Martin,
I respect your right to your opinion, but when you go so far as to write in a public forum about using "obvious insider knowledge" as the basis for stuff written by the Motley Fool, I think you're crossing the line into some reasonably dangerous, unfounded accusations based on nothing more than your circumstancial, anecdotal experience. That sort of declaration shouldn't be mentioned, in my opinion, without the facts to support it.
If you are right that they are using their forum to "hype a stock ... to keep it right up front as a discussion of pros and cons," they are doing a massively terrible job of it. The losses of many stocks in their real-money portfolios are a testament to how bad a job they are doing at hyping their stocks. Just yesterday I was reminded that they rode Iomega from $16 all the way down to $3. That was noted in a Qualcomm folder, of all places.
And as for the Motley Fool's credibiliity, do you know of one organization that has just one real-money portfolio, a portfolio whose managers make the announcement of buy and sell decisions before they make the trade, a portfolio that includes all costs including the spread between the bid and ask price and all commissions? At last count, I think the Motley Fool has five such portfolios not including the recently begun so-called retirement portfolios that I'm not familiar enough with to include in the count. If that and the fact that they have nearly 2 million unique visitors each month holding them accountable to the way they run and communicate about their portfolios doesn't make you wonder if your lack of empirical evidence shouldn't shed some doubt on your anecdotal theories, there's certainly no basis for a continued discussion about this particular subject.
Frankly, I think you owe all the readers here and the Motley Fool a public apology for your unfounded accusation of using insider knowledge as a basis for their published writings.
--Mike Buckley |
