Customer Reviews

The Foolish Four: How to Crush Your Mutual Funds in 15 Minutes a Year

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I'm a frequent reader of the Motley Fool's website, and a former investor in this strategy. Many of the other reviews are right--there's nothing new to Dow Investing. I first saw some of the ideas in this book ten years ago in Beating the Dow, by Michael O'Higgins, whom the Gardners graciously acknowledge. Both O'Higgins and the Motley Fool do a great job of demystifying investing.

What isn't so great is that in recent years, this strategy has fallen far short of its promises. The Motley Fool's site has a message board dedicated to this style of investing (formerly called Dogs of the Dow, Dow High-Yield Investing, etc.) and lately, the arguments there are _raging_. On the one side are the theory's ne'er-doubting supporters; on the other, those who, having blindly invested in the theory and lost, are now adamantly opposed to it. Meanwhile, the Gardner brothers, the authors of this book and originators of the Motley Fool, have sold their Foolish Four portfolio and invested the money elsewhere. I'll let that sink in...the bottom line is that this is a method of finding down and out value stocks, which doesn't suit the kind of growth market we've known for the last half decade. Even with the current bear market, over the last five years many tech stocks, although hurting, have still outperformed the Foolish Four.

Which is not to say that the theory doesn't have merit; the book consists of a simple theory that makes sense. It might be outdated, or it may just be currently out of favor. Whichever it is, I would view the enthusiastic claims of the Gardners with a critical eye. And above all, don't invest blindly in this strategy without knowing the risks. Lastly, if you want to see what the Motley Fool is all about, may I recommend The Motley Fool Investment Workbook.

Don't waste your time and money on this one. If you've read any of the Fools' other excellent investing books, this one will do nothing to enhance your knowledge of Dow Dividend investing. I agree completely with the review below....this should have been a pamphlet. This book gets two stars only by virtue of the fact that there are some readers out there who may have never heard of the Dow Dividend approach. If you are one of those, the Approach is thoroughly explained, but is sandwiched in between 150 pages of filler.

I love the Foolish line of books. This one was perfect to give to my mom. She's not likely to visit the web to read the same information. If you have been to the web page and read the portfolio on the Foolish Four, then you don't need this book. It's good material but very redundant.

A word to any further readers who come along this. The Fools have now abandoned this investment approach, which they so cockily and vociferously expounded for many years. Although the strategy still has its uses, and they are to be commended for their honesty in abandoning it, they no longer advocate it. Like so many reviewers have wrote in criticism of other Fool books, the Gardners tend to be overcome by hyperbole in their writing, and it seems they did not do enough statistical research to warrant the claims they've been making all along with regards to Foolish Four investing.

The Fools are overall really good, and have some great ideas, but this book is now outdated. Take what they say with a grain of salt, adapt it to your own thoughts (and to their credit, this is what they advocate, although it IS easy to overlook this in their soaring prose, laden with outlandish statements), and the Fools definitely serve a purpose.

I didn't actually buy this book but I read borrowed it from a friend who wanted to know what I thought of it.

The book is very dangerous because it attempts to show how past results of a pretty obscure formula gave fantastic returns for the last 30 years. What it fails to mention is that none of the methods shown in the book have produced Dow beating results since they were published.

One reason that the Motley Fool keeps coming up with new variations is that the old ones don't seem to work very well after they have been discovered.

Anyone reading thinking about this book should skip it and take the other main piece of advice from the Motley Fool and invest in an index fund.

The authors on Motley Fool.com do not hold the beliefs in this book. I like the Motley Fool but I know this foolish four stock picks has been droped by the two founders. I recommend the Motley Fool because they admit mistakes. At one time the foolish four stocks were good picks. This last year the foolish four stocks were losers.

This booklet, in short, provides an excellent, easy to understand system for purchasing stocks that will help you beat the market. I found it very interesting, and it eased some of the fears associated with owning individual stocks. I now see a viable alternative to owning stock mutual funds.

Great condensed version of the Web site material and the Dow spreadshee

I'd read all the info on the Foolish Four on the Motley Fool site. I thought I'd get the book anyway, just to have a hard copy version and more charts in one handy location. There was more there than I expected, including a similar Dow 4 model that has outperformed the Foolish Four. There was also a good explanation of why it works. Now I'm ordering copies for friends.

This modest new book from the Fools gives a clear, easy-to-read summary of the Dow Dividend Approach to investing in stocks. In addition, there is some good background material about the Dow. A big chunk of the book is devoted to tables showing how variations of the approach performed from 1963 through 1997. This text is a good place to start for a new Roth IRA investor who is considering an online broker and stocks instead of mutual funds.