Investor Tools: Readability
As value investors, we typically read, a lot. Unfortunately, there are many places on the internet where websites are poorly designed which inhibits the readability of lengthy articles. The people at Arc90 have released a tool that I really love to use called Readability. Basically, after customizing it to your liking, you add the tool the bookmark bar in your browser and click it whenever you’re at a website that is tough to read.
Here, let me demonstrate.
So Shai Dardashti over at Reflections on Value Investing posted a great bit about BYD. One of the articles featured in the post, “Motown resembles a ghost town” by People’s Daily is a bit hard to read. The text is on the small side and it’s not anti-aliased. It looks like this:
(click to see full size)
Now, you could go onto the printer option, but that doesn’t help too much. And sure, you could try scaling up the size of the text. But I think Readability gives you a much better option. When you click the Readability button on your bookmark bar, the page transforms from the previous image to this:
(click to see full size)
Note: all the page’s elements are removed besides the text. The text is bigger, more readable, and the words per line are fixed so that your eyes don’t have to move all over the place.
I hope I don’t sound like a commercial, I haven’t been asked by these guys to blog about their tool, it’s just something I’ve found that I thought I would share. I feel that it helps me improve my concentration when reading lengthy articles because the page has less distractions. What I’ve also noticed is that on some of the SEC documents you find online, it’s great for reading through footnotes or anything without tabular data. Hopefully some of you find this as useful as I have.
