As a business journalist, she won honors from the Los Angeles Press Club and Aerospace Writers Association for exclusive stories on the military space industry. She also initiated business coverage of the South Central areas of Los Angeles, then largely overlooked by newspapers, after the Rodney King riot. In 1994, she moved East to become an editor at Bloomberg News, where as leader of the North American equities team she oversaw coverage of such transformational financial stories as the birth of online trading and the dot-com boom. Simultaneously, she served as copy desk chief and provided TV commentaries and interviews for Bloomberg TV. Laurel left Bloomberg in 2000 to work with quantitative investment pioneer Victor Niederhoffer, with whom she co-authored hundreds of columns on investing for popular financial websites such as MSN Money, The Street, and Worldly Investor. She and Niederhoffer co-wrote Practical Speculation (John Wiley & Sons, 2002), an investment guide for laypeople, and gave presentations in several countries. In 2003, Laurel left journalism to start a family, occasionally freelancing as writer and editor for Politico, RSM, and Medtech Europe. She re-entered the workforce in 2021 to join the personal finance news operation at the Balance as an editor.
