Author/Editor
Dave Gardner, Tom Gardner
Publisher
Motley Fool
Description
Launched by the Gardner brothers, with one stock pick from each per issue, but now Tom and David Gardner have largely stepped back from stock picking and the picks are made by “Rule Breaker” and “Everlasting Stock” teams.
Overall Rating
Rating: 3.6/5. From 286 votes.
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3.8
Rating from 1253 votes
If you’ve subscribed to Motley Fool Stock Advisor, please click the stars below to indicate your rating for this newsletter, and please share any other feedback about your experience using the comment box below.
Investment Performance
Rating from 362 votes
Rating: 3.8/5. From 362 votes.
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Your vote
- 5 Stars 135 Votes
- 4 Stars 101 Votes
- 3 Stars 60 Votes
- 2 Stars 35 Votes
- 1 Stars 31 Votes
Quality Of Writing/Analysis
Rating from 300 votes
Rating: 3.8/5. From 300 votes.
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- 5 Stars 83 Votes
- 4 Stars 127 Votes
- 3 Stars 48 Votes
- 2 Stars 20 Votes
- 1 Stars 22 Votes
Value For Price
Rating from 305 votes
Rating: 3.8/5. From 305 votes.
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- 5 Stars 126 Votes
- 4 Stars 76 Votes
- 3 Stars 37 Votes
- 2 Stars 35 Votes
- 1 Stars 31 Votes
Customer Service
Rating from 286 votes
Rating: 3.6/5. From 286 votes.
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Your vote
- 5 Stars 83 Votes
- 4 Stars 93 Votes
- 3 Stars 52 Votes
- 2 Stars 28 Votes
- 1 Stars 30 Votes
I have been a subscriber to MF Stock Advisor for almost 2 years. There is a montly newsletter and occasional updates. There are recommendations for where to put new money as well as recommendations each month on new stock to purchase. The service costs around $200 per year, with specials advertised quite often for discounts up to about 50%. There are advertisements each week attempting to get the subscriber to join other services. A person can try a service for 30 days free. I believe they are spreading their resources too much and it is annoying to get these get rich quick advertisements. Some of their discussion groups can be quite helpful. They take little responsibility in my opinion for their recommendations. They always say to research and make make your own decisions. I don’t need their service to do that. I will be dropping this service at the end of my subscription in March.
I subscribe to PRO, Stock Advisor, Million Dollar Portfolio, Global Gains, Hidden Gems and Rule Breakers and will post this review on all the sites. In general I found the letters useful for ideas in an up market, but not terribly helpful in our current down market. I found some excellent companies like DWSN, EDU & CTRP that I would not otherwise have looked at. Sell recommendations usually come too late and analysts tend to fall in love with stocks and catch “falling knives”. For example the repeated recommendations of Select Comfort, Irwin Financial, First Marblehead all the way down and then the final sell recommendation at much lower prices that had been recommended a few months earlier. There seems to be a reluctance to say do nothing and wait. Recent recommendation after recommendation is substantially under water.
In general Fool is an excellent source of information on a wide variety of financial subjects and the authors seem to be competent and professional. “The Boards” can be a useful source of information and opinion, however slogging through them is tedious because there are a lot of junk postings wherein people tell the reader what they are buying (not why) and criticizing other posters, a situation that breaks into a brushfire that overwhelms a posting site for a day or two.
Unfortunately the web sites for each of the portfolios, while consistent on a stand alone basis, are a total mess when one subscribes to several newsletters. Each letter ranks performance differently. No letter as far as I can ascertain includes dividends in calculation returns, a substantial flaw in assessing the performance of a stock.
The “cafertia” approach of the newsletters is also annoying – the same stock may be recommended in two different newsletters and checking the boards requires going to three different boards to get updates. The non-subscriber board and then each of the two different subscriber boards.
All in all I do not believe that the price of any individual newsletter, each of which is a niche letter, is worth it unless one is a substantial investor, as am I, although far less substantial than a year ago. I am not going to renew any of my newsletters, except PRO which I like because it discusses options.
All in all Fool is pretty good, but it presents a conundrum. The service is intended to educate unsophisticated investors, at which it does a good job, but it is so expensive as a percentage of assets that unless a subscriber has several hundred thousand of dollars to invest they would do better in a basket of index funds. I would recommend that a new investor without a substantial portfolio subscribe to one of the services for a year or two to get some education and then go on to one of the many free sites that provide all sorts of ideas and their own boards.
This is for the Motley Fool. I am posting this only to warn you against what just happened to me this morning. They sucked $149 from my credit card, renewing me for another year. Right now I am rating their customer service at zero, because they should warn you before doing this. I can only hope they will refund my money at this point.
