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Motley Fool Epic Plus Review – Is It Worth The Money?

By Dave

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Motley Fool Epic Plus Review

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Motley Fool Epic Plus Review

  • Ease of Use
  • Quality
  • Value
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Summary

Motley Fool Epic Plus is a bundle of services from the Motley Fool. This bundle includes everything the original Epic bundle features, plus more. With Epic Plus users have access to ten different services and nine new stock picks per month. Learn everything you need to know about this bundle by reading our complete Motley Fool Epic Plus review.

Pros

  • Nine stock recommendations per month
  • Includes value and international stock picks
  • Ongoing options strategies for income and risk management
  • Ranking lists and research reports to aid decision-making

Cons

  • Only suitable for investors with portfolios of $100,000 or more
  • Moneymakers portfolio is hard to follow, issues new buys infrequently

Motley Fool is well-known for its flagship Stock Advisor stock recommendation service and other long-running services like Rule Breakers. But there’s a lot more to Motley Fool, and many of the platform’s advanced services are available in the new Epic Plus subscription.

Epic Plus includes everything in Epic, plus value stock recommendations, international stock recommendations, options trade ideas, and access to real money portfolio managed by, and based on, Tom Gardner’s investing philosophy. However, at $1,999 per year, Epic Plus is also a lot more expensive than the popular Epic package.

Are the added services worth it? Our Motley Fool Epic Plus review will take a deeper look at what’s included and help you decide.

Motley Fool Epic Plus Pricing Options

Epic Plus costs $1,999 per year, which is a big step up from Epic’s $499 per year price tag. Motley Fool doesn’t offer a trial, but it is backed by Tom Gardner’s Ironclad 30-Day Credit Swap Guarantee, which allows you to transfer your membership credit to another service. You can also find the occasional discount.

Special Offer

Get $600 Off Motley Fool Epic Plus

How Does Motley Fool Epic Plus Work?

Epic Plus includes access to a wide range of Motley Fool services, including everything in Epic and a lot more.

Below is the full list of scorecards and portfolios you get with Epic Plus:

In total, you can expect 9 new stock picks per month.

We have a detailed review on Motley Fool Epic, which includes Stock Advisor, Rule Breakers, Hidden Gems, and Dividend Investor. So, we’ll mainly focus on the services that Epic Plus adds in this review.

Trends

Trends is an interesting scorecard that focuses on finding growth stocks in emerging sectors like fintech, biotech, cloud computing, renewable energy, and artificial intelligence. It has a fair amount of overlap with Stock Advisor and Rule Breakers, but I found that Trends also recommends a lot more mid-cap stocks with valuations under $10 billion.

The portfolio was just launched in April 2024, so it will be interesting to see if some of the early picks turn into big winners in coming years. As of September 2024, the portfolio is up 29.4% compared to 46.7% for the S&P 500.

Value Hunters

Value Hunters is an unusual scorecard for Motley Fool in that it focuses on value stocks rather than growth stocks. The goal is to buy stocks that are trading below their intrinsic value and offer a reasonable margin of safety. Value Hunters feels a lot more like following a Warren Buffett investing plan than one from the Gardner brothers. 

Motley Fool Epic Plus Value Hunters

Since launching in January 2023, the portfolio is up 36.7% compared to 26.0% for the S&P 500 (as of September 2024). Notably, there have been no sell recommendations in this scorecard since it launched.

Global Partners

The Global Partners scorecard recommends high-growth international stocks from around the world. It’s an interesting scorecard because I hadn’t previously heard of many of the recommended companies. Some of them are large-cap stocks, but many are small-caps and not all of them have a strong presence in the US market.

This is a relatively established scorecard, launched in August 2018. As of September 2024, it has returned 32.7% compared to 24.8% for the S&P International 700 index.

Moneymakers

Moneymakers is a real money portfolio managed by Motley Fool co-founder Tom Gardner. The portfolio focuses on high-growth companies that have dominant pricing power in their market. 

Moneymakers doesn’t make monthly recommendations, but instead buys new stocks sporadically when there’s a good opportunity. The last purchase was in October 2023, almost a year ago, which means it will be hard to copy this portfolio if you’re new to Epic Plus. In that sense, it’s a lot more helpful for generating ideas than for getting recommendations.

From inception in October 2018 to September 2024, Moneymakers has returned 104.9% compared to 133.7% for the S&P 500.

Options

Motley Fool Options is a unique scorecard that uses options to create hedged strategies around good companies. It’s not focused on short-term options trading, like most other options services are.

Motley Fool Epic Plus Options

Options mostly uses bull call spread, covered call, and long call strategies, usually with an eye toward generating income or maximizing return based on high-probability price movements. The strategies are relatively easy to follow even if you’re new to options, and the service comes with a set of educational guides to teach you the basics of options strategies.

From launch in 2009 to September 2024, Options has achieved accuracy of 81.2%.

Motley Fool Epic Plus Additional Features

Epic Plus doesn’t include any bonus features above and beyond what you get with Epic. However, it’s worth noting how you can use the expanded universe of stock picks, research reports, and rankings to find the best stocks to buy.

With Epic Plus, you can sort Motley Fool’s monthly ranking lists by scorecard, which makes it easy to find convergence in recommended stocks across the different scorecards. Most investors aren’t going to buy nine new stocks every month—and Motley Fool likely wouldn’t recommend this—so this capability is great for deciding which recommendations have the most conviction behind them.

Motley Fool Epic Plus Rankings

Each service also produces its own research report for each recommended stock, even when there’s overlap. So, you can get different perspectives on the same stock from different teams of analysts within Motley Fool to help you make investment decisions.

Special Offer

Get $600 Off Motley Fool Epic Plus

What Type of Investor is Motley Fool Epic Plus Best For?

Epic Plus is a lot more expensive than Epic, so it’s worth thinking critically about the additional services and how they can add to your portfolio. The big draw I see for Epic Plus is that several of the services it adds are fully unique from what’s included with Epic.

For example, Value Hunters focuses on undervalued stocks and Global Partners focuses on international stocks. There are no similar services in Epic, so these two services can really help you diversify your portfolio. Options is another significant addition, since it gives you a way to actively invest in the market, generate income, and build more complex strategies than simply holding long stock positions.

Trends and Moneymakers feel somewhat less valuable. While I like the thrust behind Trends, there’s a lot of overlap with Stock Advisor and Rule Breakers. Moneymakers issues new recommendations too infrequently to be all that helpful for most investors.

If you’re new to Motley Fool, I recommend starting out with Epic and seeing if that fulfills your needs. If you feel like you need more diverse investment recommendations, then upgrading to Epic Plus could be a good option.

In addition, keep in mind that at $1,999 per year, Epic Plus only makes sense if you have at least $100,000 (and ideally $150,000 or more) to invest. Otherwise, the service’s price tag can really eat into your portfolio and can even be more expensive than hiring a financial advisor.

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Dave

Dave has been a part-time day trader and swing trader since 2011 when he first became obsessed with the markets. He focuses primarily on technical setups and will hold positions anywhere from a few minutes to a few days. Over his trading career, Dave has tried numerous day trading products, brokers, services, and courses. He continues to test and review new day trading services to this day.

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