Anyone a member that would care to share their views? I’m sure I’m not the only one getting emails about the new opening happening.
I’m not currently inclined to join, but if folks have compelling reasons beyond the ad hype.
(I agree with many who have stated the most valuable part of Fool subscriptions are the board activity, and I’m not sure how that might translate for a ONE membership.)
-FrickNFool
I’m a One member, for about a year now. A did the 5 year plan, so my chance to exit with a full refund is just about up. I plan to stay with One.
For me, the biggest benefits so far are:
There are Fool One member events. They appear to be trying for one per quarter, with locations that vary around the country. One of the events per year is also open to other portfolio service members, but there is an extra day of events just for One members. I’ve only been to one member event so far, and I really enjoyed it (especially meeting other folks from the boards); I’m already signed up for the next one.
They’ve recently started “raves”, which are a more comprehensive investigation into the stocks in the Everlasting Portfolio. I’m liking the extra depth of coverage there. It would be cool if it covered other stocks I like (or if the EP picked those stocks…).
The Everlasting Portfolio is somewhat interesting to me. I don’t try to buy all their picks. I treat it as yet another recommendation service to consider. They do sometimes pick stocks that haven’t been picked in any other service.
I haven’t used the Ayco (financial counselor) service. I get the feeling the Fool wants to bring some or all of that in house.
I’ve used the Touchstone feature (computer-generated portfolio advice), mostly to check my balance across market caps and sectors. I haven’t bothered to follow its recommended buy/sell guidance.
I haven’t tried the Self Managed Accounts (which are currently closed to new applications as they make it more individually tailored). I’m a tinkerer, so I probably wouldn’t use them myself unless I got to a point where I felt like I was no longer competent or interested in managing my own portfolio. But I could definitely see having my wife use it if something happened to me (since she has basically no interest in how to invest).
You can get access to most of the newsletters through MDP 360, which is cheaper. But that wouldn’t get you the other portfolio services, or other One-specific features.
Hope that helps,
-Mark
Personally, I can’t even imagine paying the (outrageous to me) price asked for MF ONE, but that’s me. Of course, I wouldn’t even pay much, much less because I just wouldn’t get the value out of it. Everyone has different needs, wants and budgets and has to decide for themselves.
Mostly I just had to comment that it’s interesting that one of the draws to ONE is access to all of the services while there has been a discussion on an RB board that there are too many active picks on RB alone. I actually just dropped SA and only have RB now. I just wasn’t using SA enough and like to focus on RB, which is the service I started with.
Steve
Adding to what Mark said, there is a thread here on the SA Options board discussing one:
http://discussion.fool.com/1081/ot-mf-one-31416157.aspx?sort=who…
If you don’t subscribe to SA, my post is shown below. It was originally a response to people on PRO, hence the references:
There is no prying PRO away from you if you join MF One - PRO is included as part of it.
I decided to give MF One a one year trial earlier this year, and so far have found it worthwhile on a number of counts. Prior to subscribing to One, I was already subscribing to most of the services anyway, so the incremental cost wasn’t that bad. It would have been an even better deal if I had committed to a 5 year sub, which I didn’t. There is a money back guarantee up until the end of the first year, so there is nothing to lose by giving it a try.
If you are only currently subscribing to PRO and MFO, then the incremental cost would be more significant.
The things that I like about it are:
- They pull together information from all the different services in a fairly seamless way. For example you can see the top recommendations from every service summarized together on one page. They have a stock screener which has similar functionality, so you can see which services have recommended a stock, then you can click on the ticker and it takes you to a page that pulls together the coverage, recommendations, board posts etc form all Services that have that stock as a recommendation. This might be the single most powerful and worthwhile aspect of MF One
- They’ve just introduced a feature called ‘Everlasting Raves’ which does a very nice job of summarizing the investment thesis for each recommendation in Tom’s Everlasting Portfolio.
- they have a bunch of MF One exclusive content, including an excellent library of Tom Gardner interviews with CEO’s and other people, and articles by Morgan Housel
- They have an Around the Fool option which pulls together Alerts, articles etc from all the services into one place
- You get much more interaction on the One message boards from Tom, Morgan Housel, Alyce Lomax and Toby Bordelon (TMFEpsilon) amongst others.
