Meet The Fools

After completing a PhD in Chemistry at Imperial College, David returned to his hometown in Hong Kong to hone his business skills. When he returned to the UK, via Singapore, he did a stint at Hilton Group's Racing Division, where he picked up a tip or two about the world of horse racing before joining the Fool in the summer of 2000.

Married with two children, David also produces the Fool's investing podcast, MoneyTalk, and can be seen regularly on the BBC, Sky and CNBC. He primarily invests in a mixture of UK and US blue chips and is a keen supporter of Chelsea Football Club.

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Maynard has worked at the Fool since 1999. He ran the Qualiport online portfolio on the Fool from November 1999 to September 2005 and was lead adviser for the Champion Shares stock-picking service from September 2005 to October 2009, at which time the service was relaunched as Champion Shares PRO.

Prior to joining the Fool, Maynard worked for a year as a Poll Tax clerk and then for six years at the local authority's IT department in the murky world of ICL mainframes and COBOL programming. He relocated to Kent to join a financial services firm's IT department and there discovered the joys of stock market investing. As well as keeping an eye on share prices and his local housing market, Maynard's interests include karting, martial arts and entertaining his young family.

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Before joining the Fool in late 2000, Jon spent eight years working at a university, lecturing and researching in computing, followed by a few years developing robotic laboratory automation systems for the pharmaceutical industry. Jon's other previous jobs have included - wine merchant, record shop assistant, croupier, bar tender, market researcher, actor and fire-eater. (One of those is a lie - and it's not 'fire-eater'.)

Jon now heads up the Community department of the Fool, dealing with customer service enquiries and moderating the discussion boards. In his spare time he invests with varying degrees of success and failure, keeps tarantulas, reads voraciously, listens to a frighteningly eclectic range of music, and cooks a great deal of curry.

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Stuart spent several years as an Chartered Accountant working in both auditing and corporate finance before joining the Fool in the dizzy dotcom summer of 1999. During his bean-counting years, he worked on a wide variety of clients, including Anglo American, Sainsbury, RNIB, Woolwich Building Society, plus a tea and coffee plantation business in Africa that was angling for a London listing (it never made it unfortunately).

A keen private investor, and even keener golfer, he started as a Foolish writer before somehow ending up the site’s editor. He’s performed that role since 2001, although he did have a couple of years off for good behaviour, during which he worked as a freelance writer. Stuart rejoined the Fool in early 2009 when the site refocused on investing.

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Owain is a magpie of the investing world -- and not because he gets into a flap. Almost any style of investing might suit him, depending on the bigger picture, and he's held all sorts of companies. Paraphrasing Keynes, he says: “When the market changes, I change my mind -- what do you do?”

That said, Owain is usually a buyer of equities, where he prefers lightly geared, modestly rated companies, and is increasingly on the lookout for Buffett-style intangible quality. He aspires to buy-and-hold: his best investment ideas are worth much more than he sold them for. Then again, his worst investment went bust due to management fraud!

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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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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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Way back in 1997, Bruce Jackson co-founded The Motley Fool UK. Back in those heady days, he fulfilled many roles, including investment writer, analyst, editor, customer service, HR, accountant and chief bottle washer. Through a process of elimination, he ended up as Managing Director for a period of 7 very odd years.

Prior to his journey at the Fool, Bruce was an accountant at the BBC, for his sins. These days, having downsized his career and his pay, Bruce is an investment analyst for The Motley Fool, both on the UK and US sites. His interests include investing (nice getting paid for working on your hobby), cycling, gardening, bodysurfing and playing with his wife and 3 young kids.

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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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Chris is a would-be value investor and serial optimist (one day West Ham will finish in the top four he tells us) who has been reading the Fool since 1999 and began writing for us in early 2009.

A freelance journalist and editor, Chris specialises in financial and business matters. Earlier in his career he worked at the Financial Times and he has since had articles in the Daily Telegraph, Independent on Sunday, The Observer, Reader's Digest, Investors Chronicle and Shares Magazine.

He first invested on the stock market in 1997, picking a 20-bagger. Since then, he's learnt that luck is a finite resource. Like some of Ben Graham's most prominent disciples, he hopes to live to be 100 years of age -- by which time compound interest should have worked a miracle with his portfolio.

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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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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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