They’re longer than classics like Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” and modern hits like J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” but nowhere nearly as engaging. Yet each week, American state and local governments crank out the doorstops by the dozens, creating a dismal stack of soporific homework for money managers studying whether or not to buy their bonds. So Morgan Stanley, one of Wall Street’s biggest investment banks, experimented with farming out the job of reading 120,000-word bond prospectuses to robots, seeing if the results could yield a sort of CliffsNotes that may separate the signal from ... (full story)