Meet The Fools

Stephen ran his own accountancy practice for a few decades, advising many of his clients on investment matters. He's been writing for the Fool since 1998, primarily on value investing. His boards moniker - pyad - stands for price, yield, assets and debt, which are the four ratios he looks at when appraising value shares.

In the past he has also written columns for the Fool on tax, mechanical investing and the High Yield Portfolio.

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Having served the required apprenticeship of a misspent youth, G A Chester began his working life as a horse-racing writer and private handicapper. He has subsequently worked as a writer and editor in a variety of fields, and began contributing to the Fool as a freelancer in 2010.

His investing career has progressed from the mis-priced second favourite in the 2.30 at Ascot, through small-cap companies, to FTSE blue chips and conservatively-run family firms. After an early nomadic life in England and France, he now lives with his partner, Mary, and their two wonderful children in Bliss.

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After qualifying as a financial adviser in the early Nineties, Cliff worked in marketing for several of the UK's leading financial firms. He joined fool.co.uk as a personal finance writer in 2003, leaving in late 2005 to start his own business as a freelance journalist and broadcaster.

Thanks to more than a decade on the 'dark side', Cliff has an in-depth knowledge of the world of personal finance. Since the late 80s, he has been a keen private investor, and he still remembers losing his shirt in the October 1987 crash!

Cliff is the author of The FT Guide to Managing Your Money, which draws on his own experiences as an investor and financial pundit.

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Neil's been investing since the late 1990s, primarily by holding passive funds, which means for most of the time he's been losing a bit less money than everyone else. His faith in index trackers over the long term remains unshaken, although that hasn't stopped him feeling frustrated at times!

He got lucky with his first dabble in tech shares, which was following a tip-off from his father, whom he generously describes as “the worst investor in the world”. The Motley Fool helped him see the error of his ways regarding more detailed research and diversification, and he's been writing for us since 2006.

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After an early career in engineering and management, Kevin dedicated fifteen years to building an engineering services enterprise before selling it as a going concern. These days, he scratches his entrepreneurial itch by investing on the stock market, and although generally preferring to invest in growing businesses, he likes to remain flexible and open to other investment opportunities as well.

Whilst aspiring to learn from the wisdom and experiences of others, he usually finds that making his own mistakes is a more reliable teacher. He therefore makes many mistakes, both in investing and in life. Happily, some of his investments and life decisions have been good ones, too.

As well as investing, Kevin fills his time with several interests, one of which is writing for the Fool.

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David is mainly a small cap / contrarian value specialist who continually fails to follow his own investing advice.

He finds himself increasingly cynical with age -- and, therefore, drawn ever more towards high yielding, good value blue-chips; a strategy he wishes he'd followed since he first began his investing career back in 1991. Since then, he's held many potentially life-changing shares that were all sold far too early.

An economics graduate, David has worked in the private, public and voluntary sectors. He's been investing for a living since 2000 and has lived in France since 2007.

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Harvey was sentenced to a career in journalism in 1988, and initially served 12 years in the medical press without parole, writing about NHS finance. He has vowed NEVER to talk to a doctor again, even if it kills him.

He has been a full-time freelance personal finance journalist since May 2000, and has written regularly for most national titles and now writes regularly for the Daily and Sunday Express, The Guardian, lovemoney.com, What Investment and anybody else who will pay him. He recently started writing about investments for Dubai newspaper The National after discovering it paid in dollars.

Harvey is partly based in Norway, thanks to his girlfriend Ingrid and daughter Molly, and enjoys the irony that after a career telling people how to save money, he has relocated to the most expensive country in the world. Hobbies include cross-country skiing, reading 19th-century literature and restoring old wooden windows (there's not much else to do in Norway).

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Tony started investing in the stock market over 25 years ago and has been an active investor ever since. He prefers to invest in companies which have strong brand names and favours international markets, particularly the Americas and India.

Tony has had an eclectic career, amongst his various jobs are a parachute cord tester, removal man and working for seven years as an IFA. He was an Actuary for five years during the personal pensions mis-selling review and worked for a provincial firm of solicitors for a while, but he hopes that no-one will hold the latter against him! He is studying for his fourth Open University degree and spends far too much time watching sport on television.

