motley fool llc — three letters that protect the fool

llc, three letters that follow the word fool like a small sword. a title, additional. mike pours one and asks what llc means. i tell him it protects the fool legally. tom, ghost, agrees from his marriage. a coffee shop hum settles around the explanation.

writing this from my desk. the printer two cubicles over is wheezing in a way that suggests retirement. nobody is going to fix it. that’s our culture here.

topic on the table, mid-friday: motley fool llc. the company. the suffix. three letters that turn a court jester into a registered taxpayer. motley fool llc is the rare case of a name doing what it says, then doing slightly more on paper.

motley fool llc: the registered limited liability company that operates the motley fool brand — investment newsletters, podcasts, the website. the “llc” portion is a legal shield: the people behind motley fool llc are not, personally, on the hook if the advice goes sideways. the fool, in other words, has paperwork. the rest of us do not.

A FOOL. WITH. A. CORPORATE. SUFFIX.

motley fool llc, the corporate suffix

the brand is “the motley fool”. the legal entity is “the motley fool, llc”. one is what marketing puts on the homepage. the other is what lawyers put on the footer. marketing is the bell. the legal entity is the cap, the wood under the bell, the man holding the stick.

i looked it up between two emails. limited liability company. you pay a fee, you get a certificate. the certificate is not, as i once assumed, hand-calligraphed. it is a pdf that says: if this venture goes badly, the people behind it are protected, like a man in a coat in winter.

the fool, historically, did not have this. the fool stood in front of the king and could be, on a bad day, hanged. the modern fool stands in front of retail investors, protected by a suffix the king of denmark would have considered cheating.

why the fool incorporated, a noble move

the fool, by trade, is wrong out loud. that’s the whole job. the fool says the unsayable and wakes up alive because the rules of the court allowed for it. the rules of the modern market do not. the modern market has angry men with bloomberg terminals and a willingness to file paperwork.

so the modern fool — any operation that issues opinions about money — has a choice. either stop being wrong, which removes the profession from history, or put a small wall between yourself and your wrongness. the wall is the llc. it’s the reason the noble tradition of the fool can publish a confident take at 2:47pm, watch it invert by 4:30pm, and not be personally followed home by the men who lost the rent on it.

this is, in a phrase i’ll fight for, the noblest move available. the fool studied the king’s court. the fool noticed the gallows. the fool went to the secretary of state and filed.

the llc as a kind of cap-and-bells, legally speaking

the cap-and-bells was a uniform. when the man in the cap said something insulting, you didn’t draw a sword, because the cap meant this is a fool, licensed to be wrong. the cap was the license.

the llc is the modern cap. when motley fool llc tells you a stock is going to the moon and the stock instead goes into a hole, you don’t legally get to draw a sword. you get to read the disclaimer. size-9 font, bottom of the page. those are the bells. they jingle when you scroll. you don’t even hear them anymore.

mike at the corner thinks an llc is a bar with paperwork

i ran this past mike. mike is at the corner most weeknights, at a stool he calls “his” — though the bar would dispute that in writing. wrong man to ask about corporate structures. right man to ask about everything else.

i said: “mike. an llc. what do you think it is.”

mike took a long drink. mike said: “an llc is a bar with paperwork.”

i wrote it on a napkin. it now lives in the wallet i bought for receipts and which contains, mostly, napkins. a bar with paperwork. drinks pour, voices rise, and at the end of the night a piece of paper says nobody can be sued for any of it. that, in spirit, is what motley fool llc is. you walk in, you order a stock pick, you drink it, and the bar is not legally responsible for the morning.

mike, for his part, has the system, which is to do nothing — itself a kind of llc, a one-man, liability-uncertain entity called Mike. it has not failed yet. that’s a fact.

tom has an opinion about llcs, i did not call him

tom has opinions about all paperwork. tom has a pension tom understands, which puts him fifty floors above me on the building of adult competence. tom has, somewhere, an llc of his own — a consulting arm, the sort a man forms in his late thirties to write off mileage to the wedding venue he co-owns with his wife’s family. (mine had one tie. his had a venue.)

my phone buzzed sunday. tom’s name. mom called an hour later — mothers know who else has been calling, it’s part of the network — and asked if i’d called him back. i said i’d been busy. she said “okay”. she said it the way she says it when she has counted the months and chosen, today, not to mention the count. a paid membership has rules about cancellation; mothers have stricter ones.

i did not call back. tom is a one-man motley fool llc: licensed by paperwork to be confident about money. mine, sundays, ends at 6pm. sundays should end at 6 PM, on principle. tom’s call came at 5:47. close. but the rule held.

verdict — the suffix protects the tradition

where does this leave us, on a friday, spreadsheet open, printer still wheezing.

here. the fool survives the modern era only because the fool has access to a filing fee. without the llc, the fool is the medieval fool, dependent on the king’s mood. with the llc, the fool is a small, well-defended business, wrong on a wednesday and still picking up groceries on a thursday. motley fool llc is not a cynical move. it’s the only move.

notice that motley fool llc ends in the same three letters as the company that printed your last receipt and the company that owns the building i’m sitting in. the actual fool of the courts would have laughed at this — and then, after laughing, would have asked where to file.

the difference between a domain name and a registered entity is the difference between a costume and a job. the costume gets you laughs. the job gets you a w-2. motley fool llc wears both, on alternating days. that, on its own quiet terms, is a kind of low-grade brilliance.

printer just stopped on its own. nobody touched it. that’s two miracles this morning, if we count me writing this through to the end.

the unopened mail pile has a letter from a state agency about a fee i either paid or did not, for a thing i either started or did not. some of us are a long way from filing our own llc.

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