Career

Katja Dofel was born this year in the Bavarian capital city of Munich. And a lot was going on there, as Oktoberfest was celebrating its 161st birthday. But unfortunately Munich also experienced its first bank robbery with hostages taken. And FC Bayern München was the German trophy winner.

Katja Dofel began her 13-year education. In the course of the years, German, French, politics, and sports became her favorite subjects of study. In 1977 the City of Munich Savings Bank opened the first ATM in Germany. And the future pope, Joseph Ratzinger, became the Archbishop of Munich.

At age 19 she began her studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) in Munich. In 1996 she graduated with a Master of Arts (M.A.) in politics, economics, and literature. LMU was founded in 1472 in Ingolstadt and moved to Munich in 1826.

Katja Dofel spent a year of her education at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. She chose Edinburgh because she had heard of the great student flair and beauty of this city. And it was a good opportunity to study English; in fact, she learned that this is done just as well in the pubs as in class.

Until now, Munich had been Katja Dofel’s cherished home city. But in the 1990’s she discovered a new love: New York City. She first discovered this „City of Superlatives“ during her time as an intern at the UN headquarters on the East Side. Is that where she acquired her taste for finance? In 1996 she completed an internship at the SPD headquarters in Bonn. And finally, she became an independent financial journalist with the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) newspaper in Munich.

Then, once again she moved from Munich to New York, where she started her career as a stock market correspondent as the first employee of stock market journalist Markus Koch and his company Wall Street Correspondents. Together with Markus Koch, Katja Dofel reported from the parquet of the New York Stock Exchange for the news channel ntv and various radio stations. In addition, she wrote for financial publications such as Das Wertpapier (Germany) and Cash (Switzerland).

With all my love (for New York): Shortly before the turn of the millennium, Munich’s „Madl“ was drawn back home to good old Europe. The Alps, the Mediterranean, the 1000-year-old cities, the German Stock Exchange…Katja Dofel has since lived with her family in the financial metropolis of Frankfurt am Main, where she started her career as a stock market editor for the Financial Times Germany newspaper. But she quickly returned to television, when a few months later she went back to ntv to report for her „hometown broadcaster“ from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

Since 2001 Katja Dofel has been leading the stock exchange studio for ntv in Frankfurt. And although her successful TV career has lasted more than 20 years, and according to her own reports, as of 2017 she has conducted more than 4000 interviews with capital market experts, she looks forward being on camera for the next 4000. In 2003-2004 Katja Dofel completed a postgraduate course in business administration at the Fernuniversität Hagen.

Since 2016 Katja Dofel has been collaborating on a project in the area of economics education, specifically dealing with financial literacy, at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. And in 2018 she began a teaching appointment at the College of Economy and Environment Nürtingen/Geislingen in Stuttgart. There she teaches economics students in equity management and equity research.