Felix Salmon: From Art History Grad To Financial Journalist

Felix Salmon has had an interesting career path. He studied art history in the UK but ultimately became a financial journalist and a blogging editor for Reuters. “I've been doing this for four years now,” he told Benzinga during a recent interview. “I link to interesting stuff on the web and add my two cents when it's worth it. I have a lot of fun doing it.” So how did an art history grad become a financial journalist? Salmon jokes that he was otherwise unemployable. “The only person foolish enough to give me a job was Euromoney,” he said. At the time, he didn't know much about the bond market. But he quickly caught on and eventually found himself on an unexpected career path. “I moved to NYC in 1997 for a little dot-com operation called intermoney.com,” he said. “The idea was that we would bring financial journalism online. So, yeah, I've been writing web-formatted hyperlinked stories since 1997.” In recognition of his work, Salmon recently received the Excellence in Statistical Reporting award this year. “I'm not entirely sure what work I did to earn that award,” he jokes. “All I know is that the good people at Columbia University decided to give me this award.” “The Columbia people,” he adds, “know that I've been banging on how a blog should be a blog. I provide a level of skepticism that a lot of journalism don't have the time to provide.” Some of that skepticism includes the belief that stocks are a good long-term investment. “Is there any sort of theoretical basis why that should be true?” he questions. “I think there probably is – but I think people are far too unequivocal when they look at these things. They don't stop and ask whether they these things are actually true before making these enormous decisions about their life savings.” As it turns out, Salmon's best investments have nothing to do with powerhouse corporations like Google Inc. GOOG, which currently trades for more than $600, or Priceline.com PCLN, which trades for more than $360. “The best investment decision I ever made was probably my G4 Quicksilver Mac tower, which I bought over 10 years ago and got me up and running in terms of blogs and the like,” Salmon said. “The worst investment, there's been so many of those. Fortunately, most of those were not financial. [But] I always feel like I learn something when I spend a lot of money on something useless.” You can read the full interview with Salmon – or listen to the podcast – right here on Benzinga.com: Simply Stats – Interview with Felix Salmon, Blogging Editor for Reuters.