I guess it's time to explain

Investment Analysis Clubs Saul’s Investing Discussions
1

First, I want to say a big thanks to the Motley Fool (TMF) for hosting this board. Finding Saul’s in 2015 has been a huge part of my investing journey. I’m eternally grateful to Saul for starting it and TMF for hosting it.

I also appreciate all the support TMF has given Saul’s board in the past. I know Saul worked with them from years back, and as the board got more popular Saul made me and a few others his assistant board managers. TMF always helped with requests and maintenance (if anyone was around in 2021 you know how overrun the board got, and how many posts Saul had to have deleted, etc), and when the message boards got a huge overhaul in 2022, TMF had a session with a few of us showing us how it worked, and they were extremely supportive in every way.

In 2024, Saul abdicated and very shortly after moved on from posting and spends his time on other things. Good for Saul! Not so good for the board. Board maintenance fell to me, and like Saul, my heart was no longer in it. I limped through 2025, occasionally getting support from TMF, but I did the minimum.

In Jan 2026 I had a question about something board-related and I emailed my TMF support person, and even after several follow ups, I never heard back. I made a few half-hearted attempts to contact others including the one supervisor whose email I had…and the second email I sent him came back “undeliverable.” Unknown mailbox. That was in March.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that TMF no longer wanted to support this board. If anyone from TMF is reading this, feel free to reach out if that is wrong.

After some deliberation the next couple months, WPR and I started the subreddit GrowthStockInvesting in May. It’s been fun…we’re getting posts from people who never even requested to post here. Our community is expanding.

Again I want to thank TMF for all the good years. I hope they continue to have much success, and I hope they continue to host this board. I still get a lot out of looking through old posts from time to time.

Thanks to all who have contributed here, and to those who read this board and “lurked.” It’s been amazing. Hope to see you on the subreddit.

Bear

75 Likes
TMF now letting Discussion Boards whither and fail?
2

RDDT is a better place to sell your wares, but the sharing of knowledge with integrity in the “band of brothers” environment of Saull’s board is uniquely structured. The focus of screening out experiments and homing in on a system with 30 years of whiskers is vastly superior to anything RDDT is offering. My spreadsheet analysis approach is outside your knowledge base, so I do no contribute much, but I read every message and pour over monthly reports. Oh, I look thru RDDT from time to time, but always discover my time there is heavily diluted with trivia that Saul’s fine screen trashed. Thanks to all who have supported Saul’s passion for quality, honesty and intensity. If you are into finessing your personal investing success this is the place to be, but if you have something to sell, perhaps RDDT or FB is a better market.

Gray

42 Likes
3

Well Bear and the rest of the quiet mods, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Thanks! I guess this site will slowly wither, but as I said in another thread ‘things change’. It is worth pointing out, as long as I have your ear, that reddit is much the inferior tool for running discussions. It does not have a way to signal that a thread has been added to, for instance. And of course there is the far more intrusive spam, junk posts, etc. But, good enough will have to do.

33 Likes
4

Thank you for your explanation Bear. Yes, I remember that 2021 in particular was a really busy time on the board and it was a huge amount of work for Saul, yourself and the other moderators. Thank you for all you have done. I don’t have a Reddit account and have not been on the new Reddit board. But I echo what others have said above that this TMF board feels a much better place for in depth stock discussions. I think Saul’s board was the only one that TMF chose to fully migrate over to the new system in 2022 and to keep all of the old posts. All the other boards had their old posts deleted then. So we are grateful to TMF for that.

Are you still in touch with Saul, can I ask? Is he well and enjoying his retirement? I do hope so

Anyway, thanks again for all you have done to maintain these boards over the years.

Jonathan

36 Likes
5

Bear,

While we’re here. Can you give us an update on how Saul is doing?

20 Likes
6

The signal to noise ratio is much lower at RDDT and, ironically, the upvote/down vote system which is supposed to support better content isn’t functioning there because the average viewer is trained to react to emotional triggers, not logic, scrutiny and financial savy. (The average user is not of the culture/quality shown in action at the Saul board, IMO)

For example, several posters (from here) have strayed from the primary board there to widen the audience and provide guidance. They are met with “troll”, “bot” or “FUD generator” and many other variations simply because the commentary isn’t diamond hands pump for whatever the issue of the day seems to be.

