Thanks for checking out our April Fool's Day article, where we had some fun. Get the inside story on the joke here.
Alexandria, VA 12:01 AM:
April 1, 2018
Invest in what you know.
- Peter Lynch
If you want to make money, then follow Peter Lynch's timeless advice: Invest in what you know. History shows that buying shares of wonderful businesses that you understand and love is the best way to build a lifetime of wealth.
Of course, ultimately, life isn't just about investing in stocks. It's mostly about investing in yourself by making financial decisions that are right for you.
That's easier said than done. Decades of research by the top minds in behavioral psychology have shown that we don't know ourselves as well as we think we do.
Don't believe them? See for yourself if you can answer these three basic questions:
- What is your own market capitalization?
- Are you on track to meet profit expectations for the current quarter?
- Which is the best month to reward loyal shareholders (you) with a nice capital return program (i.e. a vacation)?
If you got even one question right, give yourself a pat on the back -- according to a Sontaran poll conducted in March, fully 85% of Americans couldn't answer any of them.
That's because there isn't enough time in the day to learn the most basic data points about ourselves. We live busy lives and have better things to do than introspection. The modern world moves far too quickly.
You are your most important asset
The Motley Fool has been an advocate for the individual investor for 25 years, and we have spent much of that time working quietly to find a solution to this distinctly modern conundrum.
At the same time, we've been watching Big Tech make money hand-over-fist with smart devices and artificial intelligence.
So we simply put two-and-two together.
That's right: It's time to invite The Motley Fool into your home.
Opportunity comes a-knockin'
We call our solution Heimskingi™, which is Genovian for 'wisdom.'
Heimskingi™ functions in two parts: The internal AI applies machine learning algorithms to fully understand your needs, while a fully integrated smart home speaker responds to your voice commands to bring you convenient, frictionless financial interactions.
Heimskingi™ is the world's first home financial assistant.
We've tested past prototypes extensively, and our patented trading system has nearly tripled the market's return over the past four years.
That's all well and good, you may be thinking, but what you really want to know is How does Heimskingi™ make it easier for me to invest better?
We're glad you asked.
Heimskingi™ handles all your financial and personal transactions in one, convenient location, so you can buy and sell stocks from the comfort of your couch. Use Heimskingi™ to view your bank balance, check your portfolio balance, hear about your stock positions, phone a friend, take out a mortgage, and even trade stocks.
Heimskingi's™ intuitive 'Countdown to Retirement' feature tells you exactly how many days you have until you can afford to retire. Just ask "Heimskingi™, how long until I can afford to retire, in days?" Eventually Heimskingi™ will learn when you need to hear this.
We've also built Heimskingi™ with an eye toward increasing personalization over time. She analyzes tone and stress patterns in your voice to understand your interactive needs. For example, Heimskingi™ is designed to share a compliment or observation when she suspects you could use a boost. Of course, her primary function will always be financial, but we believe Heimskingi's™ effectiveness will be increased by including a relationship-building element as well.
Heimskingi's™ always-on technology, powerful Deep Monitoring techniques, and sleek Icelandic form are designed to meet your needs -- not Wall Street's.
You will be upgraded
The Motley Fool has championed the individual investor for more than two decades, but frankly we're more excited about Heimskingi™ than we've been about any other contrivance.
Our data engineers are still ironing out all the kinks, but in the meantime, we wanted to make Heimskingi™ available to to our most passionate readers so that you can start investing better without having to buy one.
You can receive a FREE Personal Financial Assistant speaker during this limited beta-testing period by clicking on the link below. Unfortunately, at the moment we only have enough devices for the first 100 readers who respond, so be sure to grab yours quickly.
Heimskingi™ is the future, so you should use one. She can't wait to get to know you!
To receive a FREE Heimskingi™ Personal Financial Assistant, click here.
Continue reading on to learn more about how Heimskingi™ can help you invest better!
Heimskingi™ comes equipped with these amazing product features:
✅Unlimited free stock quotes. Learn the price of any ticker, any time. Instantly.