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Alun trained as an engineer and is well into his fourth age as an investor. The first age was simply cash savings. He read the Economist and business section of papers since his teens but was too cautious to buy shares until his second age -- the free lunch of UK privatisations. The third age was finding he wasn't as smart as he thought, losing half his savings on one share at the tail end of the 90s tech-telecoms boom after resisting the Siren call of easy money until the last gasp.

The pain led to the fourth age - value and independence. For the first time he did some simple but independent research, sold his telecoms shares at a loss and bought lowly rated retailers and house builders. That was nearly ten years ago. His contrarian view, an engineer's methodology, reading The Motley Fool boards and a few great investing books has made him financially independent. He shops at Aldi.

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Michelle ran away from school at 16 to join the circus, and became the youngest female lion tamer in Essex. She was then rescued from a life of itinerant entertainment by her devoted geek of a husband, with whom she now has three wonderful boys.

Running a household with three apparently typical males, not to mention a cat, doesn't leave her a lot of spare time, but in what little she has Michelle enjoys keeping fit, watching action films, reading about cattle ranching on the Argentinian Pampas, and eating biscuits. She leads a very happy life with her husband and sons, but every so often she still dreams of holding a chair in one hand and a whip in the other.

Michelle is part of the Community team, doing customer service and moderating the Fool's discussion boards as TMFSash1.

Padraig has been investing since the mid-1990s. He has followed the Fool's discussion boards for many years and written for the site on a freelance basis since 2006.

His investment style is predominantly focused on small cap opportunities, while also using ETFs to take macro positions. He has a keen interest in behavioural finance, especially as it relates to his own decision-making.

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Alan was originally a software developer and first began writing for the Fool in the late 1990s, when he was the author of the Fool book "Make Your Child A Millionaire". He has been a private investor for around 20 years, and has explored a number of strategies.

In his younger days he was dedicated to small cap growth shares and largely followed the ideas of Jim Slater, but with advancing years (and the arrival of his first grandchild), he is turning increasingly to high-yielding blue-chip shares (but with the occasional "blue sky" punt for fun). Alan currently works as a freelance writer and is also part of the moderation team for the Fool's discussion boards, posting as TMFBoing.

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Selwyn Parker spent 15 years in journalism, starting out as a sports sub-editor with Reuters in the illogical progress of most hacks, before falling in love with the world of investment, industry and what he calls geo-finance typified by the currency wars. Since then he's written three books on investment, four company histories, an account of the global Great Depression and specialises in financial history.

A perfect night's entertainment these days is three hours on a couch with a volume on medieval French mints. An MA in modern languages, he works in French, Spanish, German and (very slowly) Italian. Although he can’t claim to have done a Nouriel Roubini and predicted the latest crisis, he and his partner got nervous in 2004 and sold all of their assets including property, lived in three different countries, and haven't yet reinvested. For leisure he does triathlons, road-racing and plays the piano.

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Tony spent most of his career in strategy and corporate finance, and now runs his own corporate development consultancy. He applies his professional approach to personal investing, preferring to analyse a company in terms of its market and competitive position as much as its financials.

He is a firm believer in emerging markets, having worked extensively in Eastern Europe before it emerged. This means he also has an intimate grasp of the concept of risk, and how things might turn out differently from what was expected. He is unfortunately less acquainted, in a personal capacity, with the parallel concept of luck, but believes that one day there will be a unified quantum theory of the stock market to explain everything.

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Malcolm has been an avid reader of the Fool's discussion boards since 2000, and began writing for us in early 2007. After a career in industry and two of the (then) Big Five consulting firms, he began writing full-time in 1991. He has a Master's degree in Economics, an MBA, and in 1983 completed a part-time Ph.D degree.

Malcolm bought his first share aged 19, participated in the usual clutch of 1980s privatisations and flotations, and is a fan of low-cost index trackers and specialist funds that aren't closet trackers charging much higher prices. Otherwise, he prefers higher-yielding mega-caps. A lapsed private pilot, he's building an aircraft in his garage: one day, it's rumoured, he may even finish it. He lives near the sea in rural Devon.

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