US media veterans back new trading firm with financial news arm

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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. “Watchdog” was a name floated early on for the news arm.

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.

The venture capital arm of Emerson Collective, the philanthropic organisation run by Laurene Powell Jobs that is the majority owner of The Atlantic magazine, is also an investor. Representatives for Emerson did not immediately respond to a request for 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.

Among the seed investors in Hunterbrook are General Catalyst founder David Fialkow, Avenue Capital’s Marc Lasry, founders of RA Capital Management and former JPMorgan chief investment officer Matt Cherwin, according to the people familiar with the matter. Other investors include a former US solicitor general and quantitative traders from funds including Jane Street, Balyasny Asset Management and Millennium Management, according to the email.

Horwitz, who has a background in biology, is the son of Geraldine Brooks and the late Tony Horwitz, both Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists.