April 14, 1998
Six
Opinions
The Fool on the Beardstown
Ladies
The Foolishness of the
Ladies
by Trudy Bowen
([email protected])
It's been a bad time for those nice old ladies in Beardstown. After announcing that, because of an accounting error, their reported returns had been inflated, the market Wise jumped on them like a duck on an Illinois June bug.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Merton Miller from the University of Chicago said, "I never took them very seriously."
The financial sections of city newspapers all over the country couldn't come out quick enough with the "I told you so" remarks. An editorial in the Seattle Times warned readers to "beware of grannies dispensing such homespun financial." The column ended with: "More important, most beat-the-market magic -- whether pitched by Kindly Grandmas or Motley Fools -- is nothing more than sheer randomness."
Well, this is one Fool who's proud to be mentioned in the same holier-than-thou paragraph as the Grannies. And why is that? Because the column's author and the financial pundits just don't get it. But then, they never have, have they?
The philosophy espoused by both the Beardstown Ladies and the Motley Fool has nothing to do with "beat the market magic." It has everything to do with personal empowerment and integrity.
If you were to ever visit the "Global Headquarters of the Motley Fool" you would find an office full of talented men and women from all over America hunched over computers reading and writing about the stock market. Some them were even lured away from those "Wise" guys on Wall Street. Why would so many smart people chuck the big bucks and perks that go along with working for a NYSE brokerage firm or a Fortune 500 company to slave away in the sleepy backwaters of suburban Virginia?
Because if you kept walking past all of us hunched over our computers you'd come to our big conference room in the corner. (Right past Erik's golf equipment, but before you get to the copier.) And on the wall of this conference room is a framed poster with these words:
The Motley Fool Core Values
--We bring an uncompromising honesty to all our endeavors, great and small.
--We exhibit a joyful optimism shared with customers, partners, and employees alike.
--We bring about social progress through cooperative endeavor, championing civil and open debate.
--We search relentlessly for better solutions.
And who came up with these values? Who wrote those words? Tom and David Gardner? A consultant that we hired to give us a focus? A book from Borders on how to write mission statements?
No. We did. The employees and partners of the Motley Fool wrote our Core Values Statement.
Does it talk about making lots of money? Does it talk about get-rich-quick schemes or beating the market every year?
Or does it talk about honesty, research, education, and open communication? Aren't these the same values that have always been espoused by our elder sisters in Illinois?
Most of us who work at the Motley Fool are here because we believe that we don't need experts to tell us how to invest our own money. These are skills that any diligent student can learn if he is willing to take control of his financial life. It is our life, after all. Who has more of a vested interest in making it good?
I applaud the Beardstown Ladies for coming clean with their accounting problem. I know it's the kind of thing that we Fools would do if we were ever confronted with such a dilemma.
Do you think your broker or the manager of your mutual fund or your favorite financial writer would be so honest? Let's hope so.