This is earnings week. Apple reports tonight after the close, and the market will move on a document — a few pages of carefully chosen words with numbers attached. Dena Falken reads that document the way she has read documents for thirty years: word by word, because the words are chosen, and chosen words can be read.
An earnings release is a drafted text. Approximately is not exactly. Expects is not promises. Growth always answers two questions: growth of what, and compared to when? A one-time charge named plainly in the first paragraph is candor. The same charge buried in a footnote is a decision about what the reader is meant to see.
Berkshire Hathaway taught its shareholders this discipline. There is no earnings call and no guidance to hide behind: the report speaks for itself, and the shareholder’s job is to read it — slowly, completely, and in the order it was written.
Trading is language. The same precision that decides a cross-border contract decides an earnings season. Contracts, earnings calls, and central bank statements are one discipline: reading exactly what is written, and noticing exactly what is not.
For thirty years, through Legal-Ease International, Dena Falken has trained professionals from Saudi Arabia to Panama, Portugal, Mexico City, and Chile to read documents this way — because in her world, one word can cost millions.
She is the author of Million Dollar Words and The Global Legal English Masterclass: Essential Terminology for Cross-Border Documents, available through her Amazon author page: Million Dollar Words and The Global Legal English Masterclass. Million Dollar Words is also on Goodreads.
Dedicated to her mother, Laurel Ruth Falken, who loved words — she taught English — and to her father, Steven N Falken, who loved entrepreneurship, and who told her, when she began her seminars: “You’ll be an entrepreneur.”
