Investing For Growth
Investing For Growth
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FOOL GLOBAL WIRE
LEXINGTON, Kentucky (December 27) -- Following up on yesterday's report on my plans for the Foolish Workshop for 1997, a couple of points became clearer after getting responses from readers. One is that following ten-stock portfolios for each of these screens may be unnecessarily creating extra work. Most people following along have mentioned that they use these growth screens only for a portion of their overall portfolios, the core still being built on the Dow approaches or Beating the S&P. So few of them actually use 10 stocks in their growth portfolios. To make everything easier to track then, I may only follow five-stock portfolios for each of the growth screens on the assumption that this is only one part of a larger portfolio. Plus it cuts the record-keeping time in half, a big consideration! Another point that came up in talks with Fool HQ is that we might just leave the Value Approaches (the Dow and S&P yield approaches) in the Dow Area where they reside now. Since they're only updated once a year and they all come from the same field of 30 stocks (except for BSP), condensing that information into a single spot in that area suits me fine. I've been sent some great ideas on that area from the office, so I'll wait to see how they develop before I know for sure how it will look. Nevertheless, thanks for the comments and suggestions and I'll keep you posted as we get closer to the first Friday in 1997, when the growth screens begin. On a completely different tack, if you'll allow me, I want to address a more general point that comes up from time to time when people discover I write about stock-market investing as a career. Occasionally a self-righteous soul will throw up a famous, albeit inaccurate quote from the Bible in an attempt to shame me for spending my working hours dealing with the acquisition of wealth. "Money is the root of all evil," they quote piously. The actual text is radix malorum est cupiditas, or "the love of money is the root of all evil." It's quite a different cause, I think you'll agree. That aside, however, I want to share with you a more reasoned approach to this emotional tug of war over money and its uses. It comes from Lewis H. Lapham's 1988 book, Money and Class in America: "Money is like fire, an element as little troubled by moralizing as earth, air and water. Men can employ it as a tool or they can dance around it as if it were the incarnation of a god. Money votes socialist or monarchist, finds a profit in pornography or translations from the Bible, commissions Rembrandt and underwrites the technology of Auschwitz. It acquires its meaning from the uses to which it is put." The Motley Fool isn't here to sit in judgment on the uses to which you put your wealth. Our job is much more pedestrian, simply to help you acquire the tools with which to make it in the first place. The rest is up to you. Fool on! (Don't forget the Thoroughbred Stock Challenge. Entries will be taken up until the opening bell next Thursday, January 2.)
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