We're very excited at Fool HQ about a new service we've just launched, The Motley Fool Select. Select is a monthly investing publication focused exclusively on our best investment ideas. It serves as a replacement for our Company Research reports. This article is intended to give you a better idea of why we're so excited about Select, as well as some of the reasons for our decision to discontinue our current Company Research coverage.

Finally, for those of you who are considering purchasing Select, I'd like to provide you with a better idea of what you are getting (and, just as importantly, what you won't be getting) for your hard-earned cash. We hope that by providing more and better information about this service, we can ensure that each customer receives exactly what they hoped for -- and that folks who are looking for something else won't be disappointed. Select isn't for everybody, and we would rather not have the sale if the result is an unhappy customer. 

What is The Motley Fool Select?
The Motley Fool Select is a monthly publication of our best investment ideas, each one explained in just enough depth to help you determine if you're interested in a stock. Depthwith convenience was our goal in designing this service. Each month, we will profile the most compelling investment opportunities from each of our Foolish investing strategies:

  • The Rule Maker team will profile a highly profitable, market-dominating company with the potential to double its value in five years.
  • The Rule Breaker team will profile a dynamic, fast-growing company with the potential to rewrite the rules of business in an emerging industry.
  • We'll profile one small, fast-growing company from the universe of Small-Cap Foolish 8 stocks that offers an attractive combination of growth and value.

In addition to these stock ideas, we will present a feature article every month that introduces an investing theme or industry profile that you can use to make better investing decisions today. 

What's different, better, and special about The Motley Fool Select?
First of all, Select is all about investing ideas. Therefore, a compelling investment opportunity is the spark for anything and everything you'll find in Select. 

One of the qualities of The Motley Fool that our customers find most valuable is that we demystify what many others try to make overly complex. In Select, every investment idea is presented in our down-to-earth, entertaining style. We'll show you how the profiled company makes money, how it can make more money, and whether it has a lasting advantage in its industry.

Finally, each idea ends with a clear, specific valuation-based investment opinion as to why we think it's worth your attention now. If we think a stock is overvalued, we'll tell you. If we think it's a steal, we'll explain why. We'll also provide a straightforward discussion of the risks involved.

Why are we discontinuing our Company Reports?
We have decided to discontinue Company Reports for several reasons based on what our customers have told us. The first one was convenience. In our company reports, we were able to cover 18 companies, with quarterly updates on each. That's a total of 72 reports a year, and most of our subscribers simply didn't have the time to read them all. In addition, we discovered that most of the value we were able to create with our company reports was contained in the first "initiating coverage" report.

Finally, the number one topic of feedback from our company report subscribers was very simple: they wanted us to extend our coverage to more companies, and to cover a broader range of companies beyond the large-cap heavyweights that tend to be well-covered in the investing media. Considering the very limited resources available to us, we determined that it is relatively inefficient to use 72 reports a year to cover 18 companies. Finally, the limitations of our fixed universe of companies meant that we weren't able to provide our readers with new opportunities when we came across them -- the format just didn't lend itself to getting investment ideas to our customers.

With Select, we plan to produce the same quality of coverage for 36 different companies each year -- and to broaden the types of companies to include small-cap stocks and Rule Breakers in addition to the Rule Maker-type stocks that dominated our Company Research product. 

In selecting these companies, we also wanted to become more timely with our coverage -- to bring companies to your attention that we feel are good investment ideas at the current price, rather than having to cover companies that we don't feel offer compelling values just because it's time for the quarterly update.

In addition, we felt that adding a cover story that teaches something about an investment theme and offers short takes on companies that fit that theme rounds out the product very well. The new product will offer our readers several investment ideas and pack a lot of timely investment information into a convenient package that doesn't require a large investment of time. 

A lower price
Finally, being able to condense our best ideas into a monthly report allows us to offer Select at a lower price than any of our previous subscription products. The price of $49 for an annual subscription comes out to about $4.00 an issue, and is about half the cost of an annual subscription to our Company Reports. In fact, it's about what I spent on my ice-cold, grande Mocha Frappuccino this morning. 

Single issues will be available for $10. If you'd like to try out this month's issue but aren't sure you'd like to subscribe, we'll be sending out a special offer to single issue customers that allows them to put that $10 towards a full-year subscription.

We've also put together a preview download of the April 2001 premiere issue -- "Safe Havens For Your Portfolio" -- so that you can get a sneak peak of what kind of features The Motley Fool Select has to offer. As always, your feedback on the product is much appreciated, so if you have ideas or suggestions, feel free to send them to us!