Doug Ashburn
Doug Ashburn
Encyclopædia Britannica Editor
Connect with Doug Ashburn
BIOGRAPHY

THE BIG PICTURE

Doug is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER®ļø and Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst who spent more than 20 years as a derivatives market maker and asset manager before “reincarnating” as a financial media professional 15 years ago.

Before joining Britannica as executive editor in 2022, Doug spent nearly six years managing financial education initiatives for a dozen clients, including TD Ameritrade (and later Charles Schwab & Co.), for which he served as the principal editor of The Ticker Tape, a market news and personal finance site for retail investors. He also spent five years covering financial market structure, with a specialization in derivatives regulation in the wake of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010.

PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS

CFP®ļø | CFP Board 
Certificant since 2026

CAIA | Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst 
Charter Holder since 2006

PRMIA | Professional Risk Managers’ International Association  
Former Regional Director (Chicago region)
Former editor of Intelligent Risk, PRMIA’s global member newsletter

CME Group  
Former member, Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Chicago Board of Trade

EDUCATION

BS, Agricultural Economics | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 
MBA, Economics & Sustainability | Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL  

IN DOUG’S OWN WORDS …

While my years as a financial journalist taught me how to get to the heart of a story and create a narrative, nothing shaped my craft quite like those years as a derivatives trader. It’s there that I learned how to mix the quantitative and the qualitative, how to separate the signal from the noise and, above all, how to act and think independently so I could steer my own financial ship. 

That’s the spirit with which we’re building Britannica Money—to offer practical,  relevant, unbiased financial insights to all investors of all ages and stages.

Whether you go it alone or work with an advisor, the goal is the same: make smarter, more confident decisions. That’s where Britannica Money comes in.

Primary Contributions (144)
Close-up of George Washington on a U.S. dollar bill wearing blue swimming goggles.
There’s a joke in economic circles that a recession is when your neighbor loses their job, and a depression is when you lose yours. But if you go by the National Bureau of Economic Research (ā€œNBER,ā€ whose Business Cycle Dating Committee is the official ā€œrecession refereeā€), a recession is a…
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