Making financial disclosures more readable

FINANCIAL disclosure documents are notoriously difficult to make sense of, even for seasoned investors. Warren Buffett, the guru of investing, spoke for many of us when he said: "For more than forty years, I've studied the documents that public companies file. Too often, I've been unable to decipher just what is being said or, worse yet, had to conclude that nothing was being said."

While financial concepts can themselves be complex, they are frequently made more difficult to understand by the manner in which they are pr…