Merry weekend, fools, and welcome to the first mailbag episode of the personal finance

edition of the Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing podcast.

I'm Robert Brokamp, though my nickname Around the Fool is Bro, which you'll hear about today.

And my colleagues who host the weekday shows have been soliciting questions from our audience for the past few months.

And it turns out, y'all have plenty of financial planning questions.

So I thought I'd devote an entire episode to answering some of them and to help me as my longtime partner in crime, Dan Kaplanar. Dan is a former financial

planner and trust attorney. And for more than six years, Dan and I have been answering questions

for Motleyful Premium members during two live shows each and every week. So I asked Dan to join me

for this inaugural mailbag episode. Welcome to the show, Dan. Glad to be here, bro. It's always

fun to talk financial planning with you.

Outstanding. So this is how this is going to work. So we chose six questions from those that we received,

which touch on personal finance as well as a little bit of investing. I will read each question,

and Dan and I will take turns taking a first crack in it, and then the other will add his

thoughts if he has any. With all that said, here's the first question. It comes from brother Zach, who wrote in that

the fool recommends holding at least 25 individual stocks. How do ETS play into that? Do they count as

one stock, one and a half stocks, or do you count them as completely outside of the 25 individual holdings? Dan, what do you

think? So, Zach, I need to update you quickly on the full philosophy because full CEO co-founder

Tom Gardner recently updated that 25 individual stock number to 50. That really reflects the importance of you have so many individual stocks that kind

of overlap in terms of industry, in terms of business model.

You don't want to assume that just having 25 stocks is going to give you perfect

diversification.

That's part of the justification for

...