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Alexandra Zendrian, Subscriber
Tom Gardner is co-founder and chief executive of The Motley Fool, an investment and personal finance advisory service that advocates for investors.
Gardner is the lead analyst and director of the Motley Fool Hidden Gems investment newsletter service. He and his brother, David, with whom he co-founded the firm, have also co-authored several best-selling books, including The Motley Fool Investment Guide, You Have More Than You Think: The Motley Fool Guide to Investing What You Have, and Rule Breakers, Rule Makers. The brothers also oversee The Motley Fool's nationally syndicated newspaper column and are co-advisers of the market-beating Motley Fool Stock Advisor investment newsletter service.
Gardner has testified before the U.S. Senate, calling for greater transparency in the financial services industry.
He graduated with an honors degree in English and creative writing from Brown University in 1990 and received an honorary Ph.D. in humane letters from Strayer University in 2000.
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Debriefing Gardner
Interview conducted by Alexandra Zendrian
Sept. 16, 2009
Forbes: How did The Motley Fool get started? Where does the name come from? And what is it like founding this company with your brother?
Tom Gardner: The Motley Fool really started in 1993 as a printed newsletter. We attracted the attention of America Online in 1994 and started a business. So as a formal business we began in 1994, 15 years ago.
The origin of the name The Motley Fool comes from Shakespeare's As You Like It. The fool was obviously a main player on both Shakespearean stages and also in Elizabethan court as the character that had an opportunity to tell the king and the world the truth without putting himself in harm's way. Or herself, there were female fools. As long the fool maintained his sense of humor, he could actually provide some pretty withering criticism of the world as the fool saw it. So for us there is a rich literary tradition that we can call upon with foolishness, whether it's Shakespeare or a variety of great quotes from other authors and philosophers over time about foolishness.
In our approach to investing, foolishness means not believe that you're an authority. We're essentially a company aspiring to build the world's greatest investment community and really the only way you can do that is if you don't believe you have a central source of expertise, but rather that you're able to draw from people all around the world and all walks of life and you don't denigrate somebody who could be an 18-year-old investor in Omaha, Neb., who ends up being Warren Buffet, but in other circles he might be treated as an 18-year-old punk and what does he know about business and investing. We have big ears for the ideas around the world and we try to have fun. I think our Motley Fool culture is pretty unique, both in the world of finance and in business in general. I won't bore you with giving you a five point view of our Motley Fool culture, but suffice it to say you don't come to Motley Fool and expect to be wearing a suit and tie.
That must be comfortable. So speaking of being critical, it seems like lately analysts rarely give a stock a "sell" rating and it almost seems like it's difficult to get a critical rating of a company, either because someone is afraid of being sued or the company doesn't want them to have a critical opinion. Do you feel like you're able to circumvent that?
Well, I'll first identify why I think that is the case, that you don't see many sell ratings. There are a lot of natural, understandable incentives about focusing on a company that you're excited about. But then we also have to recognize that the investment banks, historically and today, have relationships with these businesses from a financing standpoint. They may be doing a secondary stock offering, they may be creating a bond offering for that particular company, and if they come out and say "sell", the management of that company is going to say, "Well, I actually don't want to be financed by you now, so I'm gonna go look at your competitor." And that conflict of interest is significantly diluting the value of a lot of the research that's out on Wall Street. So we generally look for un-conflicted, independent sources of research and that means that we don't have a problem issuing a sell opinion on a particular company. We also short companies. Sometimes we're more shorting the stock than the company. We may actually think the company is relatively strong but at 60 times earnings, it's ridiculous. We love civil and open debate and what you will find at the Motley Fool community online, for any stock, are differing opinions. And we have a ratings system called CAPS where more than 70,000 people have put their stock picks up, long and short. We track all of their results. We rank all of the investors competing and we also have a corresponding company rating that comes out of all of those ratings. And the reason why I say that is that on any stock there's a grand debate going on throughout the day, week after week, month after month, about whether the stock is a good company, a bad company, a good stock to buy or a stock to avoid.
How do you think the CAPS program is doing and do you think when investors rate stocks that they're able to give a more genuine opinion?
I think that, on average, you are getting an un-conflicted view when you have an open community system. I think the most important thing that CAPS provides in this respect is that it gives everyone a voice. You know, when we started as a business, or a few years in, in the late 1990s, we began really actively campaigning against the idea that public companies would have quarterly calls to announce their earnings and have just Wall Street analysts on those calls. And in fact at one point,
Getting back to what you were saying before about the conflicts of interest that some of these research firms have, how do you think that that's impacting the market and specifically the retail investor who could be trading on their own and relying on these reports for information? What does it mean for them when they're getting a report that says "hold" when it really should be "sell"?
You know, I think there are actually two outcomes to that. The first is the newer investor may also not realize the second conflict that exists with this research and that is that oftentimes it's the firm trying to get the firm's clients to transact so that it can generate commissions for the brokerage side of the business. So if we set aside whether the "hold" really means "hold" and there can be different words for everything. Like strong buy versus buy. I never really understood that. Am I supposed to shout in the phone to my broker if it's a strong buy versus a buy? So all these shades add ambiguity.
But if we separate that out and look at how often they're changing their ratings and could that possibly be feeding transaction costs for which they might take anything from $50, to $100, to a couple thousand dollars on their transactions. So these are also transaction machines that are looking for ratings changes as frequently as possible. At the Motley Fool, what we're encouraging our members to do is to become stakeholders of the business. So don't think that jumping in and out of a stock every three days, three weeks, three months, or in many cases even three years. The greatest investments that we think are in American history and will be going forward are when you find a great company, particularly when it's small and entrepreneurial, and it has a fantastic market opportunity, great people, a great mission, and that company grows and becomes
I think the only other thing I'd say is actually I think it's becoming less relevant. So when you asked "what is the effect on the retail investor", I think it has a diminishing effect with each year because people are becoming more educated. Because people have the internet, they're getting information more easily and forming an opinion around information that shows they should be skeptical bordering on cynical about any information that comes out of Wall Street.
How do you find those great growth stories in the first place? How do you find the Pixar's before they become Pixar?
That's a great question. I think there are a couple of things that we look for. Of course, we have a lot of different opinions at The Motley Fool. But I'll say from my perspective it starts with the people behind the business. And historically, that's difficult to get much information on. I mean, when I began investing as a senior at Brown University in 1989, 1990, the only way that I could learn about the CEO of the company was obviously I would get the annual report. I would get their shareholder letter which had usually been, where every line is usually gone over by the marketing and legal department and I can't really get a picture. And then I would go to the card catalogue in the library. Now you can just
So it starts there. I would love to find companies that have high returns on their invested capital and that have real competitive advantages. Marvel Entertainment is one company that my brother has been recommending. He's never sold it, and has been recommending and re-recommending it for the last six or seven years, and it was just bought by
We just had in our office today, we have speakers that come through on an on-going basis, and today we had Jim Sinegal, founder of Costco, which he founded in the 1980s. He's been there ever since. I mean, I think his equity stake is worth $150 million. He could have retired a long time ago and instead he sits in front of our company today and we ask him, "What do you think your greatest weakness as a CEO is?" And he says, "Fear of failure. I just love what we're doing so much, there's so many people that rely on it, and I'm afraid of failing for them." And you're thinking, gosh, this guy has $150 million. I mean, he could be off on an island with other retired executives but he's still, at the age of 72, he comes to work every day and he's coming to our company to talk and he's afraid of failing. It's amazing the level of commitment some people give their business versus what frankly happened at the Wall Street firms over the last five to 10 years. It's just been an example of the many sins of capitalism.
Your brother likes Marvel. What are some of your favorites right now?
I love a company that you're probably familiar with in name, although maybe you've studied it. That's Dolby. We certainly see Dolby surround sound with the movies and DVDs. You'll see it on all your different music devices, et cetera. That was a company that was started about 40 years ago. At the center of the business is Ray Dolby. He's a very large shareholder in the company. He started the business, it was not in the business plan to make money. He had been meditating in India and he wanted to capture the sound of the music he was hearing and he didn't have a good recording device. And so he went back to California and began fiddling around and tried to improve sound quality with his technical skills. And that began a business that he has stuck with for his entire life. It's been a great stock, it's been a great stock through a difficult market. It didn't suffer in the way a lot of U.S. equities did. And I think it's got a lot of good growth prospects. It is basically a technology, a technology in the audio area but they also have video technologies coming as well. They're essentially able to license it to any device. Think of them as not being very easily co-opted or replaced by another platform. American Online was crushed when broadband came along. You can enjoy the internet at much higher speeds without dialing up through AOL. All of a sudden AOL almost got eliminated by it. Dolby is selling technology to all of the different devices and so I think that they have a great business model. They have great leadership and they have a great culture at their company. I think Dolby basically requires that every other weekend is a three-day weekend for their employees. I mean, that generally makes you love the place you're working at. If you're not waiting for that one Labor Day holiday or whatever, it's like every other week I get to spend more time with my family and get away from the office. That's a stock and a company that I love.
