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A group of veteran US financial journalists is teaming up with investors to launch a trading firm that is designed to trade on market-moving news unearthed by its own investigative reporting.
The business, founded by investor Nathaniel Brooks Horwitz and writer Sam Koppelman, would comprise two entities: a trading fund and a group of analysts and journalists producing stories based on publicly available material, according to several people familiar with the matter.
The fund would place trades before articles were published, and then publish its research and trading thesis, they said, but would not trade on information that was not publicly available.
The start-up, called Hunterbrook, had raised $10mn in seed funding and is targeting a $100mn launch for its fund, according to two people involved.
Matt Murray, the former editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal, is acting as an adviser through his role with Outside the Box Investments, one of the company’s investors. Hunterbrook and Murray declined to comment.
In an early message to potential investors, seen by the Financial Times, Horwitz said the investment fund would get “unique access” to articles before they are published. “Rather than try to predict or react to events, we time trades on news we break ourselves,” he wrote, styling the venture as “the first trading fund driven by a global publication”.
The reporting team — which Horwitz’s email said would include journalists from the WSJ, BBC and Barron’s as well as “intel analysts” — aims to publish market-moving investigative pieces “like Bloomberg”, but with no advertisements or subscription paywall.
The fund would trade stocks, options, currencies, commodities and other assets, Horwitz told potential backers.
Its investors include founders of General Catalyst, Avenue Capital and RA Capital Management, according to his email, as well as a former US solicitor general and quantitative traders from funds including Jane Street, Balyasny Asset Management and Millennium Management.
