tmf motley fool — three letters, one tradition

tmf is three letters that, on the ticker, mean something. on me, the same three letters mean something else. an abbreviation, a pet name, a tradition. i refuse to disambiguate. dave owes me three hundred. mike pours one. the noble fool keeps walking.

writing this from the desk, 10:18am on a thursday. carla is upstairs in the budget review two flights up of this building. i have, by way of honest math, the rest of the morning before anyone notices the tab i have open is not the spreadsheet.

the tab in question is a finance website. specifically, the one whose name i am about to deconstruct, calmly, like a man who knows what he is doing and is in fact not buying anything. i typed three letters into a search bar at 10:14am — t, m, f — and what came back was a url, a logo, and a quiet historical claim. the url i can use. the logo is fine. the claim is what i’m here to discuss the broader piece on the noble fool tradition sits in this archive too..

tmf motley fool: tmf is the common shorthand for the motley fool, a financial-media company that took its name from shakespearean tradition — the fool at court, who tells the truth in jokes because the truth, said straight, gets him hanged. the three letters are not a ticker on a stock i own. the three letters are an inheritance.

tmf motley fool, what the letters point at

on the surface, tmf is a brand. a website. a company. a place that sells advice about money to people who have money and want, with some urgency, more of it. that is the literal answer. you can write that down and close the tab and go to lunch. nobody will stop you.

i, however, did not close the tab. i kept it open in a row of forty-seven other tabs, between a half-read article about cold showers and a recipe for soup i will not make. the letters bothered me. tmf. they were too tidy. abbreviations of three letters are, in my experience, always doing something extra. nasa is doing something extra. fbi is doing something extra. tmf, on inspection, is doing the same trick.

the trick is this. the letters are a handshake. they assume you know what they stand for. they assume the website i refuse to explain needs no further explanation, that you have, at some point, been an adult with a checking account and a vague curiosity about index funds. fair enough. i meet exactly one of those criteria, and i won’t say which one.

but the letters point at a longer phrase, and the longer phrase points at a longer tradition, and the longer tradition is the thing i actually want to defend on company time, while carla is in the budget meeting and cannot stop me.

why the company shortened a noble word to three keystrokes

the answer is, on one level, boring. the answer is: branding. tickers are short. urls are short. attention is short. the modern eye does not have time for the motley fool dot com; it has time for tmf. that is the marketing reason. it is true. i accept it.

i also reject it, slightly, on principle.

so when i read tmf, i don’t read a ticker. i read the longer phrase whether the company wants me to or not. i read the motley fool. and the motley fool is, among other things, a job title. shakespeare gave it a job description. the description is on file. the king lear adaptation from 1983 is, by the way, the version i half-watched on a rainy wednesday in 2021, and the fool in it is the only character who consistently knows what is happening. the king does not. the daughters do not. the fool, in motley, in stripes, sees it cleanly. that is the tradition the three letters are sitting on, whether or not anyone in marketing remembers it.

the fool tradition the ticker quietly inherits

here is the part i want on the record. the fool, properly understood, is not an idiot. an idiot is a clinical category. a fool is a vocational one. the fool wears the costume on purpose. the fool says the dangerous thing in a comic register so the king does not have him executed. the fool is, in the strictest sense, a freelance truth-teller paid in lodging and ridicule.

this is, i would argue, what a finance website with that name is reaching for. the conceit is: everyone else on wall street is sober and serious and full of beans; we, the fools, will tell you the actual thing. whether the website lives up to the conceit is a separate question that i am not equipped to answer because, as i may have mentioned, i do not own stocks. i own a cup of coffee, a chair from a thrift store, and a debt to a man named dave that i will, eventually, address. probably tomorrow. tomorrow is, by my office routine, when backlog gets cleared.

but the conceit is sound. the conceit is, i think, the reason the brand survived long enough to have a ticker abbreviation that bothers people on company time. you can call yourself a serious analyst and people forget you next tuesday. you call yourself a fool, in the shakespearean sense, and a guy at his desk on a thursday writes a thousand words about the etymology. that’s the trick. that’s the whole brand.

