Tom Lauricella
Tom Lauricella links global markets coverage with investor-focused context, using recurring series to show how moves in stocks, bonds, and themes like artificial intelligence and mega-IPOs translate into risks and opportunities for portfolios. He is Senior Editorial Director, Global Markets, chief global markets editor, and editor of the Smart Investor newsletter at Morningstar, anchoring the masthead’s cross-asset markets coverage. His distinguishing focus is on synthesising disparate market signals - earnings, interest rates, fund flows, and new technologies - into clear narratives about what matters for investors now and what may drive returns next.
Smart Investor: Cross-Asset Weekly Playbook for Investors
Smart Investor is his primary vehicle for shaping a weekly playbook across equities, bonds, funds, and thematic stories. These pieces consistently bundle multiple angles, such as “Rising Income Potential on Bonds, What’s Next for Gold, and Anthropic IPO Preview” or “Tech Stocks to Weather AI, Good News-Bad News on Return Dispersion, and Is ESG Investing Dead,” framing each topic around the practical implications for investors. He uses this format to walk through shifting drivers for stocks, from earnings surprises and sector rotations to questions about whether index investors are taking on hidden risks, as in Smart Investor: Next Drivers for Stocks, Risks for Index Investors, and Economic Outlook. The coverage often highlights how fund managers are responding, including pieces on fund managers dialing back risk and stock picks from top growth managers, putting professional positioning alongside market data. Across these columns, he emphasises portfolio-level outcomes: income potential from rising bond yields, undervaluation in stocks that crushed earnings, and the dispersion of returns that challenges simple benchmark tracking.
Markets Brief: Fast Lens on Earnings, Rates, and Market Structure
Through the Markets Brief series, Lauricella delivers shorter, timely reads that still carry a broad market lens. Headlines such as “Markets Brief: Are We in an Earnings Bubble?” and “Goldilocks for Stocks vs. the Bond Market, Private Credit Exodus Continues” show a focus on earnings sustainability, valuation, and the tension between equity rallies and fixed-income signals.
He often connects rate dynamics and yield levels with equity risk, as in “Here’s How High Yields Could Trip Up the Bull Market,” making clear how bond markets can destabilise stock advances.
Other briefs track structural shifts, from value ETFs making big tech bets and Nvidia’s dealmaking to private credit flows and currency moves like “Big-Tech Capex and What’s Next for the Yen,” framing these as underappreciated drivers of broader market behaviour. The series also extends to thematic questions such as “How Will AI Affect Economic Moats? Morningstar’s Take on the New Paradigm,” where he draws on house research to explore how technology changes competitive advantages and, in turn, valuation frameworks.
In aggregate, Markets Brief presents him as a guide to the week’s most pressing market signals, with an emphasis on whether current pricing and earnings trends line up with longer-term fundamentals.
AI, Mega-IPOs, and Market Disruptions
Lauricella has a sustained strand of coverage on artificial intelligence, high-profile private companies, and their impact on public markets and portfolios. Articles like “How AI Is Taking Over Your Portfolio” spell out how AI exposure creeps into diversified holdings through large-cap tech stocks, sector funds, and index construction. He follows this with detailed looks at upcoming mega-IPOs, including two-part Q&As on Anthropic that examine its business model, margin needs, and the risks investors should watch ahead of listing.
Similar attention goes to OpenAI’s reported valuation jump and the tension between rapid growth and growing AI safety concerns, tying corporate developments to regulatory and reputational risks that could affect valuations.
Beyond AI, he writes on SpaceX in the spotlight, explaining how earnings and lockup expirations could trigger waves of stock sales and reshape index fund exposures. This strand is reinforced by pieces on whether investors are ignoring big market disruptions and what risks sit in that complacency, underscoring his interest in how structural change and innovation can disturb familiar return patterns.
Income, Risk, and Return Dispersion Across Asset Classes
Another recurring theme is the balance between seeking income and managing risk across stocks, bonds, and real assets.