This is not helpful as negative points of view (and DRIVEN BY DATA and HIGH ANALYSIS) are critical to the function of this board. It’s easy to give a rec or an upvote. It’s much harder to balance buoyant performance statements to level set on business challenges/opportunities when the commentary is ad hominem and frequent.

That said, we all own responsibility to keep this (or that) board functioning. If you find value, ADD to the discussion!

34 Likes
7

I am greatly saddened to see the evolution of this Saul’s Board to subreddit as I have gained so much knowledge about high growth investing here for the past 6 years. While I will check the reddit site along with this Saul’s board, I sincerely hope and wish the monthly reports by experienced Saul’s posters will continue here. Thank you to Saul for creating this board and to all the contributors who make this board special!

35 Likes
8

As a long time reader watching this community wither and slow down has been a great tragedy. TMF is one of the last digital communities out there from the gogo years of the internet before large aggregations swallowed everything.

I truly wish there was a way to make it work. A challenge with reddit is the absolute runaway infestation of bots there which makes most subreddits completely untrustworthy and unusable. It hardly feels like a community there especially when considering the reddit of the 2010s.

I am a rare poster here but frequent reader and wanted to express my deep gratitude to this community for being a refuge of rigorous analysis and thoughtful debate in a world where that is ever so rare. And of course thanks to Saul and the mainstays for imparting so many valuable lessons along the way

30 Likes
9

you said, “Our community is expanding” and my question is why not expand on Saul’s board? The reddit sight is not nearly as easy follow or as effective in limiting all the “noise” found on reddit?

22 Likes
10

I’ve been on Motley Fool member for over 20 years. I do not post much however I read all I can on this board and like to thank all who put valuable info here. I just don’t understand how Reddit is a better place with all the other noise on that site. I wish you and WPR would reconsider. Thank You

31 Likes
11

Really appreciate the sentiments about the board in the thread!

It’s worth pointing out a few more of the challenges with the board. There is a large number of potential posters who are either locked out of their Fool accounts, or unable to get posting permissions for Saul’s board.

I was surprised how many people reached out recently to say they have been looking to post on Saul’s board for years but were unable to do so. I’ve talked with some folks who tried extensively to fix their Fool account but it did not work. The result is that new posters are unable to post here because of the high barriers to entry.

As Bear mentioned, it would be great if this board was getting more support from The Fool. Part of the reason to set up another discussion area was so that people who want to participate in the discussions can join.

Many have pointed out there are trade offs with Reddit which has more noise. This does allow the investing discussions to grow though, as opposed to having potential posters locked out from posting on this board.

Adding an update that I’m still going to be posting on here on Saul’s board. I have a write up planned for a stock at the end of the month that I haven’t discussed on the boards yet.

50 Likes
12

The board started the limitation of posters because of being so popular and what was happening with the number of unwanted posts. Saul started that with the blessing of many on here . Please correct me if I am wrong. It is so easy to navigate here that is why I am asking for reconsideration. Maybe you could get the fool to open the board back up so anyone can post and see how that goes. I don’t have a clue how Saul was able to have certain members be invited to post here. What good is it if you can’t figure out who is legit on Reddit and also is there any moderators on Reddit. I just started going over there and not sure what I am doing yet. Thanks again

15 Likes
14

The structure of MF boards has been refined over many years. I was one of the first group on the MF (Aol) message boards ~1994/5. I had previously used the primitive Internet for search and was at a useful total loss. And I knew nobody who even had an email address to message with (Pine). And my friends were all engineers! So the arrival of Aol CD disk and their connectivity service was my wish come true.

