I would describe the Motley Fool as a rich man's "Seeking Alpha," that is to say that the main page is nothing more than a collection of articles written by volunteers (mainly professionals in the industry). Just by reading a few articles, you can tell from the style right away that these articles aren't written by journalists, simply by CFAs, most of the time who just want to write their opinion on a stock.
So due to the decentralized nature of the main page, and combined with the varying opinions (and often times contradictory!) of the writers, I don't really know if motley fool (not talking about the premium services) has any official "recommendations" for anyone to really follow.
The real strength of the fool is their section in personal finance and their articles on fundamental analysis. They stress a buy and hold strategy, which is a strategy I personally subscribe to.
As for the articles themselves, I will agree that a lot of them can be fluffy and I suspect that a lot of the cheesy "penny stock" sounding ads are simply automatically appended at the end of each article.
Also, there are a lot of investors at the fool who recommend a lot of high pe growth stocks, such as Facebook and a bunch of 3d printing stocks, which, as an aspiring value investor, I don't agree with. I've been reading them long enough that Ive learned to simply ignore the articles on stocks or industries that aren't in my circle of competence.
If I blindly bought a stock on the advice of a certain fool article, then I figure I would do no better or worse if I read any random article on the internet. I think that those who are buying stocks based solely on a single article on the fool is missing the point of the site.
As for the services they are pimping out? I expect that those articles are written by full time staff at the fool and will contain formal recommendations as well. I honestly have no opinion on those, since I've never tried them. I may try a 30 day trial one of these days though.
Long story short TMF is a great resource for getting ideas on stocks and reading a few differing opinions on them. It's a starting point, and hopefully it will motivate investors to research more into a company if they read about a stock that sounds compelling.
This review is the subjective opinion of an Investimonials member and not of Investimonials LLC
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