WHATWALL STREET WON’TTELLYOU
new subscribers is, in many ways, a richer challenge than pulling together a hard-boiled report for a corporate client. He and Spivey strolled the Boston Common, chomping on Philippine cigars, while they brainstormed a recent composition: “Florence Nightingale Was a Data Scientist.” It tells the story of the pioneering nurse and social reformer’s often-overlooked impact on the field of biomedical recordkeeping – all as a means of introducing Valens’ study of CVS and Aetna’s new foray into large-scale biomedical data collection. “He’s spending so much time and energy on this because he has a passion for trying to teach people how to really think about value and companies and strategies of companies,” says Miles Everson, the CEO of MBO Partners and, until recently, the head of global advisory and consulting at PricewaterhouseCoopers. “There’s an authenticity or an honesty and purity about how he sees the world – and the way he makes his money is obviously publishing the information and providing it, but he doesn’t feel slippery.” Everson argues that Litman doesn’t actually try to sell you on the companies he’s choosing to highlight. Instead, he’s just genuinely excited to tell you what he knows. Individual investors and institutions technically receive the same advice at the same time. The CVS-Aetna analysis, for instance, goes to elite Valens clients and retail investors who sign up for Altimetry. But Altimetry subscribers get an engaging story about a historical heroine who harnessed the power of biomedical engineering, whereas institutional
clients get just the numbers and facts. Taking such conventionally inaccessible, tedious, and technical material as the alchemy of accurate accounting and making it not just accessible, but interesting and exciting for a general audience, is the kind of impossible task only a natural teacher would want to take on. “The teaching continues at every level,” Litman says of the path that’s led him here – and its goal, all along, to find the most efficient way to tell the truth about financial statements. “If I could speak to a million people at once about this stuff, I would.” Of course, that’s kind of the whole idea: Subscribe, and you’ll be one of them. American Consequences magazine is pleased to announce that we have partnered with Joel Litman to get access for our readers to his newWall Street “truth detecting” system. On September 25, he is featuring a free training session and presentation – and you can join him. But you have to RSVP to reserve your seat. Click here to learn more about his work and how to get free access to his system. Alice Lloyd is a writer and reporter in Washington, D.C., covering culture, politics, and the weirdness in between. Her work has been featured in the New York Times , the Washington Post , the Boston Globe , and the Weekly Standard .
Joel Litman Photograpy By Ben Struble.
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