SEZL is a well-run, financially strong small BNPL company; its founder-CEO owns 40% and T. Rowe Price's long-term stake validates it. It rose from about $20 to roughly $120, and the speaker still sees it potentially doubling over five years, though competitive margin pressure is a risk.

Next is " Sezel", and its code is SEZL. This has been a great investment for us in "The Motley Fool". This is a company that operates on a "buy now, pay later" system.

There are many people who have said, "Oh, I'm not going to get involved in this system." Thank you very much. "I don't want to encourage people to borrow money for things they can't afford."

But what they don't understand about "buy now, pay later" is that it's a much better alternative to credit card debt , because these providers, whether it's Klarna, Affirm, PayPal, or in this case, Sizzle, place a maximum limit on the amount that can be borrowed and require a limited number of payments to complete the transaction.

Therefore, it is not a scenario where you can take out your credit card and continue to buy at 22% interest. In fact, those expenses are restricted and controlled. Therefore, I believe that "buy now, pay later" is a major innovation in the market, and very useful to society, and to families and individuals who borrow money, and in some cases borrow out of sheer necessity to buy groceries, in the period between their paychecks.

So, I think this is a great addition to the market.

It is also a very well-run company. The founder and CEO, Charlie Joachim, is someone I have interviewed several times and had the opportunity to sit down with for lunch and really understand his philosophy , his approach to work, and his concerns about the opportunity this company has provided for him and all his employees.

They have clearly made their way through the pandemic. That was a very interesting period for this small company. This is a company with a market value of only a few billion dollars , but its financial situation is strong.

The founding CEO owns 40% of the business, which is amazing.

As I mentioned before, as a corporate shareholder, I would love to see a startup company in which T Rowe Price buys shares. This tells me that we have an organization that likes to think in terms of periods ranging from 5 to 20 years as an owner, and has evaluated this work and validated what it does .

This does not mean that T Rowe Price does not sell shares here and there along the way, of course, and abandon its positions, certainly. But I think when you find these companies with a good track record that make long- term investments and validate a very small company, that's a bright light for us to evaluate the business ourselves.

Now, "Sizzle," when I recommended it at around $20 a share, today it's reached about $120 after only a few years. The small company was the highest-ranked in our AI-powered registration database.

We don't have AI scores in "The Motley Fool", they're just momentum scores or one-dimensional surface work . We have programmers around the world, and we pump over 500 data sources into all our ratings, and when it turns out that from all of them that "Sizzle" is the highest-rated company from a financial perspective, and it is small among giants, it is one of the best- managed financial companies .

I loved what I saw and made that investment, and I still believe this company could double in value over the next five years . I would say that the "buy now, pay later" space is competitive, so margin pressure is something to watch out for with "Sizzle," but I'm very happy to have it added here to our list of eight.