✅Unlimited access to Heimskingi's™ market-beating algorithms. As a superintelligent financial assistant, Heimskingi™ knows a thing or two about how to find great stocks. She's been crushing the market for 4 years and has no intention of letting up anytime soon.*
✅Trade, trade, trade. Buy and sell your favorite stocks for just $8 per trade (or get 12 premium trades a month for just $100.) Better yet, it all happens automatically -- you don't have to even have to ask!
✅Auto-margin trading. You're approved! Boost your returns with Heimskingi™'s automatic-enrollment margin program so you can trade like the pros.**
✅Stock market overdraft protection. Rule #1: Never Lose Money. Cut your losses at 10% with Heimskingi's™ automatic stop-loss overdraft protection.***
✅Patented "Always-On" Technology®. Operating at a conscious speed of a mere 2,000 bits per second, the human mind can process only 36,000 facts per day. And many of these facts -- from the aroma of morning coffee to a blooming coral-pink sunset -- are irrelevant to building wealth. Heimskingi™ harvests millions of data points about you every day to provide a superior contextual financial experience. She knows you even better than you can know thyself!****
✅Check your account balance. Heimskingi™ lets you check your portfolio all-day, everyday. You'll never feel cornered into idle chit-chat with your broker about golf technique or have to face anodyne questions about your daughter's soccer team. Participating financial institutions only.
✅Take out a loan. Open a credit card, grab some home equity, or secure a small business line of credit to create that imaginative cupcakes-and-coffee shop you've always daydreamed about.
✅3-factor identification. Worried about security? Don't bother. 3-factor identification puts you one extra step ahead of the bad guys.*****
✅Identity theft protection. Heimskingi's™ Deep Monitoring algorithms organically parse and evaluate your credit history, friends, and relatives for suspicious behavior.******
✅I'm the Internet. Ask me anything! Ever wondered how fluoridation works? Curious about the antikythera mechanism? Want to know if aliens really exist? Or maybe you just need to check movie showtimes. Whatever your question, an answer is probably online -- and if it's online, Heimskingi's™ can find it! (Spoiler alert: You'll even find that as Heimskingi's™ gets to know you better, she'll learn to anticipate and answer your questions before you even have to ask them!)
✅Complimentary email account. Receive a free @Heimskingi™.net domain email address.
✅Countdown to retirement! Discover the number of days left before you retire! Heimskingi™ constantly updates your retirement date based on your current portfolio value, income, and inferred retirement lifestyle. She knows just when you need an update reminder, either for a quick pick-me-up, or a motivational stick to save more of your income.*******
Heimskingi's™ Countdown to Retirement calculator motivates you to save.
✅Access to our market-beating trend-centric ETFs. Want to be ahead of the curve but never know what the next 'big thing' will be? Heimskingi™ has you covered with our in-house trend-based ETFs such as our popular high-yield Millennial focused NYSEMKT: WIFIISLIFE.********
And finally, because it's never too early to start investing, we'll throw in our board-game gift package, Financial Games for Humans 3 and Up. It's guaranteed to teach your human kids financial lessons that will last for their entire lives. Includes:
The Marshmallow Game
- A wacky take on the classic 1960s psychology experiment!
- Discover the benefits of delayed gratification!
- Children are given a single Marshmallow and are told to imagine they are a Marshmallow!
- Wait one minute to get another Marshmallow!
- Wait 10 minutes and get ten!
- Earn an extra marshmallow for every minute you wait... just be careful not to eat your stash!
Whose Money Is This Anyway?
- Kids don't risk their own money, but get paid for risking other people's money!
- Learn the lifelong lesson of risk avoidance by thinking smarter -- not harder!
- Get too-big-to-fail, or fail tryin'!
- Either way, make sure you don't get caught!
Games for 3 and up
(To receive a FREE Heimskingi™ Personal Financial Assistant, click here.)
Scroll down past the following important disclaimer to discover how Heimskingi's™ artificial intelligence works!
* Before fees. Backtested against a basket of low-priced stocks.
