I have been a financial journalist for more than 25 years. I began this leg of my journalism career as a reporter writing about the corporate part of the capital markets back in the 1980s when companies like L.F. Rothschild and Alex. Brown (remember them?) were rushing to sell their IPOs, when the retail rage was Home Shopping Network and QVC and a guy named Mike Milken and his trading desk in Beverly Hills dominated the high-yield bond market (Mike used to yell at me for calling them “junk” bonds) for Drexel Burnham Lambert. I reported on the 1987 stock market crash and thought to myself – this will be the biggest story of my financial career. Fast forward 20 years and I’m now helping direct our reporting and editing staffs through coverage of what certainly is the biggest story of my financial career. Back in the late 1980s, I wrote about some crazy residual mortgage securities that brought down a REIT or two and led to the demise of a securities firm called Thomson McKinnon. And again, I thought I had just closed the book on writing about bad mortgages being packaged into esoteric securities. Some of the characters/sources I used to hang around with: “Don The Junk Man” was one of the best junk bond traders and he didn’t work for Drexel. Kevin “G-Man” was an excellent investment-grade corporate bond trader. My ears are still ring from having the phone slammed in them every time I called the Salomon Brothers syndicate desk.
After reporting, I helped build the reporting staff at the Dow Jones News Service and later took on other managerial roles, eventually becoming the managing editor of the News Service for about seven years. While there, I helped create some of our content aimed at financial advisers and helped create what has become an award-winning column called “In The Money,” which we still publish today and takes a close look at the value proposition of companies and market segments.
Today, I am senior editor of the Americas for Newswires, which means I am ultimately responsible for what we publish from Toronto in the north to Buenos Aires in the south. I still try to write an occasional column and stick my nose into our coverage of many of the bigger stories of the day and those others I find interesting/amusing.
Prior to Dow Jones, I was, among other things, a police reporter for a small newspaper in New Jersey. Whoever would have thought that background would come in handy today (read Madoff, Stanford, etc.)
I’m a proud graduate of the University of Richmond, the 2008 National Champs for the old Division 1-AA football league. English, Math and Journalism were my majors.
