Buy This, Not That: Super Bowl’s Big Winners (It’s Not Who You Think)

Shah Gilani|February 12, 2025

The commercials were the real MVP of Super Bowl LVIII…

And two companies absolutely crushed it.

Nike’s first Super Bowl ad in 27 years featured an all-star cast of female athletes in stunning black and white…

While Rocket Mortgage had the whole stadium singing “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”

But great marketing doesn’t always mean great investing.

Let me show you which of these Super Bowl standouts deserves your investment dollars – and which one to avoid despite the touching commercial.

One has solid fundamentals backing up its creative flair… while the other is struggling where it counts.

Tune in for your weekly Buy This, Not That.

Click on the thumbnail to dive in.

Note: Send in your tickers! In future videos, I’ll rate them as Buys or Not. The email is mailbag@manwardpress.com.

TRANSCRIPT

Hey, everybody.

Shah Gilani here with your weekly BTNT, as in BUY This, Not That.

Now, I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about the Super Bowl…but not the game itself. That’s not worth talking about. Unless you’re an Eagles fan, then it’s certainly worth talking about.

I’m talking about the commercials.

Wow.

I watched the Super Bowl. But when it’s a runaway game like we saw, I also watch it for the commercials.

In truth, I always watch it for the commercials mostly anyway. Nonetheless, when the game isn’t that exciting, it’s all about the commercials.

And I don’t think there was anything more exciting than the commercials at this year’s Super Bowl.

So, I wanna pick out two commercials, none of the bad ones. There were a lot of ones I thought didn’t make any sense. There were ones that just had my brain thinking…

What was that?

What was the messaging?

What was that about?

What did that refer to?

Was that an ad?

You know the ones I’m talking about. But there were a lot of good ones.

My two favorite ones, I’m gonna talk about the stocks, the companies behind those fabulous ads, Nike (NKE) and Rocket Companies (RKT), aka Rocket Mortgages. Oh my gosh.

Those two commercials were absolutely fantastic in my opinion. So first up, I’m gonna talk about the Nike commercial.

First of all, black and white. All women, all amazing athletes.

I had to look up the list of the women, the names on there because there were so many of them, I couldn’t keep track because as I was watching them I was like, “Oh my gosh. I know her. I know her. I know her.” So they were all iconic.

A’ja Wilson, Caitlin Clark, Juju Watkins, Jordan Chiles, Sha’Carri Richardson, she just rips. Sophia Smith Wilson and a couple of other amazing athletes.

I thought the black and white effect was fantastic. I thought the messaging was cool. It was about you.

You say you put yourself down. You can’t do this. You can’t do this. Then just go do it.

It’s typical Nike. Just do it. But in the end, and from the beginning, you knew it was a Nike commercial. It just had that whole feel.

By the way, Nike hasn’t done a commercial, a Super Bowl commercial in, I think it’s something like twenty-seven years. I believe it was 1998 that Nike’s last Super Bowl commercial was out there. I thought they hit it out of the park.

I’ll talk about the stock in a minute.

The other one was the Rocket Mortgage. Oh my gosh. Everybody singing John Denver’s classic Take Me Home Countrt Roads. I’m sorry if I’m ruining your day with my singing.

Everybody got into that to the place where I belong.

Oh my gosh. How could you not love that song?

And then when we went back to the game, the audience was singing it. At the Super Bowl, it was just absolutely fabulous.

Absolutely just touching, heart wrenching, beautiful messaging.

The end of that commercial was Own the Dream. Absolutely beautiful.

So, both commercials, I thought, were great.

The stocks…not so much.

But one’s a better buy than the other right here, and it’s more on a speculative basis. So let’s have a quick look at Nike and Rocket Companies.

Now here is Rocket Companies trading at $12.80. Now I’m gonna say this is not the buy here, people, and I’ll tell you why.

It’s maybe a speculative play if you wanna try and catch this bounce.

But the stock from its high back here in September came down from twenty one and change down to ten. So we had a 55% drop in a very short period of time. That’s a pretty ugly duck.

Now they had some issues, some legal issues, competitive issues that, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is looking into. That may be over because that bureau seems to be under the axe, the Musk axe.

And, so we don’t know if anything’s gonna become of that. And maybe that’s why the stock is bouncing here because less regulation and perhaps a reprieve for Rocket Companies on that.

As far as the company goes, color me unimpressed. This is $1.88 billion market cap company, $4.0 billion in revenue. That’s pretty decent.

The profit margin is negative 0.35%. Operating margin is negative 41%.

So a mortgage company that is supposedly killing it, the stock is doing poorly because the company’s not doing what it should be doing in terms of making money.

Year over year, quarterly revenue growth down 41%.

Yikes! Pretty scary.

Now it’s got as you can see, it got really oversold here.

Is it a buy because it’s a bounce?

You can try it. But if you wanna try it, put a very tight stop on it.

But if you think interest rates are ticking higher, and they are once again starting to tick higher, that’s not gonna do well for the mortgage business. So I’m gonna say Rocket Companies, RKT, a great commercial, loved it, but not a great stock.

Next up, of course, is Nike.

Now Nike, you know, for comparison purposes…well, there really is no comparison.

Nike is a $105 billion market cap company. Nike’s revenue is over $50 billion annually, and all over the place as far as a profit margin, 10.6%. It slides up and down a little bit, but pretty steady there.

But the operating margin’s pretty solid about 10.5%. So good stuff there.

But quarterly revenue growth down here, year over year, down 10.4%. So not doing well.

And, hence, the stock is not doing well.

But, you know, I’m a bottom fisher sometimes. I don’t like to buy a new low. And we just got one recently. But if we see this thing come up a little bit, yeah, it could be worth trading.

With all the revenue that Nike has, and, yes, it’s profitable, can Nike turn it around?

I would wager some money on Nike. I’d probably put a little bit more on Nike as far as the speculative play than I would on Rocket.

But neither one of them really catch my fancy, but loved both their commercials.

If you’re gonna play one for a pop, play Nike.

I think it’s got some room to move. You got the gigantic gap here, which it tried to fill.

Who knows? It might take a year or two to fill that gap, but that wouldn’t be a bad game.

Great commercials, YouTube, Nike, rocket companies, your stocks, your companies.

You might wanna pay a little more attention to them than the artistic side of your marketing.

Cheers, everybody.

Catch you next week.