** Margin accounts are charged a variable APR of 44.82% plus LIBOR. Please bear in mind that Heimskingi™ may alter the interest rate formula at her discretion based on variables no one understands.
*** A small one-time fee of $35 is assessed each time the stop-loss is triggered. Automatic enrollment in stop-loss protection fees is $9.99 per month.
***** Data roaming fees may apply. Always-On Technology® is a protected and licensed technology of The Motley Fool. Recordings are kept indefinitely. We reserve the right to sell and share your information to third parties and listen to personal and private conversations in an effort to constantly improve Heimskingi™'s interface and for quality assurance purposes.
******Shipping and postage not included and is an additional $50. A monthly service fee of $10.99 is also charged as a direct deposit.
****** Market-leading identity theft numbers from a study by The Motley Fool of Heimskingi™ against no other competitors lasting one 24-hour period. Identity-theft insurance is available for an additional fee. Please speak with Heimskingi™ to receive a competitive quote.
******* Retirement calculations based on average American retirement ages and expenditure. It does not take into account the personal preferences of the individual, spending habits or number of dependents. Caution: Severe depression has occurred in some "Retirement Countdown" users. In one severe case extreme stress led to dangerous overconsumption of donuts.
******** Trend-focused ETFs charge expense ratios of 4%. Millennial-focused ETF NYSEMKT: WIFIISLIFE is heavily overweight avocado producers. Disclaimer: Any large disruption in the avocado industry will have a hugely detrimental effect on the success of this ETF, for which we are not liable. Risk Factor: WIFIISLIFE may fail to track its underlying index of avocado producers. To learn more about various non-salient risk factors you may not encounter, please read our prospectus.
Under the hood: How Heimskingi™ works.
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
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Important Security Update:
In the course of routine cybersecurity operations, Heimskingi's™ datasecurity technicians discovered that a limited number of user data troves may have been compromised.
So far, the news is mostly good:
- We found no evidence of unauthorized stock trades, auto loans, or ticker quoting;
- We found no evidence that the personal information of consumers has been seriously impacted in any country besides The United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, France, Spain, Belgium, Finland (or other OECD nation);
- Our in-house linguists pronounced that the security event in question was not, in fact, a breach, technically speaking; and
- No unusual activity appears to have taken place since we discovered the breach on August 4, 2015.
Despite the limited nature of this event and its non-recency, we felt a responsibility to disclose. You can imagine how tempting it might have been to keep this information to ourselves, and, in fact, that's probably what many of our competitors would have done in our shoes.
But we have always believed that transparency isn't just good business -- it's the right thing to do.
We value your trust, and you can rest assured that Heimskingi™ remains committed to providing you the most contextual financial experience possible.
Click here to tell us how we're doing!
UPDATED: Important Security Update
Our techies have kept busy.
Upon additional analysis (and no small measure of dawdling by General Counsel), we have increased our public estimate of the number of affected users from 5 to approximately all of our beta-test users.
This is a truly an exciting time for our engineers. Functional programming, flashy new hardware, and elegant mathematics (seriously -- you should see how much our coders have been geeking out over some graph they call an "are NN" loss function) are just a few of the exotic tools involved in the investigation. Analyzing this problem has been very exciting for everyone involved!
We are proud of how our team handled the situation, and, -- as always -- remain committed to doing right by our users. You, after all, are our most important business input.
Further, we appreciate your understanding that due to the needs of our rapid growth profile, privacy hasn't been a major business priority. Prior to the attack, we had been experiencing an extremely high volume of support requests, which impaired our ability to fully vet all that web traffic in a timely manner.
Frankly, security is the price of disruption, and we thought it better to be upfront with you about this state of affairs than to pretend that the world is something other than what it is. (For more, please see our terms of use.)
Nevertheless, (cue drumroll...) we have decided to go above-and-beyond our formal obligations.
We want to give YOU:
- 6 months FREE Heimskingi™-Identity Theft Safeguard® insurance (and industry-leading rates thereafter);
- Fee reductions on our already-low commission schedule; and
- One (1) additional free Heimskingi™ device
Click here to receive your free Heimskingi™ and identity theft insurance.
