PROFILE · SEPTEMBER 12, 2026
A deep dive on Taylor Riggs, CFA — the Fox Business co-anchor who treats a balance sheet like a beat and a marathon like a career plan.
By Henry McClure · MCRE Media
Most business-television anchors can read a ticker. A smaller number can read a 10-K without blinking. A still smaller number can do both live, two hours a day, with a Chartered Financial Analyst charter on the résumé, a master’s in finance from Johns Hopkins, a law-school night shift in progress, seventeen finished marathons, and two young daughters at home. That is the stack Taylor Riggs brings to Fox Business Network’s The Big Money Show.
The show airs weekdays from noon to 2 p.m. Eastern. Riggs co-hosts with Jackie DeAngelis, Brian Brenberg, and Dagen McDowell. The format is a roundtable: markets, the Fed, earnings, inflation, housing, and the household consequences of all of it. Her public case for the job is not that Wall Street needs another talking head. It is that ordinary viewers should have access to the same kind of analysis institutions use every morning — without having to become institutions themselves.
When I think of Big Money, I think of the big institutional funding on Wall Street that is making money every day. Why can’t Americans have the same access to that, and the same opportunity to grow and build their financial wealth?
That line, from a January 2023 interview after she left Bloomberg, is still the cleanest statement of what she is trying to do on air. This profile is a look at how she got there, what the credentials actually buy her, and why the running-and-family story is not a sidebar. It is the same personality applied to different courses.
A small-town start, then New York at 18
Riggs was raised in Merced, in California’s Central Valley. When The Big Money Show launched, the Merced County Times ran the hometown story: parents from the Valley, a church that she still describes as a village, and a young woman who left for New York University at eighteen. She has said the small-town foundation — family, faith, a good head on her shoulders — is what kept her upright in a city that can feel like a chicken with its head cut off.
Her first paycheck was not a newsroom. It was her father’s small business: filing, reception, photocopies, the mail room. Asked later by Dana Perino how she made her first dollar, that was the answer. The detail matters because it is the same muscle she later praises in other people — show up, do the unglamorous work, learn the shop.
At NYU she earned a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and Communication Studies, class of 2009. The print years came next. She covered municipal-bond investors and sell-side analysts for The Bond Buyer, then moved to Bloomberg News, where the muni desk, Bloomberg Brief: Municipal Market, and eventually live television became the path. Nine years at Bloomberg is the long middle of the résumé: co-anchor of Bloomberg Markets: The Close and Bloomberg Triple Take, plus the less visible job of leading cross-asset coverage across stocks, bonds, currencies, and commodities.
Print first, then air, is not an accident she regrets. She has said the early writing years taught grammar, punctuation, and the value of every word — a lifelong skill — and that the jump to camera was harder in a different way. Face-to-face, she argued, carries more impact than the page. That is a reporter’s confession, not a celebrity’s.
The CFA, the master’s, and the law books
The letters after her name are not decoration. Riggs passed CFA Level I in 2015, Level II in 2017, and Level III in 2018. She also holds a Master of Science in Finance from Johns Hopkins University’s Carey Business School. She is a Juris Doctor candidate at New York Law School. She has described the CFA as the single most important educational decision of her life.
It was grueling but taught me everything I needed to know about how to analyze what a company is worth and be able to read and then understand financial statements. Plus, it empowered me to take control of my own finances and have my financial independence. It also gave me confidence knowing I could interview the smartest CEOs and analysts in the world on TV and go toe-to-toe with them without hesitation.
Asked whether other journalists should sit for the charter, her answer was yes, three times, with a warning: be prepared to give up your life for a few years. Girlfriends, she said, did not see her much during the study stretch. The dinners could wait.
Law school started in the pandemic, after too many episodes of Suits and an LSAT. She frames it as curiosity with a practical edge — learning to argue both sides, to follow a statute, to see how bankruptcy, commercial law, and the Constitution show up in markets whether viewers notice or not. Her husband, Bryan Kolterman, signed off on the enrollment so long as it cut down on Legally Blonde rewatches on the couch. That is her telling, not a press release.
There is also a chapter in a serious book. In 2019 she co-authored “Debt Investment Strategies” with Steven Cosares and Andrew C. Spieler in Debt Markets and Investments, an Oxford University Press volume edited by H. Kent Baker, Greg Filbeck, and Spieler. That is the muni-and-fixed-income reporter still in the building. Television did not erase the desk.
