How MarketWatch’s Saefong has covered commodities for 20 years

Myra Saefong

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.”