Welcome to the Age of Foolishness! - the first words of a new book on personal investment published this week. Not the most reassuring opening for those seeking sensible financial advice. But this is something of an idiot's guide and the idiots are none other than the Motley Fools.

Fool founders David and Tom Gardner have made a transatlantic link up with Fool fan David Berger to produce The Motley Fool UK Investment Guide, How the Fools beat the City's Wise men and how you can too.

The Motley Fools tell their story to BBC News Online

Just how the Fools became a runaway success in the States and are now catching on here is also quite a tale. Tom, a teacher, and Dave, who had trained as an investment analyst, began a financial newsletter five years ago which started out in print and then was put up on an online bulletin board.

Their big break was in 1994 when they highlighted the hype behind penny shares by tipping a non-existent portable toilet maker. Thousands rushed to buy stock in the company before the brothers revealed the scam and the Wall Street Journal ran an article on them. America Online took notice and signed them up to produce an investment area within its service.

A tale told by an idiot

The Motley Fool is named after Jacques in Shakespeare's As You Like It who had a habit of pointing out that the truth was not necessarily the conventional wisdom. The brothers' wit combined with common sense advice soon made the Fool the most popular area of AOL and led to a Website, books, a national radio show and a column syndicated to 160 newspapers.

Despite their Website getting 20 million visits a month, the Fools were making little impact in the UK - their Investment Guide sold just 17 copies. But help was at hand from David Berger, a junior hospital doctor from Bournemouth who had become addicted to the site.

He e-mailed the Gardners to suggest a British Motley Fool which lo and behold came about on AOL in autumn 1997, with the Website following in February 1998, and now the book.

The book of the Website

Berger has stayed true to Fool principles but obviously changed all the advice to fit UK investment vehicles and injected his own brand of humour, which appears inspired by Douglas Adams's Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.

There are literary quotes for each chapter heading (such as Tallulah Bankhead's There is less in this than meets the eye) and dozens of practical examples and scenarios of investing with companies such as Vulture Fund Management.