In Smart Investor columns he highlights the boon of rising bond yields, opportunities in outperforming REITs, and shifting prospects for gold, often pairing yield stories with questions about volatility and drawdown risk. Pieces on undervalued stocks that crushed earnings and value ETFs making big tech bets show his focus on where valuation and fundamentals disconnect, and how investors can use that dispersion rather than be hurt by it. He also tackles debates around ESG and the changing nature of return dispersion, examining whether certain investing styles remain viable as market leadership narrows or broadens.
Throughout, risk is treated as multi-dimensional: policy moves from the Federal Reserve, inflation pressures, possible earnings bubbles, and the role of “questionable tokens” in portfolios all appear as factors that can alter the risk–reward profile across asset classes. The result is coverage that regularly connects macroeconomic settings, valuation, and asset allocation, giving a clear view of how income and growth opportunities are shaped by evolving market conditions rather than isolated stock stories.
4 more finance journalists.
Abigail Summerville
Abigail Summerville brings a leveraged finance background to her work covering consumer and retail mergers and acquisitions for Reuters. She reports on deal-making and capital markets across food, beverages, spirits, personal care, skincare, bath products and pet food. Her stories focus on transaction terms, ownership stakes, valuation, debt structures and funding sources. She often breaks news on potential sales and strategic reviews before formal announcements. Notable coverage includes Sazerac’s acquisition of Au Vodka, Blackstone’s exploration of a ZO Skin Health sale, CVC’s efforts to sell the parent of Dr Teal’s, and Colgate-Palmolive’s planned divestitures. She also covers consumer IPOs, including Jersey Mike’s and Black Rock Coffee, and co-writes Wall Street market reports. She joined Reuters in 2022 after three years covering leveraged finance and primary debt markets.
Adekunle Agbetiloye
Adekunle Agbetiloye is a senior reporter who connects capital flows, hard numbers and energy transition to the wider African economy. He works at Business Insider Africa, covering how money, technology and energy reshape economic growth, jobs and living conditions. His beat spans the African economy, technology, energy transition, climate change, startups and critical minerals, with a focus on concrete deals and data-led stories. He reports on African startup funding cycles, sovereign wealth funds, billionaire investors, multilateral and private investment programs, energy and power markets, Bitcoin mining, and economic policy choices. His work follows how governments finance spending, manage debt and respond to social pressure, and how sector snapshots and health and development metrics reveal links between macro indicators, corporate strategy and everyday costs.
Aimee Picchi
Aimee Picchi connects Social Security, retirement programs and economic policy directly to the financial security of ordinary Americans, showing how macro decisions hit household budgets. She is associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch at CBS News, covering business and personal finance with clear, accessible explanations of complex money issues. Her core beat is Social Security and retirement, interest rates and inflation, and how policy, markets and company strategies affect workers, retirees, savers and investors. She reports on benefit adequacy, looming Social Security cuts, COLA changes, Federal Reserve rate decisions, fuel costs, trade tensions and labor’s share of income, always framing coverage around pocketbook impacts. Her background includes retirement reporting fellowships, prior staff reporting on technology, media and business, an Institutional Investor book on affluent investors, and freelance work for national outlets. She also writes science fiction and fantasy and is a Nebula Award finalist.
Alex Harring
Alex Harring turns fast-moving market, economic and corporate developments into clear pre-market briefings that show what will matter when U.S. trading opens. He is a markets and economics reporter for CNBC’s digital platforms and writes Morning Squawk, a flagship daily newsletter that gives readers five key things to know before the stock market opens. His beat spans financial markets, investing, consumer trends and the U.S. economy, with coverage of central bank decisions, inflation, corporate strategy, sector moves and geopolitical shocks. He focuses on how policy, data and earnings shape equities, interest rates, currencies and investor positioning, linking price action with underlying drivers in real time and in reported features. Harring’s background reporting on corporate news, business and the economy across print, digital, broadcast and streaming informs his habit of connecting markets, companies and geopolitics in one frame.