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here to send us your personal review of The Motley Fool Review
written by Barbara. I've
always considered myself to be money savvy. I clipped coupons, bought
generic brands and lived by a budget. I stumbled across Fool.com when
another website offered to pay me to become a member of the Fool. Pretty
savvy, huh?
Finding out the benefits of becoming a member.
Approximately a year later, I was surfing the web looking for information
on buying a house. Lender requirements, calculators, how to find an agent,
etc. when I once again stumbled across the Fool. Not only was I able to
read articles on that information, but I also found the "Buying a
Home" message board. Since I was already a member, I was able to post
questions I had about the process. Questions I hadn't even considered were
being answered. Now that I knew anything and everything about my future
home purchase, I ventured over to another message board, "Consumer
Credit/Credit Cards."
Learning to be Foolish, not foolish.
I had credit problems in the past but I was on my way to a brighter
future. I finally had a credit card and an auto loan and I was paying them
on time. I was shocked to learn from the group that I didn't have to carry
a balance on my credit cards in order to have a good credit history. The
wealth of information this broad group of people holds is staggering to
say the least. Credit cards, balance transfers, credit reports, 401K's,
IRA's, stocks, bonds, investments, etc. are just a handful of topics that
are discussed. I've been working my way out of debt for 8 months now and
my debt free date will be in November 2004. Although that seems like a
long time, I realize I would have been in debt longer and a fool with my
hard earned money if I hadn't learned how to be a Fool and make my hard
earned money work for me.
Finding Information
This can be quite the task. The Fool website can be difficult to navigate
when you're new. They have so much great information on their website you
can get lost. You'll read a great article and click on a link and before
you know it, you've clicked on 8 links and you can't find the original
article. The Fool isn't only about finances over at the message boards.
Members can create their own message board on any topic over in the
"Speakers Corner." Quitting smoking, Fools Fighting Fat, Parents
and Expecting Parents and Quick and Easy Recipes just name a few of the
hundreds of topics. (Tip: When you're a member you can add anyone to your
Favorite Fool list. Click on "Favorite Fools" and you can view
all of the boards that person has posted messages on.)
My Fool
Once you're a member you can personalize the way you navigate the website.
Favorite message boards, portfolios, indices, favorite features, etc. will
allow you a one-stop click to allow you to move quickly and freely around
the website.
Try it, it's free
Nothing is better than free. Membership at the Fool is free. What could be
better? Seriously, it only takes a quick minute and the information you'll
receive is priceless. Fool on!
Review
written by George. Being
an avid stock-market fan I subscribe to a plethora of websites; some
useful, some not. Fool.com is one of those that falls into the first
category. I have been using Fool.com since mid June '01 and have found
their webpage very helpful for advice and for understanding complex
investing decisions.
For the new user you have two decisions--became a fool.com registered
member or not. Depending on how much information you intend to gather from
fool.com is the basis on whether or not you should register. Most of the
information is public; available to members and visitors, however more in
depth information is off-limits to visitors.
Want to enter a portfolio and watch how it moves (with quotes delayed up
to 20 minutes)? You'll have to become a member. Want to join discussion
groups and research mutual funds and stocks? Again, you'll have to join.
The application is short and painless, enter in the typical personal
information and you're ready to go. Don't worry, fool.com won't spam you
and won't sell your email address to people who will either.
Being a member of other similar webpages, let me now compare fool.com with
a few other personal finance pages; namely cnnfn and yahoo!
I find cnnfn to be much more timely for the stock market, both in terms of
getting a feel for how the current market is doing and for recent news.
Cnnfn constantly has news reports --the latest earnings reports, how the
markets are doing. Fool.com can't really compete, yeah at the top of many
screens they'll give you the current performance of the Dow, Nasdaq and
S&P500 but that's about it.
Cnnfn also beats Fool in every aspect except one for keeping track of your
portfolio. You can setup many different portfolios with cnnfn, change the
view (performance, tax implications, historical performance)...while fool
offers some of these, it is not nearly as easy to switch the view. Also,
cnnfn is just more efficient--you get news reports instantly on the
stocks, can set price alerts and also important alerts such as when
dividends are declared, splits are announced, volume exceeds 300% of the
average and so on.
The only thing fool has on cnnfn is the ability to setup benchmarking on
your portfolio. Fool can track how you are doing next to the major indices
based on when you entered your portfolio and your bases on your equities.
However, fool.com has a wealth of information missing on cnnfn such as
glossaries of investing definitions and good discussions on topics like
Retiring, Investing for the Long Run, how to pick a mutual fund and such.
Both sites are good and depending on what you need from a financial
website one is probably more suited to your tastes/demands.
Again Fool.com is inferior to Yahoo! in many aspects. While Yahoo! is more
of an encompassing portal and webage and this is to be expected, Fool
doesn't really stand a chance next to this giant.
Yahoo! allows you to do the basics (enter portfolios, setup views and add
notes) but also can serve as a vital hub for your OTHER information such
as email, global news stories, latest cd releases, current movie times (in
YOUR area) and MUCH MUCH more.
Finance wise Yahoo! trumps Fool by a mile. Yahoo! has a myriad of finance
pages (albeit sometimes harder to navigate and find) such as Funds
Transfer-- really a wonderful tool which allows you to freely transfer
funds from all sorts of financial institutions for FREE (as long as you
don't transfer more than $10,000 /month or so...but that limit is more
than reasonable). Bank at a small local credit union, a big time bank and
use one of the big brokers? You can move money bank and forth...hell even
just for the fun of it.
Want to pay bills? Again Yahoo! offers this over Fool and 1000s of other
options. While this isn't an epinion parading the benefits of Yahoo, in
order to fairly compare what Fool has to the competition this is
important.
While Fool.com may NOT have everything on their webpage they don't need
to. They keep it simple by focusing strictly on financial information and
having more discussions/analysis of the market and stocks than other
sites. Fool.com is definitely a bookmark for any fan of the stock
market--whether a beginner or an old time invester, you're bound to learn
something new. Think of it as an Investing class.
The only real downside to Fool.com is that there are often the annoying
'popups' such as to 'free credit reports' and other nusiances. With a
popup killer these can be eliminated. Also, occasionally quotes and
portfolio information haven't been available due to 'server maintenance'
and whatnot. Still, an 8/10 and a must visit site.
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