What the CFA does on a two-hour live show is specific. She has described it as learning to ask the unromantic questions: How does the company take in revenue? Where does the money go? What is the bottom line? Does it have pricing power, or is inflation eating the margin? The point is not to recite ratios on air. The point is to have already done the homework so the audience does not have to.
Why she left Bloomberg
She has been careful not to dump on the place that trained her. Bloomberg, she said, honed the financial skills and the “inside baseball” conversations. Fox Business was the chance to translate those conversations for a different room. Change, in her phrasing, is how you keep growing; you run toward a good opportunity rather than stay out of loyalty theater.
The Big Money Show premiered in January 2023 after she joined the network in December 2022. Early interviews have her talking inflation, the Federal Reserve, rate hikes, and what a 25-basis-point move actually does to a car payment, a mortgage, and a student loan. That is the translation job: take the wonky number and walk it to the kitchen table.
Her own investing advice, given more than once, is almost aggressively ordinary. Start young. Stay invested. Time in the market beats timing the market. She has said she dollar-cost averages an ETF that tracks the S&P 500 and tries not to sell when she is nervous. The hope is not a hot tip. It is that the index will be higher in twenty years. For a first-timer terrified of looking stupid, that is a more useful sentence than a stock pick of the week.
Most people start too late because they are afraid they don’t know what they are doing. And when the market has a big correction, they get nervous and sell instead of staying invested.
She applies the same rule at home. A slice of each paycheck goes into a 401(k) she will not touch for decades. Another slice goes into stocks she actually wants to own now. A smaller slice is for a dinner or a trip — but only if the saving is already happening. “We can’t eat out or go on a vacation if we also aren’t saving for the future. That’s our rule.” She has talked out loud to a baby in a grocery aisle about budgets, earnings, and a 529. Financial freedom, she argues, is a thing you teach early, not a lecture you deliver at eighteen.
Seventeen marathons and two daughters
The bio line on X is almost a joke until you notice it is a work ethic: co-anchor, formerly Bloomberg TV, CFA charterholder, MSF, JD, 17x marathoner, cat lover. The running is not a hobby she mentions for color. It is how she talks about everything else.
Life is a marathon, not a sprint. Marathon training teaches me the importance of routine, determination, pushing through pain and doing things I don’t always want to do even though I should do them.
She has cited David Goggins as the voice in her head on a 20-mile training run. She has called running mentally therapeutic. She has also run the original course — Athens — on a weekend that sounds like a travel agent’s nightmare: San Francisco to a red-eye, a missed connection and a night in Istanbul, the race on Sunday, back to California on Monday. Her now-husband flew west so she would not fly alone. Jet lag and 26.2 miles, she said, taught her that a weekend holds more than people think, and that you should be with someone you can still like when the itinerary falls apart.
She married Bryan Kolterman in July 2022. They have two daughters. Milly Ro Kolterman arrived September 11, 2023. Louisa Adeline (also reported as Adelaine) Kolterman arrived July 21, 2025 — in the back seat of a Lyft, a few blocks from a New York hospital, after Riggs underestimated how fast labor would move and how little the city’s traffic would care. A nurse cut the cord in the car. The name Louisa points to Kolterman’s grandfather; Adeline traces to a great-great-great-great-grandmother born in 1823. Riggs has said she once thought of herself as a “career” woman without maternal instincts. The public record since 2023 says otherwise.
She ran a marathon at 19 weeks pregnant. Recent posts have her talking through postpartum physical therapy — core and pelvic floor — and looking at a flat, warm December race in Florida rather than New York. The husband, she noted on X this weekend, is a Florida Gator. The running calendar and the family calendar are the same calendar.
How she sounds on the air, and off it
Watch the clips long enough and a pattern shows up. She likes a chart. She likes a guest who will defend a number. She does not perform outrage as a substitute for a multiple. That is the CFA habit leaking into television: start with what the company is worth, then argue. It is also why the “make finance cool” line is less fluffy than it reads. Cool, in her usage, means competent. It means a viewer can follow the cash without feeling talked down to.
