What Kate Admits
The (Almost) Unvarnished Facts

An early product of the baby boom, Kathryn M. Welling grew up in New Haven, IN, as the oldest of seven children. Youthful employment on the wait staff of her father's restaurant proved a powerful incentive for academic achievement. Kate won a scholarship to Northwestern University and graduated in 1974 with a B.S. from the Medill School of Journalism. The "Woodstein" wannabe immediately ventured to the Big Apple, joining Dow Jones & Co. as a copyreader for the AP-Dow Jones wire service and for the then-nascent Dow Jones News/Retrieval Service. Soon she was freelancing for publications ranging from a women's magazine, Savvy, to Barron's, the Dow Jones Business and Financial Weekly. 

In 1976, Kate talked her way into an editing job at the Wall Street Journal, but left the paper later that same year when Alan Abelson, at that time the managing editor of Barron's, offered her the opportunity to report and write full-time for the magazine. Over the next two-plus decades Kate tackled topics ranging from cardiac pacemakers to "down-hole steam generators" for enhanced oil recovery; from mainframes through minicomputers to PCs and the Net; from Disney's magical accounting to derivatives. She also covered crises spawned by the likes of Baldwin United, Penn Square Bank, Drysdale Government Securities, the Crash of 1987, and the demise of both Drexel Burnham Lambert and Long-Term Capital Management. Among the innumerable exposés she penned: the first ever published on convicted penny stock fraudster Robert Brennan and his once-high-flying First Jersey Securities and a bubble-pricking piece on Presstek's purportedly revolutionary printing technology. There was another revealing - near the apex of the stock's trajectory and more than a year before it sought bankruptcy protection - that a hot issue named Solv-Ex was more of a tar baby than a tar sands wunderkind. Kate also outed a company called ZZZZ Best.which wasn't. 

In December 1981, Alan Abelson became Barron's editor and promoted Kate to assistant to the editor. She claimed the managing editor title in February 1983. The Abelson-Welling team built, directed, shaped, edited and in no small measure wrote Barron's throughout the tumultuous 'Eighties, driving its circulation to record levels.

Kate relinquished the managing editor's post at the magazine at the end of 1991 to take an extended maternity leave after the birth of her second child. She rejoined Barron's, part-time, as associate editor, in May 1992, and full-time, the next year, but resumed only two of her long-standing roles: Backing up Abelson in the creation of his influential Up And Down Wall Street column and producing virtually all of the magazine's signature "Q&A" interviews, including its annual Roundtable issues.

Eleven years ago, in March 1999, Kate resigned from Barron's. The reason: Weeden & Co. LP CEO Barry Small had offered Kate the irresistible opportunity to create an independent research service in association with that respected institutional brokerage firm. The first issue of welling@weeden, her biweekly journal of investment news analysis and research, featuring Kate's trademark interrogatory journalism, was distributed to clients of her partners at Weeden that next August. As the advantages of electronic distribution grew, Kate quickly transformed welling@weeden into a secure web-based service, through which she consistently delivers incisive, independent market intelligence, analysis and perspective to clients who are institutional investors and savvy market pros.

Kate and her husband have two sons and live in Maplewood, NJ, a suburb of New York City.