Democratizing the Understanding of Public Companies
Public companies are required to disclose everything. The public can't understand any of it. This is a solvable problem.
The Absurdity
Public companies are legally required to disclose everything material about their business. Every quarter, they file detailed reports with the SEC. Earnings calls are transcribed. Risk factors are enumerated. The information is technically available to anyone.
And yet, for the actual public—the millions of retail investors who own these companies—the disclosures are practically inaccessible.
This isn't a technology problem. It's a translation problem. And for the first time in history, it's a solvable one.
The comprehension gap
We have more financial information than ever—real-time quotes, instant news, AI-generated summaries—yet retail investors understand less than they should about the companies they own.
The problem is not access to data. The problem is access to understanding.
Consider what it takes for a retail investor to truly understand Apple. The 10-K alone is 80 pages. Quarterly filings add another 150 pages per year. Earnings transcripts run 10,000+ words each quarter. A conscientious investor faces hundreds of pages of dense, legally-cautious prose written for institutional analysts and regulators.
So most people don't read any of it. They read summaries instead. And summaries compress—they do not explain.
A summary tells you Apple's revenue was $383 billion. It does not tell you why Services revenue matters more than the number suggests, or how the installed base creates a flywheel, or what happens if China becomes hostile. Summaries give you facts. They don't give you the engine.
Who benefits from the gap?
The comprehension gap is not an accident. It's an economic equilibrium.
Bloomberg terminals cost $24,000 per year. Sell-side research is written for institutions, not individuals. Financial media optimizes for eyeballs, not understanding. The infrastructure of financial knowledge was built for professionals and has never been rebuilt for the public that now participates in markets at unprecedented scale.
The result? Retail investors make worse decisions. They buy high and sell low. They chase headlines. They mistake price movements for fundamentals. The "dumb money" narrative becomes self-fulfilling—not because retail investors are dumb, but because they're denied the tools to be smart.
Information asymmetry compounds wealth inequality. The institutions that can afford research analysts, data terminals, and expert networks make better decisions. The retail investor, armed only with CNBC and Reddit, makes worse ones. Over decades, this compounds.
This is not inevitable. It's a choice—a choice made by systems that have never prioritized retail comprehension. That choice can be unmade.
What understanding actually looks like
To close the comprehension gap, we must first define what understanding means. It is not knowing a company's market cap or last quarter's EPS. Understanding means being able to answer three questions:
The Engine
How does this company actually make money? What are the mechanisms that drive growth and profit?
The Context
What are the 2-3 things to watch right now? What matters specifically today, not generically?
The Dialectic
What is the best case for owning this? What is the best case against? With evidence, not opinion.
Take Apple. Real understanding is seeing the iPhone as a portal that captures high-value users, and Services as a tollbooth on that captive audience. It is understanding that China represents both the largest growth opportunity and the largest geopolitical risk. It is understanding what gross margin trajectory implies about pricing power—and what happens if App Store commissions compress.
This kind of understanding should be as accessible as understanding how photosynthesis works. The information exists. The synthesis exists. What's been missing is the commitment to make it accessible.
Five principles any solution must meet
These are not preferences. They are requirements. Any system that claims to close the comprehension gap must embody all five:
Source Fidelity
Every factual claim must trace to a specific document that the reader can access. No orphan facts. No hallucinated citations. If a claim cannot be verified, it cannot be included. This is the foundation of trust.
Educational Depth
Explain mechanisms, not just metrics. Revenue is a number; the business model is a system. Understanding requires explaining the system—flywheels, constraints, dependencies, competitive dynamics.
Honest Dialectic
Present the strongest version of both bull and bear cases. Steelman each position—make the best argument a thoughtful advocate would make, then let the reader weigh evidence. Avoid false balance.
Temporal Precision
Know what is current, what is historical, and what has been superseded. Financial data decays rapidly. Presenting stale guidance as current fact is dangerous misinformation.
Radical Accessibility
Understanding public companies should be free and discoverable. Public companies are publicly owned—the knowledge about them should be publicly accessible, not locked behind terminals and paywalls.
These principles are not novel. They describe what good journalism, good research, and good education have always looked like. What is novel is applying them systematically to every publicly traded company, at scale, with full citations and free access.
What this is not
Defining a vision requires clarity about what lies outside it:
Not Investment Advice
- No price targets or buy/sell recommendations
- No forward estimates or projections
- No opinions on whether to invest
- Education about businesses, not advocacy
Not AI Summary Slop
- No hallucinated facts or orphan citations
- No generic descriptions that fit any company
- No content that obscures rather than illuminates
- Depth and specificity, not compression
The distinction matters because the failure modes are predictable. Systems optimized for engagement produce noise. Systems optimized for legal safety produce hedged mush. Only systems explicitly optimized for educational depth can close the comprehension gap.
Why this is possible now
This vision isn't new. The desire to make financial knowledge accessible has existed for decades. What's new is that synthesis at scale is now possible.
Large language models can read hundreds of pages of filings and extract the mechanisms that matter. They can trace claims to citations. They can present bull and bear cases without advocacy. They can do in minutes what would take a research analyst days.
But technology alone is not sufficient. ChatGPT can summarize a 10-K. It cannot guarantee source fidelity, maintain temporal precision, or produce educational depth. Those require architectural choices—choices that most AI applications do not make because they optimize for engagement, not understanding.
The Democratization Tradition
Wikipedia democratized encyclopedic knowledge.
Open source democratized software.
Khan Academy democratized education.
This movement would democratize financial comprehension.
The sources exist—they're called SEC filings and earnings transcripts. The synthesis capability exists—it's called AI with citation requirements. The distribution mechanism exists—it's called the internet. What has been missing is the commitment to assemble these pieces into a system optimized for understanding rather than engagement.
The understanding test
A manifesto without a success metric is just words. Here is the test:
A retail investor reads about Apple and can explain: how Apple makes money, what the Services flywheel is, what the bull and bear cases are, and what the key risks are—with confidence that every claim traces to a verifiable source.
When this test passes for every public company, the comprehension gap is closed.
This is a high bar. Most financial content fails it. Most AI summaries fail it. But it is the right bar—the bar that separates understanding from noise.
The invitation
Imagine a world where understanding how Apple makes money is as accessible as understanding how photosynthesis works. Where every publicly traded company has a clear explanation of its business, updated continuously, with citations to primary sources, free for anyone to read.
In this world, a first-time investor can understand what they're buying—not just the ticker symbol, but the engine. A financial advisor can quickly get up to speed on an unfamiliar company. A journalist can verify claims about a business in minutes.
The comprehension gap is not inevitable. It persists because no one has prioritized closing it—because engagement metrics reward noise, because legal caution produces mush, because the institutions that could build educational synthesis have no incentive to do so.
That can change.
The sources exist. The technology exists. The need exists.
What's missing is the commitment.