Jamie Ashcroft

I came to financial journalism from the dealing desk. My career story is not linear. You might say that I have a unique collection of skills.

After earning a first-class degree in Business and Economics, I started out as a stockbroker at the very tail end of a bull market that rolled into what we now call the global financial crisis. It was a wild time to cut your teeth in the markets, and, perhaps, it tells its own story that in 2009 I switched from stockbroker to journalist.

Before all that, I was a code school dropout; but that’s another story that takes a while longer to come back around to.

In 2009, I joined Proactive as one of its first external hires, when the site was still a blog and an investor events business. In the 15-plus years that followed I’ve written about practically every part of the UK market, and an awful lot of the major exchanges abroad as well.

For Proactive, there’s been an emphasis on the small-cap end of the market, and I’ve covered all the major beats: tech, oil and gas, mining, fintech, digital assets and finance.

I have also been developing the travel media brand We Are Guests.

Over time, my career moved toward SEO, publishing tech and content operations. And, with the advent of contemporary coding tools, my attentions have returned to matters of software.

In addition to being UK News Editor and Content Operations specialist for Proactive, I’ve been building the Velcrow Newsroom, a contemporary workspace for journalists and a low-friction publishing tool, along with a number of greenfield news media platforms which provide me with an exciting and innovative live workshop to battle test leading edge content.