Disclosure Policy

Here at 401kplan.net, when it comes to matters of money, we believe in transparency and accountability. Day in and day out, we dedicate ourselves to delivering responsible investing ideas and sound financial education. That’s why, when it comes to talking about stocks, we think it’s important that you know exactly where we’re coming from. With this in mind, we have developed a company-wide disclosure policy to guide our business and communications.

Investors Communicating With Investors

401kplan.net is a company that represents investors teaching and learning from other investors. Many financial publications do not permit their writers and editors to own stocks. 401kplan.net not only permits, but also encourages its staff to invest in common stock. Why? Two reasons.

First, we strongly believe the most effective way to create wealth is through the long-term ownership of stocks. The stock market has compounded 11% average annual returns over the last century. We believe in using the stock market as a savings bank, and we strongly encourage treating money management as a lifelong endeavor. Therefore, we think it’d be downright mean of us to close that avenue of investment to our employees.

Second, and more important, we don’t consider our employees to be journalists, but rather communicators and teachers of financial matters. It’s a subtle but critical difference that affects our entire service — from our online site at Fool.com, to our investment books, to our nationally syndicated newspaper column to our newsletters. As a company, we utilize every available medium to teach people of all ages, all income levels, all backgrounds, and all genetic codes about money and its applications in modern life. Therefore, we believe our staff’s involvement in managing their own money is critical to their learning more about the subject and their succeeding in their own lives. And who better to write about investing than those who do it themselves?

401kplan.net writes about stocks in both free and paid content. We make stock recommendations in our various premium newsletter services and actually hold some of these shares in our portfolio service. To be fair to the newsletter subscribers, we do not disclose in our free content any stock recommendation made as part of our premium services for at least 30 days from its recommendation date. Though we may cover a recommended stock in our free content during the initial 30-day period — in the event of relevant news, for instance — we will not disclose that it is a premium service recommendation out of respect for our subscribers. Of course, in both free and paid content we will continue to disclose whether the author has an interest in the stocks mentioned.

Internally, 401kplan.net has always strived to operate with the highest levels of integrity and transparency. As such, here are the key components of 401kplan.net’s disclosure policy:

Disclosure

• When a writer writes about a stock that he or she owns or beneficially owns, that fact is disclosed at the end of the article.
• All 401kplan.net employees and contractors are required to publicly disclose their current individual stock holdings on their personal profile pages on the 401kplan.net website. (We do not disclose the individual stocks that might be in a 401kplan.net employee’s mutual funds.)

Trading Restrictions

In addition to the above disclosure requirements, 401kplan.net employees work under additional trading restrictions and guidelines. These restrictions require that they:

• Must hold any stock they own for at least 30 days. (No day trading allowed — as if we’d want to!)
• Cannot write about a stock in the period ten days before and ten days after purchasing or selling the stock.
• Cannot trade based on any knowledge they may have about articles that have yet to be published.
• Must notify our compliance officer every time they buy or sell a stock, regardless of whether they have written about it.

Advertisers
As a general rule, if you see ads from a company on our site, that company is paying us for such placement.  Additionally, companies pay us for inclusion in our decision centers and forums.

In Conclusion

We have designed our disclosure and trading guidelines to serve our community, our customers, and our employees fairly. As always, though, you should remember to consider every piece of investment information you receive, here at 401kplan.net or elsewhere, not as a de facto recommendation, but as an idea for further consideration. Even the strongest disclosure policy in the world does not excuse individuals from taking responsibility for their own decisions. Due diligence, critical thought, and use of the most extraordinary device in the world (the human brain) are crucial to your financial success.

If you’d like to offer us any feedback on this stuff, contact us.

Last updated September 16, 2008