Friday, September 26, 1997
Flower Power and
the BTD
by Douglas Rapier
([email protected])
I don’t consider myself a new Fool. I was a hippie musician in my younger days and that entailed quite a lot of Foolish behavior on a daily basis. The whole essence of being a hippie was to consciously buck the precepts of the Wise establishment of bankers, brokers, economists, lawyers, and politicians. It was, essentially, contrarian living.
However, it didn’t pay very well. And when the patina of innocent nobility that gave a righteous sheen to a life of self-imposed poverty finally wore off in its constant brushes with reality, I returned, albeit in a fleece disguise, to the fold.
After a few years of beating about, I found myself a good profession that pays well enough for me to consider investing some of my disposable income. But I have kept my contrarian ways.
Once again the old rub with the Wise wears at my resolve to walk a higher road. I wandered in the wilderness of conflicting investing methodologies. I tested the waters and found touts and hucksters clinging like lampreys to the sharks of Wall Street. I strove to be an individual investor -- not simply a source of chum for the big fish to greedily feed from.
I mistook trading for investing. I spent hours every day reviewing charts and articles, trying to glean something from the turgid babblings of the Wise that I might apply to my own fledgling portfolio... so that it might take wing.
I thought I had the key to unlocking the mysteries of the equity markets when I read The Beardstown Ladies Common Sense Investment Guide. It gave me confidence and resolve to know that these women from a small Illinois town had bested the Wise at their own game. Enthusiastically, I joined the National Association of Investors Corp. (NAIC) and studied their proscribed method for successful investing.
Alas, the key to the NAIC method is reliance on the Value Line Investment Survey, which is not readily or economically available in Taiwan, where I live. So, it was back to spending most of my waking hours sluicing through a flood looking for a few grains of useful information that met the criteria for common sense investments the NAIC way. I resigned myself to being a monk in the cloister of MSNBC, WSJ, and S&P.
Then, after a couple of fitful months of erratic trial and error, I found the Font of Foolishness: Tom and David Gardner’s Motley Fool. The moniker itself was what drew me to check out their website. Foolish investments? Cool!
Here, intelligent people are proud to thumb their noses contemptuously at the Wise. They have a record of successful investments bucking the establishment view. What’s more, they have a magnanimous, communal sensibility that allows them to share the details of their technique with anybody interested.
I read their book and afterwards read one of the sources of their inspiration, Michael O’Higgins's Beating The Dow. The simple, succinct, straightforward BTD method and its variants have freed me from my monkish incarceration and its concomitant dependency on the pronouncements of the Wise. I can once again enjoy human interaction, take up my former hobbies, and sleep at night.
Now I can proudly proclaim that I am a Complete Fool in a forum that will cheer such absurd announcements. I have learned Foolish ways to augment my common-sense approaches and make them contrarian to suit my nature and my personal history. And it makes me wonder... didn’t I see the Gardners at Woodstock?
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