Viktor Koen, who illustrated this month's cover story, holds a bachelor's of fine arts from the Bezalel Academy of Arts & Design in Jerusalem and a masters of fine arts with honors from the School of Visual Arts. Viktor serves on the faculty of Parsons School of Design and the MFA program of SVA. His images are regularly published in the New York Times Book Review, Time, Newsweek and Esquire. His client list includes Penguin, Random House, Doubleday, Simon & Schuster, Harper Collins, Rizzoli, Houghton Mifflin, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, Fortune, Money, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Atlantic Records, Delta Air-lines, IBM and Merrill Lynch. His award-winning prints are exhibited in galleries and museums in the United States, Europe, Japan and Australia.
Kristen French is managing editor for Registered Rep. and in June, began a blog on regulatory issues for the magazine's website called The Advisor Reformation. She's fascinated by crooks and cops. During her career in financial journalism, she has already witnessed two market booms and busts. Prior to joining this magazine, she was a reporter at Financial Planning magazine, and before that she was a reporter at TheStreet.com, just as the dot.com bubble was imploding. Kristen has called Brooklyn home for 10 years. She was raised in the suburbs of Chicago, on Lake Michigan, and went to college in the Berkshires.
Stan Luxenberg has written about mutual funds and investing since the 1970s. Writing for The New York Times, Forbes, and other publications, he covered the beginning of the great bull market in 1982, the market crash of 1987, and the dot.com bust in 2000. He has written for many websites, including TheStreet.com and CNNMoney.com.
Brad Zigler, managing editor of Hard Assets Investor (www.HardAssetsInvesor.com), has been both the observed and the observer on Wall Street and LaSalle Avenue. He was a regular media presence while heading up marketing, research and education for the Pacific Exchange's (now NYSE Arca) option market and the iShares complex of exchange-traded funds. Brad switched to observer status when he started writing for Registered Rep., Ticker, Mutual Fund, Futures, Financial Planning and Financial Advisor magazines, as well as Institutional Investor Journals. A morbid fear of idleness prompted him to also serve as a financial correspondent for the European Press Network and National Public Radio. A long-time Rep. contributor, Zigler wrote the story on page 54 this month on gold futures.