by
Greetings, Fools.
You can train a mouse to run through a maze pretty quickly. I know because I did it once as part of a junior high school science project. At first, the mouse will wander through the little passageways at random, but quickly, within the space of a few hours, he will know the direct route to get to exactly where he wants to go. He won't even bother to look down the other passages any more. If he's scared, or if he wants a food pellet, he'll run through all the twists and turns as if he were moving in a straight line. Once he has the pattern memorized, the dead-end passages are outside of his consciousness. A trained mouse might never look down certain corridors ever again.
I have a mouse of a different sort on my desktop next to my computer, and it's pretty well-trained, too. When I want to browse through the Fool's content, it leads me right to the Today's Features page, which gives me a comprehensive listing of all the specials and features that have appeared on the site for the past week. It's a very handy reference point, and a very bookmarkable place to spend your time. Of course, the Fool's main page is also a good place to scan for what's happening at any given moment in the world of investing.
| The Markets -- January 7, 2000 | |||||
| 12/31 Close | 1/7 Close | Change | %Change | ||
| NOW 50 | 2,000.00 | 1,957.82 | -42.18 | -2.11 | |
| DJIA | 11,497.12 | 11,522.56 | +25.44 | +0.22 | |
| S&P 500 | 1,469.25 | 1,441.47 | -27.78 | -1.89 | |
| Nasdaq | 4,069.31 | 3,882.62 | -186.69 | -4.59 | |
Thing is, if you get too predictable in your habits, if you always rumble down the same corridors of the Internet labyrinth, you stand to miss a lot of good stuff out there. One small example of this came the other day when I found myself accidentally looking at the Fool Stock Strategies page, and realizing what a really nifty collection of material was there: All the latest portfolio reports in one easily clickable place. It's not that I had never been there before; it's just that my habit has always been, when I wanted to look at one of the Fool's portfolio reports, to travel to them by other means. And that's when I thought of that mouse that I had met in that junior high school experiment so many years ago. I thought of the ruts our brains get stuck in, and the abrupt little accidents that jar us out of them, letting us see things in a fresh way. Thing is, you don't even need an accident to change your habits. All you need to do is resolve to click around a little more, away from your usual patterns, to check out some of those unexplored passages you've been missing until now.
In a way, The Motley Fool itself is dedicated to getting our entire culture to move out of its old, habitual patterns of thought. This week, for example, we launched our new NOW 50 Stock Index, designed to replace older indexes as the benchmark for measuring stock performance in the next century. Pundits have been making cases against the arbitrariness and limitations of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500 Index, and other measures of stock performance for quite some time -- but leave it to a Fool to actually do something about it. Creating an index is an intriguing process of mathematics and deliberation, and that part of the maze is worth the time it takes to explore. It's also the subject of this week's Dueling Fools -- bell-capped gladiators Rick Aristotle Munarriz (TMF Edible) and Paul Larson (TMF Parlay) debate whether it is to be the NOW 50 or the Dow that will produce the superior investment return in the year to come.
| This Week's Top News Stories |
It's the Fool's way to challenge conventional thinking on all fronts. Today's official Notes from a Fool Pick O' The Week (a highly prestigious award that I just invented 39 seconds ago) goes to Bill Mann (TMF Otter) for Wednesday's Fool on the Hill commentary, "Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain." Bill makes note of one analyst's $1000 price target for Qualcomm (Nasdaq: QCOM), and then explains in Foolish detail -- noting the many conflicts of interest that are commonplace on Wall Street -- why such predictions from financial analysts must be viewed with a skeptical eye at best. Why do markets react so reflexively to these reports when everyone knows the conflicts that are inherent in the system? Call it conventional thinking, or "Wisdom," or any other term you want, but at bottom it's exactly the behavior of that mouse running through that same rut through that same maze. It won't change until people start looking over a few of those walls that have blocked their way in the past.
It was an interesting week for Foolish Four investors. Our Rule Makers have decided to forego the strategy in favor of a more purely Rule Making investment strategy. Phil Weiss (TMF Grape) explains the move in Monday's Rule Maker report. Meanwhile, in Monday's Retiree Portfolio message, David Braze (TMF Pixy) defends his use of the Foolish Four strategy in the three retirement portfolios he manages. The lesson I draw here is that investing is situational: Much depends on who you are, the nature of your goals, and the personality you bring to the management of your assets. Again, looking over the walls and being aware of all the possibilities will bring you the greatest chance for success.
Moral of the story? Do some fresh thinking. There's never been a better time for it than now. This is the first week of this fresh year, so while you're here, check out our Fool Year's Resolutions page, which is being updated each day in January with a new suggestion for you to follow to get your financial life in good order for the year, and (if you're especially resolute) for the rest of your life. My addition to the list: Take that mouse in your hand and start pushing it down some corridors it hasn't seen in a while. It can make a difference.
Until next week,
Fool on!
Cheeze
Any questions or comments about this product? Send them on to us at Weekend@Fool.com.
RSS Headlines
Fool UK