Off camera the advice she repeats to other women is blunt. Invest in yourself. People can take a house or a car. They cannot take what you studied. Someone once asked her how she wanted to look back on the previous five years. Time was going to pass either way. Learn something, or watch reruns. Failure, she added, is evidence you tried. If you are not failing, you are probably not attempting anything new.
Peter Thiel’s interview question — “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” — is the one she says every manager should steal. She likes it because it punishes groupthink. That is a useful tell. The person who wants contrarians in the building is usually one.
She is also, by her own admission, a terrible cook. Kolterman is Italian and handles the pesto and the pasta. Favorite family board game growing up was Sorry!, luck with a hint of strategy. Monopoly took too long. She would get on a SpaceX flight tomorrow if Elon Musk offered the seat. Last book she mentioned to Perino was Shark Heart, which she did not expect to like and then did. None of that is material to the S&P 500. All of it is material to the person reading the S&P 500 on live television.
What the record actually shows
It is worth being precise, because profiles of on-air talent collect sloppy facts the way a ticker collects noise. Public sources put her birthday at November 30, 1986. Height is listed around 5-foot-5½. Mother’s name in public records: Gaye Carskaddon Riggs. Sister: Chiara Riggs Sill. X handle @RiggsReport, on the order of 35,000 followers. Instagram is @riggsreport. She is listed with speaker bureaus as someone who can take a macro print and turn it into a decision a room can use. The Fox Business biography remains the official short version of the career. The longer version is in the interviews she has already given — Talking Biz News, Adweek’s TVNewser, Fox News’ short questions with Dana Perino, the Merced paper, a pregnancy-and-running conversation, and the on-air work itself.
A few numbers will move. Show times have been described as both the 12–2 window and, in early launch coverage, a 1 p.m. hour; Fox’s current page lists 12–2 p.m. ET. The CFA charter date is sometimes compressed in older bios; the exam years are the clean public record. Daughter names and the Lyft birth are on the record through People and follow-on coverage. Where sources conflict on birthplace — New York versus California — the first-person line is the one that matters: born and raised in California, New York from age 18. Merced is the hometown that claimed her when the show launched.
Why this résumé is unusual, and why that matters
Business television has plenty of smart people. It has fewer people who have sat for the CFA’s multi-year gauntlet, written about debt strategy for a university press, covered the municipal market from the print side, and then chosen a general-audience show on purpose. The rare part is not the ambition. The rare part is the sequence: desk, charter, camera, law school, two kids, another long run.
That sequence produces a particular kind of question on air. Not “How do you feel about the tape?” so much as “Can this company raise price, or is the customer already done?” Not “Is the Fed hawkish?” so much as “What does this do to the payment on the truck?” The translation is the job she said she wanted. The credentials are why the translation does not have to be vague.
There is a Topeka lesson in that, and it does not require anyone here to care about cable bookings. Markets punish people who outsource their homework. Cities do too. Riggs’s public argument is that financial independence is a skill you can study, the way you study a course or a course record. You do not need a seat on a trading floor. You need time in the market, a willingness to look at a statement, and enough self-respect to invest in your own head before you invest in anyone else’s product.
She put it shorter for other journalists, and it travels: invest in yourself. You are worth it. Time will pass anyway.
That is not a closing applause line. It is the method. Merced to NYU to The Bond Buyer to Bloomberg to Fox. Level I, II, and III. Night classes. A race in Athens on no sleep. A second daughter born in traffic. Back on the set. The tape will do what the tape does. The work, in her telling, is to still be in the market — and still in the work — when the noise moves on.
Sources and notes
This profile is based on public interviews and official biographies, including Fox Business’s on-air bio; Talking Biz News (Media Movers Q&A, January 2023); Adweek/TVNewser on the move from Bloomberg; Fox News “Short Questions with Dana Perino”; Merced County Times hometown coverage (January 2023); First Time Parent Magazine on running and pregnancy; People / follow-on coverage of the July 2025 birth; the table of contents of Debt Markets and Investments (Oxford University Press, 2019); LinkedIn credential listings; and Riggs’s public X and Instagram profiles. Direct quotations are from those interviews. Where secondary bios disagree on small facts (birthplace listings, exact charter-issue month), this piece privileges first-person statements and official network copy.
Henry McClure is a Topeka real estate broker and the founder of MCRE, LLC and MCRE Media.
