Is the Temu Hype Warranted?

In this podcast, Motley Fool analyst Bill Mann and host Ricky Mulvey discuss:

• Expectations going into Nvidia's earnings results. This podcast was recorded before the report.
• Temu's owner, PDD, shedding $55 billion in value.
• One possible reason why a co-CEO is talking down his company's stock.
• Red Lobster's new CEO.

Then, Motley Fool retirement expert Robert Brokamp interviews Dan Otter and Scott Dauenhauer about the challenges that teachers face while saving for retirement.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our beginner's guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.

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This video was recorded on August 27, 2024.

Ricky Mulvey: Today's news is cancelled, Nvidia reports tomorrow. You're listening to Motley Fool Money. I'm Ricky Mulvey, joined today by Bill Mann. Bill, I need to kill some time. Not a lot to talk about. What have you been up to these past couple of weeks?

Bill Mann: Is that how we start? We're just going to start drawing things out. We can turn this into a clip show.

Ricky Mulvey: There you go. I could show you some cool articles I've been reading and some different tweets and memes, if you like. But no, that seems to be what the market is waiting on, which is Nvidia and CrowdStrike, more so Nvidia. We're going to be covering Nvidia and CrowdStrike on Thursday's show. But Nvidia is really driving the market right now. I thought I'd be good to get some mindset ready because this is just expectations. What are some scenarios that investors should be ready for, you think on Wednesday afternoon?

Bill Mann: I like the fact that you're setting up Nvidia, a 3 trillion Dollar company as a vibe stock.

Ricky Mulvey: Is it?

Bill Mann: Well, let's put some structure around what Nvidia is and what it does. Not that this is a particularly useful measure in terms of assessing an investment, but in the S&P 500, which oddly enough has 505 different stocks in it, Nvidia is only the 42nd largest company by revenue. Its revenues are less than a quarter of those of a company called Cencora, which I guarantee has never been brought up in this show, which is the 205th largest company in the S&P by market cap. Nvidia is the dominant provider of the chips that are needed to operate artificial intelligence, and that's prompted massive buying of its products at high prices and big profit margins. It's a great success story. In terms of multiples of earnings, it isn't all that expensive. But they do have a relatively small revenue base, and they sell products worth a huge ticket price, and their customers are in an arms race, and so they have an incentive to hoard in support of an industry that has done nothing so far but incinerate capital.

Ricky Mulvey: Chip makers or chip designers incinerate capital.

Bill Mann: I'm talking about AI. It's 6% of the total stock market by valuation. Its four largest companies. Its customers are Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon. Everything that Nvidia sells, some other company within the S&P 500 is buying. I don't want to paint a terrifying picture, but it is fairly unprecedented. In fact, by fairly unprecedented, I mean absolutely unprecedented that a company has gone from being one of the largest companies in the world and 10X in a year. Yeah, there's a lot writing on the report for Nvidia tomorrow, but underneath what is writing on it, there's not a whole lot of there from a commerce perspective.

Ricky Mulvey: Maybe it is vibes. That's what we got back to. I think there are a few things that could happen. One is that Nvidia has the best house on the block with its Blackwell chips, and sales continue to boom beyond analysts' expectations and the party keeps going. Then there's another side of this, which you mentioned. AI is incinerating capital. CFOs may be wondering, hey, when are we getting some of that return on our spend? Expectations change a little bit for Nvidia, and then the market maybe catches a cold. My point with this is that I'm not making a prediction. I'm not going out here on CNBC, Bill Mann, and saying, this is my unique perspective on Nvidia. [laughs] But I think there are multiple scenarios in which things go really well. Things go poorly, at least in the short term, and I think it's good for investors to be ready for both of those. John Auther is pointing out in his Bloomberg column, basically, "Since ChatGPT launched in November of 2022, Nvidia's market cap has risen by more than $3 trillion." There is no precedent for a company rising so quickly to become this much of a weight in the S&P 500. Do you think this is meaningful when we think about the life cycle of companies? There's the Jimmy Cliff song, The Harder They Come, The Harder They Fall. There's a part of my brain that thinks that has to be true. With this quick rise, do you expect a shorter life cycle for a company like Nvidia?

