During this time, I delivered a wide range of ground breaking stories, ranging from Libya's seizure of a jet leased by Morgan Stanley to the role of mortgage backed securities in the demise of American International Group during the 2008 financial crisis and the use of an Irish subsidiary by George Soros to defer taxes on some $14 billion in hedge fund profits. I now write and provide contract research on a broad range of topics related to corporations, money managers and Wall Street banks.

My career as a financial reporter began in the basement of the Securities and Exchange Commission. It was early 1990, when corporations and investors still met their disclosure obligations through paper documents delivered to SEC headquarters in Washington, DC. Every hour on the hour, a staffer would trundle a metal cart filled with these documents to a cavernous press room on the building’s bottom floor. Dow Jones, Reuters and other news agencies would then race to inform Wall Street on the latest takeovers by corporate raiders such as Kirk Kerkorian and T. Boone Pickens.

It was there that I learned how to find major news stories by deciphering the details of merger agreements, loan documents, employment contracts, and financial statements. I gained expertise in using filings by mutual and hedge fund managers to better understand their trading strategies, performance, and use of leverage. Over time I developed expertise on derivatives, insurance, taxation and regulations for brokers, banks and money managers.

I now focus on using documents and databases available through government agencies -- as well as key stakeholders in the legal, tax and institutional investing communities -- to do research and report on Wall Street money managers and brokerage firms. While SEC filings are now widely available online, many other federal and state offices house information-rich documents that are much harder to track down. I have a deep understanding of how to creatively use these documents to obtain information on almost any financial issue, whether it is for writing news stories or providing custom research to clients.