Motley Fool Investment Guide How the Fool Beats Wall Street's Wise Men and How You Can Too

Chapter One: "Fool"? Take heed...The wise may be instructed by a fool...You know how by the advice and counsel and predictionof fools, many kings, princes, states, and commonwealthshave been preserved, several battles gained, and diversdoubts of a most perplexed intricacy resolved.-- Rabelais Fool? Not a very wise choice for a name when you're trying to ply your trade in the investment world. For decades financial professionals have done their best to sell customers on their Wisdom. Whether it's the pinstripe suit, the avuncular smile, the firm handshake, or the advertising jingle ("Rock Solid, Market Wise" comes to mind), your typical broker, money manager, or financial planner has striven for an image that smacks of success, intelligence, experience, respectability -- in a word, Wisdom.And for years they've all been making a fair amount of money off fools. You know about fools. You may even have been one yourself at some point. Ever listened to a salesman on the other end of a phone long enough that the voice-activated vacuum cleaner he was trying to sell you began to make sense? You were being foolish. Ever bought a stock on your dentist's recommendation without even looking to see if it was listed? How very foolish of you. Or what about when you snapped up shares of International Dashed Hopes Load Fund just because your broker said it was the top performer in its category last year? Terribly, terribly foolish.Basking in the excesses brought about by this folly, the financial establishment hadn't banked on one thing -- that one day the tables might turn when some Fools (and that's a capital F, maestro) actually showed up.The Wise would have you believe that "a Fool and his money are soon parted." But in a world where more than 80 percent of all professional mutual fund managers lose to the market averages, year in and year out, how Wise should one aspire to be? In what other realms could such a compelling paradox exist, that the paid professional can do no better than -- in fact, cannot even do as well as -- dumb luck? And this general ineptitude has been made more ironic by the appurtenances that typically attend the Wise: expensive suits and gold cuff links (to impress their clients), Swiss watches (to convey the importance of their time), mahogany desks (to rest at between rounds of golf), and other similar displays designed to impress and intimidate their customers. Ah, the many-splendored totems of those who were paid too much to make too little.In fact, we got to thinking after a while that we should just go ahead and call ourselves Fools, since our attitudes and approach to life were so radically different from what was being passed off as Wisdom all around us. So we launched our original Motley Fool, taking the name from a nondescript quotation from Shakespeare's As You Like It: "A fool, a fool! I met a fool i' the forest, a motley fool." We'd always loved Shakespeare's Fools...they amused as they instructed, and were the only members of society who could tell the truth to the king or queen without having their heads lopped off. The Motley Fool began as a monthly newsletter, then transformed into a daily feature on a national online service, then became one of the premier financial destinations on the World Wide Web. And among other things, of course, it is also a series of books (of which this is the second, following The Motley Fool You Have More Than You Think), all containing as much Foolishness as we can pack into them.Our goal was and is very simple: Beat the market and show others how to do it -- the more novice, the better. In our brief Foolish history, we've enabled thousands of average people who didn't previously know a dividend from a divining rod to invest theiGardner, David is the author of 'Motley Fool Investment Guide How the Fool Beats Wall Street's Wise Men and How You Can Too', published 2001 under ISBN 9780743201735 and ISBN 0743201736.