February 2026 Mailbag: Countless… Right?

Rule Breaker Investing

The Motley Fool

Business, Investing

4.4 • 959 Ratings

🗓️ 25 February 2026

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week’s Mailbag picks up where Pet Peeves left off—and then some. Listeners write in with their own linguistic grievances, from “10 straight unanswered points” to the curious inflation of words like “countless,” to the conversational reflex of “Right?” that may or may not actually validate anything. Along the way, we touch on Evernote in an AI world, foreign exchange risk from a Fool down under, and the eternal market phenomenon of buying the day before the drop. It’s playful, pointed, and a reminder that words shape how we think… and how we invest. Sign up for The Motley Fool’s Breakfast News here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠www.fool.com/breakfastnews⁠⁠⁠⁠ Order David’s Rule Breaker Investing book here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1804091219/⁠⁠ Host: David GardnerProducer: Bart Shannon Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Countless. Is it, though? Ten straight unanswered points, as opposed to ten straight
0:09.7	answered ones? At the end of the day? Well, which day? And why the end? It started last week with
0:19.4	my pet peeves, but something interesting happened, you wrote back.
0:24.1	And now it turns out we have, well, at least for one mailbag, we have a movement, a linguistic uprising.
0:30.9	It's a quiet rebellion against lazy phrasing, verbal shortcuts, the small erosions of precision that, if we're not careful, dull the edge of our thinking.
0:42.2	Because this movement on rule breaker investing this week isn't really about grammar.
0:47.6	It's about clarity.
0:49.6	And clarity is an investing advantage.
0:53.8	So at this month's close, well, for February 2026, at least,
0:58.9	the mailbag fights back, only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.
1:06.4	It's the Rule Breaker Investing podcast with Motley Full co-founder, David Gardner.
1:14.8	Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing.
1:16.9	Happy almost March.
1:19.6	February has been a month.
1:21.4	Gosh, it's been a very cold month on the East Coast, and we just got another blizzard.
1:25.6	It's been quite a February.
1:27.4	Therefore, many of us who do,
1:29.2	I love winter. I'm always cheering on snow, but once we've had enough of it, many of us look forward to
1:34.3	March. And on this podcast, I hope you'll also look forward with me to March Market Cab Madness,
1:40.7	because starting next week with Lauren Hurst and Andy Cross and then the week after
1:45.9	with Emily Flippin and Bill Barker, we are going to have our final four of the Market Cap game
1:52.1	show. Of course, the third week of March will battle off my two finalists. So yeah, March,
	...

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