Plain Interest publishes one weekly edition of five weekday lessons, following a fixed path from a reader’s real question to a useful, evidenced answer. This page explains why the site exists, who writes it, how AI is used, how sources are chosen, how mistakes are corrected, and what the site is not.
Why Plain Interest exists
I’m not a financial expert. I don’t hold a professional qualification in investing, and I’m not a licensed adviser. What I have done is spend real time trying to understand how money, markets and investing actually work, starting from the same confused, jargon heavy starting point most people start from.
Most explanations of this subject are written by people who already understand it, for readers who already understand a fair amount of it too. That leaves a real gap for anyone starting closer to zero. Plain Interest is my attempt to close that gap: to explain what I’ve learned in plain, ordinary language, so someone else who isn’t an expert either can get there faster than I did.
That’s why Plain Interest is written and edited by James Beddington, not by a licensed financial adviser, and every lesson says so plainly rather than implying an expertise it doesn’t have.
How AI is used here
Plain Interest is written with the help of AI. I use it to research each topic, check the facts, and write and rewrite each lesson until it’s accurate.
I’m telling you this because I want to be honest with you. Using AI means I can check every fact, in every lesson, every week, more thoroughly than I could on my own. I do that checking so you don’t have to. You don’t need to go and track down the sources yourself. You can read the lesson and trust that the hard work has already been done.
AI helps me write each lesson. It doesn’t lower the standard. Every lesson still has to be accurate, based on real sources, and honest about anything it doesn’t know.
Sourcing
Each lesson prefers primary sources: regulators, exchanges, issuer documents and official guidance, over secondary commentary. Where a secondary source is used, it must be authoritative. Every source carries a publisher, title, link and the date it was checked, visible in the Evidence section of the article it supports.
Corrections
When a published lesson needs a substantive correction, the article is updated in place, the updated date is shown next to the original publish date, and a short change note explains what changed and why. Nothing is silently rewritten.
Educational status
Everything published here is general education, not a personal recommendation. Plain Interest does not know your circumstances, and nothing on this site should be read as advice to buy, sell or hold anything. Where a lesson references a live or illustrative figure, that status is stated directly next to it.