Dodged and Left Hanging: When Two Signals Appear Together

Some earnings calls combine two red flags: executives dodge a question, and the analyst who asked it never gets a real answer. Across 165,182 earnings-call transcripts read by an AI, 3,629 calls — about 2.2% — show this "dodged and left hanging" pattern. For anyone who listens to calls for a living, it's worth knowing what tends to travel with it: rehearsed delivery, weak guidance, and a notable absence of reassured skeptics.

The profile is striking: evasion scores average 6.23 versus 2.7 baseline, while candor sits at 5.75 against 6.86. Guidance is withdrawn on 8.0% of these calls versus 2.7% overall, and raised on only 8.5% versus 21.1%. Co-occurrence tells the same story: "Calls That Resolve Doubts" appears on just 19.9% of these calls versus 79.5% baseline (a 0.25 ratio), and "Skeptic Reassured" on 17.0% versus 66.4%. The pattern has also faded over time, falling from 3.93% of calls in 2015 to 1.36% in 2025. Among 360 such calls with return data, the median move was -13.3% versus -7.2% baseline.

These AI-read fields are noisy, and the return comparison is descriptive history from a 22,449-call sample — not a trading signal. Our own forward tests falsified directional prediction, and language models partially remember famous stocks' histories, which contaminates any backtest. Treat this as a description of how language patterns cluster, not a forecast.

Behavior profile

Guidance actions in this group

What travels with it

Share of calls by year

Recent examples