CITIZEN ANALYST

Citizen Analyst is just what it sounds: a citizen doing analysis.  I started this site because I became increasingly frustrated at the quality of analysis I was reading in the press, and as a former investment analyst, I thought some of my work could help people better understand the important economic, legal, and political issues of our day.  Americans have rightly lost faith in the press, as it has increasingly abandoned objectivity and succumbed to the partisanship and political correctness that most of us have grown very tired of.  The Press has been and always will be about "grabbing headlines," but as competition in the media has grown and our attention spans have dwindled, this has only exacerbated the worst tendencies in the media.  I am convinced that people are still hungry for places they can go to read credible, balanced, and thoughtful analysis about the issues driving society.  I hope this site will be one of those places.

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To be more concrete about it, what this site hopes to do is to focus on the key economic, legal, and political issues driving the news and to report on and analyze them objectively.  Sometimes this will be "short-form" pieces, and other times it will be "long-form," depending on what the issue requires.  It will not be a day-to-day source for news, or at least not yet.  Often it may be stories or cases you haven't heard about at all, because for whatever reason they didn't make the cut at the major media outlets.  As we've all learned, the major outlets are not only subjective in how they cover current affairs now, but they're also subjective in what they cover.  I am also going to do my best to not (or at least not unnecessarily) wade into the "culture wars."  Sometimes that will be needed, but often times, those are merely contentious issues that have no right answer and that will always divide us.  That is ok.  People are not going to agree on everything, nor should we want that.  But merely stating my opinions on contentious issues is rarely going to add value to anyone, so don't look for that too often here.  There's plenty of places to find that elsewhere.  If I do venture into those choppy waters, it will likely be because of something being consistently misrepresented or misreported in other parts of the press.

 

Now, why should you listen to what I have to say?  First, because I think I have a unique place in the political spectrum where ironically I think most people are: the middle.  I have my leanings like anyone else, but I concretely believe the truth in politics lies somewhere in the middle, just as it often does in life, and my own voting record reflects this belief.  Second, you should listen to me because I spent ten years in the investment management business as an analyst, where objectivity is forced on you.  If you're not objective there, you lose money, plain and simple.  This is not true for journalists at the New York Times or anywhere else.  As a generalist analyst looking at all different kinds of businesses, I've learned to look at a lot of different situations, and to look at them in a lot of different ways.  I hope to apply both of these mantras--centrism and objectivity--to Citizen Analyst.  Though I still actively invest my own money full-time, I started Citizen Analyst because I want to take the skill set I learned on Wall St. and apply it to other things that I'm more interested in, and that are more important to society.  But the approach to conducting good analysis is really no different.  

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I hope you enjoy the content, and if you have questions, comments, things I should write about,  or anything else, please don't hesitate to reach out:  Justin@citizenanalyst.com