to make life easier. Sometimes it's just simply getting to be there that is the perk itself. Thank you as well for your vision to suggest we have pet perks on this podcast. I've done a few of them. I'm sure we'll do a few more. Most of all, Ben, thank you, and Fool on.
With that, another Authors in August and another mailbag is in the books. My thanks once again to Thi Nguyen, Vasant Dhar, and Dave Ulrich for giving us a lot to think about this month, and to our correspondents this week, Matt, Logan, Ken, Andrew, Ben, and everyone else who keeps the thinking going by writing in or sounding in, challenging an idea, sharing a story, recommending a game or a song, or simply just noticing something worth noticing. The authors supply the books, but you, my fellow Fools, help turn those ideas into a conversation, and better still, into lives actually lived. Thank you for another wonderful August together. Let's bring on September. Fool on.
Charles Schwab is an advertising partner of Motley Fool Money. David Gardner has positions in Amazon, Apple, and Palantir Technologies. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon, Apple, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Palantir Technologies. The Motley Fool recommends Charles Schwab and recommends the following options: short September 2026 $95 calls on Charles Schwab. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
