Changes to Motley Fool CAPS

We’re excited to announce that we’ve made a couple changes to Motley Fool CAPS that should focus the platform more on Foolish investing principles and improve our collective body of knowledge around tickers of consequence. On Aug. 1, 2017, we bid farewell to a host of tickers that are of little interest to most Fools and that do little more than create CAPS clutter.

Over the first decade or so of CAPS, several players used what we at Fool HQ refer to as “toxic tickers” in order to rack up points. We’ve aimed to end some of those practices and to clean up CAPS going forward.

First, we gave penny stocks the boot. We don’t use them in our investing, and likewise they no longer have a place in CAPS. Specifically, stocks need to have a trailing three-month average daily dollar trading volume greater than $250,000 and a current market cap greater than $50 million to be picked. Also, we maintained our floor of $1.50 per share price for any stock to be eligible for your CAPS scorecard. The platform is now focused on the companies we care about.

Second, we removed all ETFs from CAPS. Obviously, there are legitimate reasons to pick ETFs in CAPS (and in life), and it’s largely only the heavily leveraged ETFs that are being exploited for points. But for the sake of simplicity for our players, we’ve stripped out the entire ETF universe. ETFs are made up of individual stocks, after all, so we’ve got that covered.

Open picks of these penny stocks and ETFs automatically closed on Aug. 1, 2017, and they are unavailable going forward. (As a side note, we considered adjusting historical scores to remove them from the beginning, but decided it wouldn’t be fair to make the changes retroactive. You play by the rules you’re given.)

We’re happy to be improving CAPS, aligning it even more with Foolish investing and focusing on what matters most to us as investors.

Fool on,

The CAPS team