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.

Many value investors will tell you that they don’t really need any fancy tools. Maybe some good reading materials, a way to view/screen companies, and then then time. I agree with this. We’re a pretty spartan bunch, but there are certain things that could make us more productive. Evernote is one of them.

Every day I read an assortment of financial blogs along with newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. I also browse news that specifically relates to any of the companies I own (I obtain this through Google Finance).

Sometimes though, I don’t have time to read all of an article. Or I want to save the article I’m reading. Here is where Evernote comes in.

You can add a small button to the bookmark bar of your browser, and while you are reading articles which you’d like to save for later, all you have to do is highlight some of the text that you find important and press the bookmark bar. Upon doing this you’ll be brought to the Evernote page where you can confirm that you’d like to add this and you can tag the page for easier searching later on.

Here’s an example. Today I was reading an article about Children’s Place and their earnings and wanted to save it for later use.

So first in the article, I highlight the key text I want, and then I click the Evernote button in my bookmark bar. (As always, click the image to enlarge)

Upon clicking the bookmark bar, you will be asked to log in to Evernote, and then fill out some details about the note you are adding.

As you can see, I just tagged a few things regarding the note. The company’s name and then the nature of the note (earnings). Finally, if you click the button to go to your notebook, or ever decide to visit your notebook, you will see your notes in the following format:

You see the title of the web page, the text that I had originally highlighted, and you have a link to the website. All together, this makes for an almost seamless method of saving things that you have read and liked online, so that you can easily go back to it. Evernote offers a few different solutions, what I have just shown here is their web solution — which I like because you gain the ability to access your information from anywhere. However, the company offers applications for Windows and Mac OS X Leopard users. Also, while I have only shown that you can use Evernote for creating databases of websites and articles you’ve read, you can also use it for almost any kind of data – pictures, pdf files, .doc files, and so on.

Lately I have found this extremely useful for breaking down long articles and reading them later, and I find it beneficial for my blogging. I read so much that it is helpful to easily be able to create a “filing cabinet” of things I want to come back later.

Evernote isn’t going to automatically perform DCF valuations or calculate the intrinsic value of your investments, but it might help you keep track of companies you find interesting. I believe that at the moment their web service is by invitation only, but feel free to e-mail me if you would like an invite.