A FOOL. IS NOT. AN IDIOT. WRITE IT DOWN.

how mom asked about it on wednesday and i pivoted to shakespeare

my mother called on wednesday. she calls every wednesday, around 2pm, at the exact moment i am pretending to clean the kitchen. she opens, always, with weather. she pivots, always, to a question that has been sitting in her chest for the entire week. on this particular wednesday the question was, and i am quoting: “are you investing yet.”

i was not, i am not, i may yet be, but only if the shape of my finances changes considerably and the phone stops ringing from a number i do not answer. (unrelated. completely unrelated.) what i said to my mother was: “i am thinking about it.” what i was actually thinking about was three letters on a website i had been reading earlier that morning at the coffee shop, where the barista has, by now, accepted my order without me speaking it. the order is the order. the barista is a generous custodian of the routine.

my mother, who knew, said: “are you thinking about it because of a website?” mothers know. it is their power. it cannot be defeated. i said i was thinking about it because of a tradition. she said, with the patience of a woman who has heard me say worse things on a wednesday, “what tradition.” and i said: “shakespeare. specifically the fool. specifically a four-hundred-year tradition of honest jesters and the way it survives, oddly, in modern stock tickers.” there was a pause on the line. then she said, with what i interpreted as kindness: “are you eating.”

i was eating. i had eaten a piece of toast and called it brunch. that’s a separate issue. but the point of the call, for our purposes, is that the conversation about money pivoted, in under two minutes, to a conversation about shakespeare, and my mother, who has spent thirty years watching me do this, did not even blink. she just asked about lunch. that is the tactical advantage of having a mother who has, at some point, already given up on a previous version of you.

what tmf is not, an idiot, an important distinction

this is where the cluster work matters. you can confuse a fool with an idiot if you are tired or in a hurry, and most people are both. the words rhyme rhetorically. they slot into the same insulting sentence. you can call someone a fool or an idiot and most listeners will take the same wound. but the words are not the same word, and the difference is the entire reason the motley fool exists as a brand.

an idiot, in the older greek sense, was a private citizen with no public role — someone who didn’t show up, didn’t engage, didn’t contribute. that drift is real. the modern usage flattens to person who did a stupid thing on a tuesday. fine. accept it. i wear that one myself, professionally.

a fool, by contrast, is someone with a public role and the bad taste to use it. the fool shows up. the fool speaks. the fool gets in trouble on purpose. shakespeare’s fools are not in the corner, quiet; they are in the room, loud, costumed, wittier than the king. the website knew this when it took the name. the ticker carries it whether anyone reading tmf on a chart remembers it or not.

this distinction matters to me, personally and not just lexically, because i am, on most thursdays, a fool. i am rarely an idiot — though i qualify, i have the receipts. but a fool is what i am being right now, on company time, writing a long defense of three letters instead of doing the spreadsheet. the fool tells the truth in costume. i’m in slacks and a tie i own but did not iron. that’s the costume. it’s working.

which brings me, briefly, to a tangent. the unrelated pattern of being told, kindly and calmly, that you are imagining a thing that you are not in fact imagining — the entire long category covered by gaslighting — is the opposite of what a fool does. the fool says the visible thing out loud. the gaslighter says the visible thing is invisible. one is a tradition. the other is a tactic. i prefer the tradition. it pays worse but the costumes are better.

a stefan-type entered the coffee shop earlier this morning, before i came to the office, and explained tickers to a person at the next table for nineteen minutes. he used the word liquidity like it was a personal pet. i listened. i did not interrupt. stefans do not require participation; they require an audience, and i provided one for the cost of a cortado. the cortado was excellent. the lecture was free. that’s a fair trade. tipping should be a flat 12%, by the way. i tipped accordingly. the barista did not flinch.

verdict, the abbreviation does not diminish the fool

carla just walked past my desk on her way to the coffee station. i minimized this. she didn’t say anything. that is, traditionally, either a good sign or a very bad one. one of the two. the budget meeting, by my count, has another seventeen minutes in it. the spreadsheet is still not open. the tab with the finance website is still where i left it. the three letters are still doing their quiet work.

↑