What is Deception Analysis?
Deception Analysis acts as a lens, allowing you to quantify instances when executives are less than clear and pick up on speech patterns like evasion, jargon, negative clichés and stalls that are otherwise missed when analyzing an earnings call.
Deception Events
What exactly is our text analytics model looking for regarding Deception? The model has been trained to not only parse every word of every sentence for the underlying financial meaning but also to identify linguistic patterns that Symphony Analytics has determined as being consistent with deceptive language.
Our text AI identifies linguistic trends that we call Events under the key driver, Deception. These Deception Events may indicate evasive language, attempting to spin a negative or tension with the analyst community, etc.
Deception Analysis in a Document
To highlight an application of Deception analysis, we analyze Apple, Inc., a Technology company
Notice that Deception is highlighted as one of the Key Drivers behind the significant drop (-60%) in the Symphony Analytics Score for Q3 2024:
Selecting the latest earnings transcript and sorting by the number of negatives in the Key Drivers tab causes Deception to rise towards the top.
Next, in the navigation pane we expand Deception to view extractions of the deceptive events.
We see Detours - when a management team is trying to redirect and not answer the question directly. In this example the statement But I would say... tries to spin a negative regarding a near-term headwind.
Scrolling through more deceptive events, we see Evasive commentary such as, We don't have that again, following a positive statement. And you start to see a theme: the model is identifying hidden negatives surrounding seemingly positive comments:
Lastly, the phrase, I can’t remember historically having this kind of downtime in the first quarter shows an example of Selective Memory.
These are the type of comments that the Deception Model can identify and cluster together, allowing you to spot patterns when management teams are being incrementally more evasive, less direct, or more confrontational with analysts relative to prior quarters. In your next big earnings call make sure to apply your analysis through the lens of the Deception Model to see what you've been missing.
What is a Deception Score?
The Symphony Analytics Deception Score uses a dynamic methodology to quantify deceptive language patterns used by company executives in earnings calls.
The Deception Score factors in the frequency, severity, and context of the statements. It is best to look at the Score in the context of a company’s historical patterns to account for individuals' speaking habits, seasonality, and other variables.
Elevated levels of the Deception Score unveil critical and otherwise unattainable intelligence into company performance, including the specific question topics on which executives are responding deceptively.