Arends joins SmartMoney

SmartMoney editor in chief Jonathan Dahl sent out the following staff announcement on Friday afternoon:

I’m pleased to announce that Brett Arends, an award-winning columnist and one of Dow Jones’s most followed online journalist , has joined SmartMoney, effective immediately. Brett will bring his traffic-gaining prowess to our site, where he will continue to write his ROI (Return on Investment) column with his usual flair. But he will also now be writing features for the magazine. Already, in fact, he’s jumped into this new role with a bang in our new issue, contributing an enterprising feature about a 34-year-old college dropout/money manager who’s been baffling Wall Street with startling returns over the past 12 years. It’s a fine example of Brett’s knowledge and talents, as well as further evidence of SmartMoney’s commitment to expanding the reach and importance of personal finance coverage.

Brett has been at Dow Jones since 2007, first as a columnist for the Wall Street Journal online and then for MarketWatch. He came from TheStreet.com, where he won a SABEW award for distinguished commentary. Before that, from 2004 to 2006, he was a business columnist for the Boston Herald. He is a veteran of two infamous institutions: McKinsey & Co., for whom he was a consultant in the mid-1990s, and London’s Fleet Street, where he wrote for the Daily Mail, Private Eye and numerous other publications. He studied at Cambridge, where he took a “double first” in History, and he received his master’s degree from Oxford, where, as he puts it, he has still not gotten around to submitting his doctoral thesis.

Please join me in welcoming Brett to the team.