Investor Communications Editing and Proofreading Services

Investor communications is judged over years by readers who keep the previous editions. A shareholder letter written this year is compared with last year's and the one from three years ago, and the comparison is the point — investors are assessing whether management understands its own business, predicts it accurately, and describes reality consistently whether the year was good or bad. Letters that read well in isolation and poorly in sequence are the ones that erode a management team's credibility.

We edit what companies and their advisers produce — annual shareholder letters and chairman's statements, investor presentations and their speaker notes, capital markets day material, strategy and business model explanations for investors, capital allocation policy documents, dividend and buyback rationale, acquisition and disposal rationale documents, private company investor updates and board reports, fundraising material and information memoranda, shareholder circulars and resolutions, proxy statement narrative sections, and investor question and answer preparation. Our editors read the previous years alongside the current draft.

The shareholder letter is where a management team either builds a record or accumulates a set of unexamined claims. The version that erodes credibility follows a pattern: last year's disappointments are not mentioned, this year's good results are attributed to strategy, the bad ones to conditions, and every year describes the business as well positioned. We write these so the letter revisits what was said last year explicitly — what was promised, what happened, and where the judgement was wrong; so results are attributed honestly, which means naming the tailwind when there was one, because an investor who can see the tailwind and reads it claimed as execution discounts the whole letter; so the capital allocation reasoning is shown, since that is the decision shareholders are actually assessing management on; and so at least one thing management got wrong is stated without an excuse attached. Letters written this way are notably shorter, are read in full, and make the good years believable.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including material before release and information that is price-sensitive. We are editors rather than financial, legal or investor relations advisers, and we offer no view on strategy, disclosure obligations, or any financial statement or projection. What we can do is make the writing clear and consistent with what the company said before.