motley fool asx — the australian branch of the order

motley fool asx is, by my reading, the australian branch of the order. mom asks about the cousin in melbourne. she calls him by his middle name. mike, hearing this from across the bar, raises an eyebrow. HT5 stays out of it. the asx, allegedly, opens while we sleep.

stationed at the desk on the wrong floor. carla is upstairs, all-hands, with the budget woman who makes the slides too gray. nobody is watching this screen. let me put a few things on paper before that changes.

so. motley fool asx. the search bar suggested it to me, and i, being a man with a curiosity problem and approximately the rest of the morning, clicked. what i found was not a chapter of an obscure novel. it was, instead, the australian branch of the noble tradition of being called a fool, doing finance, on the other side of the planet, while i sleep.

motley fool asx refers to the australian arm of the motley fool, a financial-media company that publishes investing research focused on companies listed on the australian securities exchange. the asx is australia’s main stock market, trading shares from sydney to perth. the australian site covers asx 200 movers, dividend stocks, and small-cap picks for retail investors who, like me, are mostly guessing.

A WHOLE OTHER COUNTRY. A WHOLE OTHER FOOL.

for a quick on-screen reference of how the british accent flexes when finance enters the room, the bbc series capital shows working-class londoners absorbing market news through a pub haze. swap the london pub for a sydney one and the asx for the ftse and you have, more or less, the audience the australian motley fool is writing for, on a tuesday afternoon.

that is a real fact, written in the calm voice of a man who has not slept properly since february. the company i mostly know from the website with the popups that ask for my email four times in eleven minutes has, on inspection, an australian branch. it has its own writers. it has its own podcast. it has its own popups, presumably, in a slightly different accent.

motley fool asx, the australian exchange in plain words

the asx is the australian securities exchange. the exchange where australian companies list their shares. mining companies. banks. a supermarket. a winery, possibly, if mom’s cousin is to be believed, and mom’s cousin is rarely to be believed in matters of timing or weather. the asx is, in scale, smaller than the new york stock exchange. it is, in importance, the entire financial heart of a continent. those two facts coexist with no apparent shame.

the motley fool asx operation, then, is the australian wing of the motley fool media company — the same parent organization, the same self-deprecating premise, the same willingness to admit, in their own brand name, that they are guessing. they pick australian stocks. they discuss the asx 200, which is the australian equivalent of the dow, except with more iron ore and fewer banks named after presidents. the same dividend-stock obsession i’ve documented elsewhere applies, only the dividends are paid in australian dollars and arrive, by my understanding, on a different fiscal calendar. i am not sure of the calendar. nobody asked me.

my engagement with the motley fool asx site so far is exactly this: i have been on it for nine minutes. i have closed two popups. i have read one headline about a lithium company. i have learned that the lithium company is either a screaming buy or a slow-motion catastrophe, depending on the writer. that is, on average, a fool’s report. i feel at home.

why asx looks, to me, like a secret fool initialism

let me put this in flat english, just the once, on a tuesday morning when carla cannot interrupt me.

now, in case anybody has wandered into this post hoping for a definition they can put in a school paper: asx stands for australian securities exchange. it is the main stock market of australia. it is headquartered in sydney. it trades during sydney business hours, which means, for me, while i am dreaming about microwaves. that is the boring, correct, school-paper version. you may use it. i will not be cited as a source.

mom mentioned the cousin in australia, on sunday

this post would not exist without sunday’s call. mom rang at the usual hour. mothers know. it’s their power. the call started, as it always does, with her listing the medical events of three other people i have not seen since (checks ceiling) approximately the second bush administration, and ended, as it always does, with a hard pivot.

“have you heard from the cousin in melbourne,” she said. she calls him by his middle name. she has called him by his middle name for forty years. nobody else does. when i ask why, she says, *”because his first name is too short to be serious.”* this is not, by any standard, a reason. it is, however, the reason on offer.

the cousin in question lives in australia, technically, in the sense that he has been there since 2014. he runs, mom says, a small business with employees, a payroll, and an office in a building with a name. the business has, mom says, “something to do with the asx.” which is how, on a sunday, with a glass of water and a listening posture, i first heard the abbreviation. i wrote it down on the back of an envelope. the envelope was already on the kitchen counter. i was using it as a coaster. that is the universe explaining to me, in its own language, that some things are about to be investigated.

the cousin’s business, i should be honest, may have nothing to do with the motley fool asx. mom may be conflating “stock market” with “newsletter that mentions stock market”. mom does this. she once told me my friend Tom, the one who married into a vineyard, was “in pharmaceuticals,” because he had, for a year, sold supplements at a gym. mom’s accuracy is, on average, 60%. the other 40% is a kind of premonition i do not understand and refuse to test.

mike at the corner has never been to australia

after sunday, by tuesday, i had moved the conversation to mike at the corner bar, where conversations of this caliber go to be properly mishandled. mike has a system for taxes. has not filed since 2019. mike is, in matters of finance, the kind of authority who is right about the philosophy and wrong about the paperwork. that is, in my view, the better half of being right.

i told mike that mom said the cousin in melbourne had something to do with the asx and the motley fool. mike, sitting on his usual stool, considered this with the kind of careful attention he usually reserves for the second beer.