A company that I continue to like, which has been a very good performer. Well, I'll give you two more. One of them is
And the other company is Middleby, and they actually sell to companies like Buffalo Wild Wings. Middleby is a maker of commercial ovens. And Middlebys business, it used to be a disaster, it was very near bankruptcy, and the new CEO came in and said, "Let's get all the stuff that we're either not that good at or that we don't have, that there's not a real profit center for us in. All the things that don't really matter or we don't do well and let's just stop doing them." And actually when that happened, a lot of people though the company was really going to go bankrupt because he just abandoned a bunch of business lines, but what he did was focus on ovens and he said, "There are real safety issues with ovens restaurants take seriously when they buy an oven. Also, energy efficiency is becoming increasingly important. The cost of that. So if we focus on energy efficiency and safety with our ovens, and then finally, if we sell to chains and we win one chain and then another and we can have all our existing restaurants and these future restaurants." So it's really a great business. So he tied everything to the commercial oven; got rid of deli cases, refrigerators, all sorts of kitchen equipment that they couldn't differentiate themselves in. And Middleby has been an unbelievable stock. It's up many times in value since I first recommended it six years ago and I think that its future is still bright for the following reasons. Particularly the U.S. has really set the example of the two-income household and that example is beginning to play out in different examples around the world now, both men and women in the workplace after starting a family with children, and that means that families eat out more than ever before. So you're seeing more and more of people's savings money going toward lunch and dinner in restaurants, which only plays into the strengths of someone who's selling commercial ovens to restaurants.
How is the mutual fund that you recently started doing?
It's called The Motley Fool Independence Fund. We launched the fund earlier this year, in June. And the reason that we did it is we've been somewhat inundated by requests from people within our community that "I enjoy your advice, I'm just not inclined to get a discount broker and make the stock picks myself. I would prefer to do just invest with you instead of just doing it with your help. It's not convenient enough for me." So that motivated us to look for solutions to meet that need. And it's funny, we actually hesitate to call it a mutual fund, although it fits that model. We're really focused on performance and so internally we call it a performance fund. And I think a way that it's distinct from the many thousands of other mutual funds out there is we're using something called the fulcrum fee, and the fulcrum fee is a fee that swings with the performance of the fund based on the S&P 500. So we make a little bit more money if we beat the market and we make less money if we lose to the market. And the reason that we created that is that we want to walk even more steps in the shoes of the customers of that fund. And we invest our own money in the fund as well. We've been quite critical of the mutual fund industry over the years but we also recognize there are a lot of great funds. And they generally hold to some core investment decisions that we believe in, one of them being eat your own cooking, invest in your own fund and prove that you really believe in it. And in the second case, in what we've done is tying fees to performance is extremely rare in the retail fund category, so we're excited about that. We have just one fund in the retail market.
The final innovation we're excited about is we've created a pretty dynamic site, it's called foolfunds.com, which obviously makes it easy to invest through there, but if we aspire to be the world's greatest investment community, we want to create as many opportunities as we can for them to get information.
We finally have a pretty interesting prospectus in that most prospecti aren't making jokes and highlighting the fees so that you know exactly what you're paying. So we're very excited about it. It's top of the first inning for us though in developing asset management.
Going back to what you mentioned about investors being encouraged by research reports to trade too much, do you have any solutions for this?
Mr. Buffett says a great way to reform the tax code is to make the short-term capital gains tax rate 100%. So if you make a profit owning a stock for less than a year, we'll take that entire profit, because you're not using the market for the reason it was created, to help fund the growth of businesses. And if that seems silly, I'll make it more serious by saying maybe it's not 100%, but let's at least ladder the capital gains tax rate down to zero for those that truly make long-term investments. I would be happy for the government to tell me I will pay no tax on gains that I make in an investment that I hold for five years. I could make it 10 years if you wanted to. But reward long-term ownership. It's gonna add stability to the marketplace and it will cause much less of a trader mentality both with stock prices and business ownership. The American capitalism has grown is on the shoulders of people who wanted to create something like Steve Jobs did with
Gardner in Forbes
Guru Screen
Five Hot Stocks For The Long Run
John Reese, Validea.com, 12.05.08, 01:20 PM EST
Just because a stock has momentum behind it doesn't mean the fundamentals are lousy. These five are hot and cheap.
As we wade through the worst economic crisis we've seen in decades, it seems as if nothing has been working for the stock market over the past couple months.
Energy stocks have plunged as the price of oil has fallen; financial stocks have been pounded as the credit crisis continues to unwind; basic materials and commodities stocks have plummeted as the global economic slowdown has worsened and speculative trades unwind; and even alcohol and tobacco stocks are down substantially, as not even vice stocks, which traditionally do well when the economy falters, have not been immune to the carnage. In fact, you cannot find one industry with a positive return for the past three months–not one.
With such widespread pain, a lot of investors are asking, Has anything been gaining ground lately?
The answer is, of course, yes. There are thousands of stocks in the stock market, and at any given time you can find some winners, even if that time is during a terrible economic crisis and bear market. Given how dark the market clouds have been lately, it is quite tempting to try to latch on to any of those recent winners, scooping up any bit of positive vibes–and returns–that you can get.
As any long-term investor knows, blindly following hot stocks can get you in trouble, and in this environment, it can spell disaster for your portfolio. Simply going with stocks that have been hot during an incredibly anomalous climate is no strategy for success.
The bottom line is that buying "hot" stocks is fine if they haven't gotten too pricey and still have strong fundamentals to support their valuations. What stocks fit that bill today? With a bit of digging and the use of my guru strategy computer models, each of which is based on the approach of a different Wall Street great, like O'Shaughnessy, I've found several. Let's take a look at some stocks making the cut.
While EBS's stock has been climbing, the guru strategy I base on the writings of mutual fund legend Peter Lynch thinks it's still a good buy. Because of its 30% long-term growth rate (based on the average of the three- and four-year earnings per share figures) this strategy considers EBS a "fast grower," Lynch's favorite type of investment.
To find fast growers selling on the cheap, Lynch famously used the price-to-earnings-growth ratio, looking for stocks with PEGs below 1.0. By dividing EBS's 15.12 P/E ratio by its growth rate, we get a PEG of 0.51, which easily makes the grade and nearly makes it into this model's best-case category (below 0.5).
One final area Lynch examined was the inventory/sales ratio. He astutely saw it as a red flag when a company's inventory is piling up faster than its sales were rising. This year, EBS's inventory/sales ratio is 9.24, down significantly from 16.19% the previous year. That's a great sign and probably has a lot to do with the success of its anthrax vaccine.
The Florida-based firm, which delivers pet medications and other health products for dogs, cats, and horses through its Web site and 800 number, has seen its stock jump about 10% in the past three months and has been particularly hot over the past month and a half, gaining about 25% while the S&P has been in the red.
PetMed, which has a $381 million market cap, is another favorite of my Lynch-based model. Its strong growth rate (36% based on the average of the three-, four- and five-year EPS figures) and reasonable P/E (17.8) make for a PEG ratio of just 0.49, which falls into the best-case category on the Lynch model's most important test. That's a sign that this fast grower is still a good buy.
Another big reason my Lynch-based approach is high on PetMed: The firm has no long-term debt.
Earlier I mentioned how O'Shaughnessy focused on relative strength as part of his growth stock approach, and Berkley gets high marks from my O'Shaughnessy-based model. The company's strong performance has earned it a relative strength of 89 over the past year (meaning it has outperformed 89% of all other stocks), plus its price-to-sales ratio is just 0.91. That comes in under my O'Shaughnessy-based model's 1.5 upper limit, an indication that, while it's hot right now, WRB is still a bargain.
Another reason my O'Shaughnessy model likes Berkley: earnings growth in each year of the past five-year period, with EPS rising from $1.72 to $3.78 in that time. O'Shaughnessy was more concerned with the persistence of growth than magnitude, and Berkley has indeed shown that persistence.
Berkley also gets approval from my Lynch-based model. This method likes the stock's 12.45 P/E ratio and 24% long-term growth rate (based on the average of the three-, four- and five-year EPS figures). Those numbers make for a stellar PEG ratio of 0.52.
In addition, Lynch used a couple special criteria for financials: the equity/assets ratio, which measures financial strength, and the return on assets rate, which measures profitability. With an E/A ratio of 19% and an ROA of 2.58%, Berkley easily beats this model's targets of 5% and 1%, respectively.
Apollo may be hot right now, but the stock also gets approval from my Warren Buffett-based model, which looks back further into a company's past than just about any other strategy I use.
For example, this method looks for companies that have consistently increased EPS over a 10-year period. In the past decade, Apollo's earnings have increased in every year but one (2003), and over the entire period EPS has grown from $0.33 to $2.87. That's the kind of steady, predictable earnings growth Buffett usually likes to see.
Buffett is known to look for firms that have a "durable competitive advantage" over their peers, and one way he has done that is by looking at a company's return on equity. The model I base on his approach targets companies with 10-year average ROEs of at least 15%; at 21.5%, Apollo easily meets that standard. More recently, its ROEs have been even stronger, averaging more than 60% over the past three years.
One more reason the conservative Buffett method likes Apollo: The firm has no long-term debt.
While the stock market has been floundering, Life Partners' stock has been climbing. The $433 million market cap stock has gained more than 25% in the past three months.
Life Partners gets approval from the guru strategy I base on the writings of brothers Tom and David Gardner, the creators of the Motley Fool web site. Like the Lynch method, this small-cap growth approach looks for a low PEG ratio (below 0.5). With a PEG of just 0.27, Life Partners passes the test.
The Gardners' method also targets stocks with profit margins that have been consistently high, and my model looks for firms with margins of at least 7% in each of the past three years. Over the past three years, Life Partners' margins have grown from 13.44% to 27.47% to 50.95%, blowing away that target.
Another interesting area the Gardners looked at involved income tax rates. If the ratio of income tax paid to pretax income is less than 20%, that could mean earnings have been inflated because of low tax rates that might not continue. Over the past two years, however, Life Partners' ratios of income tax to pretax income have been 28.66% (last year) and 34.65% (this year), passing this test.
