Last week’s BEAR! (no wait BULL!) market reminded me of a conversation I had a while back with Brian Richards, Managing Editor at The Motley Fool, a financial services company based out of Alexandria, VA (just a hop over the Potomac in DC). Click here to see Brian’s last fifty articles.

I asked Brian how he got into finance after MAPH, where he wrote his thesis on the topic of (depending on how you look at it, either perfectly applicable to finance, or not) horror films. At the conclusion of the program, he got a job in academic book publishing, and it was this first move after graduation that helped shape his career. “That’s where I got my skills and my vocation in editing,” he says. He worked on the academic side of the publishing industry for three years before finding an editorial opening at The Fool.

Brian says he had always considered stock-watching a hobby (heeding advice from his grandfather to invest wisely and be mindful of his money), and it made sense to apply editing skills in a field where he already had interest. This was especially true, given the background of The Fool‘s founders. “We’re very stock and investing focused,” Brian says, “but the guys who founded the company were English majors.” (Hence the company’s name, a nod to Shakespeare). Today, the site aims to publish sharp analysis of stocks, providing investors with insights and leaving news reporting and aggregation to other outlets.

“We leave questions about what happened to other publications,” Richards says. “We provide the so what and now what.”

Indexes are off a percentage point today on bad news from the German economy. So……..now what?

Brian lives in Washington, DC with his wife and two children (the second of which arrived just two months ago). Congrats!