Carol Junge Loomis (born June 25, 1929) is an American financial
journalist
A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalis ...
, who retired in 2014 as senior
editor-at-large at ''
Fortune'' magazine.
Education
Carol Junge Loomis attended
Drury College
Drury University, formerly Drury College and originally Springfield College, is a private university in Springfield, Missouri. The university's mission statement describes itself as "church-related". It enrolls about 1,700 undergraduate and grad ...
, and graduated from the
University of Missouri
The University of Missouri (Mizzou, MU, or Missouri) is a public land-grant research university in Columbia, Missouri. It is Missouri's largest university and the flagship of the four-campus University of Missouri System. MU was founded in ...
, with a Bachelor of Journalism degree in 1951.
Career
Loomis had the longest tenure of any employee in ''Fortune'' magazine's history, having joined the staff in 1954 as a research associate and retired on July 1, 2014.
In 1966, she coined the term "
hedge fund
A hedge fund is a pooled investment fund that trades in relatively liquid assets and is able to make extensive use of more complex trading, portfolio-construction, and risk management techniques in an attempt to improve performance, such as s ...
". for a hitherto little known strategy that took off as a result. That year Carol Loomis wrote an article called "The Jones Nobody Keeps Up With." Published in Fortune, Loomis' article lionized Jones and his approach. The article's opening line summarizes the results at A.W. Jones & Co.: "There are reasons to believe that the best professional money manager of investors' money these days is a quiet-spoken seldom photographed man named Alfred Winslow Jones."
4Coining the term 'hedge fund' to describe Jones' fund, it pointed out that his hedge fund had outperformed the best mutual fund over the previous five years by 44 percent, despite its management-incentive fee. On a 10-year basis, Mr. Jones's hedge fund had beaten the top performer Dreyfus Fund by 87 percent. This led to a flurry of interest in hedge funds and within the next three years at least 130 hedge funds were started, including
George Soros
George Soros ( name written in eastern order), (born György Schwartz, August 12, 1930) is a Hungarian-American businessman and philanthropist. , he had a net worth of US$8.6 billion, Note that this site is updated daily. having donated mo ...
's
Quantum Fund
The Quantum Group of Funds are privately owned hedge funds based in London, New York, Curaçao (Kingdom of the Netherlands) and Cayman Islands. They are advised by George Soros through his company Soros Fund Management. Soros started the fund i ...
and
Michael Steinhardt
Michael H. Steinhardt (born December 7, 1940) is an American billionaire hedge fund manager, philanthropist, and former antiquities collector. In 1967, he founded a hedge fund, Steinhardt Partners which he ran until he closed it in 1995. After a ...
's Steinhardt Partners.
5
In 1976, she was appointed to the Advisory Committee on Federal
Consolidated Financial Statements
Consolidated financial statements are the "financial statements of a group in which the assets, liabilities, equity, income, expenses and cash flows of the parent company and its subsidiaries are presented as those of a single economic entity", ...
.
In
1980, Loomis was one of six panelists at the presidential debates of
Ronald Reagan and
John B. Anderson.
She retired from Time/Fortune magazine in July 2014 after a tenure of over 60 years with the company.
Carol was met with sexism at the
Economic Club of New York
The Economic Club of New York is a U.S. nonprofit and non-partisan membership organization dedicated to promoting the study and discussion of social, economic and political questions.
History
Founded in 1907, the Economic Club of New York is t ...
, after they called Fortune to send someone to cover their black tie dinner in 1970. They refused Carol's attendance as they "didn't allow women"; their director said he did not want "any frivolous little Smith girls looking for a free dinner and the chance to spend an evening with 1,200 men in black tie." She still went, and later sued them. It was a private club so she lost the case.
Carol was later invited to the Economic Club and she turned down the invitation.
Personal life
Carol Loomis is a "longtime friend of
Warren Buffett
Warren Edward Buffett ( ; born August 30, 1930) is an American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. He is currently the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. He is one of the most successful investors in the world and has a net ...
's, the ''
pro bono'' editor of his annual letter to shareholders, and a shareholder in
Berkshire Hathaway
Berkshire Hathaway Inc. () is an American multinational conglomerate holding company headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, United States. Its main business and source of capital is insurance, from which it invests the float (the retained premiu ...
."
She married John Loomis, who was a partner in
First Manhattan Co. They raised two children in
Larchmont, New York
Larchmont is a village located within the Town of Mamaroneck in Westchester County, New York, approximately northeast of Midtown Manhattan. The population of the village was 5,864 at the 2010 census. In February 2019, Bloomberg ranked Lar ...
.
[
]
Awards
* 1968 John Hancock Award for Excellence in business and financial writing, national magazine writers
*1974 Gerald Loeb Award for Magazines for "How the Terrible Two Tier Market Came to Wall Street"Society of American Business Editors and Writers
The Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing is an association of business journalists. Originally founded as the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, in 2018, it changed its name "as part of a broader effort to embrace a ...
Works
"A conversation with Warren Buffett"
''Fortune'', June 25, 2006
October 27, 1997 (website of the Los Angeles Chinese Learning Center)
''Fortune'', February 5, 2001 (website of a McDonough School of Business
The Robert Emmett McDonough School of Business, commonly shorted to the McDonough School of Business and abbreviated as the MSB, is the business school of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1957, it grants both undergraduate an ...
faculty member)
*''Tap Dancing to Work: Warren Buffett on Practically Everything, 1966-2012'', Penguin, 2012,
See also
*Buffett indicator
The Buffett indicator (or the Buffett metric, or the Market capitalization-to-GDP ratio) is a valuation multiple used to assess how expensive or cheap the aggregate stock market is at a given point in time. It was proposed as a metric by inve ...
References
External links
"Fortune magazine senior editor returns to MU"
''Missourian'', KATY STEINMETZ, September 13, 2008
''University of North Carolina'', Chris Roush, Sept. 12, 2005
Carol Loomis articles at Byliner
''News Hour'', June 27, 2002
"Carol Loomis"
''Charlie Rose''
"Happy 80th birthday, Carol Loomis"
from the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Carol Loomis
''Longform podcast'', August 5, 2015
{{DEFAULTSORT:Loomis, Carol
1929 births
Living people
American women journalists
University of Missouri alumni
Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award winners
Gerald Loeb Award winners for Magazines
21st-century American women