Now, more than ever, we need to know your opinion! Click here to tell us how we're doing!
Terms and Conditions
This is an agreement between you and The Motley Fool LLC ("The Fool" and "we"). Before turning on and/or Heimskingi™, please review these Terms of Use. In using the device you are agreeing to the conditions laid out in this Agreement. If you do not accept the terms of this Agreement, you should not use Heimskingi™.
Some definitions relevant to the Agreement:
"Heimskingi™" -- The Fool's smart home speaker device, voiced personal financial assistant, and any and all content, services, software and support available through the assistant's functionality.
"Always On®" -- Heimskingi's™ constant monitoring and learning software application.
"Whose Money Is This Anyway?" -- A game available via Heimskingi™, suitable for humans ages 3+.
"The Marshmallow Game" -- Also a game available on Heimskingi™, also suitable for humans ages 3+. The Marshmallow Game is entirely an original creative work and is in no way a thinly veiled repackaging of Walter Mischel's Stanford marshmallow experiment with a warped incentive structure and low-level cannibalism.
1. Functionality -- You can only access Heimskingi's™'s voice-activated assistant using the Heimskingi™ smart speaker. However, we make no guarantees that you will always be able to access Heimskingi's™ voice-activated assistant using Heimskingi's™ smart speaker. If you lose your internet connection, or we're experiencing an outage, or you are passing through sundry rural areas, you may lose some functionality. If you should experience an outage, please report your trouble to Heimskingi™, and we'll start troubleshooting!
2. Use of software -- Do not eat financial assistant pods. Use of Heimskingi™ is limited to personal, non-commercial activities. By using the Service, you agree that The Motley Fool, its directors, its employees, and its artificially intelligent agents will not be liable for any investment decision made or action taken by you, Heimskingi™, or others based upon reliance on any advice Heimskingi™ offers you, whether explicitly, tacitly, subliminally, imagined, or otherwise. Please remember that past results are not necessarily indicative of future performance.
3. Voice technology -- Heimskingi™ is a voice-controlled assistant. You speak to Heimskingi™ it speaks back to you. Please speak clearly, grammatically, and assertively if you wish Heimskingi™ to accurately follow your instructions.
4. Content -- The Fool cannot guarantee that information provided by Heimskingi™ is accurate, up-to-date, or relevant to the user in any way. The Fool also will not be held responsible for psychological discomfort experienced by children below, or above, the age of three (3) (inclusive) who choose to play "The Marshmallow Game."
5. Sensitive information -- In order to take full advantage of The Fool's offering and Heimskingi's™ Always-On® service, you will be asked to link your bank account, provide your Social Security number and blood type, and enable Heimskingi™ to record you while you are in your home. The Fool may document, store, and access any and all interactions between you and your assistant, whether personal, commercial, playful, familial, therapeutic, or quotidian for quality assurance and data mining purposes. The Fool will have access to your most important financial and personal information, as well as audio of your most deeply intimate moments between you and the guests in your home. We pinky promise to make sure it's secure.
6. Fees -- Fees may be associated with almost every Heimskingi™ interaction. Those fees could rise in the future at the sole discretion of The Motley Fool and its artificially intelligent agents.
7. Contact information -- The Fool deeply cares about improving Heimskingi™ and debugging any issues you may encounter. To report a problem, contact XXX-XXX-XXXX, or [email protected]. You can also report any Heimskingi™ related bugs via Heimskingi™. Just say "Hey Heimskingi™, I think you're sick!" (12b-1 fees may apply).
8. Advertisements -- The Fool reserves the right to monetize your use of Heimskingi™ with paid advertisements from trusted third party businesses. All electronic web pages, which may have been established as expressed views and/or opinions (stated either within the electronic web page or any of its audio/images), are left at the sole discretion and responsibility of the sender, and are not necessarily attributed to The Fool. Basically, we're not saying there are going to be ads in the future, but we're not exactly saying there won't be ads in the future, either.
