Lighthouses in Alyce’s Words
“I would say a lot of my current and former Motley Fool colleagues are lighthouses, but if I have to pick one person, it would be my mom. She has always believed in me and has been so proud of my accomplishments but also at times has steered me in ways that I might not have gone on my own. Granted, I don't always do what she thinks I should—me interviewing at start-ups in people's houses used to freak her out when I was in my twenties. That whole concept was so new back then and older generations were used to people working for one company all their lives and then retiring with a pension. Still, she is always my biggest cheerleader and defender and at times, makes me step back and think of things in a different way.”
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From 1988 until 1992, Alyce attended St. Mary’s College of Maryland, where she majored in language and literature. Although that was a formative experience that molded much of her life, for personal reasons, she withdrew from college just short of an official degree. She had always dreamed of being a writer, but during that time, jobs for aspiring writers and even college graduates were few and far between, so she decided it was unrealistic to wait for the perfect day job. She took a job as a typist at a subcontractor to the Securities and Exchange Commission. She advanced steadily within the organization, but as the Internet became more prominent, Alyce realized she wanted to take her experience as an English major and use it for a job in the business and financial information field. Shortly after, she found a job at Comtex News Network in its Top News Summaries Division. She learned firsthand of the limitless possibilities of the Internet such as constant access to real-time news. Her job exposed her to many aspects of journalism and finance in the early dot-com days that continued to intrigue her and led to her next job.
Although Alyce was continuously exposed to the stock market through her job at Comtex, she did not buy her first stock until the mid to late nineties, during the dot-com bubble. Throughout her life, she has been an avid reader of The Motley Fool and followed that service closely, but she fell victim to the excitement of the dot-com bubble and learned some valuable lessons when she bought shares in some unsuccessful technology companies. Not all her investments were bad, though. She also was an early shareholder of Amazon and XM Satellite Radio. These investments could have paid off in the long haul, but Alyce was laid off from her job when the dot-com bubble burst and had to sell her shares in all of her stocks. Yet again, she struggled to find a job that fit her.
In the mid-90s, Alyce decided that she wanted to work for The Motley Fool. She interviewed three times for different positions at The Fool: “I think giving up too easily on things you want is a mistake, and trying again, sometimes repeatedly, can really pay off.” It did pay off because in 2003 she was hired as a writer and analyst at The Fool. The Shakespearean inspiration behind its name (it comes from the play As You Like It) most attracted Alyce to the company. A fool in medieval times was a court jester, the only member of the king’s court who could be brutally honest with the king without getting his head chopped off. The Motley Fool is “dedicated to educating, amusing, and enriching individuals in search of the truth.” She also found her English major, along with the company’s supportive atmosphere, helped her be a successful employee: “It seemed like a natural place for someone like me to want to be.”
The critical thinking strategies she learned in college became important to her, as an analyst. She found there are lots of “unreliable narrators and narratives” in the industry, and an important part of investing is to ferret out the difference between the “good” and the “too good to be true.” Throughout her career at The Fool, Alyce has become a specialist in SRI. She worked on The Motley Fool’s Real-Money Portfolio project to show investors that social responsibility with investing does not have to come at the cost of high returns.
When Alyce began to focus on SRI about ten or so years ago, it was still a very small niche in the investing industry, with only a handful of funds specializing in the combination of aligning values with investments. Since her early days of writing about SRI, it has flourished alongside environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing to become a major growth area in the investing community.
True investors—as opposed to traders—focus on the long term. Over the long haul, how a company affects the environment, society, and the world matters just as much as profits. In other words, investors do not have to choose between a great investment and a company that makes them feel good. As Alyce explains, “I don't believe investors have to sacrifice! These days, there are more and more companies that are doing great work in making their businesses more sustainable, stakeholder-centric, and so forth. The range of choices we can make of companies to invest in while keeping our values in mind is expanding. Of course, it also helps to be a patient, long-term investor buying shares of high-quality, well-managed companies—and often, those kinds of companies are stakeholder-centric.”
Increasingly, younger investors factor social responsibility into their valuations of companies, but there are other investors who do not want to mix personal values with money making. Alyce has therefore made it her mission to educate investors on SRI: “Let's not forget the SRI integration element involves mitigating risk: if a company that's been hurting stakeholders in the blind, irresponsible pursuit of short-term shareholder value blows up and the stock collapses, well, they've lost money. People don't always realize SRI is a way to try to avoid downside risk. For many investors to be able to fully sleep at night, they'd want to stick to SRI portfolios or companies.”
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