Soon I found the Aol stock message board. (Search still sucked) I ran into a poster named James C that attacked my thoughts for buying AOL stock. Short it! AOL was the first stock purchase in my life and half of my savings $5,000. AOL stock dropped further. I checked the modem channel for connectivity (my advantage since I had friends at US Robotics in Silicon Valley (Aol supplier)). I posted my findings on the AOL stock board. Again I was more aggressively attacked by James C. as being not well versed. Connectivity was collapsing. So I invested the last $5,000 of my savings in AOL. This sounds like a humorless small amount, but it was a huge amount to me at that time. This guy got a TOS, whatever that was from the monitoring. I had to look TOS up, but the guy was no more to be seen. My $10,000 became worth over $100,000 in the next few years, my first spiffy pop.

I was a TMF Guide for a while but it was a pretty useless job. So I dropped out. I bought mostly MF recommended stocks for years but did just OK. Meanwhile I started choosing 5 high risk MF growth stocks every 6 months for a small 10% portfolio investment. I studied and tracked in depth. Much to my surprise, I did pretty good with usually 4 out of 5 winners at >30% per year. But I was afraid to increase my investment past 10%. I had no collaboration on MF. I searched other boards with no excitement and I noticed something called Saul’s Board had a huge following. I thought maybe he was a criminal like TV show Breaking Bad’s and Call Saul. What a stupid name, but let’s check it out. Wow, Saul and others had a well established process kind of along the lines of my 5 growth stock gambit. I now had a small collaboration that juiced me to fully embrace a more concentrated higher growth portfolio.

I am now of the age to have forced distribution for my the IRA Rollover (RMD). Even with the forced hefty annual distributions, my stock portfolio grows. I have retirement security. And I have a lot of fun probably 3-4 hours/days.

Yeh I am on the Reddit board and watching. But Saul’s Board has the best contributors and best respectful conversation. And the high tech analysis is of a very high level. I know, I spent the last 20 years and 4 start ups in network/cyber security. We all want each other to succeed. What distinguished this board?

structure
monitoring
spiffy pop
small group collaboration
lot of fun
a family

So let’s keep Saul’s Board strong as it has become a family to most of us.

-zane

67 Likes
16

To clarify, we continue to support this board as well as the free side. There have been no real changes in TMFs support for this board. We’ve left it pretty much as a self-sustaining board since we moved to the new platform 4 years ago and trained Saul and the other board moderators on how to use the new moderation tools. Other than the occasional nudge for a moderator to process a flagged post or membership request, this board requires little to no involvement from the main moderators.

What we have experienced over the last 12 months is a number of folks leaving and responsibilities shifting, and more work for those of us left behind. Plus, in my case, about 4-6 months of very limited duty for medical reasons last winter. But the moderator team, although smaller by about 30%, is still around to support.

Jen

42 Likes
17

I still enjoy this board and the value it brings. I’ve been on MF since 2005 or maybe earlier and I finally joined Saul’s board in 2019 after hearing it mentioned many times before. It has been a game changer for many. I hope this board lives on.

I also keep wondering how Saul is doing.

Razz

16 Likes
18

Jen,

Thanks for the information. I’m curious if this board has any moderators that have access to allow new people to post. I know I was approved by Saul and it took a while because it was one of his first injuries and I had to wait. So I’m wondering if that moderator power has only been reserved for Saul or if he is the only one who knew how to do it.

Moderators,
If you need extra help, I’m retired investor who can give back to the community and moderate if needed. If not, I will continue to enjoy the hard work you do.

Thanks,
Drew

21 Likes
19

Been thinking about this too. Got two more years till I can be “free” but now I have to worry about interviews to get my old job back after a reduction in force at my work. Sigh. Yeah, I am keeping that offer in my mind.

7 Likes
20

With the above mention of cutting staff at TMF, this board brings little revenue to TMF and therefore might be on the low end of the totem pole. When Saul was running the board - each day , it was the most viewed board on TMF.

It seems like there is something in place that still limits who can post on the board, I do remember getting the ok to post several years ago here. That has been mentioned a few times in the recent posts, if that roadblock could be removed, the board might still be able to exist. Maybe TMFMints could address that.

A few have offered to volunteer to be a moderator to basically delete offensive or robotic posts and subjects that go on and on and beat a dead horse.

10 Likes
21

Forgot this - I think the reason approval was needed to post - the popularity of Saul’s board brought many shills or trolls that tried to turn discussions to their benefit.

7 Likes