Evasive and Under Stress: When Two Signals Appear Together

When an AI read 165,182 earnings-call transcripts and scored each one, it found 657 calls—about 0.4% of the corpus—where high evasion and high stress appear together. That combination matters because each signal alone is common and easy to dismiss; together they mark calls where management is both deflecting questions and showing visible strain, which is when the deflection is hardest to read as routine caution.

These calls look different on almost every dimension: evasion of 6.55 versus 2.7 baseline, stress of 6.41 versus 2.43, and confidence of 5.5 versus 7.21. Guidance tells the story—14% withdrew guidance versus 2.7% baseline, and 19.5% lowered it versus 11.6%. Only 3.4% raised guidance against 21.1% overall. Nearly all of these calls (100%) contain "The Question Left Hanging," versus 48% baseline. Post-call returns were worse: median −13.0% versus −7.2% baseline, with 28.9% beating versus 39.5%. The pattern has also faded over time, from 0.78 in 2015 to 0.18 in 2025.

These fields are AI-generated and noisy, and the return comparison is descriptive history from a 22,449-call sample—not a trading signal. Our own forward tests failed to confirm directional prediction from these signals. Language models also partially remember famous stocks' histories, which contaminates any backtest of language-based patterns.

Behavior profile

Guidance actions in this group

What travels with it

Share of calls by year

Recent examples