Stay focused on value, and on the long term. All of the stocks mentioned here have been producing strong returns amid one of the worst market climates we've seen in a long time. While their momentum alone may net some more short-term gains as investors chase performance, you never know when that kind of momentum is going to run out.
The true appeal of these stocks is that their strong balance sheets and low valuation measures have them positioned for solid growth over the long run. Those are the kind of businesses you should focus on, regardless of what their stocks have been doing in recent weeks.
John P. Reese is founder and CEO of Validea.com and Validea Capital Management. He is also co-author of The Market Gurus: Stock Investing Strategies You Can Use From Wall Street's Best.
February 19, 2001
A Fool's Paradise
By Philipp Harper
Fools they may be, but they also know where their debts lie. Brothers Tom and David Gardner freely admit that the startling success of The Motley Fool, their personal finance Web site (www.fool.com), is attributable to more than their documented investment savvy or their puckish and well-packaged sense of humor. Nearly as important as the product itself is how it has been distributed. Fool COO Erik Rydholm and the Gardners do not begrudge AOL a tip of their foolscaps. "No doubt about it, they've greatly enhanced our growth," says Rydholm, referring to the company's ongoing relationship with AOL.
In seven years The Motley Fool has evolved from a 16-page newsletter, distributed by mail to family and friends, to a Web site that attracts more than 2 million unique visitors a month, a nationally syndicated radio show and newspaper column, and four best-selling books, to name only the most visible regions of the empire. Meanwhile, there has been strong revenue growth each year, according to Rydholm, and staff has gone from three to more than 375. Their Rule Breaker Portfolio has averaged an annualized return of 44% since its funding in 1994, compared with 19% for the S&P 500. The Gardner brothers may be the only grown men in America who can dispense financial advice on television while wearing fools' hats and be taken seriously.
Market segment and marketing shtick notwithstanding, perhaps the most conclusive factor in The Motley Fool's success was its presence in the early '90s at the intersection of the cyber and real worlds. Both computer buffs, the Gardners maintained a message folder in AOL's Investors' Network, where they advertised their newsletter and solicited investing questions from other AOL members. They were active on other services as well, and when David Gardner went online to spoof the penny stock touts on one of Prodigy's message boards, the prank was picked up by the national financial press.
The story was read in AOL's corporate suite, and members of The Motley Fool management team were soon traveling from their offices in Alexandria, Virginia, to nearby Vienna, then the site of AOL headquarters. The meeting led to a partnership that in August 1994 saw The Motley Fool assume a featured position on the AOL home page in exchange for a share of the royalties it generated.
By the following spring, Ted Leonsis, then president of AOL Services, was hailing The Motley Fool as the prototype of AOL's new content-acquisition strategy, swapping seed capital and a variety of support and consulting services for equity in his new partner. (AOL still owns the stock, which Rydholm says amounts to less than 20% of outstanding shares.) Rydholm characterizes the branding help from AOL as "huge in the beginning." By the end of 1995, The Motley Fool was attracting 250,000 visitors a month.
As it happened, Rydholm says, "Everything started to take off in 1996," and he and the Gardners began to plan their post-AOL existence. What was shaping up as a potentially nasty split "AOL wasn't excited about our fleeing the platform," Rydholm says was preempted by the marketplace. With flat-fee Internet service providers becoming ubiquitous, AOL and similar providers were no longer charging hourly rates, a change that effectively ended their revenue-sharing arrangements with content providers.
In April 1997, when their agreement with AOL expired, Rydholm and the Gardners launched Fool.com. They maintained their original AOL presence until September 1999, when the partners launched a cobranded site. These days, The Motley Fool pays for the positioning of its link on AOL in return for a guaranteed level of traffic.
Philipp Harper is a freelance writer who lives on Virginia's Northern Neck.
February 23, 1998
Practicing Versus Preaching
BY Mark Hulbert
Mark Hulbert is editor of the Alexandria, Va.-based Hulbert Financial Digest, a monthly service that monitors the performance of investment advisory letters. firstname.lastname@example.com
THE MOTLEY FOOL, the on-line investment letter inaugurated in 1994, has evolved into the hottest Internet investment Web site (www.fool.com). I've received more inquiries about it over the last few months than about all other services combined. Its educational articles and hand-holding discussions for the novice investor refreshingly cut through Wall Street jargon.
I wish I could be as generous in praise of its performance. Let's start with the Motley Fool model portfolio (referred to officially as the "Fool Portfolio"). Since its August 1994 inception, it has beaten the Wilshire 5000′s total return by a margin of 39.1% to 25.5% (annualized). That's undeniably impressive. However, as Paul Harvey likes to say, there's the rest of the story.
In this case the rest of the story isn't very good (for further information, log on to www.investorhome.com/fools.htm). Other Motley Fool real-money portfolios have underperformed the market, some badly. One of the other portfolios that still exist (referred to as "the Boring Portfolio") has at least made some money — even though it has underperformed the market since its January 1996 inception by around 15 percentage points on an annualized basis.
But there are at least two other portfolios that have been closed out — both having lost money. Indeed, one of the now-defunct portfolios lost more than 50%. (For the purposes of this review, I am ignoring two new real-money portfolios that the Motley Fool inaugurated recently — one that's very tiny, created last July, and another started just this past January. As of press time, the second one still was in cash.)
Putting it all together: Three of the four real-money Motley Fool portfolios of which I'm aware have lagged the stock market. One lost a huge amount, while one significantly bettered the market. That's a far less rosy picture than is painted by the investors who have contacted me in recent months about the Motley Fool.
The primary reason that most investors don't know the full picture: The service has discontinued its losing portfolios. This is particularly ironic because the Motley Fool rightly ridicules mutual fund managers who conceal market-lagging performance by a fund by shutting it down. But it's difficult to escape the conclusion that that's exactly what the Motley Fool has done.
What about the one Motley Fool portfolio that has performed so well? Only two stocks account for the bulk of this portfolio's vaunted performance:
Consider what happened to the thousands of investors who started following this one market-beating portfolio in May 1996, the point at which this new on-line service burst onto the financial media's radar screen. At the time, the portfolio was less than two years old, but it had had its good run. Since then this portfolio has lost 20%, while the market as a whole has gained 40%. It's a safe guess that most of the Motley Fool's followers, attracted by that early success, have not done particularly well following the portfolio. According to the Hulbert Financial Digest monitoring service, in fact, the Motley Fool was in 44th place last year among the 150 tracked investment letters.
The Gardner brothers, David and Tom, who run the Motley Fool, advocate a long-term, buy-and-hold approach to avoid getting "lost in the day-by-day noise of stock moves." Yet the Motley Fool Web site is very noisy. Twice daily it reports the biggest stock price changes for the day — once at midday and once after the market closes. While it preaches long-term, it sells short-term.
I know I'll catch lots of flack for my skepticism about these heroes of the Internet age, but numbers are numbers and facts are facts.
The Gardner Interview
Being Fool-ish
Steve Forbes: Well, Tom, thank you for joining us. We were remarking just before we went on camera that you've dressed up for this occasion. Even without the tie, this is highly formal for you.
Tom Gardner: This is an unusual day. We have dress-up Friday once a quarter at the Fool.
Forbes: Which leads to the question: How the name?
Gardner: Well, The Motley Fool comes from Shakespeare's As You Like It. It is–there is a rich literary tradition of fools. It's a great disclaimer when things don't go well. But the real essence of the name coming from Shakespeare is that the fool was the one who could tell the king the truth without risking losing his head. And, in this case, we've been at this for about 15 years and I think our aim is to make sure that we're accessible to everyone. People can understand the language. And at times, when we criticize, we do so with some sense of humor. But we've been very critical of Wall Street over the last 15 years, and I think we've seen what happens when you create the sort of compensation packages they had in place on Wall Street over the last 18 months of misery.
Forbes: Right. So what approach did you and your brother bring when you got in this business? What distinguishes you guys from everyone else in this large field?
Gardner: You know, I think probably, more than anything else, [it's] that we believe in community, and learning from other people. So, David or I–neither David nor I has ever felt that we had a core expertise that was better than anyone else in the marketplace. I think we had the benefit of being taught this subject by our father as teenagers. He had been taught by his father. I think our Dad made his first investment when he was six. And so we were taught the same way.
We came to love the market, not fear it. To understand that it would be highly volatile at times, that you would suffer two or three years of pain, in order to have 15 or 20 years of happiness. So, we got the context from our father, and then the game of investing and reading Peter Lynch, we brought that subject to the Internet in 1994 and we did so by basically saying, "We want to hear your ideas. We want to talk together. We want to learn together." And we've ended up attracting a lot of very bright minds to The Motley Fool.
Focus on Management
Forbes: So how would you describe your investment approach? You have several newsletters. You've got a new mutual fund. Do you have various classes, various approaches, or what's your brand?
Gardner: Well, I think probably more than anything else, it's fundamental analysis. We're not interested in stock price movements over a weekly or quarterly basis. We're really looking at the business and trying to evaluate it.
We probably spend more time on the strength of the business than the value of the stock, although both are obviously quite important. And we have a number of different approaches at The Motley Fool. I mean, for example, my brother is a little bit more of a VC-type investor. He's happy to have six or seven disappointments in order to have a company like
So I spend a lot of time looking at the ownership, how much stock is owned by the CEO, how long has he or she been with the business, and I think we right now live in a marketplace where there's such a short-term focus, even after what's happened. And I think if people learned to look at businesses over 10, 15, 20 years, they'd find people like Jim Sinegal at
Forbes: You put a great emphasis, then, on the company's management. And I'd love to cite my grandfather, who founded our company. He said, "You'll learn more about the prospects of a company looking at the head knocker"–that was his name for CEOs–"than you will at the balance sheet." How do you measure management? I mean, you've seen plenty of managers who know how to spin a good game, but there's nothing behind. It's sort of the Wizard of Oz. Are there metrics? You mention ownership, metrics as well as gut. How do you do it?
