MarketWatch.com reporter Myra Saefong writes about how she came to cover commodities for the financial news website for 20 years.
Saefong writes, “I was hired as a newswire operator to help distribute financial news and commodity reports to customers for a third-party client.
“As part of my duties, I was required to arrive in the office promptly at 5 a.m. — several miles from my home with few transportation options that early in the morning, particularly for someone who didn’t have a driver’s license. That didn’t work out too well for me in the first couple of weeks, but thanks to a devoted father, who charged me $20 a week for gas, and an office move to more public-transit-friendly San Francisco, I was able to keep my job.
“Admittedly, I didn’t cover commodities when I first started, but the transition was a natural one, after working the newswires and distributing news — from economic reports to oil and gold to U.S. Department of Agriculture reports on grains and livestock — and watching the market reactions to each piece of news.
“Weeks turned to months, and I learned much more about commodities and how to report on them from my mentor, Mary Kennedy, who wrote a daily column titled ‘Futures Movers.’ As the company grew, it hired more reporters and, by then, I had proved to be a strong writer, with a good understanding of the commodities market.
“When my mentor left, I took over the column and eventually started two more dailies: ‘Metals Stocks‘ and the now-defunct ‘Energy Stocks.’ I started up my ‘Commodities Corner‘ column in 2005, did a two-year stint at the MarketWatch Asia bureau in Japan, and began writing a weekly commodities column for Barron’s in 2017.”
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