Claude Walker

I'm happier for being here.

Good to chat to you guys both.

Well, it's always hard to know where to start with those stories.

And I've told parts of the story before.

So perhaps I'll just fast forward to the bit when I created my first website, which was for blogging about stocks, which is kind of relevant in this context.

particular discussion because it was called Green Equities.

And I don't think many people know about that and it doesn't exist anymore.

But my first idea when I wanted to write about stocks is I wanted to write about stocks that would specifically be good for the environment because I love trees and nature and wildlife and all that sort of stuff.

And I basically...

wanted to find a way to align me making money and other people making money with also you know saving the environment um and then you know i think that the first sort of that essentially that first iteration in some senses failed because i was too focused on

uh, what I would call, you know, more pie in the sky, like green tech kind of companies, which just generally speaking, um, often promise a lot and delivered very little.

I think, you know, I've talked before about my first actual investment, which was a company called ceramic fuel cells, uh,

and that just the stock price went up because I bought it in February, 2009.

And I thought I was really smart for a while, but of course, throughout all that journey of that kind of investing in green equities, the initial website, I sort of started to realize, Oh, it would be really hard to, um, find high quality companies if I was so narrow in my focus.

So I decided to broaden it out to, um,

anything that I sort of considered ethical.

So then my next website was Ethical Equities, which I did for a while and I had a fair bit more success with in terms of the companies that I was personally buying and researching and writing about, you know, they did much better.

And, you know, it was at that point that like I then, I was hired by the Motley Fool and worked there for quite a few years, ultimately as advisor of the small cap service Hidden Gems for separate reasons.

You know, I like to invest in smaller companies.

And, you know, through that time, obviously, that wasn't an ethical investing service.