motley fool newsletter vs my newsletter, an honest comparison

two newsletters arrive in two inboxes. one is the motley fool. the other is mine, idiotagain. both promise a kind of return. the_ex once ran a newsletter about wine, and i still remember the subject lines, which is its own kind of yield.

it’s 10:38am. wednesday. the spreadsheet i should be updating is in tab 4 of 47. the boss is in a vendor walkthrough that started, by my count, eight minutes ago. i have, with luck, the rest of the morning.

so. the motley fool newsletter. i’ve been subscribed to it for ten weeks — what i’d call research and what dave would call a slow-motion mistake. in the same period, i’ve sent my own, idiotagain, to a list of people who did not ask for it but are too polite to unsubscribe. ten weeks of theirs going one way, ten weeks of mine going the other. this is not a post about whether to pay for a motley fool subscription. that’s a different ledger. this is the newsletter — the email, the open, the click, the line at the top.

motley fool newsletter: a weekly email from the financial media company at www fool com, sent to subscribers, mostly free with paid upgrades. tone: confident. length: long. claim: identify stocks before they move. mine, idiotagain, does none of these things. that’s the comparison, in one paragraph, for people in a hurry.

A NEWSLETTER. IS NOT. A PROMISE.

some people will tell you a newsletter is a contract — the writer owes you, in exchange for your email, weekly insight or weekly correctness. those people are confusing a newsletter with a job. a newsletter is a piece of paper that arrives. what’s on the paper is the writer’s problem. whether you read it is yours.

the table, which is the whole reason i’m writing this

i made a table. mom called on sunday and asked, in her voice that is half question and half summons, what i was doing for money. i said “comparing newsletters.” long pause. then “alright,” in the way she files things away for later. the table exists, in part, because of that pause.

that’s the table. it won’t get me invited to a conference. it will hold up under questioning, which is more than i can say for most marketing decks.

open rate and length: the numbers that lie politely

the motley fool newsletter, like every newsletter ever emailed, claims an open rate. open rates, in modern email, are partial fiction. an “open” can mean a person opened the email — or their phone, in a pocket, while buying a sandwich, downloaded the tracking pixel by accident. so when a finance newsletter brags about its open rate, what it is really bragging about is that some sandwiches were purchased that week.

i do not check mine. dave thinks this is a moral failing. he thinks every metric should be checked, framed, and emailed to him for verification. he works in insurance, where every digit is sacred, which colors his judgment.

length, too. the motley fool newsletter is, on average, almost as long as a serious blog post. section breaks. subheads. a thing at the bottom called “a final thought,” which, in the corporate sense, is the upgrade reminder. a magazine that delivers itself to your inbox while pretending to be a friend. mine is a paragraph, then another paragraph, then an admission. i write it in forty minutes, in the chair across the row from somebody else’s empty chair, between meetings i was not invited to. the_ex, in years i’d rather not date precisely, sent a wine newsletter. one subject line was “this bottle ruined a wednesday.” i never opened that one. i opened all the others. i think about her subject lines more than i think about her — either healing, or a different kind of haunted.

tone: confident vs damp

the motley fool newsletter is written by people who are, professionally, confident. confidence is the deliverable. nobody pays a finance newsletter to say “i don’t know what’s going to happen next, friend, it’s all weather.” they pay it to say “this is the move.” even when the move is wrong, the tone has to be the move.

mine reflects 4B too. 4B is my upstairs neighbor, who, in the past three weeks, has acquired a drum kit and the conviction that 7:48pm is “early.” 4B’s drumming is bad in the same specific way bad newsletter analysis is bad: it has confidence, it has rhythm, but the rhythm is wrong, and the confidence is what makes it intolerable. a newsletter that is wrong with confidence is a man with two sticks and no time signature. you hear it through the floor. you hear it in your inbox. same sound. boiler room is the film about it — men in shirts selling stocks they have not researched.

what they’re really selling, which is not stocks

what the reader actually gets

i can tell you what i get from the motley fool newsletter, because i have ten weeks of it in a folder. three stock picks. two macro warnings. one upsell, sometimes two. a chart i can’t read on my phone. a paragraph at the bottom that begins “now more than ever,” which is the corporate way of saying please stay subscribed. i’m not mocking it. i’m describing it. somebody, somewhere, has a checklist.

mine is closer to a phone call from a friend who has had two coffees and a shock. one anecdote. one hot take — recently, the take that books on tape are cheating, which i still believe and have refused to walk back. one regret. last week’s regret was the DM i sent on a sunday at 1:14am to a person i used to work with, asking if she still had the spare key i lost in 2022. she did not reply. she has not replied. she will not reply. the DM sits in the outbox of my brain like a small fish that died of embarrassment.

the verdict, as much as a comparison gets a verdict

so which newsletter is better. the question is, on closer inspection, the wrong question. the motley fool newsletter is better at being the motley fool newsletter. mine is better at being mine. that’s what newsletters do — they get good, over time, at being the specific thing they are, which is why most attempts to imitate one with another end in a bad cover band of an inbox.

if you want stock picks, signed and confident, in serif font, every wednesday, you know where to find them. mom told me sunday that the third yoga mat is “still under the couch, i can hear it from here.” (she cannot — she lives 200 miles away — but she said it with the kind of authority a man at the bar would respect.) the yoga mat is not a stock pick. but it has held its value better than most stock picks i’ve ever pulled from a newsletter.

if you’d rather get a short email from a man at a desk who has, that morning, considered both his life and his seventh microwave — see also the post on what it means to be a fool, generally — one will arrive.

methodology, briefly: i read the last ten of each, in the same week, on the same desk, with the same coffee. a man at the corner bar — different evening, different wednesday — once told me you can compare anything if you put it in a table, and the table doesn’t have to be true, it just has to be in a table. i kept this in mind. i also rejected it.

↑