The Motley Fool is driving me Nuts!
Celebrating my Fooliversary!
It’s my Fooliversary! I’ve been subscribed to a Motley Fool newsletter for a year. Unfortunately, Tom & David Gardner’s Motley Fool marketing machine is driving me nuts!
I signed up for the Motley Fool Income Investor newsletter. The newsletter is OK, focusing on high yielding investment products with a firm-ish base. But I understand now that these individual subscriptions are just “gateway drugs” to continue to offer more and more investment advice and services, and, quite frankly, it’s become annoying.
In the first 6 months of this year, I’ve received nearly 100 e-mails asking me to join, subscribe to, or purchase:
- Motley Fool Supernova, a premium meta-stock picking service based on the recommendations of two other MF services, Stock Advisors and Rule Breakers,
- The Motley Fool Independence Fund (Ticker: FOOLX), a low load mutual fund,
- Motley Fool Pro, a portfolio of stocks, options, hedges and shorts seeking steady returns,
- Motley Fool Options, for Options trades and guidance,
- Motley Fool One, access to ALL of MF newsletters and MF Wealth Management, a full-fledged financial management service.
Want to see the whole list of MF products? Aren’t some of these mutually exclusive? How many Income Investors are also looking to trade options on the side? This isn’t new thinking; as long as Motley Fool has been around they’ve had detractors, like Mike Piper at Oblivious Investor.
I’m a believer in John Bogle’s investment advice. As a government employee, my current investments are in the Thrift Savings Plan. My Rollover assets are in a low-cost Vanguard portfolio.
But kudos to MF Customer service – they cancelled the auto-renew and responded to my email in less time than it took me to write this blog post!