Gardner: I think insider ownership is a great statistic to follow. I also think tenure. There's a wonderful book by Fred Reichheld at Harvard, entitled The Loyalty Effect, in which he just measure companies, public companies based on the tenure of the different constituents of the business.
How long has the CEO been with the company? How long have the board members been with the company? How long have the employees been with the company? I mentioned Costco before: Costco's turnover of employees in a service industry is incredible. You know, sub-15%. So I like to find organizations that are attracting and retaining and developing people over long periods of time. And I think, you know, the antithesis of that is Wall Street, where you see people jump from firm to firm for compensation packages.
And the academic literature shows that what keeps people at great organizations are great people, great challenges. The big bonus, the big, annual bonus isn't why most people go to work from one year to the next.
And I think organizations hurt themselves when they focus on that. So I really look for tenure and ownership at the business. And then, finally, you mentioned the Wizard of Oz scenario. I like to see someone who's self-critical. Somebody who can talk about their mistakes easily. Jim Sinegal from Costco was in our office last week, and he said, "My biggest mistake is that I am terribly afraid of failure," which is amazing on the part of a man who must have about $150 million of Costco stock, built the business over 30 years, could retire. He's in his early 70s, and he goes to work every single day, afraid of failing. And so that, you can really learn so much by talking to management, but also by just using Google. When I started investing at Brown University 20 years ago, you could go to the library card catalog and try and find something about a leader. But now you can learn so much by signing online, either to The Motley Fool, to Forbes, to Google, and reading interviews with leadership.
Forbes: In terms of–you've talked about stability of management, longevity, commitment. How do you avoid being stultified? I mean, having a distinct culture can be an asset, [but] as also we've seen, [it] can lead you into oblivion.
Gardner: That is true. There are a certain number of things that you have to unlearn in order to succeed as an organization. So I think you have to start by looking at that team. And then you have to see how adaptive they are throughout time. How many changes? How many new products have they shifted from one platform to the next? We grew up with a front-row seat to America Online in the 1990s. It was, as we know, an unbelievable stock. Got more than 100 times in value in less than a decade. One of the greatest decades of any public company in American history, and then it utterly collapsed right before our eyes because they were unable to move from dial-up to Broadband.
And so you want to look at the incentive systems, and whether they're–where the management team is in its tenure, and whether you have an owner that's put his reputation on the line with that business. So, I think in the case of AOL, there was a real incentive to just continue with the core business that they had and not reinvest. Not hurt their earnings in the short-term. Keep the high multiple on the stock and keep pretending that it had been earned. And so, oftentimes, a technology platform shift is a time to get really concerned about whether management can make that transition. So you don't always get it right.
I've made plenty of mistakes as an investor. But I do find that when I focus on the people, that's where I found my 10-, 20-baggers as an investor in my lifetime. It hasn't been on the earnings, quarterly earnings report vs. Wall Street estimates, and what the stock price is doing from one quarter to the next. It's really trying to understand the essence of the business and the people that are running it.
Forbes: So then how do you then look out for what you might call the "Xerox Effect?" You know, growing up, Xerox was the thing. Great new technology, patented fairly well. Nobody could touch them.
Gardner: I think that a lot of times, you're following the math, just the mathematics of it, the trends, the growth rates, the returns on capital of those investments that they're making from one year to the next. And when you see the trend turn against you, if there isn't a good explanation for that being an economic cycle, but actually it's a competitive threat. And you're not hearing from management an articulation of what to do differently. I mean, a modern-day example would just be
And, of course, it's difficult to see and know that Amazon is gonna be the winner. It is a company we've invested in pretty much since its IPO. But I will say that, again, you make mistakes as well. And you have to understand that if you do, if your portfolio succeeds, it's not surprising if six or seven stocks have done well, and three or four have done poorly. And that's just the nature of the game. It's a little bit like baseball, although you'd really be in the Hall of Fame if you went six for 10.
Breaking Up Microsoft
Forbes: Yes, you would.
Gardner: But I think, in the end, when it comes to Xerox, you've got to look at the growth rates, declining returns on capital, and just the spirit of the organization, whether they're really willing to transform themselves. I would say, for example, that Microsoft, obviously, has been a disappointment over the last 10 years.
And pretty much for most of the last 10 years, I've been saying–and I still say it today–I think they should break the business up. I think that would simplify the regulatory issues. I think it would re-energize the organization, create more sense of entrepreneurship, give people that competitive flare that just doesn't, I think–
Forbes: How would you break it up?
Gardner: I mean, it would be difficult to do so, but I certainly would separate the operating, the Internet, and I would just try and get it into small chunks and give people that opportunity to compete.
I have no, there's no question in my mind that Microsoft has as much talent in their company as Google. It's just that they weren't able to get their energies focused on that because it was getting so bureaucratic after the government investigation, no matter what we feel about that. I think that was time where, almost, they should've taken the Standard Oil approach: Instead of being broken up, break themselves up into competitive units.
I still think Microsoft is a wonderful organization, but it is increasingly difficult to create value as your organization grows. So, I will say, my final comment about Xerox–and not a very succinct answer–is that I like to look for smaller companies. And I find that when you have a company valued at more than $100 billion trading at more than 30 times earnings, you usually have some pain coming.
Forbes: Now you've mentioned in the newsletters and elsewhere that if you never sell a stock, you'll probably do better than trying to be a rapid trader.
Gardner: That is true. I mean, the, for me, the crowning example of that is Shelby Davis, who was, you know, the creator of the Davis Funds that you know well. And he pretty much never sold a stock. And in some of his stocks, he lost millions of dollars because they went bankrupt. But he started with $50,000 in the 1940s, and when he died in the mid-1980s, he had more than $900 million. He had returned 24% a year with almost no taxes. And I think that the excitement of trading, I mean, one of the changes that I would make to the public market system, government, a tax change that I really would support is the Warren Buffett joke of make the short-term capital gains tax rate 100%.
So maybe that's too silly and absurd, but maybe make it 50%, and then ladder it down, so that if I hold a stock for five years or more, I pay no capital gains tax. Because I've really used the market as I think the market was intended–to help fund businesses and grow organizations and institutions that will serve for long periods of time, rather than–
Forbes: You're getting on human nature here. Emotions are your enemy?
Gardner: It really is true. And, of course, the very time when none of us want to buy stock is the time when no one's bidding, and the auctioneer is yelling out prices.
Forbes: Just to pat you on the head, at the beginning of the year, you were bullish, even as the market continued to tank right through the beginning of March.
Gardner: It is true, and it's, thank you for saying that. It's tough to do, and it was, it's sad to see your portfolio go down, but you really have to train yourself to look at it in 10-year cycles. And I think, obviously, this has not been a great last 10 years. But, all in all, when the market is down, that's the time to get excited. And when the P/E and all the multiples on earnings across the market are north of 20, that's a time to get concerned.
Creating Community
Forbes: Now you talked about community as a distinctive feature of Motley Fool. You have a CAPS system. Can you describe what that's about? And also, if you could give us some examples of what you've learned from seeming people who wouldn't have standing normally in the financial community, but through this community system, you learned something from?
Gardner: Unfortunately, CAPS was my brother's idea. So I have to credit him, which is painful.
Forbes: A little sibling rivalry.
Gardner: CAPS is a network at The Motley Fool with about 75,000 active competitors, who are putting in their stock picks, long and short. Every change they make is updated in real-time. They're ranked from one to 75,000. We don't limit it to 75,000. We just, that's the size of the community right now. And we are, by ranking them, we also have a correlating or running alongside of it, company ratings. And they're based on the performance of the players. So, the top quintile of players has tremendous influence on the company ratings. The bottom quintile has no influence. We actually thought about making them a contrary indicator, but thought that might be too cruel. And so, the net–
Forbes: And there are self-esteem issues there.
Gardner: Exactly. We didn't want to drive people away, just when they were probably ready to learn. And so what I've learned is that there are a tremendous number of bright business people and investors around the country and around the world. So, I think CAPS is going to attract the next 14-year-old great investor from Omaha, Neb., that would otherwise be disregarded because he, perhaps, hadn't gone to business school yet. Or hadn't gotten the Series 7, which is kind of a joke as an indicator of whether you know anything about investing. So, I've learned, I've also learned that the community, Wisdom of Crowds, Jim Surowiecki.
The difference for CAPS is it's actually wisdom in the crowds because it's a meritocracy. It's not one person, one vote. We're weighting it toward the better players. So the system can't really be gamed. And what I've learned is that top quintile is very much worth studying. I mean, our five-star stocks have dramatically outperformed the market. One-star stocks have dramatically lost to the market. And so I take the five-star rating on our CAPS system quite seriously.
Forbes: So, is this a democratic Value Line?
Gardner: It's a meritocratic, democratic-meritocratic Value Line. And we're quite interested, not just in the ratings, but also the blogs and the contributions that so many people are putting up out there. So, I really believe in community. I believe in it across every category of every discipline in life. In the financial world, I just think there's just a tremendous opportunity to ask a question and get an answer. I mean, down at this level, away from CAPS, just think about how many financial transactions the average American makes in isolation. With an insurance salesman, a broker or a car dealer. All of these things pit somebody with sales tactics against somebody who is going to make this transaction once a decade, perhaps … or once a lifetime. And in many of those cases, the average consumer is under-armed with information.
