Investing For Growth
Investing For Growth
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FOOL GLOBAL WIRE LEXINGTON, KY. (December 20) -- Maybe it's the holiday season, maybe it's the end of a surprisingly good year after no one expected it, maybe it's the anti-histamines, but I've sat here for the last two hours in some kind of bizarre reverie about what it is that we're able to do today.
For those of you who know me, this is old news. For those of you who are relatively new to the Fool, this may surprise you. But just a shade over two years ago, I had never purchased a common stock before. (I had been given a few shares of one when my grandmother died years ago, but I didn't know anything about it and didn't care since it was a steel company which went straight down for years after I received it.)
At the time I discovered the Motley Fool, I was teaching English literature and writing at the University of Kentucky and Georgetown College (a small private college just north of Lexington). I was invested in some mediocre mutual funds (or is that redundant?) and didn't know anything about individual stocks.
By chance, I happened on the Fool icon on AOL's main screen the day I tried my ten free hours. (I can't count how many coincidences had to occur for me to be a part of the Fool today.) I had been a CompuServe subscriber for a while but quit in frustration because I never knew what I was paying per hour in each service. So I fully planned to use my ten hours and chuck AOL, too.
But being a literature teacher, how could I pass up something remotely Shakespearean right there on AOL's welcome screen? (An hour earlier or later and I might never have seen the Fool icon.) And that was it, I was hooked. The first thing a new Fool reader saw in those days was the series of articles on "How to Invest What You Have." From $1 to $1 million, Tom and David had a clever answer penned. The style and the fact that someone was really willing to tell readers what they should do for themselves was exactly what I, and undoubtedly millions of others, wanted.
The growth of the Fool since then is obviously the stuff of which legends are made, so I won't recount it here. But in addition to the Fool, which I consider one of the best educational sites (let alone financial ones) anywhere online or off, I'm amazed at the immense wealth of information we, as individual investors, have access to for the $20 a month AOL now charges. Stock quotes on thousands of issues, news reports from half a dozen major wire services, analyst earnings estimates, links directly to company web sites, electronic financial statements direct from the Securities & Exchange Commission, online brokers where you control your decisions and don't have to pay an arm and a leg to manage your own destiny. And more and more and more.
What amazed me today is that I continue to discover even more information here on AOL and on the web, all there for the taking for anyone with a computer, a modem, a little bit of cash each month, and the desire to find it. How else could such a bizarre confluence of events take place to jettison me out of a teaching job where I felt I was spinning my wheels into a digital workplace where my employers had never met me in person, were going to allow me to work at home, and were going to let me talk about something I was just learning myself? (Don't bring this up with the Gardners, they might still reconsider.)
I guess I hold myself out as the archetypal Fool reader. I was a blank slate two years ago, and let the Foolish philosophy guide me in my own stock market education. And there's so much left to learn, but somehow it's not so scary when we know there are literally hundreds of thousands of others just like us visiting these cyber-hallways to share ideas and help us work through dilemmas. I still have to shake my head when I think about it from a distance. Simply amazing what we're able to accomplish this way. Fool on, indeed! Also, don't forget to check out the game I designed to go along with our Foolish Workshop ideas, The Thoroughbred Stock Challenge. If you're an AOL reader, just add the URL to your favorite places folder. If you're a Web reader, bookmark it so you can return each day to check the standings and read what's new. Fool on!
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