Discover the Best Books Written by Carol J. Loomis

Carol Junge Loomis (born June 25, 1929) is an American financial journalist who retired in 2014 as senior editor-at-large at Fortune magazine. Carol Junge Loomis attended Drury College and graduated from the University of Missouri with a Bachelor of Journalism degree in 1951. Loomis had the longest tenure of any employee in Fortune magazine's history, having joined the staff in 1954 as a research associate and retiring on July 1, 2014. 

In 1966, she coined the term "hedge fund." 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." 

Coining 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's Quantum Fund and Michael Steinhardt's Steinhardt Partners.

In 1976, she was appointed to the Advisory Committee on Federal Consolidated Financial Statements. 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 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. Carol Loomis is a "longtime friend of Warren Buffett's, the pro bono editor of his annual letter to shareholders, and a shareholder in Berkshire Hathaway." She married John Loomis, who was a partner in First Manhattan Co. They raised two children in Larchmont, New York.