And I think that's totally changing now with the Internet, and the opportunity to get second opinions right on your iPhone, sitting there with any salesman, and say, "Well, it's funny you say that I should have an annuity with this kind of fee structure, because I just went out to The Motley Fool, Forbes or any other business or investment community, asked a question, and I think you're trying to sell me something that isn't best for me." So, I think we're seeing the world change right before our eyes.
Forbes: Now in the rankings, you also include Wall Street firms?
Gardner: Yes, we do. And Jim Cramer. Everybody's always interested to see how Jim is doing. Of course, he's got a Ferris wheel of picks every day, so it's difficult. We've got, we have, I feel like we maybe have had to staff up to track Jim. But what I have found also is that, of course, there are some great Wall Street firms that do great research. We know the hidden conflict that's there.
Sells Are Rare
Forbes: You're able to get all that, so you can put together a real ranking or a real grade for how a particular firm does on buy, hold, occasional sell?
Gardner: Exactly. The very rare sell. We have a deal with Briefing.com, and we get all of the analysts' picks when they happen. And we put them into the system. And they're tracked right alongside my uncle. I mean, everybody is competing against each other. And so we can see–and the beauty of it is that you can slice and dice them by industry, and really understand who are the best stock analysts in retail, in oil and gas. So, you've got just a tremendous amount of data coming through the system.
Forbes: So, why not a five-star fund?
Gardner: We actually have thought quite seriously about doing so. The Independence Fund, our first fund, and we have, we are really not actively calling them mutual funds. We're calling them performance funds. Because one thing that we're doing that's pretty unique, it's very rare in the mutual fund industry, is that we have a fulcrum fee. That's a performance fee based on our–
Eating Your Cooking
Forbes: I was going to ask you on that. How exactly does that work on the upside and the downside?
Gardner: It moves about 30 basis points, up or down, based on our performance against the S&P. So, we have a baseline expense management fee, and the performance hurts or helps us. So, we're really aligned with our outside shareholders. We're, of course, investing in the fund ourselves. We very much believe in eating your own cooking.
And so, but with that fee structure, we're further saying, "Hey, this industry which has become a marketing industry, there's a reason there are 10,000 mutual funds is that people have not been trained to look at performance and the fees they're paying for what they're getting." And so, in our case, we're actually doubling down your attention on the performance. We want you to follow it with us. And we think that by doing so, we increase our chances of performing well.
I think it's true anywhere. Out on the golf course, if you really hold yourself accountable for every stroke you take, rather than kicking the ball out here, taking a mulligan on the front and back nine, etc., you actually start to perform better because of the expectations you've placed on yourself. You could, of course, fall apart on the 16th hole, as I often do.
But, in general, I think when you raise the accountability standard, you increase the chances of performance success. And that's what we've done. And I think we will ultimately have the CAPS space fund.
Forbes: So what do you, what does the Independence fund measure itself against? The
Gardner: It measures itself against the world index. That's because it has the opportunity to go anywhere. And buy value growth, buy international, domestic, so–
Forbes: Now in the first few months, you lagged it a little bit, and didn't hesitate to point it out.
Gardner: Exactly. And we have no interest in obfuscation. I don't think that that serves anyone. And we certainly don't want to find ourselves at the end of a five or 10 or 15 or a lifetime saying, "We made a lot of money by misleading people on our performance." So, transparency, even if we didn't believe in it, the very nature of having an open community, which must be a shock to Wall Street system, the idea that your customers can talk to each other, and you actually want them to do so. It's, we can't hide, and we don't want to hide.
Conflicted Research
Forbes: Now you've had some criticism of Wall Street research. Quickly, what are the criticisms? And where can people find what you might call "unconflicted" advice or research?
Gardner: I think one criticism is just how frequently they change their opinion.
Forbes: And that's return?
Gardner: Strong Buy. Strong Buy to Buy, Buy to Hold, Hold back to Buy. I've never known the difference between Strong Buy and Buy. Am I supposed to yell on the phone at my broker if I, if it's a Strong Buy?
Forbes: So, 98-pound weakling Buy? Yes.
Gardner: Exactly. Exactly. And so I think that that is done to generate transactions for the brokerage side of the business. And I don't think that's business research. I think that's stock price movements, technical analysis, and it's about generating commissions. And I don't think it benefits the vast majority of investors.
And I think the second conflict that we know about is that if you have one side of the business providing financing, and the other side of the business providing analysis, the analytic side is going to be told, "Don't you dare put a sell rating on this business that we're about to do a secondary offering for or they'll simply move away from us." So, I think that conflict, in the end, what I really believe is I don't believe in significantly increased regulation in this aspect of the marketplace.
I just want transparency, complete transparency and disclosure of why, what the business' relationship with a particular firm is. So, ultimately, I'm very optimistic, though, that research is going to become increasingly unconflicted. It's going to be out online, and it's open for review, which is a great thing. Again, if an analyst report comes out in print form, it's not the same as when it comes out in digital with a comments area, that everyone can provide feedback on, question, challenge.
Other people answer questions. You might find somebody in the comment group knows a lot more about the company than the analyst. So all of those things are beautiful. And I think the momentum and the tide is in the favor of that community participation.
Goals, Not Capital
Forbes: Wall Street compensation. Why did it get so out of hand?
Gardner: There are a couple of reasons that I think it did. I think the first is that it's a very short-term environment. And so–
Forbes: Because you talked about the meritocracy of what you're doing with the community, and ranking 75,000 people. Andy Kessler on Forbes.com the other day said, "Wall Street's the old meritocracy," in the sense that if you succeed, you do well, and if you don't–no matter if you've been around 20 years–[you're] out. In the minors. Never hear from you again.
Gardner: And there is truth to that. What I'll say is that there, I don't dislike everything about Wall Street. But what I will is that annual bonus focuses you on a time frame that, again, I don't think you can make smart transactions on a regular, repeated basis within a year. And I also think it just creates a culture where you're attracting people whose primary interest is money. And I don't, I'm a capitalist. I have no interest in telling people not to pursue financial independence. But I think that when that's the primary reason that somebody is going.
Again, I mentioned earlier, the academic literature shows that it's actually about the people that you're working with, and the challenges that you're getting that motivate most people. And money, as a bonus, not the core salary. Everybody needs a good wage. But the big bonus that comes after that actually should come after the people you work with, and the challenges that you seek.
We may not think it, as we sit here in New York City, but most of the people in this country go to work that way, whether they're working at Pixar or
Forbes: I wonder if dating services should know that creepy background.
Gardner: That might be good: a forced categorization for any Wall Streeter trying to look for a date.
Forbes: Quickly, some of the winners you've had. You mentioned your brother on Marvel, and some of the losses you've had that you've learned lessons from. But, you look for things that are kind of unique. Like, what is it,
Gardner: Steve, have you never been to a Buffalo Wild Wings?
Forbes: I haven't. I'm still going to Sammy's, in the dark, dank thing where you scream and throw beer at the big screen.
Gardner: Exactly. And I don't think, but I don't know if Buffalo Wild Wings is in New York City yet, but Buffalo Wild Wings is a national sports bar. There is not a national sports bar brand. So, think of obvious–
Forbes: Sort of
Gardner: It has Starbucks-like qualities. Although, obviously, it's going to be a smaller category than getting a cup or two cups of coffee every day. But Buffalo Wild Wings, a very well-run business. Also, a business with high insider ownership. The two women, the CEO and CFO that have run the business, have been there for well more than a decade. It's just, the economics are great at the business.
Forbes: Talk about the man who brought the two women in.
Gardner: He was the founder of Miracle Ear. He was a World War II vet who lost his hearing when he was imprisoned in Germany. And came back, created Miracle Ear. The two women that were running the financial side of the business, he said, "I've got this opportunity to run this restaurant, and I really think you all would do great." And they said, "Well, I'm not sure we really want to do that." And he said, "I think you'll do great." And so they've run Buffalo Wild Wings, and it's been a great stock. It's been a great stock through a down period. It's not an expensive ticket at the restaurant, so it's on college campuses also around the country. So, I love to find, you know, high returns on equity, high returns on invested capital, no leverage, plenty of cash on the balance sheet, nice 20%-plus growth rate.
Forbes: Well, tell us about the particular insight of this vis-à-vis the neighborhood bar?
Gardner: Well, I think that I think it when people think about their local sports bar–you mentioned Sammy's or some such name sports bar–it's usually pretty dark, pretty dirty and it's mostly guys yelling at flat-screens. And what Sally Smith came in and Buffalo Wild Wings did, she said, "Gosh, we could really broaden our base of customers and make a lot more money on this business if we made it family-friendly. If we actually made it comfortable for a woman to come in and root on their sports team as well, had kids here as well, so they're now very well-lit. Very, very welcoming establishments. And, of course, they still have the flat-screen and sports.
So, it's a great environment, and that's probably my favorite. The stock is not as cheap as I'd like it to be, at about $40 a share today, but I think it's got great prospects over the next decade.
Forbes: What are other ones like that, that go in unique areas?
Gardner: Well,
Forbes: Because people never do at cocktail parties.
Gardner: That's very true. Quality Systems is electronic medical record keeping. It's been about a 10-bagger over the last six years. It is a very well-run business, and this is a major wave, as we know. Most of us go to our doctor's office, and you can see on the wall, pencil and paper records of your visits over the years. It's not the most efficient. It is expensive to upgrade to electronic medical record keeping, but it's a much better service. Particularly when you think of Hurricane Katrina rolling through, and destroying a lot of hospital records in the basements of hospitals. It's just ridiculous that these records weren't digitized. So, Quality Systems is, has the leading software package to digitize medical information.
