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.

She 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 retired 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.