- They offer Managed Accounts, which are supposed to follow particular service offerings - e.g instead of following PRO yourself, you could have a Managed Account which would mimic the PRO portfolio. This was attractive to me (and a number of other people) as a possible solution to managing our assets on behalf of my wife if something happens to me. I should say though to be fair, that they are in the process of re-thinking this for reasons that are not entirely clear.
- They hold regular live events for members - I went to one in Alexandria earlier this year and one in San Francisco this summer. These were both excellent and energizing. You get to meet a lot of Fools that you know from the boards.
- I was pleasantly surprised after I joined One, how many people I know well on the boards over the years were One members.
So, it may not be for everyone, it may be too expensive, but if you value having access to everything on TMF, streamlined in a way to help you make more efficient use of it, I would definitely recommend giving it a try.
You’ll probably find that you still spend most of your social time here on PRO, just as most of my board time is still on Stock Advisor.
One thing I forgot to include in my list of things about MF One, whioh came up in the Live Chat is that As a member of Fool ONE, you would have access to our international services, too, including Canada, Australia, Singapore (when launched) and Germany (when launched).
This is a nice perk - I’ve looked at the Canadian site for more coverage of Canadian companies.
John
- I was pleasantly surprised after I joined One, how many people I know well on the boards over the years were One members.
John,
How would you rank the discussion boards of the various subscription services in terms of their utility to you? You are a generous cross-poster, but where do you go most frequently when looking for useful information?
For those who look for value in the discussion boards, your perspective could be quite informative.
Regards,
tomagi
P.S. Have you run a survey of MF One members concerning board utilization?
How would you rank the discussion boards of the various subscription services in terms of their utility to you?
tomagi:
I responded to a similar question over on RB:
http://discussion.fool.com/1069/mf-one-siphoning-off-board-traff…
For those of you who don’t subscribe to RB, here is my response. I’ve blanked out the stock symbols, since we’re out in the wild here:
Original comment:
Wow. It appears that MF One has private boards for stocks recommended by other services, and is actively directing traffic from these boards to the private ones:
My reply:
Jim:
I think your concerns are misplaced. I joined MF One earlier this year (Feb/Mar). At that time a number of people on Stock Advisor expressed similar concerns that a number of the prolific posters on SA (me, huibs, FrankDip and others) had joined One, and that SA was going to suffer as a result. I don’t think that has happened, and if anything I have become even more prolific (if that’s possible) since joining One, as it has been such a good experience (particularly the live meetings) that it has energized me even more as to the value of TMF.
MF One has a lot of great features, but stock specific discussion boards are not one of them (sorry Tom).
I’ll probably get my knuckles rapped or this post pulled for sharing this information, but let’s look at a few stocks which are MF One Everlasting Portfolio picks. The four that I chose are RB recommendations and two of them are also SA recommendations. I have shown the rec date for MF One, which is the same as the board opening date, then I have shown the number of posts on MF One and on RB and SA (where applicable) since the same date.
Rec Date MF One RB SA
Pick 1 6/1/2012 402 1,212 652
Pick 2 10/1/2013 294 518 -
Pick 3 7/1/2013 259 755 -
Pick 4 1/2/2014 157 1,013 4,212
Options 7/16/2012 395 236 10,759
Of course quantity doesn’t tell you anything about quality and I’ll grant you that on the MF One boards you are likely to see posts by Tom Gardner and other TMF’s that you won’t see anywhere else, but as far as member input, the RB and SA boards are second to none.
My view of this is that most of the active posters on MF One started their TMF life in other services and still view those as their home base. In my case that is Stock Advisor and Rule Breakers, so I still mainly post there when it comes to specific stocks. I will occasionally post TSLA information to the MF One board, but I have concluded that cross-posting to multiple boards is just too time consuming, so most of my TSLA posts go to the SA board, with an occasional cross-post to RB. If you want to follow the minutiae of TSLA you have to subscribe to SA. Likewise with Options.
There are a lot of very good MF One discussion boards, but they are not stock specific.
John