The Motley Fool needed writers. Good ones, lots of them, fast. They asked me to lead recruitment for experienced business writers who could bolster our free news coverage. 

Small problem: These very able folks knew the sectors they covered inside and out, but not necessarily how to cover those businesses as investments. They weren’t always trained to estimate how real-world business moves might affect the stocks behind those companies. I had to teach them, quickly, in ways that wouldn’t scare them off or put them to sleep.

Luckily, I’d spent years as a fact-checker, trawling through the documents companies must file by law with the Securities and Exchange Commission. I’d drunk deeply of the financial firehose of S&P Capital IQ. And I’d learned how to find and tell the simple stories hiding in all those numbers. (Kinda like the characters in The Matrix who can decipher all that green code just by looking at it.)

I wrote the first version of this guide to share that knowledge with my writers. (I’ve since adapted it to remove all the Fool-specific stuff, since they still own the original version.) In plain English, it lays out what documents to check; what numbers to look for within them; and what those numbers actually mean. Six-plus years of experience, condensed into about a 20-minute read.

Not quite an “I know kung fu” download … but not too far off, either?

Read Financial Statements: A Crash Course.