Alan Kohler

Who is Alan Kohler?

Alan Kohler has been a financial journalist since 1971. He 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 publishes 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 that it did when it was owned by AIBM.

He also appears on the ABC’s Inside Business from 2002 to 2013 and 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, Alan 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’. This saw Kohler receive some criticism from Eureka Report readers, many who followed his lead and sold off most of their shares without knowing that the market was set for a two year bull run.