Cebra Graves: The Financial Web site Morningstar
Four years ago, Cebra Graves, a 22-year-old English major recently graduated from Yale, followed a few friends to Chicago, encouraged by the prospect of cheap rent and because "It seemed like as good a place as anywhere" to launch a career.
"I wanted to write a novel."
The fiction-writing has been shelved, but Mr. Graves is indeed making a living with his pen, or, more accurately, a computer keyboard - albeit in a vastly different way than he imagined.
The former Springs resident is now the editor of the financial Web site launched earlier this year by Morningstar, a mutual fund-rating service.
Rave Reviews
Although in its infancy, the Morningstar site has garnered rave reviews. Barron's, the weekly published by Dow Jones, recently listed it in its top 10, ranking it number 4.
Money magazine went a step further, calling Morningstar's the best financial site on the Web.
With more and more Americans saving for their retirement, children's education, or other long-term financial goals, mutual funds have become the investment of choice and a trillion-dollar industry. But with some 8,000 funds to choose from, making investment decisions can be a bewildering experience.
Five-Star System
"The whole idea behind Morningstar is that people hate numbers. They don't want to learn the theory, they just want the numbers translated into something that is easy and understandable," said Mr. Graves.
The company, launched in 1985, is widely regarded as a trusted source for fund information. Its five-star rating system has a reputation akin to a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.
But Mr. Graves stressed that Morningstar takes pains to remind investors that the rating system, which ranks funds based on their volatility and success against the broader market, is "just one component," and should not be the sole reason to buy a particular fund.
The company's Web site (http://www.morningstar.net), he said, takes advantage of the explosive growth in personal computers to give users additional information that may not be found so readily elsewhere.
It includes sections that help investors learn basic financial concepts, plan strategy, research stocks and mutual funds, choose a discount broker, monitor their portfolios, and talk money with each other in a chat room.
As editor, Mr. Graves is in charge of "content, and getting it out there every week." He oversees a staff of three feature writers and a news reporter, who monitors financial wire services for breaking news and edits work submitted by freelancers and staff members.
New Every Day
"We have a new feature every day, a new column every day, and news spread throughout the site," said the Webmeister. He also writes at least one story a week.
As might be expected, the pages are heavily laced with interviews with fund managers, reports on stock offerings, and other business news. For instance, when Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company led by Warren Buffet, the superman of investors, held its annual meeting, Morningstar was there.
"We profiled some of the companies he has bought into, and even had a complete transcript of the meeting," said Mr. Graves. "It was a pretty good journalistic piece. No newspaper would be able to do that. It is just too focused a niche."
Wide-Open Spaces
Mr. Graves is quick not to take credit for the Web site's success. Morningstar operates the project on a "team concept," he said. He praised its designers, who, he said, have created pages that are easy to navigate, allowing users, estimated at over 20,000 a day, to jump from news articles to statistical databases and back.
"The Web is really a designer's medium," Mr. Graves said. "It's a whole new format that's wide open. It's as if when they invented the printing press, they distributed it to millions of people at once."
Newcomers have the edge in the financial Web sites. None of the top 10, said Mr. Graves, "have anything to do with traditional publishers. It's like, anything you learned in conventional publishing doesn't work."
Slow Starter
Although Morningstar tries to stay on the "cutting edge of new technology," according to Mr. Graves, it was slow to launch a Web site. At first, the company relied on a service provided by America Online.
"It was pretty bland," said Mr. Graves, who was among several staff members urging management to start its own site.
"One of the people who was lobbying the bosses was "the boss," said Mr. Graves, meaning Joseph Mansueto, the company's founder, who came out of semiretirement to lead the project. "Without his interest, it wouldn't have taken off."
Two Years And Out
Before joining the Web site staff, Mr. Graves worked for two years as one of the company's mutual-fund analysts. His job was to write terse summaries of a dozen different funds every two weeks.
"It's like writing a sonnet about the same subject every day, and the subject is mutual funds," he said with a sigh.
"It's pretty much a two-year-and-out kind of job," Mr. Graves continued, noting that many Morningstar analysts have built on their experience and training there to land jobs with investment companies.
Entry To Business
Morningstar prefers to hire liberal arts graduates, he said, reasoning that "it's easier to teach an English major about investing than it is to teach an investor how to write."
Although he is now well versed in the world of finance and investing, Mr. Graves said he still relies on his background in English. "About the only place deconstructionism works is when you try to decipher what Alan Greenspan said," he joked.
His own entry to the business world was something of a fluke. Mr. Graves spent the summer after graduation in East Hampton busing tables to squirrel away money for the move to Chicago. The low rents he expected to find there did not materialize, and he turned to temporary agencies for work.
Early Dismissal
He soon eyed a position in futures trading.
"You got off at 3 o'clock," he explained - leaving plenty of time to write that novel.
The first job Mr. Graves applied for was with an arbitrage firm. "I went out and bought a suit, because I didn't even have one."
The prospective employer told him to be at the office at the ungodly hour of 5 a.m. He showed up at the appointed time and waited until 6:30, when the trader showed up - dressed in jeans.
No Future In Futures
The interview was "a steady stream of abuse," Mr. Graves recalled, with the trader telling him he was too small and ill-prepared to make it in the rough-and-tumble world of the Chicago trading pits.
Still, "he offered me a job right then and there" - a job which, said Mr. Graves, he declined, because "the guy was such a wacko."
Mr. Graves eventually found a home with a hedge fund "run by a Harvard dropout who was not at all impressed with my Yale education." He was placed on the stock loan desk and assigned "to shave a couple basis points" off the cost of borrowing securities needed to collateralize the firm's short positions.
Fascination With Computers
Realizing that he would not become a trader with the firm, Mr. Graves then made the jump to Morningstar.
Although he is now an editor - following, in a way, the footsteps of his father, Jack Graves, The Star's longtime sports editor and columnist - Mr. Graves would like to work on the "development side" of the Web site, exploring "what kind of features we'll have, and finding new ways to tell the stories and explain the concepts."
"It's all very exciting," he said of the Web. "There is all this information that will soon be at your fingertips."
A fascination with computers is "a generational thing," Mr. Graves suspects.
"Almost all my college friends are working on line, or in some way related to the computer industry," he said. "My grandmother will never see what I do with my life, because she'll never get on a computer. Just mention the word 'Web' to her, and she sighs."