Motley Fool Million Dollar Portfolio: How to Build and Grow Your Own Seven-figure Portfolio

This is an innovative book on investing from The Motley Fool that shows readers how to build a seven-figure portfolio with a proven market-beating approach. Their latest effort comes on the heels of the experimental and wildly successful "Motley Fool Million Dollar Portfolio" - a one-of-a-kind membership service that allows qualified individual investors to follow along as Tom Gardner invests and manages $1 million of The Motley Fool's own money. Due to overwhelming demand, the service had to be closed to additional subscribers. David and Tom Gardner's new book is the next best thing. In page after page of sound, sensible investment advice, peppered with case studies and personal anecdotes, readers are offered a rare glimpse into the inner workings of The Motley Fool machine.

"The best place online for talking with investors... amusing as well as educational." -- Barron's, "Their panache is a cover for a belief in the old-fashioned virtues of patience, simplicity, and prudence." -- U.S. News & World Report, "They’ve built up a large and much-deserved following." -- Washington Post

Review

"If you apply this approach consistently and follow it for the next several decades, you will do well. If you follow your own ideas, I doubt if your results after tax will come close to what you could have earned by applying these methods.

One of the guilty little secrets about Wall Street is that the average investor does poorly, selling when stocks are down and buying when they are up, trading too often, piling up extra expenses for taxes and brokerage commissions. Why? People want to get rich quick. It's possible, but you are more likely to get rich slowly. This book teaches you how to do the latter by taking advantage of compounded returns.

David and Tom Gardner have provided a solid resource for those who are new to investing and want to take advantage of long-term trends and the odds to build a portfolio that will outperform inflation and the market averages. At a time like this when stocks have cratered and many bonds have buckled, many people will be reluctant to invest in anything other than treasury securities. Yet the best opportunities to invest usually come when things look quite bleak.

The book assumes that you've never bought a stock before. If that's you, I'm sure you will be able to pick a better stock than my first broker picked out for me (which promptly fell 95 percent in value).

From there, you'll learn about the benefits of buying stocks that grow and pay generous dividends (more than half of long-term gains from stocks come in dividend payments).

Next, the Gardners explain about buying high-quality, large companies inexpensively (at a discount, the Warren Buffett approach).

After that, you'll learn about why small-cap stocks should always outperform larger cap ones and how to pick the right ones.

The next section helps you spot companies that are breaking the mold with new business models that can give them extraordinary success over a short period of time (as Google did in the 21st century).

The Gardners next look at international investing and help you understand the various ways that you can pick successful stocks that will benefit from selling into locations where growth and profits will be high.

In the CAPS section, they explain about their online resource for assessing individual securities as a way for you to check your thinking.
It's an example of crowd wisdom.

Finally, you are shown how to assemble a portfolio using these various approaches . . . adjusted for your age, needs, and risk tolerances.

The book also gives you guidance on how to pick mutual funds in the appendix if you decide you don't want to be a stock picker.

The book has an excellent balance of summarizing the best academic research and outstanding books while providing simple "how to" directions complemented by examples that are completely developed enough to help you understand the analysis and thinking process that are being recommended.

I have only a few reservations about the book that kept me from grading it at five stars:

1. The book assumes that the investor is paying taxes on gains when incurred. If you are investing in a tax-deferred account (such as an IRA or 401k, the answers are a little different from what is described here).

2. The book assumes that an investor who reads this book wants to try to be a stock picker. Most people would be well advised not to be stock pickers. The joys of putting together a portfolio of index funds should have been explained in detail for those people.

3. The section on risk takers and rule breakers wasn't strong enough to teach someone what to look for. That surprised me given that the Gardners have published a book in the past on that very subject.

As a complement for this book, I suggest you also read John Bogle's Common Sense on Mutual Funds: New Imperatives for the Intelligent Investor and Jeremy Siegel's Stocks for the Long Run, 4th Edition: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns And Long Term Investment Strategies." Donald Mitchell, Boston.

Author Biography

Brothers David Gardner and Tom Gardner cofounded The Motley Fool, a multimedia financial education company, in 1993. They have coauthored four New York Times bestsellers, including The Motley Fool Investment Guide, The Motley Fool You Have More than You Think, and The Motley Fool's Rule Breakers, Rule Makers. The Gardners also oversee the award-winning website Fool.com (with over 4.3 million unique visitors per month).