Beat Wall Street: Empowering Investors & Financial Advisors

October 20, 2017

©Copyright 2017 Valens Research. All rights reserved

To be held at DePaul University's Driehaus College of Commerce, Downtown Chicago
with Joel Litman, President, CEO, and Chief Investment Strategist at Valens Research and Clinical Professor of Strategy and Valuation at the Driehaus College of Commerce at DePaul University

Professor Joel Litman

Sign up below to save your seat at this complimentary program. Although there is no cost to sign up, seating capacity is limited so please sign up early to avoid any inconvenience. 

We hate SPAM and promise to keep your contact information safe.

DePaul University's School of Accountancy

DePaul University Driehaus College of Commerce, Loop Campus
Richard M. and Maggie C. Daley Building
14 E Jackson Blvd.
8th Floor, Room 806
Chicago, Illinois 60604

Joel Litman is President and CEO of Valens Research, a global corporate performance and investment research and analytics firm. In the role of Chief Investment Strategist, he advises institutional investors in equities, corporate credit, and macroeconomic strategy. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of COL Financial Group, a leading brokerage firm in Asia (PSE:COL).

Litman has been on CNBC, quoted in Barron’s and Institutional Investor, and interviewed in Forbes.com. He has published in Harvard Business Review, is a top contributor to SeekingAlpha, and co-authored the highly-acclaimed book, DRIVEN: Business Strategy, Human Actions, and the Creation of Wealth.

Litman has taught or guest-lectured at Harvard Business School, U Chicago Booth, Wharton, LBS, SAIF Jiao Tong, and others. He is a Professor at Hult International Business School, an FT and Economist top-ranked international MBA program. He conducts seminars regularly for financial and industry conferences around the world such as CFA and CPA chapters.

Litman is Chair of the UAFRS Advisory Council which is spearheading usage of Uniform Adjusted Financial Reporting Standards aka Uniform Accounting. He helped build Credit Suisse’s HOLT University and the Center for S.E.V. and MBA Concentration at the Driehaus College of Commerce at DePaul University.

Past employment includes Credit Suisse, Diamond Tech Partners (now PwC), Deloitte, and American Express. He is a member of CFA Institute, the global association for investment professionals, and the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. He is a CPA (Certified Public Accountant), received a B.S in Accounting from DePaul University and an MBA/MM from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.

Litman’s philanthropy is focused on community development through scholarships, job training programs, and extensive microfinance lending, particularly in the Philippines.

In 2009, just as the dust was settling from the last major equity and credit market crises, we launched a boutique research firm with the intention of breaking Wall Street’s biases and broken incentives:

• GAAP and IFRS have failed to provide rules for reliable financial statement reporting
• Stock analyst recommendations are not grounded in disciplined financial analysis
• Credit agencies have been set up to grossly fail in their responsibilities to investors and the public markets
• Utter lack of willingness of major research firms to employ the the most advanced forensic analysis available 

We sought to provide investors and company analysts with a source of information that changed all that.

Many years later, our business model remains because little has changed on Wall Street.

• Corporate credit ratings remain years behind the fundamental underpinnings of company performance
• Stock analysts continue to make recommendations with deeply inherent biases
• Research firms have failed to break down the walls between credit, equity, and macroeconomic research
• The governing accounting bodies have created more leeway for mis-estimates and mis-classifications as financials have become unwieldy and overwhelming

The integrity of Valens Research is founded in our disciplined processes and analytics. No “star” analysts. No corporate advisory relationships. No-nonsense opinions and recommendations.

What Others Are Saying...

Wall Street has failed the financial advisor. 

Full of poor recommendations for buying at the tops, selling at the bottoms, and doing little to support a wealth manager’s real goals for the family and individual investor...

That’s where the movement behind UAFRS comes in. So much of a financial advisor’s work is dependent on quality investment research and reliable market forecasts -- and relying on as-reported financial data gives you anything but those two.

UAFRS, also known as “Uniform Accounting,” is a platform for more reliable equity, credit, and macro research. It provides quality insights that Wall Street and the Big 3 credit agencies have almost completely ignored.

By attending this complimentary program, you'll see just how transformative this can be for a wealth manager’s practice.

Download your complimentary copy of the precursor working paper here.