Page 9 - 11Cyber

many have taken a position in the stocks they are buy and hold strategy, not trading, is the path to real
now pumping, not unlike the Motley Fools, with wealth accumulation. They deride ALL short-term
hopes of profitable dumping. trading dogmatically but make tons of picks, some
work, others totally fail. Also, they advise not to both-
Upsells er trying to time the market; just spend time in the
market holding your winners and trimming losers. So
If you are not satisfied with the advice provided ac- there – in this paragraph, I've reflected virtually all of
cording to your original subscription, the Motley the sound advice you are likely to glean from the Mot-
Fools will offer you "better" subscriptions, such as: ley Fool website – and it was FREE!
Or
Can they do 5X better than the market?

It is inconceivable that The Motley Fool could beat
the S&P 500 by over 500%, as they claim in their cur-
rent advertising. Most professional money managers
and advisors have difficulty equaling the performance
of the market averages. Those who are considered
investment geniuses, such as Peter Lynch and War-
ren Buffett, could beat the market by a few percent-
age points a year. Anyone able to beat the market
A Foolish Website averages by 500% would be able to amass great
wealth investing and would not have to sell a tout ser-
I am not new to the stock market; I focused on secu- vice.
rity analysis in college and have been doing my own
research for over 50 years. Almost everything I have
seen from the Motley Fools is absolute garbage. I Even the free offers are less than worthless
highly recommend not
using their website for Almost every day, I see Motley Fool teaser articles on
any information except sites such as Yahoo Finance, and often the headline
maybe for the enter- is misleading. The article provides just a superficial
tainment value of how discussion of a stock. Usually, the article ends stating
foolish it is. Often the stock discussed is OK (or bad), but the Motley
there are contradicting Fools knows ten stocks that are better, which they
opinions on the same will provide to you if you just furnish your email ad-
stock on the same dress. I have done this several times (providing my
day! "junk" email address) and have never received the
information the Motley Fools promised. Instead, they
There is way too much bombard my mail account with worthless spam. I sus-
advertising on the pect they also sold my email address since I also
Motley Fools subscription website. This site is with- started receiving spam from unknown companies.
out transparency and, therefore, of questionable
value for investors. Suppose you want to be suc- The sports betting scam
cessful, and actually be one of the rare investors
who make money relying on the advice of others. In When I worked as a Special Agent in a former life, I
that case, you need to receive information from peo- was involved in investigating an off-shore sports bet-
ple whose own investing/trading results you can ting site. The owners of this site quickly discovered
clearly see. There are several dozen articles every they could make
day, and I believe no one could construct a good more money sell-
trading strategy based on the hundreds of stocks ing gambling ad-
they say are "ready to explode." vice, also known
as tout services,
The Motley Fool's subscription website is a mess of than from the bets
marketing. Most of the articles provide virtually no themselves. The
actionable information, except pitches for more ex- profit on sports
pensive Motley Fool newsletters. Occasionally there bets was about 5
is a well-written article that contains decent infor- percent – (10% of
mation, but this is rare. losing bets), similar to on-shore bookies and casino
sportsbooks.
To be fair, I do agree with their philosophy that a (Continued on page 10)

Cyber Awareness Bulletin 9 October 2021