Ah yes, the product. I’m tired of hearing about Marvel. Yes, yes, yes, a ten bagger, but OLD news. To be fair, I like the CAPS reviews by their members, and their Novartis recommendation was pretty good. It’s down from what I paid a year ago, but has weathered this downturn better than most.
I only subscribed to their regular membership, so can’t say much for the spin-offs. Overall I rate them Average, and their subscription overpriced…
Hope this was useful. Thanks, Mark
furious at them, because they continued to say buy the market even as it sank. now,i am new at investing (or losing) so naturally i followed their advice just to see my portfolio sink. they are experienced, so why didn’t they start advising shorts etc. however it is an interesting site with lots of member feedback.
As with most every other newsletter out there, the gains they represent are all a matter of buying the stock reco’s when they are 1st announced. The fact that they continue to reco the stock months and months after the original announcement dilutes the return dramatically when you purchase at 20% premium to the original announcement date.
I lost more money following their recommendations over the last few years. Got sucked into their CAPS ratings reports and found that even if 95% of their most successful investors rated a stock 5-stars for outperforming, I could lose 80% of my money in short order. I unsubscribed after one year. Loved the idea, but hated the result.
Too much hype and chest thumping. Maybe they were good in the beginning, but their recommendations and performance were mediocre during my subscriptions.
I subscribed to MF Stock Advisor for 1 year at a price of $99. After the one year I canceled. They were consistent in giving you 2 stocks each month, 1 from Tom and 1 from Dave, but the picks would always end up in the red. If you were good at placing trailing stops, I’m sure you might have been able to eek out a few % points here and there. Overall, I wouldn’t recommend.
Stock Advisor was my 1st newsletter, and I agree, a very interesting read, BUT their recommendations weren’t my cup of tea, and enuf with MVL and ACTI already! Love the Caps site, and am thinking of Global Gains, we’ll see if they put it on special! I enjoyed their throw in energy newsletter, some good pick sI have bought on the cheap now waiting for oil and gas to rally!
They offer too many services. Their attempt at cross selling is almost annoying as their performance. I subscribed for two years and did not habve enough money left to renew for a third year!
They first started this service right after the last bottom in 2002 so they showed fabulous results based on their early picks (the 10-bagger in MVL being one of their loudest trumpets). Most of their later picks have been mediocre to poor. They fall in love with their picks and only sell after it is blatantly obvious (and you’ve lost a good percentage). Their overall results are still propped up by their early picks. After I ran the numbers on their picks over the last two years, I dropped the service.
As far as I can tell, The Gardner brothers and their team have the most integrity of anyone who writes financial advice of this sort. They always tell their readers to buy for the long term and not get caught up in short term market movements. Of course, their returns on their monthly picks were down in 2008, but I don’t know whose weren’t. I’ve received Stock Advisor for a while and I’ve learned some great information about companies with a ton of potential once the market gets turned around. True, their marketing is aggressive, but they always make it fair and treat people candidly and sincerely. I think Motley Fool subscribers will be among the happiest and prosperous investors anywhere within a couple years!
I was new to the investing arena and wanted to learn all I could before taking charge of my own portfolio. I signed up for the MF because I thought they had good information on the site. I did not invest on their recommendations, instead I did my own research on each rec they offered…I found the information and education part of the site to be great, but then, I found a number of other sites that offer the same benefits (i.e research, blogs, opinions etc…) at substantially lower annual fees. I will not renew, I hope they reconsider the annual memebership fees soon.
I have subscribed to the Motley Fool Stock Advisor for several years now. I enjoyed reading the newletters in the begining but that quickly became frustrating as the performance of almost every stock pick showed dismal results. Additionally, I haven’t seen the least bit of what I would call intellectual honesty from them. They could have come out and said at some point that this is a different climate as far as investment options go and appologize for their bad performance. They could acknowledge the changing landscape and adjust accordingly (like say…”hold onto your money for now”…as the market was in freefall) but they just stated the same old “foolish” commentary that was obviously quite risky given the substantial uncertaintly in the global economy. Example: Since they pride themselves on assessing the “fundamentals” of a business, why does one recommend Fed Ex as the price of oil doubles and then the global economy tanks?? Isn’t that bad for the fundamentals of that business?Genius!!! I certainly plan to cancel my subscription as this last one runs out.
