visiting the Motley Fool is not foolish
Written: Oct 29 '00 (Updated Oct 29 '00)
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Pros: Educational, Amusing, Fresh Unique Content
Cons: Message boards can be wild
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| yrium's Full Review: Motley Fool |
If you haven't heard about the Motley Fool previously here is a quick description of what their mission is ... Educate, Amuse, Enrich. In other words they intend to teach you about handling your personal finances in such a way that you are amused as you learn and you are able to live a richer life. They are located at www.fool.com and anyone who hasn't inherited a fortune should check them out.
The Motley Fool is one of the oldest content providers on the internet. They originated as a AOL feature back before the world wide web had been popularized. Since they have been around so long they have accumulated vast reservoirs of financial knowledge. They have continually improved their site, so now it is extremely well organized and user friendly. They do one of the best jobs I've ever seen at any site of archiving past information, So all of this information is available via the search engine resident on the site.
It is a vast site so let me break it down into subcategories. These are the tabs that appear on the top of each screen on their site...
Homepage
of course is your starting place for visiting the Motley Fool site(here-after abbreviated as just Fool), The homepage usually contains three or four stories that are currently hot. I love these news stories as they are created by in-house talent. Most places you get financial news are just passing along the latest business news from Reuters or the Associated Press. These Stories change every day, so there is always new content. This is a feature that is repeated all through-out the Fool site You can never read it all as it gets generated faster than you can assimilate.
Underneath the news is a collection of links to current stories or articles contained at the fool site. They are arranged somewhat familiarly in that Yahoo.com style of having two major columns that are then further subdivided by topics. These links are more static with some being semi-permanent features and others changing weekly or monthly.
Fool's School
Novices to personal finances are lead thru a thirteen step course detailing the basic precepts of the Fool. This introductory course is very simple and straight forward and is written in regular non-technical language. You'll quickly start to feel comfortable with taking care of your finances.
Discussion Boards
This is where I spend the majority of my time while at the Fool. Similar to Epinions, the discussion boards are messages created by visitors to the site. You'll have to make judgements as to how much you can trust any one post. The Fool lacks the level of poster feedback that we have here at Epinions. You can either recommend a post or report it as a problem.
The environment can be wild at times with Flame wars or off topic posts muddying the waters making it hard to navigate to the posts containing gems, but I consider it is well worth it to spend the time learning how to get around these obstacles. The Fool allows you to set Ignore user to filter out problem posters and they have a very advanced way of threading thru the conversations. You are allowed to pick next message or next thread. This allows you to skip over subjects your not interested in and quickly move on to the next topic.
Another feature of the message boards at the Fool that I love is the ability to create instant polls. A simple easy to use interface allows you to quickly create a multiple choice type poll within your message. Then when others read your message they are allowed to vote on your poll and then the results appear along with a nice bar chart that shows the percentages chosen.
Quotes & Data & Stock Research
Interested in getting the high/low for a stock for the day? Want to see a chart showing the price of your favorite stock for the last week, month, year, etc...? Want to know how many analyst cover the stock along with their ratings on the stock?
The Fool makes it easy to find this stuff out along with a whole lot more.
Shop Foolmart
The Motley Fool has their own on-line store where they sell financial books, investment newsletters, sweatshirts, mugs, etc... This is the place to go if your interested in buying a court jester hat. You know, the one with the multi-colored floppy fronds, each one ending in a bell?
My Portfolio
Is an on-line stock tracking service. You can enter in the stocks you own in a stock portfolio and track their performance. It is very easy to enter in stocks and is very customizable. You get to choose which information is displayed for each stock as well as how your stocks are sorted. Its kinda addictive checking into how your stock is doing during the day.
News
Besides the two or three featured stories found on the Homepage of the Fool they have a page that is continually updated thru out the day containing business news. Again this is in-house generated content that you can't get anywhere else.
Special Features
From time to time the Motley Fool website runs contests and this is where you'll find them. They recently ran a Survivor type spoof contest where they supposedly dropped ten investment advisors and/or celebrities on an Island. Before the contest started you were asked to pick the order in which people would get kicked off. Then as each day passed you were asked to visit the contest page and vote on who you thought should be exiled. At the end of each day another person would be kicked off along with a fictional news story detailing the days events. Top winners in their contests usually receive a pretty good prize.
Investing Strategies
The Fool maintains what they call sample portfolios. These are groups of stocks they have picked to demonstrate various investing strategies. Each day a new article will appear for each strategy. Over time and with the repeated exposure you start to get very comfortable with the idea of picking your own stocks and managing you portfolio yourself.
I've just hit the major locations within the Fool website. There is quite a large volume of information so I can't really do it justice here. If you want to take control over your finances I can suggest no better place on the internet than the Motley Fool site.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
yrium
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Member: charles simons
Location: Escondido California
Reviews written: 16
Trusted by: 10 members
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