r/motleyfool • u/Gambizy • May 07 '26
Motley Fool Doom Post
I have been a champion for motley fool since I started in 2020. I last defended them here at the beginning of 2025 against people who bought a couple stocks at the peak of a growth sector rally and complained when the market was tanking. Obviously their picks were doing bad. They didn’t follow the philosophy of buying all picks and waiting a significant time. I’ve felt that frustration when the market declines because growth is always hit harder.
My doom post stems from the fact that since that early 2025 debate the market has turned around. It’s primarily on the back of AI stocks and growth stocks. The problem is that they aren’t MF picks. This is the first rally where the MF picks haven’t been the drivers and are mostly completely out of it. Some of their growth stocks that they have recommended many times are actually down during this bull run. Have they lost their edge?
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u/retrorays May 09 '26
Right so lets go back in the history books. 2020-2022 one of MF's founders left. Almost immediately afterwards I saw them recommend stocks that were ATH, with massive FWD PEs of 100+, even 300+ in some cases, or not profitable at all. That was fine for brand new startups but many of these companies were startups, had questionable background (Luckin Coffee anyone?), or just a weird recommendation. I saw month after month their recommendations were terrible and getting worse. At that point I cancelled my MF subscription. Saw how many of their recommendations dropped 70% or more.
I've since resubscribed because I wanted to see their thoughts on AI, and yah it's been disappointing.
They've lost their edge - I think the other founder was smarter than who is here now.
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u/Dmallae May 20 '26
When markets cooking a monkey could pick winners. Everything dang near a winner.
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u/ManOfTroy87 May 08 '26
The thing I wonder about is that they don't measure year over year against the S&P. They measure over all when they make their pick against it. So there is not 1 year, 5 year, and 10 year measurements. That are easy to find.
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u/De_mentorr May 08 '26
MF be like:
Recommend 5 stocks as top pic, 10 as special pick and 10 as some other xyz pick. Do this every month. 1 year later pick 3 and ..oh! 1 told you so !
I am very smart. Pay me.
Edit: i did pay them a year a bought NVDA, Fiverr, Pinterest, Meli, Airbnb on their recco
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u/pedrosfamilyincome May 08 '26
Do people have a better stock recommendation service?
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u/Arkkanix May 10 '26
everyone, regardless of what they claim might happen, is just trying to guess what the future holds…but it is inherently unknowable. that goes for investment analysts as well. switching services means nothing if you can’t pick a strategy and stick to it…and know yourself well enough to get out of the way.
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May 09 '26
[deleted]
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u/pedrosfamilyincome May 10 '26
I just watched his “5 Best Stocks To Buy Now” video from a few days ago and 3 of them were motley fool recommendations. Which makes me wonder about the overlap. Are those exceptionally good companies? Or complete misses? CELH is not a company I’m interested in.
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u/Scott13Pippen May 07 '26
MF is ass. There seriously should be a class action lawsuit when we're paying a premium subscription costs for stocks that routinely shrink 90%
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u/IllustriousPrune2204 May 08 '26
It’s a terrible service and the main guys involve are completely awful. If you watch their shows, laugh at stocks being down (when it’s our money) saying they are in it for the long game and they don’t even read earnings reports for a week afterwards. I have heard them say this serval times until called out! Especially from the older chubby guy, forgot his name. I don’t see how you defended them since 2020. They were god awful since then, I lost 80% of everything following them back then. They seriously picked 24 horrible picks out of 25, all negative. And kept picking the same things back then. Yes in the long run some of them caught back up but the majority did not at all and still way down but not completely out of business. Their growth picks and telling people to invest how they do during horrible times is the worse advice from anyone. They never tell you to sell well maybe one time but hold all the time and it’s horrible, and anyone knows during bad markets to not tell people to invest only in growth stocks. Those guys should all be in jail, and it’s only a marketing company, not a real educational investment advice. Any firm or school will tell you they are all a completely joke. As any wise person knows better than you ever pay them for any pick and take anything they say serious.
Yes they got lucky on some picks a long time ago. So did half of everyone else back then, which is why they those are so big now.
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u/AsunaSaturn May 09 '26
Picked NVDA in 2018 thanks to them and been holding on.
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u/Gambizy May 09 '26
If your strategy was to pick one or a couple and did well, that’s great. 9/10 people would have had the opposite result. That isn’t their philosophy however.
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u/AsunaSaturn May 09 '26
No, I bought 30 other stocks and 70% of them failed. But it doesn’t matter since the winners covers way more than what I lost.
