FT: Biz journalists teaming up with investors to trade on news

A group of veteran U.S. financial journalists is teaming up with investors to launch a trading firm that is designed to trade on market-moving news unearthed by its own investigative reporting, reports the Financial Times.

Kate Duguid, Joshua Franklin, Ortenca Aliaj and James Fontanella-Khan of the FT report, “Matt Murray, the former editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal, is acting as an adviser through his role with Outside the Box Investments, one of the company’s investors. Hunterbrook and Murray declined to comment.

“In an early message to potential investors, seen by the Financial Times, Horwitz said the investment fund would get ‘unique access’ to articles before they are published. ‘Rather than try to predict or react to events, we time trades on news we break ourselves,’ he wrote, styling the venture as ‘the first trading fund driven by a global publication.’

“The reporting team — which Horwitz’s email said would include journalists from the WSJ, BBC and Barron’s as well as ‘intel analysts’ — aims to publish market-moving investigative pieces ‘like Bloomberg,’ but with no advertisements or subscription paywall.

“The fund would trade stocks, options, currencies, commodities and other assets, Horwitz told potential backers.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.