Bill Mann: I don't. A lot of people have tied in an equivalence of Nvidia with what Cisco was in the early 2000s when it was basically the equipment maker for the stars. Every company that wanted to be on the Internet, or part of the surfing the worldwide web needed to have Cisco equipment. I think that that is somewhat true of Nvidia today. What we're talking about here is that the overall influence on the stock market from Nvidia's report tomorrow comes from a relatively teeny slice of revenues. It's not a huge part of the US economy. It's not a huge part of the global economy, but it's being painted as it's going to be incredibly important. Just like you, I happen to think it is, and it will be, but I don't think that it will develop in the same way or in the same speed in which people think, and you're already seeing from its largest customers, the hyperscalers, questions being asked by their shareholders about why they're spending so much money.

Ricky Mulvey: Let's move on to the owner of Temu. Pinduoduo, had a rough day. The Chinese e-commerce firm, it's an agricultural SaaS platform, which I didn't know. It shed $55 billion in market cap or 29% of the company. Take your pick. This has to do with the sales outlook. For Temu when we're talking about it, are we talking about an e-commerce platform? Are we talking about software for farmers? What are we talking about, Bill?

Bill Mann: Soybeans as a service, I think maybe that's what their SaaS stands for. Pinduoduo, and the company is now called PDD, and it's actually organized in Dublin, but it is in all ways a Chinese and Chinese-dominated company. It's a multinational commerce group. But Temu, which advertises everywhere, the memes that have come out about where Temu ads have shown up are absolutely legendary. Pinduoduo has been, I guess, what you might describe over the last 3-5 years as the Chinese success story as Alibaba has taken a step back, and jd.com has taken a step back. Temu is by far the largest component of it. Their earnings report was great. Their revenue grew 86%, their operating profit grew 156%, but they couldn't get out of their own ways to talk about the ways in which the company was going to struggle over the next year or so.

Ricky Mulvey: The word of the call was inevitable in terms of struggling and competition. I don't know if co CEO, Lee Chan, recently watched Avengers end game, but I was getting some Thanos vibes, "As shown in this quarter's results, high revenue growth is not sustainable and a downward trend in profitability inevitable." You usually think of CEOs in terms of, are things really as bright as this CEO is painting? But in this case it's, man, things is really this bad for Temu. What's going on, Bill?

Bill Mann: I'm trying to think whether inevitable is a word that you ever want to hear in an earnings call. Something is being inflicted upon us. If we can get into the conspiracy theory part of the show.

Ricky Mulvey: Let's go.

Bill Mann: I think, in some ways, Lee Chan and the managers at Pinduoduo are a little bit worried about walking the same path that Alibaba walked a few years ago, and Jack Ma, who came off seeming maybe a little bit too powerful within the context of the People's Republic of China. I think in some ways, that they were maybe laying the path that this is still a company that is struggling a little bit, in which case, they have managed to talk down their stock an extraordinary amount. It's now actually it's cheaper than JD.com or Alibaba on a price to earnings basis. Pretty extraordinary for a company that's grown that fast. Now, let's step back from the conspiracy theory just a moment, this is not to say that they are not telling the truth about the inevitability of slowing of revenues.

Ricky Mulvey: There were some writers talking about how, this says, something about the economy in China, which is consumer spending, tightening up a little bit. Normally, when we see consumer spending slowing in the United States for a company like, I'll use TJ Maxx, which is, for the purposes of this discussion, I'm using as a comp fill, but it's a treasure hunt and a bargain. Now, shopping at TJ Maxx, lovely experience. Shopping on the Temu website is one of the most frustrating things you can do on the Internet. Treasure hunt, bargain shopping. Does this say anything about the economy. In China, you think is there a macro story worth looking at here?