Forbes: And talking about ones that did not work out as well. You lost sleep on–you might say–
Gardner: Select Comfort was a disaster for me. I recommended it at $20, in the low 20s. It was in the low 20s a couple years later, but the decimal point moved, which was painful for me. From $20 a share to 20 cents a share. It has come back. It's been a 20-bagger, really, from its bottom in the last year and a half, but it was very near bankruptcy at that point. The mistake I made with Select Comfort, first of all, it's a difficult business, mattresses. That's an infrequent purchase by people. So, you can't really build a brand in that business. Much more difficult to do so. I have a Select Comfort bed. I love my Select Comfort bed. But, all in all, I found that I did not find a business model that I think, really, is built to last there.
And there's a lot of competition in that marketplace as well. One wonders why when you look at the economics of the business, but, so Select Comfort has, there's been some pain for shareholders in that one. And I, and that's one where there wasn't high insider ownership at the core. And I don't dislike the CEO, certainly, but he didn't come from the bedding industry. So, I like to find people who are really pursuing mastery in those leadership ranks of the business. They have been doing this for 10, 15 or 20 years, and I kind of lost my way on that recommendation.
Junk Food Dilemma
Forbes: Was
Gardner: Krispy Kreme. Thank you for bringing that up, Steve. Krispy Kreme was one of my brother's recommendations.
Forbes: Good. Now you can get back at him.
Gardner: And Krispy Kreme, as we know, was, there's some similarities–
Forbes: Great concept. I got–I'm testimony of it.
Gardner: They're great donuts, but there's a little bit of the Boston Market model in what was going on at Krispy Kreme. I mean, you had executives taking stakes in new franchises, and then buying those franchises back at inflated prices. So, I mean, that just really makes you sick as a shareholder to see. That personal self-interest and self-dealing is going on inside of business that you should be an equal partner with the leadership of that company. So, Krispy Kreme was just a mess at the core from the financial side of the business. And, all in all, of course, they got the double-whammy of most doctors coming out and saying, "This is probably not the [best choice], better for you to go to Whole Foods if you want to have 10 or 20 great years at the end of your life, rather than limping through the final years." So, Krispy Kreme. A nice little dessert, but maybe not every morning. And that hurt them. But what really hurt them is the way they set up their franchise business and financed their company.
Forbes: Now is Whole Foods an example of where you just stick with the thing, and quality will eventually come through?
Gardner: I do believe so. John Mackey is a CEO I really admire. He's another CEO.
Forbes: He's a great man.
Gardner: He is a great mind, man. He was in our office a few weeks ago, and his philosophy of conscious capitalism–he took a lot of risk in writing his article in The Wall Street Journal. I love to see CEOs that take that risk. Anybody that's going to boycott Whole Foods because the CEO wants to share how Whole Foods has run health care in their company successfully–I don't necessarily agree with everything that John wrote, but I don't think that that's any reason to step away from a business, and I don't think that's going to happen anyway. So, Whole Foods is certainly a premium price, which has hurt them in a deflationary period. But I do believe the wave of the future is natural and organic food, and I think John has created a great culture at Whole Foods, which has people that really enjoy seeing you.
I mean, service businesses don't always, you don't always get that feel that the person is glad to be there, and glad to help you from one aisle to the next. You get that feeling at Whole Foods. You get that feeling at Costco. And so you, I think those Peter Lynch guide points really still work today, of how you feel when you go into a store or when you work with a business? Do you feel like they're treating you as a member of the family? Are they letting you into the living room of their business, and enjoying that you're there? Or do you look a nuisance to them or a problem that they don't want to spend time solving? So, I do believe in Whole Foods in the long-term. They were granting an awful lot of options six or seven years ago, which I why I, personally, recommended selling the stock. But that has stopped.
Forbes: Tom, thank you very much.
Gardner: Steve, thank you very much. And I'm a great admirer of yours and of Forbes. So it's a great honor for a Fool to be given an opportunity to be with a real, legitimate, long-standing–
Forbes: What's fun is to interview is a wise fool.
Gardner: Fool on.
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To wrap up 2009, Fresh Ink Online host Blair Butler takes a look back at the best of ongoing series, including Ex Machina, Jonah Hex, Invincible Iron Man, The Sword, Secret Six, Scalped, and Locke & Key: Crown of Shadows. Plus, she delves into Batwoman: Detective Comics, Criminal and The Walking Dead. Good stuff, eh? Come on back in 2010 for a whole new batch of webisodes and have a Happy New Year.
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By EUGENE SWALBERGGuest Writer
Green River vs Panguitch-1A State Championships quarterfinal game
It was a beautiful fall day in Spanish Fork for the first round of the State Championship games in 1A baseball. Green River was to play Panguitch for a chance to play later on in the week. The team was excited and ready. Their entire season came down to this one game. Lose and go home, win and play on. It doesn't get any better.
Green River took to the bats first and after two quick outs, Brennan Bigelow was able to get on base with a double and Jason Johnson made it to first on an error, scoring Brennan. Panguitch got up and made two quick scores. Green River made one additional score at the top of the second but Panguitch made two more scores making it a 4 - 2 ball game.
Good pitching and good defense from each team saw the next two innings go scoreless which fueled the excitement of the game. At the top of the fifth inning, Hayden Pfander took one for the team and got on first base while Justin Johnson hit shallow over third base. Sarah Swalberg hit into the in field but advanced the two base runners. Brennan Bigelow got up and hit it hard down the third base line. The third baseman fielded it cleanly but overthrew it to first, allowing Bigelow to make it to second and the two base runners to score.
Now we've got a game. Half way through the fifth inning and the score is knotted at four each as Green River takes to the field. There is excitement in the air. The Pirates are pumped and the Panguitch Bobcats are wondering what happened. They were supposed to come in and take it to Green River?
The excitement was short lived as Panguitch finished out the inning with three more runs. Green River couldn't get the bats going like they needed to and were blanked the next two innings while Panguitch padded the score with two more runs.
The bottom half of the seventh inning wasn't played and the Green River Pirates took to home plate with their bubble having been burst. They came believing they could beat a team that earlier had beat them by a score of 3 - 0. They were confident but not over confident. For them to win, they would have to play excellent defense have great pitching and hit the ball like they knew they could. This young and seasoned team did all three - just not all game long.
The Pirates graduate two seniors in Brennan Bigelow and Tyson Johnson - hard shoes to fill but with a younger class poised and ready to step up and 'play ball'.


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Skip to comments.Atheists strategize against book on God
Posted on 03/04/2009 9:02:16 PM PST by GodGunsGuts
Atheists strategize against book on God
Online plot reveals plan to give Christian writing low rating
The Christian author whose book "You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence but You Can't Make Him Think" bumped atheist Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion" on Amazon.com's best-seller list says he's uncovered a conspiracy to attack his work...
(Excerpt) Read more at worldnetdaily.com ...
The fool says in his heart, There is no God. Psalms 14:1
no no its all about science and scientific evidence /sarc>
God has used Ray Comfort as an inspiration for me with the ministry with which He has blessed me. If you ever read the atheists' comments on his website, you will see how nasty they are. They hate him!
Thanks for the ping!
Ahhhh - no.
I can't help but notice your threads die out rather quickly.
Why might that be?
I guess someone will come here and quote mine me from another board and/or quote mine me from 2 years ago to provide grist for your mill.
I, OTOH, demur.
Have a blessed day.
Yours in Christ (really — I am not being sarcastic).
That all depends on the thread:
I've seen some of GGG's threads go into the multiple hundreds of responses. One or two have even broken the 1000 mark.
I'm running scared... : )
We is in series trouble now. Goliath was not an uncircumcised Philistine. He was just another athlete on steroids.
Cool, I now have a new tagline.
I caught that episode — now whenever I see anything about WoW or the "build a civilizatrion" games I just see Cartman, et. al., killing boars.
I wonder what his FR screen name is.
What's that got to do with the topic of the thread?
Interesting attack on faith and God by the atheists.
That all depends. Are you referring to the outright atheist FReepers, or the ones who call themselves Christians, but side with the atheists on every thread?
Baptist ping
I know the type.
The same ones who take the far left side on many important social issues that most Americans never asked for.
These frauds take the anti-Bible position by default and it never occurs to them how obvious is their disgrace.
I haven't read it myself, but there' a book out there that's supposed to be very good, "I Don't Have Enough Faith To Be An Athiest".
I cant help but notice your threads die out rather quickly. [excerpt]Hmmm.
I wouldn't care if not a single FReeper ever responded to my posts. See the following. It's quite inspirational—even if you're not a Christian—especially given the age we live in:
Too bad our courtesy is frequently not met with the same.
But yes, by silencing scientific voices, GGG and crew have been able to post real yawners.
Too bad our courtesy is frequently not met with the same. [excerpt]Ah yes, DCer courtesy...
All the Cretards over thereat TOS are generally insult-driven, since their opinions can't be really defended rationally or honestly. They are dishonest and that quickly leads to rudeness. --freedumb2003
The cretard threads are all petering out quickly these days. --freedumb2003
Is GGG pulling our collective legs? C'mon -- which of us is GGG and doing a caricature of a cretard? --freedumb2003
The cretard strawman "argument."
Evolution does NOT state that "light+matter=new life."
What a bunch of a######s. And stupid ones at that. --freedumb2003
Just another tempest in God's teapot!
Thank you for making my point for me.
Have a blessed day.
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text:
I like it!
Printable View
I like it!
I missed the 3.4 an hour before the 5.3 shaker (I guessed the magnitude as 5.1 right then) hit here. An angel (figurine) lost its wings. Rolling jolt that kept going. And a few aftershocks over 3.0, too.
