The Motley Fool

[ash_1050]

Has anyone been tracking or following the Motley Fool at all? Pretty standard format ala the Barefoot Investor. Produce a few articles for a major newspaper and then try and flog your $200 per year subscriptions when people visit your website.

Their number one pick for 2015, Carsales, is up 1% YTD.

 

[Lyyynnnchy]

Has anyone been tracking or following the Motley Fool at all? Pretty standard format ala the Barefoot Investor. Produce a few articles for a major newspaper and then try and flog your $200 per year subscriptions when people visit your website.

Their number one pick for 2015, Carsales, is up 1% YTD.

And what a horrendous pick that was. Saturated market and they have done nothing to show they are innovative enough that they'll come out ahead of the smaller, more cost effective websites constantly popping up

 

[ash_1050]

Indeed. Had they backed Qantas instead they'd be looking much smarter.

 

[SHOGUN_31A]

Indeed. Had they backed Qantas instead they'd be looking much smarter.

Qantas has gone up mostly because the oil price (their most important cost) has fallen. Even if you had forseen a fall in oil prices, investing in airlines would have been a poor way to do so.

Motley Fool offer longer term investing advice. They attempt to identify stocks that, in their opinion, are worth significantly more than the current market price. This is far from an exact science and thus--like any investor--they will make bad calls.

As with any investment recommendation you should do your own homework. If you're not willing to, you're better off putting your money in a broad market ETF.

 

[undefined]

Qantas has gone up mostly because the oil price (their most important cost) has fallen. Even if you had forseen a fall in oil prices, investing in airlines would have been a poor way to do so.

Virgin's gradual dropoff in the battle for marketshare has also been a major player in the Qantas share rise.

How would you (personally) capitalize on data signalling a further drop in oil prices?

 

[SHOGUN_31A]

Virgin's gradual dropoff in the battle for marketshare has also been a major player in the Qantas share rise.

How would you (personally) capitalize on data signalling a further drop in oil

Virgin's gradual dropoff in the battle for marketshare has also been a major player in the Qantas share rise.

How would you (personally) capitalize on data signalling a further drop in oil prices?

Generally the best idea is get as direct an exposure as you can access. E.g. oil futures or options (though these have shorter maturities typically), short sell or buy put options on higher cost oil producer equities, or short the currencies of countries that export a lot of oil (as a share of their economy's output).

 

[ash_1050]

Qantas has gone up mostly because the oil price (their most important cost) has fallen. Even if you had forseen a fall in oil prices, investing in airlines would have been a poor way to do so.

Motley Fool offer longer term investing advice. They attempt to identify stocks that, in their opinion, are worth significantly more than the current market price. This is far from an exact science and thus--like any investor--they will make bad calls.

As with any investment recommendation you should do your own homework. If you're not willing to, you're better off putting your money in a broad market ETF.

A drop in oil prices will have a significant impact when you have razor thin margins. Likewise the restructure helped QANTAS's share price as well but few would tipped them to rise so impressively this year.

I'm somewhat biased in that I'm skeptical of the share advisory industry as a whole. Any investor should be doing their own independent research before investing anyway, the MF would only serve to throw up some suggestions of who to research. If you need to spend $200 per year to find companies to consider investing in, then you're doing it wrong.

 

[Maester]

I'm a subscriber of the Motley Fool Share Advisor and have been for over 2 years now. They release a US recommendation and an ASX recommendation every month. Since they started in December 2011 they're thrashing the market - average 58% return on asx recommendations (compared to 13.9% average return of the market), and 64.6% in the US (compared to 15.5%). To make those numbers clearer, that is comparing the average return (including dividends) of each recommendation to the average return of the market from the time of each recommendation. And the US number is not including currency gains.

None of their recommendations are made with a 12 month time frame in mind - it's all 5+ years.

I've done poorly on some recommendations (and they don't promise they'll get everything right) but overall well, well up. More importantly I've learnt a lot about long term investing and the market from their articles and updates (these are different to the majority of articles freely available on the public site, which are primarily written by freelancers who are sharing their own views about individual stocks or sectors). Ultimately, like with any advisor service, they just make recommendations, it's still up to you to do your own research and make your own decisions. Not every stock I own is a MF recommendation, but I do find it a very useful and valuable service.

 

[Maester]

And what a horrendous pick that was. Saturated market and they have done nothing to show they are innovative enough that they'll come out ahead of the smaller, more cost effective websites constantly popping up

They own the Australian market. There's no one else even close on any metric so they have a massive network effect...but it's becoming a mature market so the rate of growth in Australia is decreasing. The make or break for Carsales is how successfully their international expansion goes, but they own or have a significant % of ownership in the number 1 car marketplaces of a number of developing markets now so I think they'll do okay in the next few years.

But for me, the biggest risk for Carsales is the huge disruption to the car industry coming in the next decade or so. With the likes of Apple, Google, Tesla, Uber and pretty much every car manufacturer investing in self-driving technology I think it's inevitable we'll have fleets of autonomous taxis on the roads. When that happens a lot less people that live in cities will need to own a car (it'll be cheaper not to have one, and no less convenient) and so you'll ultimately have fewer car sales.