Bill Mann: I'm not sure that I would put a whole lot of weight on the quarterly results or the quarterly comments, because after all, 86% more people went through the frustration of dealing with the Temu website this quarter than they did the same quarter a year ago. But we know for a fact that the Chinese growth story is broken at this point. There are huge issues in China. I think what we're seeing from Pinduoduo now is they're taking market share from other competitors.

Ricky Mulvey: I have a conspiracy theory that Temu is actually just run by a cat, because a lot of the products on there, Bill, is just like small, shiny things that don't seem to be effective, but are like, good at capturing someone's attention.

Bill Mann: Well, they certainly captured your attention, which may be the point. You may be being tracked by them in a very bizarre way, and I have no questions.

Ricky Mulvey: I can't even see the best sellers on Temu without giving them my email address and doing a puzzle piece. They want me to do a puzzle piece and give them personal information to just see what's selling on your website. Cool. Let's go to Red Lobster.

Bill Mann: There are so many questions. [laughs]

Ricky Mulvey: This is the story I actually want to talk to you about, which is that Red Lobster has a new CEO. Damola Adamolekun is previously the leader of PF Changs. He's now the sixth CEO of Red Lobster since 2020. First CEO in a while without Tai Union there. First, let's set the table. What is Mr. Adamolekun walking into at Red Lobster's the new leader?

Bill Mann: Well, he's walking into a really fantastic brand that has lost a bunch of shine over the last couple of years. We have talked and we've joked a little bit about how the endless shrimp deal tanked Red Lobster. It bears remembering that over the year prior to Red Lobster going bankrupt, their guest count was down 30%. There are a myriad problems at Red Lobster. They've just announced the closing of 23 additional stores, including one in Peoria, Illinois. Next time you're in Peoria, you're going to have to look for someplace else to get your cheddar biscuits. I think ultimately, when you have a brand that still resonates that the way that Red Lobster does, you do have the potential to hit the reset button a little bit. They have announced to get back to the endless shrimp, that that's not what they're doing anymore. They have a new value shrimp strategy. But yeah, he's got his work cut out for him from an operating standpoint as well.

Ricky Mulvey: Yeah, there's a lot of debt on the Red Lobster balance sheet, also a lot of sale lease backs, where they're going to sell the land in which the restaurant is located and then just pay rent forever, which gets some cash onto the balance sheet. I think of it as a move that gives you a little bit of oxygen if you're in that crisis. But the new owner for Red Lobster is a company called Fortress Credit, which is a private equity outfit, Got Red Lobster in a deal around $375 million. This was the only bidder for the company. When you look at the difficulty here of the turnaround story, what is the bet that these investors are making?

Bill Mann: They have a dent and scratch asset on their hands. This is not a company that is a long term owner of Red Lobster. I would almost guarantee, they're going to try and get it shined up, get some of those dents removed, maybe roll back the odometer a little bit and try and sell a stabilized company. I say that by virtue of the magic word within the middle of that name, which was credit. Credit companies and credit investors are not operators. They are looking at this as a way of taking an asset that they were able to get at pennies on the dollar and turning it to more pennies on the dollar, and then having someone else over the long term operate Red Lobster, because keep in mind, it is still a very, very hard environment for casual restaurants to operate. This is a hard operating environment. That's not what they are looking for. They are looking to flip this asset.

Ricky Mulvey: Found some cigar butts with the seafood.

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Ricky Mulvey: Bill Mann, I appreciate you being here. Thank you for your time here inside.

Bill Mann: Thanks so much, Ricky.

Ricky Mulvey: Up next, some financial advice for teachers as we get the new school year started. Dan Otter is the founder of 403bwise.org, a not-for-profit website dedicated to educating teachers about retirement plans. Scott Dauenhauer is a certified financial planner and the author of Wild West, providing fiduciary advice to public school employees. They joined my colleague, Robert Brokamp, for a discussion about how teachers save and one account that they may want to open.

