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The worst part is, the more research you do, the harder it can be to make a decision. Foolish Four or Beating the S&P? What about those Workshop strategies, or Rule Breakers and Rule Makers? Go with one, or try and spread your money around a bit with all of them? Should you keep some of your money in an index fund? And those are just some of the choices here on this website. Hey, we'd love to be all things to all people, but we don't kid ourselves -- we have some competitors out there. Some of them are pretty good, too.
Don't you just wish, sometimes, that there was someone who would just tell you what to do? Heck, I do! Not as often as I used to, but, sure, sometimes I think: I just wish I knew someone who could make these decisions for me (and be right!).
Back when I was a Customer Service Fool (and even now, sometimes), I saw many, many e-mails from people who thought that, maybe, we were that "someone." People who had gotten part of our message, the part about how we were on their side and that we gave honest advice (not always good advice, but at least it wasn't advice designed to put dollars in our pockets instead of theirs). The answer was always the same, though. I had to tell them that we can't do personal advice. We're financial writers, not advisors... although I can see how the two roles would appear very similar to a reader.
After a while, I started feeling pretty bad about turning down some requests for advice. I heard from people who had been very obviously cheated by annuity salespersons, duped by brokers, and lied to by family members. Sometimes my mailbox was a veritable country music song of financial woe.
In most cases the only cure was prevention. They should have read the annuity policy, asked questions of the broker, and sat on their wallets every time Uncle Fred came to town.
We've all been there. I don't care how financially savvy you are, I would bet you've got at least one tale of financial imbecility. In fact, sometimes the more savvy of us have the most tales, having learned the most -- the hard way.
Here at The Motley Fool we preach the gospel of independent financial decision-making. Not that making your own decisions will automatically mean they will all be the right decisions. That ain't gonna happen. But it's better to make your own mistakes than to let someone else make them for you. You learn more that way. We also provide discussion boards where you can get a variety of opinions for just about any situation. And on the discussion boards our writers are a bit more free to offer advice and opinions, since that is a public forum where any errors can be (and usually will be) corrected by other readers, some of whom know far more than we.
So we preach and we preach, but not everyone listens. We still hear from people who want someone, anyone (it sometimes seems) to tell them what they should do with their money.
Unfortunately, this human desire to let someone else step in and make the decisions isn't exactly a secret. And thus there are those who, in the best capitalist tradition, seek to fill that need. Some are honestly attempting to help, of course, and some are simply out to take whatever they can from anyone they can get to trust them. Most are somewhere in between.
This week I want to share with you a few services I've run across that offer the kind of decision-making that we do not. One is InvestorAdvice.com�("Expert buy/sell analysis of your stocks on the Internet"). Another is our old friend Wade Cook, who may not offer actual buy or sell recommendations, exactly, but does encourage a kind of fanatical belief in his trading methods that is very much at odds with the idea of independent thinking. In fact, if you have run across others (not the newsletters, please, I've got tons of those), send me a link and I will take a look. We'll dissect them on Thursday and Friday.
Fool on and prosper!