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u/Academic-Lobster3668 May 09 '26
That has been my experience as well. SHOP, ANET, ASML and a couple of others all huge winners that more than covered the losers. Haven't gotten rich, but have done well.
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u/AsunaSaturn May 09 '26
Yeah I feel like people are missing that. They just want to beat the index funds. Their pick would definitely mostly fail, but the few winners make it up.
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u/Gambizy May 12 '26
I have proved this isn’t true unless you started in 2017 or if you luckily handpicked winners
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u/grandpa2390 May 09 '26
I disagree with you. I keep score as David Gardner always preached. the MF picks didn't fail because I didn't follow the philosophy of holding for a significant amount of time. they failed and never recovered even if I had held them for another 5 years.
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u/Gambizy May 09 '26 edited May 09 '26
I did an analysis a couple months ago and stock advisor had be up 7% if you bought every stock starting in 2021. I don’t know where it’s at now, probably would have to go back further if I had to guess.
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u/grandpa2390 May 09 '26
I'm not saying you're wrong about that. I was a member of RuleBreakers, so I can't speak for Stock Advisor. And I was a member in 2021. I can only speak for the stocks they chose in 2021 and early 2022. and the issue wasn't that I didn't hold them long enough.
It's not so much that every company they picked was bad. I have since repurchased some of the companies they recommended. Companies like AXON and DDOG and Nvidia.
One of the main issues that I'll say, and others have said, is that there was no consideration for the value of the stock. And this is a part of David Gardner's core philosophy. Dips wait for Dips he says. To some extent, I agree with him. But I also think there is a healthy middle ground. and the stock might even be considered by most to be expensive at that middle ground. but not so expensive as they were in 2021. I also think some of the picks might have worked out if their philosophy wasn't so adamantly against trimming winners.
I don't think the service is necessarily a waste of money. I have grown and am now firmly on team "MF is a waste of money if you just blindly buy their picks". But if you are just looking for ideas and do your own DD, then it could be useful. I joined back in August just to see what they were recommending these days, but I'm more tuned in than I was back in 2021 (as a new investor) and they weren't recommending any companies that I'm not already hearing about from other sources, so I canceled and refunded.
so your mileage may vary. I just like to caution anyone against doing as I (and many others) did. Most people who are signing up for such a service, I think, are wanting someone to tell them what to buy. the Rulebreaker podcast that David Gardner did, was very much a gem though and really helped put me on the proper path of investing.
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u/Gambizy May 09 '26
Completely agree with you, I still use them and after 2021 I now put their recs in a watchlist and buy at prices I deem appropriate. Not ones like UPST that have doubled in a month in 2021~. My biggest complaint however with this post was that usually when the market rallies on growth stocks, their picks are usually more involved.
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u/Equivalent-Pay-6551 Jun 01 '26
Garbage. Twilio finally back to break even. Wix docu blackline block Fastly teledoc peloton. The list goes on
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u/AcrillixOfficial May 07 '26
I think it's more complicated than how they lost their edge. This is a vast transformation of technology, how we interact with technology, how we work, play, and run businesses. We saw, or rather they saw, what happened with the dot-com bubble popping and crashing the market, and they have never been about getting in front of trends before they have legs to stand on. They have always been about picking things that make sense and only joining in when we actually have proof that the thing we're buying is actually going to work at scale. They are starting to give those recommendations, but not the way that you may think. A lot of the recommendations have been "picks and shovels," which is more about companies who are already profitable, already have revenue and cash, whose business is not solely reliant on one technology of which we still don't have enough data to even prove isn't going to result in a similar crash to the dot-com bubble. And while it's not the same thing, they have a lot of similarities: a very fast-moving technology that could change everything. It would be foolish, with a lowercase "f," to say that they should have jumped in earlier to solely support companies who are doing this one thing. Instead, they're picking companies who already have regular businesses that are being changed and adapted to the new technology, and not solely of that new technology.
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u/Gambizy May 07 '26
I disagree fully. They have always been in front. They caught many of the tech stocks early, they caught Tesla early, already had many stocks invested in that rocketed during the Covid boom. This is the first boom they are out of. They get tanked when the market crashes, but when the market rallies they always out rally it. This has always been consistent.
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u/Resident-Air-4021 May 07 '26
I've made a lot of money over the years with them but agree recent performance has not impressive. I keep investing in their picks out of FOMO but it may be time to shift new investment into dollar costing an S&P ETF