Appply same principle of buying and holding for 10+ years and get the Motley Fool Stock Advisor newsletter and buy their pics periodically. Excellent stock research.
I'm not in a position to know myself, but Patrick (author of the blog post that originally kicked off this discussion) does not think highly of The Motley Fool.
The only other data point I have to add is that a year or two ago, The Motley Fool published a breathless blog post announcing that 3D printing was about to destroy Chinese manufacturing, and that everyone should invest in companies that make 3D printers or CAD software.
They are a "diversified financial brand" which does a lot of e.g. telling people to get out of credit card debt (a good idea!) and save for retirement (a good idea!). Then they also tell people that "with just a little work, you too can read company numbers and outperform the stock market" (a really bad idea!) and "if you want to do less work, buy our newsletters and we'll give you picks which mumble mumble maybe mumble mumble will make you into Warren Buffet" (a really bad idea!).
I have a word of warning on Motley Fool. I once invested in a Chinese stock pick that they were promoting, and it shortly went to zero due to being fraudulent. Their research is often second hand and no better than the research you could do yourself.
To save everyone from the oozing condescension of this guy's rant I'll boil down his thesis: Just because someone can spend Satoshi's bitcoin doesn't PROVE that they're Satoshi. Given by the many common sense reasons he listed with the know-it-all fervor of an 8th grade WoW player (someone could have stole it or the original team passed it around among themselves etc). Sure it doesn't prove anything ABSOLUTELY if Craig Write actually moved a bitcoin, but it certainly would help his case.
On the other hand... the author is a respected financial cryptographer. He invented Riccardian contracts, is a proponent of triple-entry accounting, has authored many papers and provided expert testimony to the US senate finance subcommittee. 45 leading banks have joined the R3 consortium and he is R3's blockchain architect.
One might object that we don't know the author is a respected financial cryptographer- we see merely that he's posting with a respected cryptographer's account, which proves nothing. : )
Regardless of his larger accomplishments, this particular post qualifies as a rant by my measure- phrases like "ripping the wool off sheep's backs" and "sate your pavlovian hunger" don't make for calm and measured discourse. As for substance, clearly he's angry that people are responding so scathingly to Wright's claim, but A) this is the internet, that's how it behaves, and B) we are all quite aware that cryptographic proofs aren't everything and that Satoshi might have lost his keys, but Wright has offered us many good reasons to doubt his sincerity. Past actions (fake degrees, tax shenanigans, etc) aside, he came out with the assertion that he was Satoshi and could prove it. He posted a fake demonstration of signing a message with Satoshi's key, and then made noise about being about to spend coins from the genesis block before backing out altogether. It just looks bad. If he had come out and said "I'm Satoshi Nakamoto, but I don't have the keys to prove it", well... people wouldn't necessarily believe him, but it would have remained a possibility in people's minds. This whole story has functioned as quite effective human proof that Wright is a con-artist.
Too many naysayers in this thread (get burned before guys?).
Motley Fool Investment Guide is where I started. I've subscribe to their Stock Advisor newsletter for nearly a decade and have picked from their recommendations in that newsletter. Basically i've invested money in one of their picks once per month with the expectation to hold that investment for 10+ years. That portfolio has gained an average of 25% PER year and I've never researched a stock.
When did you start investing? Because by saying "never researched a stock" sounds like you have been lucky in a bull market rather than investing for decades across multiple bull/bear cycles.
i had an idea that if I were a US bank I would create a USD token on Ethereum that would be redeemable at my bank (or my network of banks). A eUSD token would created via smart contract and be pegged to the dollar and thereby tradable on the Ethereum network. Individuals and business could then do business in USD (or any fiat of choice for that matter. Obtainable on an Ethereum exchange or through said bank(s)). Other implications: An accounting firm could create a smart contract that calculates and or files my taxes. A business structure (LLC, IPO etc) in can be written into a smart contract. And so on.
Ah, the magic trustless dollar-pegged digital token. Many tales have been spoken of them, but none stand up to close scrutiny. You need to solve this problem before basing anything else upon it.
True, but there are also other brilliant minds in the field that are creating solutions that you can also learn from. Isolating yourself from that doesn't help much either.
