motley fool stock picks — and the items in my fridge that qualify

motley fool stock picks, parsed honestly, are guesses with a layout. mine are items in my fridge that, on a generous day, qualify. supermarket failed me at checkout. schrodinger’s fridge holds the rest. the contact form on chatgpt asks if i need help. i do, but not with this.

it is 2:47pm on a wednesday. carla is upstairs in a training session about something called “agile cadence” which i believe is a kind of meeting that schedules other meetings. i have, in raw terms, the rest of the morning, and i have decided to spend it explaining my own portfolio. it is in the fridge. there is a reason for that.

before we go further, a clarification for the lawyers and for you. i am not licensed. i am not an advisor. i could not pick a stock if you handed me a board with three on it and asked me to point. what i can do is buy a tub of greek yogurt past its date and call it an investment. that is what i will be doing today, in writing, for tax-deductible reasons that are not real.

writing this from the desk while the agile cadence training runs upstairs. i am told it ends at noon. i do not believe it.

my official position on financial newsletters is that they are a longer investigation into the motley fool deserves, and i wrote one earlier and you can read it if you want the receipts. this post is the bar version. shorter. fewer footnotes. one yogurt.

motley fool stock picks, the official process

here is, as far as i can reconstruct from the marketing emails i did not subscribe to, how motley fool stock picks actually happen.

a team of analysts, by which i mean adults with two monitors each, look at companies. they read filings. they do something called “due diligence” which is the only phrase in finance that sounds like an apology. they pick two stocks a month and send them to subscribers, who then have to decide if they trust analysts they have never met more than the version of themselves at 10pm on a sunday.

the official sales pitch is that the picks have, historically, beaten the market. the unofficial version, which i prefer, is that some of them did and some of them didn’t and the ones that did are in bigger fonts on the homepage.

i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere, possibly in a magazine i have seen at the dentist, about how a list of stocks picked by a group of monkeys with darts performed roughly the same as professional pickers over a long enough horizon. the methodology was suspect. the monkeys were unionized. the point stands.

my own stock picks, in the fridge, schrodinger style

my fridge is what i now call, for branding purposes, schrodinger’s fridge. it contains items that may or may not be food until the moment i open the door. opening the door collapses the wave function. usually into “no.” sometimes into “maybe.” once, memorably, into “what is that smell.”

here is my current portfolio, as of this morning, before training cadence ends.

position one: a tub of greek yogurt, plain, full fat, expiration date redacted because it is none of your business and also because i can’t read it anymore. acquired in bulk from the bulk membership i pay for despite living alone. a single human cannot eat a tub this size before it returns to its constituent atoms. but it was, per unit, cheaper. i picked it. i stand by it. it is a long position.

position two: three eggs of unknown providence. i bought a dozen. i used four. i lost track of the rest. they are in the back, behind position one. they may be from this month. they may be from another era. i will not be testing them. they are a hold.

position three: half a jar of olives that i bought because i thought i might become a person who eats olives. i am not. the olives are unbothered. they will outlive me.

position four: a single beer that has been there since a dinner i hosted in march. the dinner was for one. i was the dinner.

this is the portfolio. the yogurt is the standout. the yogurt is, frankly, my motley fool moment. the yogurt is the call i will tell my grandchildren about, except i don’t have any, and the yogurt may not either.

PICKS. ARE. JUST. PURCHASES. WITH. CONFIDENCE.

the ikea side table picked itself, it was on sale

i need to bring up the ikea side table because it is part of the same investigation and i am the one writing this. last november i bought an ikea side table on sale. the sale was the pick. the table was incidental. the box has been on my floor for fourteen weeks. it is now, technically, a side table — i set things on the box, it holds the things, the function is performed.

i did not assemble it. i will not assemble it. a man at the bar told me ikea instructions are designed to be slightly wrong on purpose, so you feel a small triumph at the end. i don’t want a small triumph. i want a side table. the box continues to deliver. the picture on the box is doing the work. that is, in essence, my philosophy of investment — let the picture do the work, let the box be the table, let the yogurt be the position.

this is also why the motley fool podcast list never stuck for me, the same way the side table never stuck. i listened to two episodes on a walk. i nodded a lot. i bought no stocks. but i walked, which is a kind of return.

the contact form on my site filters my picks too

my contact form is run by chatgpt. i should clarify what that means, since people ask. it means a small program reads what you send me and decides what i should look at. mostly it decides nothing. it is an automated filter for the inbox of a man who does not want one. picks, in this house, are made by software i do not understand and a yogurt past its date.

last week chatgpt forwarded me a single email it deemed urgent. it was from someone selling stock picks. real stock picks. real money. the email had three exclamation points which, per my own rules, would have gotten it filtered, but apparently chatgpt thinks i’m in the market. i am not. i am in the fridge.

this is, in a small way, an investigation of how stock-pick services overstate their batting average the way a practiced liar overstates anything, with the relaxed face of someone who has rehearsed. lying, in this format, is a category and a craft, and the recommendation list and the outcome list are two different documents, and the second one is shorter than the first. nobody links the two. you have to do that yourself, with a spreadsheet, on a saturday, alone. i would rather watch the big short, which at least has christian bale playing a man who actually did the math.

the receipts confirm the picks were not picks

i went through my receipt wallet last sunday at the corner bar with mike. mike, as i note here, has a system for taxes. has not filed since 2019. the taxman sends letters in serif font, and mike has a drawer for them, and the drawer is full, and mike is at peace.

i pulled out three months of receipts. i was looking for evidence of intentional purchases. i found none. every line item was a mistake i had committed to.

the bulk yogurt. the single beer from the march dinner. a magazine in spanish. four packs of pens. a houseplant. a card for someone whose birthday i forgot and then bought a card for and then forgot to send. these were not picks. these were, in finance terms, “involuntary positions.” in normal terms, “shopping while tired.”

and yet, and this is the important part — they are mine. i bought them. i carry them home. some of them i still own. that is, i’m fairly sure, what investing is. owning something for longer than you intended.

mike laughed. mike said “that’s not investing, that’s hoarding.” mike does not understand. mike does not have a yogurt strategy. mike has a tax strategy, which is to say, no strategy. we are not the same. we are both, however, at the bar.

verdict, picks are just purchases with confidence

so where does this leave us. it leaves us with motley fool stock picks, which are real, paid, professionally produced, and may or may not work for you, the same way the yogurt may or may not still be yogurt. the difference is that the yogurt is mine and i can see it. the picks are someone else’s and you have to take them on faith, which, as i wrote in a longer piece on whether pension plans are also faith-based, is a recurring theme in this whole apparatus.

my own portfolio: a tub, three eggs, half a jar of olives, one beer, and a side table that is functionally a box. value: contested. liquidity: zero. emotional return: surprisingly stable.

i am not going to subscribe. i am, instead, going to go home tonight and open the fridge and check on my positions. one of them is making a small clicking sound. that is, possibly, growth.

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