Reading annual reports used to take me a whole day. Now it takes two hours.

I'm a private investor. Retired. I spend a lot of time reading annual reports to understand businesses I might invest in. Annual reports are long. A typical ASX company report is 80-150 pages. Reading them properly — the notes, the segment performance, the risk factors — used to take me most of a day. I found a method using AI that gets me the same quality of insight in much less time. I use Perplexity to get an overview of the company's recent financial performance and any major recent news. This gives me context before I open the report. Then I focus my reading on the parts that matter: the chairman's and CEO's letters (for tone and priorities), the financial summary, the risk factors section, and any segment that seems unusual. For sections I'm unsure about, I'll type the section out (or summarise it) and ask Claude to help me understand what it's saying in plain terms and what questions I should be asking. I make better investment decisions now than I did reading everything. Because I understand more of what I read.

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