Tuesday, June 25, 1996
On Personal Responsibility
by Murielle H

There is a rhetorical question rising from the recent media coverage of the evil Gardner Brothers, their malefic concoction, the Motley Fool, and its pathetic victims, the poor, naive, dumb individual investors like me.

Pray tell, has anyone out there besides Business Week, the San Jose Mercury News and CNBC been coerced into submission? Because I'd like to know. Just because it hasn't happened to me does not make me an unbeliever. Is this really a darkish cult in the Jim Jones vein? Some of the spin might make you think so. They paint me and you as so helpless and mentally incapacitated that we blindly follow the gurus' every command. That of course makes it the "nonline" media's moral responsibility to come to our rescue and lay the blame where it belongs -- at the Fools' feet.

Perhaps it is one of the less thrilling aspects of American culture, this tendency to lay blame on others and eschew one's own part in it. Where I grew up, in Switzerland, if you slipped on a banana peel, you should pay more attention; if you fell off the ski lift, you were a klutz; and if you invested in a stock that took you to hell and back, well, perhaps it meant you should have done your own research rather than take the bus driver's tip for it.

The opinions of the people who post to the Motley Fool should generally be considered with the same circumspection as the bus driver's. That is certainly what I get out of the Motley Fool's driving principles: do your homework, invest in what you understand, calculate the valuation in several different ways, research some more, and don't take anyone's recommendation without checking it out against the facts.

As a Foolish investor, I am thrilled to take responsibility for what I invest in. And that is precisely what the Wise would like to deny me, my free will and sense of personal responsibility, perhaps in the hopes that I shall in turn deny them, therefore holding the Wise unaccountable for those high fees and low returns.

Perhaps it's time for the Wise, like us, to quit the blaming game and stand up for the decisions we all make and their consequences. Or has it now become our moral obligation to run to their rescue and help them understand the predicament they're in? I think I know just how to do it: we'll make it compulsory for them actually to research the Motley Fool before covering it.

As in "do your homework," etc...

---Murielle Hamilton

Transmitted: 6/25/96