Alan Kohler


Alan Robert Kohler is an Australian financial journalist and newspaper editor. He is currently writing for his own online financial publication, The Constant Investor.

Career

In 1969, Kohler began as a cadet on The Australian; has been a columnist for Chanticleer in The Australian Financial Review and was editor of the AFR between 1985 and 1988. He was editor of The Age from 1992 to 1995.
Kohler was chief executive and a major shareholder of Australian Independent Business Media Pty Ltd, which published the online investment newsletter Eureka Report and the free, 24-hour business news and commentary website Business Spectator since 2007.
AIBM was sold for $30m in 2012 to News Corp; Kohler remained as editor-in-chief. The sale to News Corp did create some interesting media. It has been rumoured that Eureka Report now has less subscribers than it did when it was owned by AIBM. News Corp then sold Eureka Report to Australasian Wealth Investments, now called InvestSMART Group Limited, in March 2016.
Alan Kohler also appeared on the ABC's Inside Business from 2002 to 2013 and continues to appear on ABC News. He was chairman of Melbourne University Press between 2008 and 2012.
He is married to journalist and author Deborah Forster and has three children.
In his last weekend briefing of 2011, Kohler told his Eureka Report subscribers that he was significantly reducing his 'already reduced exposure to equities, possibly to zero' because of the high risk of 'another major panic sell-off on the market'. At the same time Morgan Stanley's equity strategist predicted a precise 7.2% fall in the US market at the start of 2012. While nothing particularly good happened in 2012, most of the bad stuff had already happened and been priced in, so markets went up.
In July 2016, following the sale of Eureka Report, Kohler started The Constant Investor - a new subscription model for investors and finance related clients which described itself as "Unbiased, Independent, Daily Insights For The Financially Curious". One of the focuses of The Constant Investor was to highlight investable companies outside the ASX200 and provide rarely available background information through interviews with their CEOs. This brought companies to the attention of investors, while their share price still had room to grow.
With a holistic view of the financial world, Kohler's work with The Constant Investor was picked up by non-financial readers. In August 2017 The Age's AFL section quoted Kohler's interview with outgoing Wesfarmers CEO, Richard Goyder, saying he "hates" pokies, and will seek to use his personal authority to wean clubs off them.
In November 2018, Kohler sold The Constant Investor to InvestSMART Group Limited with the agreement to merge the business with InvestSMART's Eureka Report. In December 2018, Kohler joined InvestSMART Group Limited as the group’s Editor-in-chief. The Constant Investor website was closed down in August 2019, with all new and old content from The Constant Investor made available within the Eureka Report website.
Kohler is known for bringing personality to financial commentary and highlighting charts that reveal more about humanity than just finance. While delivering the finance report on ABCTV on New Year's Eve 2014 he included a series of charts including the "Chunder Bell-Curve", forecasting "a little light barfing early in the evening; mainly kids and leftover mince pies."

Works