Podcast on what Business Reports can Tell Investors

“Is it possible for investors to predict the success of an investment based on the language of a company’s business report?” This was the question with which an accounting company approached us. They were planning to address this question in their podcast series on financial investments and asked Danae to present her answer during a live session. Their interest was in the automotive industry, and they were looking for a comparison of established companies with start-ups.

Presenting live is not a problem for Danae, so she was happy to agree. She received a couple of questions beforehand and prepared the answers on her own. The interview was going to take place as an interactive online session, in which the audience had the chance of asking questions during the interview. It took place during Covid restrictions, which required everybody to remotely sign up to the session. No prior testing or recording was set up, so the interview had to work out from the get-go.

Danae took three reports and read them without looking at the companies’ corporate identity or websites. Her focus was on language only, as the point was to find out whether language-based predictions were possible. It took her about two hours of discourse analysis to paint an appropriate picture of the corporate language of each of the three companies. She observed a number of stylistic differences regarding style and format, which were most noticeable between US and European companies. In the end, Danae suggested a few additional questions to the interviewer and prepared all her answers for the live interview. Textual analysis and the presentation of results both belong to Danae’s daily business, and so does speaking live, which she truly enjoys, so these parts weren’t a challenge for her. What was more of a challenge in this case was the online format, which required her to word her evaluation in a language that was clear for a lay audience without being able to see the audience. The discussions after the presentation were lively, interesting, and pertinent, however, which showed that she managed well. Plus: the insights were applicable to a broad range of contexts.

You'll find more information here: Texts for Organizations

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