The Motley Fool's What to Do With Your Money Now: Ten Steps to Staying Up in a Down Market

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• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
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19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars One thing NOT to do with your money now: Buy this book.., August 3, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Motley Fool's What to Do with Your Money Now: Ten Steps to Staying Up in a Down Market (Paperback)

After owning a couple of the previous works from the Motley Fool (and subsequently throwing them out because the advice is pretty bad) I took a look at the latest edition by borrowing it from someone.

First of all I've always found their advice frustrating. On one hand they kind of half-heartedly recommend passive index investing and then they go about telling you about the latest stock-screening get-rich-quick fad. Toss in a couple dubious stock picks along the way and you have nothing but a mixed message.

I think this book is a pretty shallow attempt for these two to make up for the really bad advice they gave in their other books over the years. They take several chapters explaining away (in hindsight) how wrong they were, but even in this light they fail to embrace proven strategies and instead go about telling you what stocks to own (Starbucks anyone??). Basically this book is trying to convince you that "This time it's different." They are now trying to mend their ways and show that now their advice is worth listening to and all the stuff they said before was wrong and they're very sorry you lost so much of your money using their strategies. And oh, by the way, we still offer for sale this nifty stock investment newsletter and website for a really great price!

I really think the best approach is to concentrate your portfolio on passive index funds compromising various asset classes (domestic, foreign, bonds, real estate) and just rebalancing once a year. This is a very proven strategy that will beat virtually every actively managed portfolio/fund with far less stress (and taxes). Most major pension funds follow an indexing approach for a good reason: It works.

For a much better read try out The Coffeehouse Investor, books by Larry Swedroe, Bogle, and William Bernstein. Send these two jesters back to the circus...

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Little here., September 23, 2005

By 

Christopher L. Del Plato "streamertyer" (Washington Twp. (Morris), NJ United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Motley Fool's What to Do with Your Money Now: Ten Steps to Staying Up in a Down Market (Paperback)

If you're a somewhat experienced investor, don't waste your money. While Gardner has an involving speaking presentation, there isn't much here beyond some superficial financial planning and investing advice, with a little history of the dot com bubble burst and some mea culpa on the Fool's business foibles. One major investing theme in the book seems to be index funds. He repeats over and over that 90% of managed funds do not beat the S&P index. While that may be true, don't tell Bill Miller, Wally Weitz, Will Danhoff, Ron Muhlenkamp, Bruce Berkowitz..... Of course, he also fails to mention that many funds do not invest in anything remotely associated with this large company index, so it's not fair to compare. Gold funds, small cap funds, international funds, sector funds..... While the average person would be better off following this advice in lieu of uninformed, uneducated investing, it's really a lazy investor philosophy. Not to mention that while repeating over and over that the only mutual fund you need is an index fund, the Motley Fool has begun a newsletter called 'Champion Funds'- makes one think they're OK with managed funds, as long as they can get paid to tout them.....

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Inexperienced But Some Gold Nuggets, September 5, 2003

By 

Randy Given (Manchester, CT USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Motley Fool's What to Do with Your Money Now: Thriving in the New Economic Reality (Audio CD)

Although the Motley Fools have shown their inexperience, like some of us knew they would, they have also started maturing. Much of their advice is generic enough to be good and hardly any of their advice is "bad" (like much of their competition). Also, there are some gold nuggets later in the program, so it is worth a listen if you are at any transition points in your life.