Robert Brokamp: Dan, you and I have known each other for more than 20 years. Both of us are ex-teachers and know what it's like to try to learn about planning for your retirement as a teacher. We bonded many years ago about the challenges, and frankly, how the insurance industry and many others in the financial service industry are really trying to rip off teachers. Tell us a little bit about 403bwise.org and how it's a non-profit that is really dedicated to educating teachers about saving for retirement.

Dan Otter: Sure. Robert, my first year of teaching, I was probably third month on the job. The kids had left for the day. There's a knock at my door, and a woman pokes her head into my classroom, and I'll never forget what she said. She said, "Do you care about your financial future?" I think there's only one answer, and that is, yes. She took that as an invitation to come into my room and try to sell me these high cost products. I patiently listened. I had no idea what she was talking about. I had some vague notion of a pension. She finally said, "Look, if you're interested, why don't you get back to me?" Thankfully, I never did.

But as I began to self-educate myself, I learned that this was a problem, not just at my school, not just at my school district or my state, but this was a national problem. It made me mad. In 2000, I launched 403bwise, and the whole goal of the website is education and advocacy. In 2016, the New York Times did a series of articles on the problems with the K12 403(b). Scott and myself aided these reporters into our great fortune. A phenomenal philanthropist named Tim Ranseta, out of Palo Auto, California, have read those articles and reached out to us and said, "I am horrified to hear how teachers are being treated. Have you ever thought about turning this into a non-profit?" My joke was, well, it's always been a non-profit. We've never really made money on it. [laughs] He said, "I can help you with this." We met with him, and thanks to his generous support. I left my job teaching and working at a university to run 403bwise.org full time. This is five years ago. We sell nothing. Everything we do is free. All of our content, we do free one hour Zoom sessions on the 403(b) and 457(b) for any school district in the country that wants us to do that. Scott and I are closing in on probably at least 100 we've done in the past couple of years.

Robert Brokamp: 403(bs) are often described as 401(k)s for non-profits. But it can actually be more complicated than that. Saving for retirement in a 403(b) can be particularly challenging for people who work for public school systems. Dan, why is that?

Dan Otter: The K12 403(b) is quite simply an inferior retirement plan for one simple reason, Robert. It doesn't enjoy the same fiduciary protections as the 401(k). This means that school districts aren't required to offer quality, low cost products, and surprise, surprise, when you know it, most don't. Too many educators are stuck with multi-vendor plans stuffed with high cost companies sold by sales agents who troll schools in teacher email inboxes. Additionally, school districts rarely educate employees about the 403(b), and even worse, too many of them leave the education to the sales agents.

Robert Brokamp: When you say multiple vendors, I think people who work for companies with 401(k), they might find this surprising. But if you work for a company with 401(k), you just have one 401(k), is from Schwaber, Vanguard, or Fidelity. But you're saying that in many of these districts, you have 40-50 choices, not of mutual funds, but the actual company running the plan, and then you got to choose that plan and then choose the mutual funds.

Dan Otter: Exactly. If you teach in the school district where I live in Redlands, California, Robert, you have 38 different companies, and 35 of them are high cost, each one selling maybe dozens and dozens of products.

Robert Brokamp: Let's discuss some ways that teachers can start off the new school year by making the most of their retirement accounts, starting with, see if you have a good 403(b) or a good choice of 403(bs).

Scott Dauenhauer: That's really the issue. Do you have the choice of a good 403(b)? For years, educators asked us. They came to us and like, how do we know if we have a good plan? How do we know if we have a good option within our plan? We didn't know what to tell them without seeing their plan. We actually decided to create a couple tools to assist educators in figuring out one, do they have a good plan? Two, how do they choose within that plan? We came up with what we call the school district ratings tool, and it's available at 403bwise.org, actually built into our home page. You can literally click the drop down and put in your state and then find your school district. Now, we've collected a little over 5,000 school districts in our database. I realize that that doesn't cover, I think there's something like 14,000 school districts, but we have the overwhelming majority of the population of school districts that teachers are in. There's a good chance that your school district is going to be in there. If it's not, we'll give you some resources to help us get that information in there. Once you do that, you're going to see a list of the vendors that are available in your school district. As Dan said, it might be as long as 38, or it could be fairly short.

