G'day, I'm Scott Phillips, The Motley Fool's Chief Investment Officer here in Australia, and welcome to The Motley Fool's Guide to Investing.

Now, thanks for watching this series. What we're going to talk to you about over the next dozen or so episodes, maybe we'll cut one off, call it 11, is that we're going to help you understand how to get started investing in the share market, on the ASX in particular. But first you want to know, who are we and why should you listen? Glad you asked. We are The Motley Fool. Strange name, right? Yep. But a serious business. Why The Motley Fool? Yeah, we're fooling you, blah, blah, blah. We get the jokes. We hear them all the time. We get it. The Motley Fool, or the multicolored court jester is where those two words come from, is Shakespearean in origin. It comes from a couple of Shakespearean plays, but most specifically the play, As You Like It.

Now, the Motley Fool was, as I said, the multicolored, so motley, and fool, or court jester in Shakespearean language, was the only person who could tell the king the truth without losing his head. And that's what we're trying to do for investors around the world, and have been since 1993, and have been in Australia since 2011. Our job is to help you understand the financial markets, understand the best places that we think you should be investing. We're going to try and help you find the best companies you can find, and also help you understand the best way to invest. We're going to try and educate you. We're going to try and amuse you, and we're going to try and enrich you along the way. If we're doing our jobs right, we'll hit on all three of those things.

Now, The Motley Fool, as I said, has been around almost 30 years, which is amazing, and more than a decade here in Australia. Motley Fool Share Advisor, the service I run, and it was our flagship, our very first service here in Australia, is soundly beating the ASX, or the all ordinaries. So we have credibility from performance. You've probably seen me around the media or around the place. We have, I think, shown ourselves to be a credible, reliable, thoughtful and independent voice for Australian investors. And I think that's what we're trying to do. I think we're doing it pretty well. And I think we're worth listening to.

Through this series, we're going to give you the nuts and bolts of how to get started, how to choose a broker, how to think about the financial statements, how to recognize great businesses, how to basically get yourself through an investing boot camp to get yourself ready to and then place your initial trades. We'll talk about things like ETFs. We'll talk about individual companies. We'll run through some of the nuts and bolts of the financials and the numbers. We'll make it fun, we'll make it interesting, and we'll make it easy to digest. That's what we try and do here at The Motley Fool. And thank you for joining us on that journey. Here we go.