SoCal is waking up!
And this is why Vin Scully is awesome.
I was in a movie theater last night when the 5.1 struck. The Raid 2 was about to start and then beat it to the punch - pun intended. Everyone left the theater, but eventually returned. The film, by the way, kicked more rear than the first one, if that's even possible. I still prefer the first, but the second was a more than worthy successor.
Here's an interesting article about the effects of the huge amount of ice that covered the Great Lakes this winter.
TI, did you feel that 4.3 shaker near you today? I didn't.
In noticing that same area of the earthquake map, apparently a -0.1 quake hit 24 km (15 mi) ESE of Coso Junction at 6:59:44, on April 15th. How?
[edit] It was the White Wolf Fault. It was bugging me, so I had to look it up.
LA-area quake started as 3.8 and then upgraded to a 4.2 last night. I sure LOVED the local TV anchors whose concerns and "facts" were each discounted by the geologic expert they had on: no, there wasn't a Santa Monica aftershock; no this wasn't an aftershock of the one in March; no this doesn't statistically mean there will be a stronger quake soon.


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Kishore Mahbubani is Dean and Professor in the Practice of Public Policy of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. He previously served for 33 years in Singapore's diplomatic service and is recognised as an expert on Asian and world affairs.
A Welcome Message from Kishore Mahbubani
The past two centuries of Western domination of world history have been a major historical aberration. All aberrations end eventually. Asia will return to centre stage again. However, many leading global minds cannot understand this because their mental maps have been trapped by narrow Western worldviews. The main goal of my writings is to awaken the world to the completely different historical era we are entering. My writings may take you out of your comfort zone but I hope they will help you to understand how different this century will be from previous centuries.
Recent Articles
[For the New Book The Great Convergence:
Asia, the West and the Logic of One World]
Book Review
By Lauren Madow, PD Magazine, Summer, 2013
The Globalist's Top Books of 2013
By The Globalist, 29 December, 2013
Books of the Year
By Martin Wolf, The Financial Times, 29 November, 2013
Book Reviews
By Lanxin Xiang, Survival, 30 September, 2013
States still compete in connected times
By Tom Switzer, The Australian, 27 July, 2013
A Bold Optimist
By David Hale, The International Economy, Spring 2013
Kishore's World
By Donald K. Emmerson, July 2013
Logic of one world
By Dr Maleeha Lodhi, 09 July 2013
Summer books guide
By Martin Wolf, 28 June 2013
[Other Articles]


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FastStone Image Viewer  3.6
* Now it runs on both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows
* It plays video files (avi, wmv, mpg) in slide shows
* It is possible to show EXIF / Histogram information and work on the thumbnails at the same time. Just press I key to turn the Image Properties window on/off
* Improved the "Batch-Convert" (under Tools menu):
o Allowed Sorting Files in the Input List
o Added "Expand Mode" option to the Canvas tab of the "Advanced Options" window
o It is now possible to "drag and drop" files from Windows Explorer to the Input List
* Improved the "Draw Board" (under Edit menu). Now annotation objects (texts, lines, boxes etc.) can be edited by re-opening the Draw Board (press D key)
* Added "Animated GIF" as an output option in Multi-Page File Builder
* Added "Multi-Page File Splitter" (under Create menu), which is used to split a multi-page file into single files
* Added "Panorama Image Builder" (under Create menu), which is used to put multiple images side by side horizontally or vertically
* Improved the Print dialog
* Fixed some bugs


text:
Style: Curly
Fiber: Synthetic
Length: Mid-Length; 5.25" front; 6" top & crown, 8" upper back & side, 5" nape.
Weight: 2.8 oz.
Features: Yaki texure and Extended neck.
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By GARY ARRINGTONSports writer
After having wondered for many a year and having had no way to prove or disprove, I finally solved a dilemma in my life that has plagued me for years and I did it in the easiest way. I went to the county fair last week and I was just minding my own business when I was conspired against. The sad thing was the conspirators were my own daughters.
After the hypnotist finished his first performance of the day, the fair crew set up to play "Are you smarter than a fifth grader?" and were handing out tickets for a drawing to participate. My daughters got me a ticket and out of all the tickets in the bucket, mine was one of the five chosen.
The contest started off easy enough as all five of us got the first question right, the second question right and the third question right. It appeared as if we would be there all night. We, the contestants, did not realize that they were on second grade questions. They were just giving us a false sense of security. They were leading us astray.
If you were in the audience giggling at us, you should be ashamed thinking that it was easy, it was not. The first several questions were such that you were questioning the answer just in case it was a trick. There was enormous pressure on each of us to not appear to be not smarter than a fifth grader.
The game lost two contestants with a trick question and they had to confess that they were not smarter than a fifth grader. There were five fifth graders there answering the questions just like us to prove how unsmart we really were.
I, at much urging of the crowd, took the category 'spelling' for us all to answer a question. That almost cost me. The question was "In the word wonderful, what does 'ful' represent." Does that sound like a spelling question? It was a trick and I did not know the answer. Thank goodness that I had a life line and the fifth graders knew the answer. The answer is suffix for you other people who do not know but now I do know as if that will ever be useful again.
All of a sudden the questions were harder and you no longer could be confident in your answers. The pressure was building and the audience was just waiting for us final three to buckle under.
We lost another contestant and then there were just two of us. I took a math question and the question was 'What is the formula for finding the area of a circle.' The other contestant did not know the answer, used his lifeline to no avail as no fifth grader knew the answer either. I did and I was the last one standing. They asked one more question that I also got right and now it is official. I am smarter than a fifth grader. Now I hope next year I will get to defend my title when they play 'Are you smarter than a sixth grader?'
And now since I am smarter, I want someone to explain to me what a jumbo shrimp is since that appears to be contradictory. After you do that, please explain large petite, as that also appears contradictory. And finally, I got a fortune cookie at the fair and it told me too that I had been good and to give myself a surprise gift. Huh? How do I do that? That has to be at least an eighth grade question.


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Moom Sugaring Hair Removal Introductory Kit
- Overview
- Ingredients
- Features
- Moom 100% Natural Hair Remover, 6 oz (175 grams)
- Fabric Strips, 12 large and 6 small
- Applicators, 2 large and 6 small
- Spread a thin layer of Moom in direction of hair growth.
- Place Moom strip over it. Rub vigorously.
- Quickly pull strip in opposite direction.
- About the brand
Sugar, Water, Chamomile, Lemon, Tea Tree Oil.
This revolutionary product offers the benefits of long term depilation, diminishes the pain and eliminates the discomfort of waxing and other methods.
Moom has taken the ancient of sugaring and revolutionized it. Adding only the highest quality beneficial ingredients and using fabric strips, makes the process cleaner and more effective.
Moom does not damage the skin, thus no need for after treatment lotions to repair the skin. In fact, Moom leaves your skin softer, healthier and younger looking naturally.
Moom's exclusive formula gently removes the hair from the root, cleans the hair follicles putting an end to ingrown hairs, leaving your skin hair free and silky smooth for up to 8 weeks.
This unique product stands alone as the gentlest, the most effective and the most pleasant long term hair remover.
As simple as 1, 2, 3:
Moom organic hair removal products combine the principles of waxing and sugaring for smooth, silky results every time. Moom hair removal products contain all natural ingredients like soothing chamomile and antiseptic lemon to protect skin from damage.
The Absolute Best!I started waxing (at home) at puberty and I'm now over 40, and over the years I have used/tried different (many ) products and methods but Moom outperforms them all. Compared to other brands or methods (i.e hot wax, etc), I have found less ingrown hair, less chances of bruising (at the bikini in particular), reliable performance regardless of the climatic conditions (a little too much humidity in the air doesn't affect its performance which I can't say about other brands) or of the length of the hair, it's more forgiving of imperfections in temperature at which it's applied, and on goes the list.
Bottom line, I never resort to other brands unless I have absolutely no other choice (i.e. out of the country and buying locally equivalents, or when the store is out of stock and I desperately need to wax) and have gone to special ordering it from the only local store who carries it with some form of regularity.
Simply put, it's the best at home waxing product out there I have encountered!
Sep 19, 2012Marie / DC
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Using It For YearsI purchased this product years ago at the northwest women's show, and am completely in love with it. I have been using it on my own since I was 13. Not only is it easy enough to use that a child can do it, but the one jar has lasted me all of this time (I'm 23 now). The product leaves the skin soft and hair free when done right, and as an added bonus, it smells amazing!Jun 24, 2012Lindsey / Washington
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So Much Nicer Than WaxI love this stuff. I will never go back to wax. You don't need a heater, just use a microwave or pot of hot water. I did buy 2 kits so I'd have enough re-useable cloth strips. Then I just buy the big jar. Since the strips are re-usable you don't need any more strips. Since the stuff is water soluble, its easy to clean up and mess as well as rinse off the cloths. It is way less painful than wax, even on underarms & bikini line. I just love it.Apr 19, 2012Joanie F. / United States
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Love Love Love!!!This stuff is AMAZING!
I have very sensitive skin, and basically anything will make me have some kind of irritation or redness, but this stuff is PERFECT!
Super gentle, doesn't hurt as much as regular waxing, leaves skin super smooth, no irritation afterward, no ingrown hairs, no sticky residue.
I am so happy that I bought this, I've been raving about it to all my girlfriends.
One of the great things is that it comes with cloth strips that are washable. All it takes is a short rinse under warm water and the strips are good as new.
