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

In these turbulent economic times, everyone is asking the same question: "What should I do with my money now?"

With their trademark irreverence and plainspokenness, David and Tom Gardner, bestselling authors and cofounders of The Motley Fool, answer this critical question and recommend ten important yet quick steps readers can take to survive economic uncertainty, secure their personal finances, and fortify their portfolios. Along the way, they address such important issues as:

• Is this the time to snatch up stock market bargains?
• Are any mutual funds sure bets?
• Is short-term debt dangerous?
• Bonds, T-bills, CDs, savings accounts -- does it make sense to be conservative?
• Why you should believe in America now more than ever.

The Gardners offer a snapshot view of business and the financial markets at the dawn of the world's "new economic reality" -- all while looking ahead to the future with some timely and timeless guidance for investors.

No matter your age or level of investing experience, The Motley Fool's What to Do with Your Money Now is an indispensable survival manual for our unpredictable economic times.

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...


Wonderful Hindsight   March 31, 2003
Rob Saunders (Ochlocknee, GA)
While minimally entertaining, it has the feel of "hey we have the best hindsight of anybody!" They admit they lost big time during the Market downturn. I gave them two stars because there were a couple of things said that not everybody else was saying.

I'm looking for information on how to avoid or benefit from the market, without listening to all the losers. Anybody know of someone who continued winning even during the downturn. Now that would be valuable information.