Online discount brokers charged $70 a trade, instead of today's going rate of nothing. Yes there was an Internet in 1996, and you could get online - but lots of people weren't yet, and needed to be told. There's a chapter telling you to get online. Some advice here is timeless some is of its time. The Fools have contempt for Wall Street, but certainly not for certain exemplary famed investors like Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch, Motley Fool heroes. The Wise tell people to just buy mutual funds, or to take the simplified Buy/Sell/Hold advice being given by some pundit on CNBC, or worst of all take sales calls from a full service broker. Riffing off Shakespeare, the "Motley Fool" conceit was about Fools versus the Wise - where the Wise represent the conventional wisdom and institutions of Wall Street, and the Fools are individuals who can think on their own, do their own analysis and research. They and the Motley Fool are still around today at fool-dot-com with ads on the Internet. (If starting out today no doubt they'd be YouTubers with a subreddit, a Discord channel, a podcast, and a Patreon). Soon they had a popular forum on AOL, and then this book, and then a website with its own forums, even a nationally syndicated radio show. Gen-X brothers Tom and David Gardner started up an investment newsletter in 1993 to promote their investment approach and advice. Iomega probably peaked about the time Joe Kernen on CNBC reported the latest news with the ejaculation "my-oh-myyy-Omega!".īut to the Fool. If someone ever wrote MY biography, it would have to have a chapter on Iomega, and the Motley Fool Iomega message board, which is mentioned in the intro, and on which I was surely one of the top 5 or so contributors during that run as a group of us amateurs taught ourselves how to analyze stocks. What I'd long forgotten is that the book starts with an intro about Iomega - a stock that ran up 200-fold over the course of 2 years from 1994 through 1996, cheered along the way in the Motley Fool message boards on AOL.įor a time Motley Fool was inseparable from Iomega among whoever might have been paying attention. And so revisiting the original Motley Fool book, 1st edition, by Tom and David Gardner, which I probably read hot off the presses back in 1996. After re-reading Peter Lynch, I was deep in nostalgia for the 1990s individual investor scene.
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