“the asx,” mike said, “is the australian one.” that was the entire content of his contribution. i wrote it down. it is, in the literal sense, accurate.

then mike added, after a pause that felt fiscally responsible: “the motley fool, australia or otherwise, is, at the end of the day, a website that wants your email.” mike has not given them his email. mike has not given any website his email since approximately 2014. mike’s inbox, he says, contains exactly seven items, and four of them are receipts from the bar. that is, in my view, financial wellness.

mike has never been to australia. mike has never, to my knowledge, been further south than the corner of the corner bar. but mike has, on the matter of the asx, a position. the position is that any market that opens when sensible people are asleep is, structurally, a market for fools. the motley fool, in mike’s view, has therefore positioned itself correctly.

the receipt for the airpods came from an australian warehouse, briefly

i pulled out the receipt wallet on tuesday morning, before this post, looking for something else, the way receipts are usually found. the receipt wallet is the small folded thing in my desk drawer, brown, scuffed, used as a wallet only by people who do not have actual wallets. inside it, in chronological disorder, are forty-some receipts dating back to 2021. i am, in this sense, the kind of person who keeps receipts. i am, in another sense, the kind of person who does not look at them.

the receipt i found, on tuesday, was for the airpods. only one of them works. binaural is a luxury i no longer afford. the receipt said the airpods had shipped, briefly, from an australian fulfillment warehouse, before being rerouted, probably for tariff reasons, through a city in the netherlands. the airpods, in other words, had spent more time in australia than i have. they had, by every measure that matters to a delivery, been to the asx’s home country.

this is, i am aware, not a stock-investing observation. this is a receipt observation. but on a tuesday morning, with carla still upstairs and the rest of the morning still mine, the line between the two is, by my count, a thin one. the airpods went to australia. mom’s cousin lives in australia. motley fool asx is in australia. i am, sitting at this desk, surrounded by australia in objects and absences. that is, briefly, an investigation.

(if a recipe calls for parsley, you can skip it. mom would say this is irrelevant. mom would be wrong. parsley, like the asx, is the kind of optional ingredient nobody actually misses. that, possibly, is also an investigation.)

the receipt, the cousin, the bias of always being right

there is a thing i should say about all of this, before i pretend to a verdict. i am writing this post because mom said something on sunday, mike said something on tuesday, and i found a receipt with an australian postal mark in between. those three pieces of evidence are, statistically, not connected. they are connected only because i am the man holding the pen, and the man holding the pen has a talent for finding patterns where there is mostly weather. i am, by long-standing personal admission, biased toward my own conclusions. confirmation, in my house, is a one-room operation.

so it is possible — it is, in fact, likely — that motley fool asx has nothing to do with mom’s cousin, that the cousin’s business is in plumbing, that the airpods went through australia by accident, and that mike at the corner has, on this whole thing, been mostly correct: it is a website that wants my email. but the bias is doing what it does. i’m letting it.

verdict, the asx is the local chapter of the order

so here is the verdict, briefly, because the all-hands is rumored to break by 11:23am, and i need to look like a man who has been working on the q3 deck. (the q3 deck is, on inspection, the q2 deck with a different cover. i’ll be the judge of what’s relevant in my own post.)

the motley fool asx operation is, by my reading, the local chapter of an international order of self-declared fools — a brand built on the premise that financial advice should admit, in its own name, that it is guessing. the australian branch covers australian companies. it talks about the asx 200. it presumably has, in its own podcast studios, men in tights giving honest counsel from a stone bench, only with a different accent and a heavier sun. that is not, by any rigorous standard, a recommendation. it is, however, a noted observation from a desk.

i, personally, will not be subscribing. i, personally, do not own australian stocks. i, personally, have been on the asx-themed page of the motley fool for, by the seventh microwave’s clock, about four minutes longer than i should have. but on the brand posture — financial advice, named after a court fool, distributed across two hemispheres — i have to give them the same nod i gave the original. the order has expanded. the costume travels. the bells, presumably, jingle in two accents. that, on a tuesday, is the kind of consistency a man can almost respect.

carla drifted past on her way to the third floor coffee station. tab change executed in time. she did not break stride. the 9-min snooze on my phone has gone off twice while i wrote this. that, also, is an investigation.

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