motleyfool — the website i refuse to explain

motleyfool sounds, to my ear, like a guild. a small one. probably eight men in tights giving honest financial counsel from a stone bench. i opened the website and found, instead, a button. the button asked for my email. the guild, technically, was elsewhere.

parked at the workstation. carla, upstairs, in the budget review. nobody is checking my screen. on the company’s clock, i am, technically, working.

so. motleyfool. the website. it has been on a list, in my head, of things to read when i become the kind of person who reads things like that. the list is long. the list includes a tax book a friend lent me in 2021. the list includes the back of a cereal box from last tuesday. the list does not, statistically, get read. but today is the day. or part of the day. or twenty minutes of it.

motleyfool: a financial-media company, founded in the early 1990s, that publishes investment research and stock-picking advice for retail investors. the name comes from shakespeare — specifically, from the figure of the court fool, who was paid to say uncomfortable truths. the company adopted the metaphor: financial advice, told plainly, by people willing to look stupid in public. that, on inspection, is a brand i can almost get behind.

FINANCIAL ADVICE. FROM. SELF-DECLARED. FOOLS.

that, frankly, is the part i respect. most financial websites pretend to be the smartest man in the room. motleyfool, by name alone, has confessed in advance. that is, in the rhetorical sense, a posture i admire. it does not mean i’m going to take their advice. it means i am willing to read their headlines.

fool_refers_to_the_company_briefly”>what motley fool refers to, the company, briefly

the company, motley fool, has been around since approximately the early 1990s, which puts it in the same age bracket as my microwave habit. it was started by two brothers — i looked it up, i am not going to name them, that is between them and the dictionary — who decided that financial advice should not require a tie or a bloomberg terminal or the kind of vocabulary that makes you nod without understanding.

the brothers took the name, as we’ll see, from the figure of the fool in shakespeare’s “king lear” — the only character allowed to tell the king he was wrong without losing his head. the metaphor, in finance, is: the wall street consensus is the king. the brothers are the fools. the fools say the consensus is wrong. sometimes the fools are correct. sometimes they are, also, fools. that’s the deal. the company has been running on it for thirty-something years, and they appear to be doing fine.

i open the bank app exactly once a quarter, when forced. i am not their core demographic. but i can, from a distance, appreciate the hustle.

why the name is, technically, perfect

let me put this in plain language, just the once.

so calling a financial-advice company “motley fool” is, on this read, the most honest naming convention in the industry. it says, on the homepage: we know what we are. we are guessing in public. we are willing to look stupid for the sake of saying things plainly. that is, etymologically, the job description of the fool. i would respect this brand more if every financial website did the same. instead most of them are called things like “capital strategies international” and they charge by the half-hour.

the financial advice i won’t be giving

i want to be honest with you, because there is a very real risk that somebody finds this post via a search engine, types motleyfool, and then expects me, on the strength of being on the internet, to tell them what to do with money. i am, by every available measure, not the man for that.

here is the situation, briefly:

• i have a bank app on my phone. it is, on the home screen, in a folder called “later”. the folder, which contains four other apps, has not been opened, by me, in 2026.
• i have a savings account. (savings accounts are a hobby for the wealthy. i’m sorry. i wish it were not so. but mathematically, when the rent goes up by nine percent and the savings rate is, on average, four, the savings account is a slow leak.) i have one. it has approximately the same dollars in it as it had in 2023. that’s not investing. that’s mummification.
• i have, somewhere in the kitchen drawer, a 401k-type form i was supposed to fill in three jobs ago. i moved it once, in 2022, when i was looking for a take-out menu. the form is now, possibly, behind the menu, possibly behind the toaster. i have not investigated.
• i have a landlord who, every six weeks, leaves a paper note on my door explaining a “small adjustment”. the small adjustment is always upward. the landlord has never, in three years, left a downward adjustment. there is a pattern there, but addressing the pattern would require speaking to the landlord, which would require the landlord answering the phone, which they do approximately one call in four.

so the financial advice i would give, if pressed, is: do whatever the man at motleyfool tells you, and ignore the man at this desk. that is, technically, my recommendation.

the spirit of the term fool, we covered this

i have, in another post, on another wednesday, gone into the noble tradition of being a fool. the fool is the licensed truth-teller. the fool is the only person in the room allowed to say the quiet part out loud. the fool, in shakespeare, is the smart one in disguise.

the financial-media company has, by adopting the name, claimed the costume. they say: we are the fools. we are willing to be wrong in public. we are not the wall street consensus. that’s a brand position. it’s not nothing.

does this mean every stock pick they publish is correct? it does not. they are, like everybody, guessing into the future, which is, statistically, a bad lit room. but the posture — the willingness to be the fool rather than the king — is the part i find rhetorically clean. most institutions hide their guessing behind certainty. motleyfool, by name alone, has admitted the guessing up front. that’s a small honesty in a noisy field.

(that said, i have been on the website for, by my count, eleven minutes, and a popup has asked me to subscribe four separate times. so the fool is also, on inspection, hustling. fair enough. so am i.)

verdict — fools all the way down

so here is where we end up.

motleyfool, the company, is named after the smartest character in king lear and run by people who appear to be aware of the joke. the joke is that financial advice is, fundamentally, a craft of guessing in public, and the people who admit it are, on average, more trustworthy than the people who don’t. that’s the read. it’s not a hot take. it’s just the math, dressed in a hat with bells.

my own situation is, by contrast, a different fool. i am the fool who has not opened the bank app since february. i am the fool who has, in a kitchen drawer, a 401k form behind a take-out menu. i am the fool who, when the phone rings from an unknown number, lets it go to voicemail and then never plays the voicemail. (the voicemail, for the record, has been full for some time. i am not going to elaborate. some calls are not, technically, mine to handle.)

so we have, in this post, two flavors of the same word.

one flavor: a financial-media company, doing the noble fool’s work, telling the consensus it might be wrong, in writing, every weekday.

the other flavor: a man at a desk, on a wednesday, with an unopened bank app, an unanswered phone call, a paper note from a landlord he is not currently speaking to, and a tab open to a website he refuses to fully explain.

both, technically, fools. one is doing the job on purpose. the other is doing it by attrition. i’m not going to tell you which is which. i think we both know.

carla drifted past the desk on her way to coffee. tab change executed in time. she did not break stride.

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