As of 2026-07-26. Counts on this page are computed from the live data at every site build.
In mid-June 2026 The Motley Fool encouraged its members to comment on the SEC’s semiannual reporting proposal. The result is the largest identifiable letter-writing campaign in this docket outside the SEC’s own aggregated form letters, and it raises a measurement question we wanted to answer: what counts as a Motley Fool letter?
The tracker tags Motley Fool letters at two levels of confidence.
Official (1,371 letters). A letter is officially tagged when the Motley Fool connection is explicit on the face of the submission. This happens in one of two ways: the docket submitter field reads “The Motley Fool Community” (1,219 letters at the July 12, 2026 tagging pass), or the letter body itself mentions the Motley Fool (148 letters found by a text scan at that pass, including creative spellings such as “Motly Fool”); letters arriving since are tagged the same two ways as they come in. Nothing is inferred; a human can verify every official tag by reading the letter.
Predicted (1,427 letters). Many campaign participants followed the Motley Fool’s suggested talking points without naming the source. To estimate the campaign’s full footprint, we trained a text classifier on the officially tagged letters (positives) against 7,500 letters received before the campaign began on June 15 (negatives). The model was frozen on July 12, 2026; every prediction after that date is out-of-sample, and newly arriving letters are scored by the same fixed model so counts stay comparable over time. A letter is tagged predicted only when the evidence is strong: a model probability of at least 0.9, a probability of at least 0.7 combined with near-duplicate similarity of at least 0.8 to an official campaign letter, or a verbatim campaign template phrase (for example “investing is ownership”). On a holdout test the model separates campaign from non-campaign letters with an AUC of 0.987, and the high-confidence tier has a false-positive rate of roughly 0.1 to 0.3 percent. The campaign’s fingerprint appears in none of the 7,500 pre-campaign letters.
Letters carry the Motley Fool jester-hat badge in the letter table. Official letters show the badge at full strength; predicted letters show a faded badge, and the hover text says a model produced the tag. The Motley Fool filter isolates both tiers together, with the two counts reported separately (“1,371 + 1,427 predicted”). The campaign exhibit chart stacks the predicted letters in pink above the official letters in purple — the two colors of the jester hat — again with separate totals.
Prediction runs only where it makes sense: letters from individuals (not firms, academics, or professionals writing in a professional capacity), received on or after June 15, 2026, that are part of the analyzed corpus (duplicates and off-topic letters are excluded). An official tag always wins; a letter never carries both tags. Predicted letters are excluded from nothing else on the site: their stance, entity, and rationale classifications are identical in kind to every other letter’s, and the stance distribution does not depend on campaign membership.
Campaigns are part of the story of this docket. The SEC itself aggregates identical form letters and reports them with submitter counts; the Motley Fool campaign sits in the harder middle ground of individually worded letters with a shared origin. Measuring it, with the uncertainty made visible, seems more honest than either ignoring it or silently folding it into the retail wall. Readers who want the raw material can filter to the campaign and read the letters themselves.