In this episode of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, Motley Fool contributors Travis Hoium, Lou Whiteman, and Rachel Warren discuss:
- Oil is up again.
- Market breather?
- Can a cheap EV win?
- Why Americans buy big.
- Is AMT’s debt a problem?
- Will satellites disrupt telecom?
To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool’s free podcasts, check out our podcast center. When you’re ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy.
A full transcript is below.
This podcast was recorded on July 8, 2026.
Travis Hoium: Oil is up, and stocks are down, and Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing starts now. Welcome to Motley Fool Gems Investing. I’m Travis Hoium, joined today by Lou Whiteman and Rachel Warren. Guys, we’ve got to start with the topic of the day, which is the market is down, oil is up about 5% as we’re recording early on Wednesday. Rachel, this does seem to be a bit of a trend, at least over the past couple of weeks. Nasdaq is down about 5% the Nasdaq-100. We’re starting to see a little bit of a pullback there. Maybe that’s valuation-based. Maybe that’s a little bit of, we’re waiting for earning season to begin. But now we have this oil thing going on. What are the headlines that people need to keep in mind as they’re looking at their investments today?
Rachel Warren: There’s a few factors at play. Obviously, oil and inflation are two big ones. The U.S. just canceled its sanctions waiver on Iranian oil. The ceasefire has been declared over. That basically means less oil is likely to be moving around the world. We’ve seen Brent Crude prices go up, and tech stocks are obviously taking a big hit because U.S. inflation is already quite warm at 4.2%. The worry about some of these spikes is that the Fed will keep interest rates higher for longer. When interest rates stay high, investors are less willing that they might be in other periods to pay those premium prices for the tech companies that move the market and that promise huge profits down the road. You can look at the chip sector this week. Had Samsung reported a massive 19-fold jump in profits with a huge AI demand, but the stock still fell. I think a lot of what we see is this Wall Street being trapped in a short-term 90-day game. A lot of the daily market volume is driven quantitative computer algorithms. When scary headlines hit the tape, those models often trigger those cell orders. I think that’s also something we’re seeing at play right now.
Travis Hoium: Lou, computers have been really running the market for quite a while. Oil is something we talked about six months ago, and it hasn’t turned out to be a huge deal. Is this a huge deal, or is this just the day-to-day volatility that we always see in the market?
Lou Whiteman: Oil has spiked to levels that are still below June 24th prices, just to give some perspective here. A lot of this is headline writing, and a lot of this is ignore the noise. I don’t think we should overread into anything. With all respect, I would be shocked if investors were really worried that oil will change the Fed’s interest rate.
Travis Hoium: A couple of drops in the stock market, and it seems like the policy decisions turn pretty quick.
Lou Whiteman: Well, I think what’s probably going on is uncertainty, plus that, yes, if Iran is back on, then the already fragile consumer could become further stressed, which is a much bigger deal than interest rate. There is thought processes here. But look, we’re up 9% for the year, Nasdaq is up more than that. We are doing just fine. This is normal; we’re coming into earning season. Look, there’s a real risk that the market will be green by the time anyone hears this podcast, it’s so important not to just overthink any one day. In the early days of Twitter, I made a little bot that just said every day, the market is either up or down, and it just pulled the top headline on Yahoo Entertainment. That’s the reason why. Every day, it said stocks fall on Taylor Swift releasing a new album. That to me made more sense than most of the headlines I see explaining why stocks move on any given day.
Travis Hoium: Lou, I wanted to get your thoughts on a dynamic that I think I see in the market that may or may not be confirmed. We’ll know this in hindsight. But it seems like when I started investing in the ‘90s, you can go back to all the way back to the Great Depression, and things were relatively correlated. I learned about this in business school. You maybe want to have some uncorrelated stocks, but a lot of stocks were correlated, and so you would have the market is up. Almost everything is up, and over time, your winners would be the ones that are up a little bit more than your losers. But there wasn’t this massive segment of the market that was inversely correlated, as we would say, with the market.
Now we get to this time where in 2022, when a lot of tech stocks crashed, if you were in industrials or energy, you may not even noticed. Some segments of the market were feeling a ton of pain, and some weren’t feeling anything. Now we get to this year. If you were invested in software stocks, some of the best software companies over the past 10, 20 years, you were just getting crushed early in 2026. But if you were invested in neoclouds, in memory, you’re crushing the market. Hundred percent gains aren’t out of the ordinary there. Now we get to this moment where just in the past couple of weeks, I was looking at Micron and Sandisk, two of the hottest stocks. If you’re invested in those stocks, they’re down 21% and 31% respectively from their highs. That can be really painful. Despite the fact that a lot of stocks are up. Are we in a world where the small segments of the market are going to move in really big ways as these themes or momentum goes in and out? Is that a new dynamic that we’re going to see going forward or is this just where we are in 2026 until we get some bigger move that would be caused by massive growth or recession or something like that?
Lou Whiteman: I think that what has changed is your ability to monitor these things. There’s just so many better tools. I think that what you just described as a normal functioning market. Usually, some things are up them, some things are down. There’s always leaders and laggards. It’s really only in a true recession or true downturn, and 2022 was not a true downturn. But if you go back to 2008 or something like, everything was down. It was just the proportion of how much it was down. Look, to this point, would it surprise you to hear that only two sectors of the market are actually in the red this year, consumer discretionary and communications? In fact, tech is the second-highest performing sector so far this year. Double digits, gains, energy, tech, industrials, real estate, materials, consumer staples. We have so many more tools to monitor these things. We look at these things, and again, we are so focused on the short term. Yes, it is technically true that Micron is in a bear market because it’s down more than 20% from its high. It’s also up 200% year to date.
Travis Hoium: Yes.
Lou Whiteman: I want all of my bear markets to involve 200% gains. That’s after the 20% fall. Again, the lesson, I think is, again, we are somewhat overwhelmed by data. There are just things that we couldn’t notice in 1984, that we can notice now. Also, we are so fixated on today.
Travis Hoium: Rachel, is that the way that you say things? Well, what we’re doing? We’re looking at individual stocks and going, hey, this is where the deals are, not just by the market or the Nasdaq-100. But where are those individual opportunities? That maybe brings a little bit of this volatility.
Rachel Warren: I definitely think that’s part of it. I think it’s also important to remember that the type of stocks that were moving the market, 20 years ago, it’s a very different market today. A lot of those biggest stocks are the ones with extreme valuation multiples, it doesn’t mean there aren’t quality underlying businesses there, it doesn’t mean there aren’t real earnings and cash generation power there. But these tend to be extremely volatile businesses that are driving some of the intraday movements in the market. It doesn’t mean that they can’t be great additions to a long-term portfolio. But these are not the blue chip stocks of yesteryear that used to drive those day-to-day market movements.
I think it’s important to understand where that volatility is coming from. Then, of course, assess individually the stocks that you own, the stocks that you want to buy. Company may be down day-to-day, still up significantly like Micron over the next year. Up to you to decide whether that’s a good addition to your portfolio. But as always, I think there are quality businesses that remain amidst the volatility and understanding where that value adds to your portfolio, I think is really key to look beyond the day-to-day red and green and see what drives you closer to your long-term financial goals.
Travis Hoium: A lot of these things are why we’re long-term investors. Keeping your head on straight is often the hardest thing that we do as investors and just being able to focus on 3, 5, 10 years from now, what is going to be a value buying and just hang on for dear life is often the best thing to do. When we come back, we’re going to talk about some new cheap EVs coming to the market. You’re listening to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing.
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