I subscribed to SA for about a week. I took the subscription and then about five days later they announced that they had been (ironically enough) fooled by Satyam and lost a bunch of money in that whole debacle. To be fair, lots of others were fooled as well, but it made me take a fresh look at the whole place over there and I suddenly realized that they had been saying it was a great time to buy for years when the market was going up and now they were saying it as the market was going down. It can’t ALWAYS be a great time to buy, even for buy-and-hold types.
I do like the CAPS part of their website, and I have learned some things from various of their articles. One thing I have learned to do is check to see what the CAPS rating is for any company I’m thinking of investing in, before I start any other research. A rating of 1 (the lowest) will save me a lot of time because it’s a sure sign something is wrong with the company. (Might be a good candidate for a short, though.)
I find it *v*e*r*y* odd that in the PRO ads they point out that according to their own data the most accurate forecaster of results is a CAPS rating of 1…yet among all their newsletters only PRO incorporates shorts, and apparently not many at that. Someone’s got some ‘splainin’ to do….
I think Stock Advisor is a great newsletter. I don’t love it so much for its stock picks, as for its educational value.
As a member of Stock Advisor, I have access to articles from all of their newsletters, as they just come up in my searches. It is true that these articles are followed by pitches to subscribe to the other newsletters, but that doesn’t make the information in them any less valuable.
As a novice investor, it is great to have access to simple instruction about things like how to read financial statements, how to trade simple options, etc. And, while the wealth of information can be overwhelming, I am getting better at at learning to sift through it. I too find the caps ratings useful, as well as the discussion boards.
I got my subscription for $79/year. Most of the stocks I have bought have not been formal recs, but their recs have done quite well, overall. I wish I had bought them all, and sold them.
I plan to keep my subscription, as long as i can renew at a bargain rate. I have found that I can enter just about anything into their search window and get a hit, even if it is just the name of a product, game or idea. Someone has discussed it, and there is a record of that discussion that i can find. That’s a great value.
Also, for all the chatting that goes on, there are some really smart people on those boards. I have gotten great and detailed answers to serious questions. That is worth a lot.
Customer service is excellent!!
Sarah G.
These guys seemingly at odds Nasdaq/Buffet investing styles often leave me perplexed! Spotlighted & Turned me on to mavericks Netflix & Marvel!! But some of the other choices! They seem to try too hard! Should have just kept featuring the two Champions above, clear faves of theirs!! When You’re right…..Hindsight being 20/20! Smart,Humurous, Honest!
I subscibed to the ‘free trial’, and then was unable to contact the fool before the 30 days were over, and got stuck for the entire year. As a begining investor, I get much more out of mad money, and I get to watch Cramer bite the heads off of plastic bulls and bears, rant, and throw chairs.
It seems to me that what counts in stock picking isn’t how well you stack up against the S&P500, but whether you actually make money on your picks. It’s hard to tell with SA if anyone ever actually makes a single penny following all the picks- but you sure know which fool did better than the other. Pretty frustrating over the last year when buying and holding stocks seems like a good way to get broke in a big hurry. And it is really sad that they didn’t recomend a sell on Satyam computer far earlier than they did. I take their picks as good ones to avoid.
I kind of felt the same way I did when I hired a roofer who named his company Quickbuild, and it took darn near forever to finish the roof. I should have know better.
JB
Subscribed a few years ago – found their chest-thumping annoying at best and fraudelent at worst. One of them claimed a 13% return for the year – sure, only because one pick did well. Of the twelve picks (one per month), 10 went down and 2 went up, one very well. They should make it very clear that for at least one of the brothers, you must buy every stock recommended or risk picking just the losers (since he, at that time, “tried to hit home runs” and there were sure to be losers).
The final straw was recommending Krazy Kreme doughnuts at $42 and continuing to recommend it all the way down to $5 – at which time it just never got mentioned again.
Anyone who trumpets the great gains of Marvel (which I did buy due to them and continue to own) should have the integrity to memtion the Krispy Kreme’s as well.
I have been a subscriber for a while now and will cancel when the time runs out. I like the format of the Newsletter and the two monthly picks, however, their picks are at best mediocre. Mostly their picks are pretty bad. They go on and on in the newsletter about the picks they like and why – sometimes 4-5 pages and usually have a couple of paragraphs on the risks. They seem to always buy at the right time and while they do admit their losses on their scorecard the prices they supposedly buy in or recommend at are usually right near or at the low for that time period. To get a more accurate score I would subract 10% from thier claimed results. They also compare all their picks to the S&P which is kind of silly depending on the stock. The best thing they do though is that they are a marketing machine. The 20 page marketing e-mails touting the next big thing are pretty comical and kind of sad at the same time. Two bozo’s who I would consider really good marketing managers and not so good advisors.