We give you a grade, an A, B, C, D, F grade. I'll get into how that works in just a moment. But the way that we create those grades is we actually take a look at the individual vendors that are available, and we rate those based on the traffic light system. We wanted to make this as simple as possible. If you're driving, you come to a traffic light, you see a green light, green means go. If you have a green vendor in your school district, you're good to go. You should use one of those green vendors. Hopefully, you have more than one green vendor, but if you have a green vendor, we have looked at these vendors and we have rated them as high quality. That generally means low in cost, you don't have to pay excessive fees, there's nothing that's going to some intermediary. Green means go. Now, there are some vendors, they fall in the middle. When you come to a yellow light, I know the conventional wisdom is that you should speed through it, but really you're supposed to proceed with caution. If you don't have any green vendors, but you have a yellow vendor or a few yellow vendors, that might be an option to consider, but you do need to proceed with caution because sometimes they are a little more expensive or perhaps they've had regulatory issues.

They might be associated with a red vendor. But it still might be an option to consider. What's a red vendor? Well, when you come to a red light, you are supposed to stop. If you have a red vendor, if you're already contributing to a 403(b) and you find that your vendor is in our red list, we think you should stop and reconsider whether your money should be going to that vendor. Generally, that means you're in a high cost plan that forces you to use an intermediary. We don't think that's the best of ideas. That's where you should really start. Try to find your vendor list through our tool. If it's there, look for a green vendor, and we actually put a check mark next to the green vendors. Some of those vendors would be Aspire in California, CalSTRS. Nationally, Fidelity and Vanguard, and Aspire are the biggest green vendors. T. Rowe Price is also a green vendor. When you take a look at all that, we've actually graded over 5,000 school districts. What's shocking to me, Robert, is that over 40% get a D or an F. What that really means is they don't have any green vendors. Forty percent of school districts don't have even one green vendor. We rate only 4% of school districts with an A or a B. Those are the school districts who have really decided to take control of their 403(b) plans and make them high quality. The rest get Cs.

Luckily, about 60% get Cs, and while that sounds terrible, what teacher wants to be in a C. The good news is it means it has at least one green vendor. The problem is most people aren't in that green vendor. They're in the yellow and the red vendors, and we want to get them into the green vendors. But it's not bad news when you see a C next to your school district. What it means is you have the opportunity to put your money with a really good vendor. The question is, are you going to take advantage of that opportunity?

Robert Brokamp: If you don't have a green 403(b), one account you may want to consider is opening a Roth IRA.

Dan Otter: Yeah, in many ways, you can make the argument that this should be Step 1. We frankly think that all teachers should have a Roth IRA. There are so many upsides to this plan. It's easy to open. You get to choose any financial company you want. You want Vanguard, you can get Vanguard. You want Fidelity, you can get Fidelity. Plus, a Roth IRA isn't tied to your employer. If you change employers or you leave education, there's nothing to roll over. Finally, while you contribute on an after tax basis, you'll pay no taxes upon withdrawal and retirement. Let me repeat that. You will pay no taxes upon withdrawal in retirement. We just think that every teacher should actually begin with opening a Roth IRA.

Robert Brokamp: I'll point out that a lot of people will say, well, the first thing you should do before you contribute to an IRA is get your company match from your employer. But the truth is, the vast majority of 403(bs) do not offer a match, correct?

Dan Otter: Yeah. In the K12, 403(b) world, yes. We've heard of maybe a handful of school district, but they are the outliers.

Ricky Mulvey: As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buyer sell anything based solely on what you hear. I'm Ricky Mulvey. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.

Randi Zuckerberg, a former director of market development and spokeswoman for Facebook and sister to Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Bill Mann has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Mary Long has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Ricky Mulvey has positions in Meta Platforms. Robert Brokamp has positions in Cisco Systems. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Cisco Systems, CrowdStrike, JD.com, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool recommends Alibaba Group and Tjx Companies and recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft and short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.