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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (36839)	12/20/2000 10:53:09 PM
From: Joshua Corbin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

OT:TMF (this is the last one, honest) More than they admitting your point, you're repeating what they openly acknowledge. (Why are you so defensive about The Motley Fool? C'mon, man, I come in peace.) I had these views long before they capitulated. Doesn't it seem obvious that a long-term portfolio should be centered on tax-deferred gains and not require so much tinkering? Besides, there have been serious criticisms dating back several years. Michael O'Higgins, the original popularizer, dropped the strategy himself three years ago. investorhome.com Some final thoughts: The Gardners are not original thinkers. They're popularizers. Nothing wrong with that. There are a lot of admirable things within their operation. Compared to the Masters of The Universe, they are salt of the earth. The world is a better place because of The Motley Fool. I said nice things about the revised Investment Guide. It's a really good book. Much of the core material is stuff I agree with and that many on SI (not you) would call heresy: opposition to options, TA, thin float stocks, position trading, etc. They also show an openness to take and accept criticism. I'm not complaining about Rule Breaker's performance. I'm not complaining that people didn't pay attention to what they said. Those things happen. The issue is the marketing that helped build up Motley Fool: that the typical investor can "crush the market by dozens of percentage points." It only takes 15 minutes a year! Face it: they built much of their reputation based on short-term performance over statistically insignificant time periods. They also took a controversial mechanical investing strategy and hyped it as a shortcut to success. Now, if you drill down into the Web site, you can find the retired portfolios. But those aren't your first impression. (We don't even know how any of those worked because they haven't been around that long, except maybe Harry Jones. There's a Fool Port that dates back to 1994, but it hasn't been one consistent strategy the whole time.) I think all this was a human mistake. When they started out, they never expected the popularity that would follow. They were in the right place (AOL) at the right time and they let a few things get out of hand. They followed the mutual fund industry on exactly one point: making a big deal out of short-term gains. Fine, they admitted their failures. But this is no small matter. F4 appears in the original TMF Investment Guide and Workbook in a big long section that comes before the parts about due diligence. In a book for newbies! And FoolMart still sells the now-obsolete Beating The Dow and the original Workbook in the Beginner section of the store - with no disclaimers. foolmart.com Let them leave portfolio performance in that area at the bottom of the column. Let them do quarterly updates on performance. And make them keep it out of the marketing copy, at least until they've had one consistent strategy running for 5-7 years.