CAUTION: This product gets lava hot, super fast. It is recommended to put in the microwave at 10 second intervals, and that's what it did, feeling the glass jar every time to see how warm it got. After my fourth "10 second interval", I decided it was warm enough, poked the wooden spreader in there, and a scalding hot bubble of wax splashed on my finger. Definitely burned me, but I was able to wash it off immediately because the product is water soluble. My recommendation, no more than two 10 second intervals in the microwave are required.Feb 16, 2012Natalya / DC
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Great ResultsNow people, you are still violently ripping hair out of your skin, don't expect to feel nothing. It is painful, but compared to waxing it hardly hurts. Waxing rips the skin off as well as the hair and I actually have scars around my eyebrows from the last time I had them waxed. This product will not rip your skin, I clean my skin well, put baby powder on my skin, spread the wax, and rub the strip for a little while and hard to ensure I have all the hair. Also taking advil or even icing the area or putting a numbing gel will help a lot with some of the pain. I use it under my arms and I do a Brazilian wax on myself and I swear by this product. I warm it for about 20 seconds and mix it a while to spread the heat evenly. If the first time you use it on a spot it doesn't get all the hair go over that spot again and pluck remaining hairs (Make sure your hair is a good length! Too much and too long will be harder and more painful!). This is a great product that is much more gentle than waxing, and it's washable so you don't have to worry about getting it on things or if you decide you don't want to sugar an area you put it on just wash it off. Some people who wrote bad reviews seemed to have a reaction to it, and it's all natural but they could just be allergic to an ingredient. You won't know until you try it and I believe it's worth trying it! After you use this if it's a sensitive area (for instance bikini) put a cream or aloe or lotion to soothe it. This product is inexpensive (the container is little but it lasts a long time), less painful than wax, washable, and gentle. It gives very good results and is a good at-home alternative to wax. Buy this with a cream for ingrown hairs if you are prone to them or think you may get them and it's a match made in heaven!Dec 29, 2011Briana
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This Product Doesnt WorkI saw this the other day and was like, "Wow, finally something that can help me with my problems with my thick black wiry leg hair". Every since grade 4 I've been having problems dealing with my hair, however when I saw this product, I had a glimpse of hope. I bought this product and honestly I was really, really excited to use it. The product came and i used it right away. Once I ripped it off, hoping I was like that girl on television, with no pain. I felt pain for about half the amount of hair. It was the worst pain I have felt. It did NOT take all the hair out. I didn't know which hurt more, my leg or my heart,the disappointment was too much to handle. After being disappointed I washed and reused as told. The second time I ripped it off, it didn't hurt, HOWEVER about 5 days later, THAT ONE SPOT had red itchy bumps that resembles herpes. This concludes my review as I am telling you that this product is the worst. It will cause you pain on your legs, heart and pocket. This truly happened to me. Believe me, I don't want another person to go through the pain I went through.Jun 27, 2011Helen R. / Canada
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100 % Organic Is Only High Point!Hard to believe this product has a 4 star rating. The product I received may have been defective since in was hard as a brick when it arrived. Couldn't use it at room temperature and proceeded to let it sit in a cup of hot water to soften it and it still wasn't spreadable. I think I'll just pay the $10.00 for an eyebrow wax at the mall salon from now on. Very disappointed!Dec 1, 2010Niki
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I Would Recommend This To AnyoneI used this on my arms. It is the first time I have ever waxed anything. It hurt a lot less than I expected, but the skin on my arms was red and raw for an hour or two. Follow the directions and it really does work. I gave it four stars because it only has been two weeks, and I already need to wax again. However, I have heard that it takes a few waxes for your hair to get thinner, so after a several more waxes it will hopefully last a lot longer. It is sticky and can make a mess if you aren't careful, but it is sugar-based, so it cleans up easily with water.Nov 9, 2010Kelly / PA
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Leaves Stray Hair BehindThis product does not hurt as much as waxing for sure, however it doesn't seem to pick up all the hair. I waxed my legs after waiting the 2 weeks for it to reach full growth and it pulled up all the long coarse hairs but left behind all my short baby hair. So to the eye it looks like my legs are hairless, but it is actually not smooth when I touch my legs. :( DOES NOT work for underarm area. It is not too messy and very easy to clean up. If it picked up all my hair it would be perfect.Sep 18, 2010Rachel
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Great!I can tell that it is only pulling out the hair and not an entire layer of my skin. i used this to wax my legs and although it took about 20 minutes, it saved me HOURS in the shower for the next 3 weeks. I LOVED this product and would definitely recommend it for everyone. Although it says you dont have to microwave it when using MOOM on your face, i still did for just about 5 seconds and my results were better and not painful. Everyone should go to www.moom.com because they have FAQS that answer a lot of questions that i previously had.Aug 21, 2010NatashaHAIR TYPEBlack / Thick or Coarse Hair
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text:
Family & Social Life
Donations to the Museum have preserved irreplaceable evidence about generations of ordinary Americans. Objects from the Copp household of Stonington, Connecticut, include many items used by a single family from 1740 to 1850. Other donations have brought treasured family artifacts from jewelry to prom gowns. These gifts and many others are all part of the Museum's family and social life collections.
Children's books and Sunday school lessons, tea sets and family portraits also mark the connections between members of a family and between families and the larger society. Prints, advertisements, and artifacts offer nostalgic or idealized images of family life and society in times past. And the collections include a few modern conveniences that have had profound effects on American families and social life, such as televisions, video games, and personal computers.
"Family & Social Life - Overview" showing 2 items.
Máquina de Margaritas Heladas
- Description
- In the 70's, the margarita surpassed the martini as the most popular American cocktail and salsa surpassed ketchup as the most-used American condiment. Today, Mexican cuisine, in all its modified, regionalized, commercialized, and even highly processed varieties, has become as American as apple pie. Mariano Martinez, a young Texas entrepreneur, and his frozen margarita machine were at the crossroads of that revolution. The margarita was first made on the California-Mexican border, and became associated with the service of Mexican food, particularly, with one of its variants, Tex-Mex, a regional cuisine that became popular all across the United States. In 1971, Martinez adapted a soft serve ice cream machine to create the world's first frozen margarita machine for his new Dallas restaurant, Mariano's Mexican Cuisine. With their blenders hard-pressed to produce a consistent mix for the newly popular drink they made from Mariano's father's recipe, his bartenders were in rebellion. Then came inspiration in the form of a Slurpee machine at a 7-Eleven, a machine invented in Dallas in 1960 to make carbonated beverages slushy enough to drink through a straw. The soft-serve ice cream machine that Martinez adapted to serve his special drink was such a success that, according to Martinez, "it brought bars in Tex-Mex restaurants front and center. People came to Mariano's for that frozen margarita out of the machine." Never patented, many versions of the frozen margarita machine subsequently came into the market. After 34 years of blending lime juice, tequila, ice, and sugar for enthusiastic customers, the world's first frozen margarita machine was retired to the Smithsonian.
- Date made
- ca 1970
- maker
- Sani-Serv
- ID Number
- 2005.0226.01
- catalog number
- 2005.0226.01
- accession number
- 2005.0226
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
1879 Almanac
- Description
- Titled Un Calendario Curioso para 1879, this almanac was printed in Mexico at the beginning of the Porfiriato—the period between 1876 and 1911 dominated by the presidency of Porfirio Díaz. This was a period of intense foreign investment in Mexico. U.S. corporations were especially active in Mexico's mining industry, which was now connected to the United States by an ever-expanding web of railroads. While many fortunes were made during this era of peace and economic growth, the boom did not trickle down to the rural poor or the urban working classes. Many small farmers and indigenous communities lost their fields to powerful landlords and plantation owners. The middle and upper classes also grew disgruntled as the political elite stifled the country's democracy in the name of progress. This almanac offers a window into the everyday lives of Mexicans living in the late 1800s. In addition to a year-long forecast, it includes a timeline of world and Mexican history, highlighting dates such Noah's flood and the execution of Emperor Maximilian. A section at the end offers an elaborate list of recipes selected by "people of good taste" for "people of all classes."
- Location
- Currently not on view
- ID Number
- catalog number
- 300959.14
- accession number
- 300959
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center


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Giuseppe Zanotti Reptile Leather Pump
Sorry, this item is sold out!
Looks like you've got more shoe shopping to do - have fun!
Looks like you've got more shoe shopping to do - have fun!
Item # dsw12prod4470117
With an exemplary display of high quality, Giuseppe Zanotti footwear embodies creativity and style. The classic style of this reptile leather pump makes it the perfect addition to your shoe collection.
- Reptile-embossed leather upper
- Also available in leather upper
- Almond toe
- Fully lined in leather
- 3¾" heel
- Leather sole
- Made in Italy
- View more Women's Giuseppe Zanotti Shoes
- Online Exclusive!
By: Serabat
Location: Manchester
October 16, 2013
Not expensive looking
"Usual Zanotti fit: slightly narrow, slightly short (typical italian sizing). The leather looks cheap and not luxe at all. Also, not comfortable - I have several pairs in this brand, but these just would not work. Not worth the price even on sale."
By: mzniko
Location: chicago
June 06, 2013
Simple yet satisfying
"Can't go wrong with this shoe. It has a simple design at first glance. If you look at it again, on the top of the foot bed it actually has an angled cut which gives it more sass!!!I have this shoe in a lavender/purple type of color and I am always complimented on this shoe. I love when they ask who makes that shoe..hehe!!On the comfort side its not the best in comfort, but if you enlist the help of a cushion for the ball of the foot....you will be good to go! The heel is just the perfect height not overly tall but tall enough. Perfect for running around on a Saturday afternoon.Yes I love this shoe!!"
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