Meet The Fools

Full-time Fools

Owain Bennallack

Owain Bennallack (TMFFlaneur)

Analyst, Champion Shares PRO

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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James Early

James Early (TMFJamesEarly)

Advisor, Share Advisor

Take a former hedge fund analyst, add in equal parts writer and philosopher, and you’ve got James Early (TMFJamesEarly). James has been the advisor on the dividend-focused Motley Fool Income Investor newsletter in the US since 2006, and has now brought his dividend firepower to the UK.

James began his investing career at a long/short equity fund, where he learned the ins and outs of value investing, accounting chicanery, and merger arbitrage. He stretched his brain and sleep schedule to build complicated derivative models, as well as international arbitrage models that ultimately overpowered his computer. But he lived. And he somehow made it to the Fool in 2004, where he served as the Director of Research & Analysis before moving to Income Investor in 2006.

Besides being an equity valuation buff (nerdy work, but somebody's got to do it), James enjoys the outdoors – skiing and climbing in particular. James holds a B.S. in finance (magna cum laude) from George Mason University.

Nathan Parmelee

Nathan Parmelee (TMFDoraemon)

Advisor, Champion Shares PRO

Nathan is the most senior member of the Fool's global equities research team, having written for the Fool since 2004 and serving as co-advisor of Motley Fool Global Gains since 2008.

Before coming to the Fool, Nathan worked for a well-regarded industrial and financial services company, where he learned the intricacies of corporate acquisitions. His previous life allowed him to see the world -- including a three-year stint in Japan -- but ultimately, it was not his passion. He feels much more at ease evaluating potential investments for Foolish readers.

Nathan's investing interests include consumer goods, energy, agriculture, and special situations.

Maynard Paton

Maynard Paton (TMFMayn)

Deputy Editor

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 & Champion Shares PRO stock-picking services from September 2005 to June 2011, at which point he moved to become Deputy Editor of the UK Fool.

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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Charly Travers

Charly Travers (TMFCandyMountain)

Advisor, Share Advisor

Charly got excited about shares while working in a research lab as a grad student and seeing biotech stocks go crazy during the heyday of the human genome project. His love for investing quickly spread to other industries, and it was not a hard choice to trade in the lab coat for a business calculator after being bitten by one too many lab rats. He is a novice home brewer who hopes to one day cook up something worth drinking ... and to not lose the recipe.

Charly has worn many hats at the Fool, including writer, analyst, and head of the biotech and pharmaceutical sectors. Charly employs diverse investing styles ranging from buying cheap shares that have temporarily fallen out of favour to buying shares of high quality growth companies that he expects to hold for many years to benefit from long-term capital appreciation.

For the past four years Charly has co-managed Motley Fool Million Dollar Portfolio, a US service that invests The Motley Fool's money into the best share ideas from across the Fool. He has years of stock picking behind him as an analyst on the Rule Breakers, Hidden Gems, and Pay Dirt services in the US.

Charly earned a B.A. in psychology from Illinois Wesleyan University and an M.S. in pharmacological and physiological sciences from St. Louis University. In the course of his studies, he conducted research on animal models of Alzheimer's disease and the molecular mechanisms of cell growth.

Jon Wallis

Jon Wallis (TMFTarantula)

Head of Community & Customer Services

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. Prior to that, Jon's occupations 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 heads up the Customer Services & Community department, making sure our customer service is the best it can be and moderating the discussion boards. He's also a member of the Fool's editorial team. In his spare time he goes scuba diving as often as possible, keeps tarantulas, tries to learn Hungarian, and cooks a great deal of curry.

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Stuart Watson

Stuart Watson (TMFTigger)

Investment Editor

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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Nate Weisshaar

Nate Weisshaar (TMFTheSnake)

Analyst, Champion Shares PRO

Nate 'The Snake' Weisshaar is a senior analyst on the Fool's global equities research team, based in London, and specialising in coverage of European and U.K. companies. His investing interests include banks and other financial companies. Away from the market, Nate enjoys, socc... um, football, mindless action movies, and free running.

Before coming to the Fool Nate spent five years providing consulting services for small banks in the United States. He is a qualified Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA).

 

Foolish Freelancers

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G A Chester

Writer

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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Kevin Godbold

Writer

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 Holding

Writer

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 Jones

Writer

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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Michelle Morrisson

Community Fool

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.

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Alan Oscroft

Writer & Community Fool

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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Tony Reading

Writer

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 Wheatley

Writer

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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