Horsewoman #4: Tanta, the screen name for the prescient commentator Doris Dungey, on Bill McBride’s influential financial blog, Calculated Risk

What she said: In December 2006, Tanta, with no prior journalistic experience and having just quit her 20-year career in the mortgage business after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer, began her bitingly humorous and exquisitely literate blog postings that presaged the sub-prime mortgage debacle and the crashing housing and equities markets. In her first post, she gained wide notice by sharply criticizing a Citibank report that predicted that the mortgage market would improve in 2007 to the benefit of highly leveraged banks such as Citi. Tanta was one of the first to suggest that Citibank, the country’s largest bank, was at fundamental risk because of mortgage-backed derivatives.

The result: Tanta became one of the most influential financial writers online and off, and one of the first to see the impending financial storm. While banks continued to make risky loans and Wall Street continued to trade derivatives, and politicians such as George Bush and regulators such as Henry Paulson continued to say the economy was "fundamentally sound," Tanta fearlessly used her deep understanding of mortgages, a fearless turn of phrase and the power of new media to warn others of the coming storm.

Condé Nast Portfolio called her "one of the best financial writers in the world." She was quoted by Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman in his New York Times blog. According to The Wall Street Journal, hers was "one of the smartest and most influential blogs on the mortgage meltdown and resulting financial crisis."

Quote to set your teeth on edge: "You must understand that someday, quite possibly sooner than you’d expect, you will just not get an answer from an e-mail to me, and that might mean I’m in the hospital, it might mean I’m in the hospice and it might mean that God is my mail drop from now on."

Doris Dungey, Tanta, succumbed to ovarian cancer on November 30, 2008 at the age of 47.