The Motley Fool Announces That April Fool's Day Prank Pays Off.

Business Editors

ALEXANDRIA, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 4, 2000

The Motley Fool, a leading multi-media source for financial information, announced today that its "discovery of Shakespeare's $18.7 billion investment portfolio" was in fact an April Fool's Day prank.

In an online press conference broadcast Friday, the company announced that information uncovered by an intern from The Motley Fool's UK office led to the exhumation of William Shakespeare's body and subsequent unearthing of his original investment portfolio. This set the stage for elaborate development of the farce on the company's website, www.fool.com. Over the weekend, the company unveiled a chart tracing Shakespeare's original stock holdings to modern day companies (e.g., Horse, Inc. became Ford Motor Co.), interviewed an heir to Shakespeare's "fortune," and uncovered an unfinished scene from MacBeth with glaring financial overtones.

As expected from The Motley Fool, beneath all this amusement there was a lesson to be learned. "If you'd invested $1,000 in Microsoft at its IPO, your investment would be worth more than $725,000 today." said Tom Gardner co-founder of The Motley Fool. "In the same way, a $40 investment in Coca-Cola in 1919 would now be worth about $6.6 million. This year's joke illustrates the fundamental truth behind Foolish investing: buying and holding good companies for the long term pays off. Day traders take note!"

True to its interactive, community-driven approach, the company engaged visitors to its website in message board discussions about the joke. By Sunday, the subject had generated more than 300 responses. One poster wrote, "(The Motley Fool) has once again found a way to creatively educate us in the boundless benefits of long-term buy-and-hold investing...the power of compounding is matched only by the power contained in the ubiquitous knowledgeable prose available at fool.com."

The Motley Fool has a long-standing tradition of elaborate April Fool's Day jokes. Last year, the company deceived its readers by announcing that it was taking a company called "e-meringue" public. The message boards on fool.com lit up as visitors scurried for investment information about the firm selling meringue via the Internet. In 1998, after years of railing against under-performing mutual funds, The Motley Fool issued an apology, stating that it had miscalculated the numbers. "Our message--that 91% of all managed mutual funds have lost to the market over the past five years--was the result of our mishandling of the data," the company said. "You see, in actuality, it's the other way around. As it turns out, since January, 1993, 91% of all mutual funds have outperformed the S&P 500, not under performed it."

"In Shakespeare's works, the Fool was the only one who could tell the king the truth without getting his head lopped off," said David Gardner, co-founder of The Motley Fool. "And he did it with humor. That's the spirit behind our April Fool's Day pranks. We try to hoodwink people into seeing the truth about finance."

The Motley Fool's mission is to educate, amuse, and enrich individual investors around the world. Having started with 60 readers its first day in August 1994, the Fool now reaches millions of investors each month by providing financial information and strategies across a variety of media: on its Web site at http://www.fool.com; via its five Simon & Schuster books, all New York Times bestsellers; through its line of self-published books and company-specific research; through its weekly syndicated column, currently appearing in more than 170 newspapers around the USA; via its daily "Market Minutes" and "The Motley Fool Radio Show," which is broadcast weekly -- both joint ventures with Cox Radio heard on more than 130 stations nationwide; through regular commentary on Marketplace Radio; and on America Online (keyword: Fool). The Fool's international sites can be found at http://www.fool.co.uk and on America Online (keyword: FoolUK), and at http://www.fool.de.