Musings From a Motley Fool

The wise use of technology for investing in the accelerating communications revolution was the theme of the first keynote address at The Times’ conference. This is excerpted from remarks by David Gardner, who with his brother Tom co-founded the Motley Fool section of America Online, where investments are discussed in great detail. More of their remarks, as well as those of the other keynote speakers, SEC Chairman Arthur Leavitt and Muriel Siebert, founder and president of Murietl Siebert & Co. discount brokerage, can be found at The Times’ Web site, https://www.latimes.com/strategies

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For most people, computers remain intimidating and unhelpful devices. And I want to speak directly to you if you’re one of those people.

[If] you’re an investor, the Internet should sell itself. . . . You’ll discover that you now have access to free, instant stock quotes, company reports, historical price graphs, earnings estimates, complete filings of all financial information, the works.

And one very important additional resource . . . people are communicating with and are helping other people. The majority of the work done every day at the Motley Fool is done by our readers, who post thousands of messages to our online message board about the stock market, individual stocks, mutual funds, mortgages, retirement plans, cars, you name it.

Our message boards represent nothing more than an open conversation, arranged chronologically, involving anyone who would like to contribute a comment. It’s kind of like a new form of talk radio except that it’s text-based, better organized . . .

With everyone’s computers hooked together, talking to each other, information once impossible to come by is now being pieced together by hundreds of thousands of individual investor foot soldiers deployed from Los Angeles to Arundell, Maine.

The result is that information becomes a great advantage to experienced investors who use it to gain an edge, and it also represents tons of free help for novice investors with whatever financial questions they might have . . .

Education leading to self-reliance is a frightening prospect for a wide spectrum of traditional financial services companies. Their business is completely built on you needing them. So what happens if and when you don’t?

Well, many full-service brokerage firms won’t be very happy about that.