Is Berkshire Bending the Rules With Bending Spoons?

In this episode of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, Motley Fool contributors Tyler Crowe, Jon Quast, and Matt Frankel discuss:

• Bank of America’s earnings and money laundering fine.
• Fastenal’s earnings, a true hidden gem.
• The business behind Bending Spoons.
• Why Berkshire is buying more of this lesser-known stock.
• CoreWeave’s debt falls into junk territory. Who’s next?

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 Oct. 15, 2026.

Tyler Crowe: Did someone tweak the Berkshire Hathaway settings? Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing starts now. Welcome to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. I’m your host, Tyler Crowe. And today, I’m joined by longtime Fool contributors, Matt Frankel and Jon Quast. We’re going to get into Berkshire Hathaway’s, some might say, peculiar decision to invest more in Bending Spoons. We’re going to talk about 15% interest rates at a certain neocloud company. But we wanted to start because it is earnings week, and we’re going to do a little bit of dumping the analyst earnings notebook. And, Matt, I want to start with you because on Tuesday, we were talking about the big banks reporting. JP Morgan, Wells Fargo. We had Bank of America report afterwards. In addition to the earnings report, there was a little bit of oops that wasn’t great. So what exactly happened here?

Matt Frankel: Yeah, so before we get to the oops, which was a $1.2 billion anti-money laundering penalty, it’s worth mentioning that the earnings miss went beyond that. So the stock had a pretty negative reaction on Wednesday. It was the worst performer of the bank stocks in response to earnings and even without that penalty, Bank of America still would have missed earnings. The big reason is investor banking, investment banking fees were down 11%. On the trading side, which was a strong point elsewhere in the industry, it was really not very strong at all. The reaction makes sense. The bank did not have a great quarter. On the consumer side, it still looks good, but the trading, the investment banking, it was much weaker than peers.

Tyler Crowe: All right, so I hear anti-money laundering, and obviously banks, that’s like a real no-go sort of thing. I remember a couple of years ago, I think it was TD Bank, which is Toronto Dominion. It’s changed its name. I can’t remember specifically what it may have changed it to now, but it had a similar problem with its anti-money laundering practices and know your customer laws. And there was actually an asset cap that was put on top of fines. Based on what you’re seeing here with this one, is this a similar situation? Could Bank of America be headed for perhaps something more punitive than just a $1.2 billion fine?

Matt Frankel: Well, it’s worth mentioning these are two totally different situations. You don’t want to hear this time is different in investing, but I’m going to do that right now. In Bank of America’s case, it was the failure to report some suspicious transactions in a timely manner. They just weren’t keeping the controls as tight as they should have. They were already under a 2024 order. All of this happened between, I think, 2018 and 2025, and they essentially got penalized because they didn’t fix their reporting process when they would see suspicious transactions. That’s what Bank of America did. TD’s was a criminal case. TD actually had certain employees taking bribes to let money laundering transactions go through. That’s a totally different animal. So unless I’m not saying it’s impossible, unless the investigation into Bank of America reveals something to that nature where it becomes more of a criminal matter than just, failure to act matter, then I don’t think an asset cap is very likely. That’s a tool that the government really pulls out only when it has you.

Tyler Crowe: And certainly with TD and Wells Fargo, asset caps have not been a fun thing to manage. Jon, I guess we could say, moving on to something completely different here. I kind of left the floor open. I didn’t even ask what company you really wanted to hit in our analyst notebook here. Over the past week, we had a few that have reported so far? What was the one that kind of stood out to you that you want to maybe shed some light on here?

Jon Quast: Well, if I was just picking what I wanted to pick most, I would go with Taiwan Semi, but this is the Hidden Gems show and you got to give the listeners what they’re looking for. I think they’re looking for a little bit something more under the radar than that. I talked about Fastenal. I looked into Fastenal. This is a cool little company. If you are a industrial player out there, you need some screws, nuts, bolts, that kind of thing. This is a company that can be your one stop shop for that really boring business. But hey, that’s what keeps it under the radar and hidden. Really big quarter that it reported this week, 15% growth. Maybe that’s not amazing by some AI standards, but hey, for a company such as this, that’s actually a really great quarter and it tells us some things. It tells us that U.S. manufacturing is quite strong. In fact, heavy manufacturing for Fastenal that revenue source up more than 20% year over year. We’re talking about strength in aerospace, industrial equipment, machine products, that kind of thing. All those are doing very well for the company. Now, it’s not completely isolated from the AI trade, so about a third of its growth roughly is from data centers. So data centers need the nuts and bolts kind of stuff that it sells, as well so that was a tailwind as well for Fastenal. But overall, it’s really pointing more to manufacturing strength than anything.

Tyler Crowe: When I hear a company like Fastenal, it’s been one of those behind the scenes businesses for a long time. As you said, 15% growth is, guess you’d say out of trend here for what it normally has done. How has this company that I was just looking at its stock chart has done spectacularly, how is it created value for investors if it is this slow growth, I don’t know gives parts to company’s business?

Jon Quast: First and foremost, I mean, it does run a tight ship. I mean, inventory levels are pretty much matching what it is generating in revenue, and that’s a good thing. You don’t want to be buying too much inventory. You want to keep that in balance. This is a good management team, and to that note, it really does prioritize its shareholders, and so definitely making moves that are shareholder friendly. One of the interesting things here is that it’s debt. It’s total debt down to only 100 million. This is a $57 billion company, so that’s really peanuts here, this debt level that it has, and it’s down pretty significantly year over year. Then you look at net income, 82% of the net income going back to shareholders in the form of share repurchases and its dividend. Dividends around 2%, but that is growing nicely. So overall, this is a management team that does prioritize its shareholder base.

Tyler Crowe: Before we get out of here, we got two stocks here. We got Fastenal, we got Bank of America. I’ll put it to each of you guys who talked about this: Matt, buy, sell, or hold Bank of America, even after

Source: www.fool.com — article syndicated from the publisher’s feed; all rights remain with the original publisher.