Meant to send the following post instead of the last:
INTERACTIVE EDUCATION
Distance Earning, Fool!
NEW MONEY
What the Market Will Bare
Over-the-Counterpoint
Distance Earning, Fool!
B2C Meets F2F
David Gardner, cofounder of the Motley Fool investment-advice empire, recognized early on that companies like AOL and eBay weren't transient sparks but flash points of incipient mass-market explosion. In Foolish parlance, they were Rule Breakers. With $50,000 he started the Rule Breaker Portfolio in 1994; today's roster includes Amgen, Amazon, AOL, @Home, Celera, eBay, and Starbucks, and the portfolio is worth north of $645,000. During the Rule Breaker Seminar, a four-week online course conducted in March via email and message boards, Gardner taught 26,000 investors how to discover other companies similarly "embedded in the zeitgeist."
Gardner's six essential qualities of a Rule Breaker: It must be the top dog in an emerging industry. Its competitive advantage must be sustainable by way of a strong business model. It must exhibit excellent stock price appreciation, a convincing management team, and household-name potential. Finally, it must have been declared overvalued in the financial media. Beware, though, the Faker Breaker - which exhibits most but not all Rule Breaker attributes - a balloon with a slow leak.
Dividing up into 50 groups, each with its own message board, students put the seminar's lessons to work, researching, proposing, and defending their own picks. The boards buzzed with hundreds of messages a day, and the instructor answered questions directly. "It was like having an NBA stadium full of students listening to one person and then breaking up into groups to carry on the conversation," Gardner says. A clamorous yet provocative conversation.
By the end of the seminar, students had assembled a list of 66 potential Rule Breaker stocks, among them the nanotechnologist Nanophase (NANX), B2B software developer BEA Systems (BEAS), fuel cell pioneer Ballard Power Systems (BLDP), and biochip maker Affymetrix (AFFX). Which of these companies will have staying power is any fool's guess; the master himself declined to make endorsements.
The Fool has other courses in the works and plans to offer the Rule Breaker seminar again in the future. Priced at only $35, it was definitely undervalued.
- Adam Bresnick (abresnick@aol.com)
Motley Fool Rule Breaker |
