Earlier this month our Restaurants Team held a conference call for institutional investors Statement Analysis - Putting Companies Through a Linguistic Polygraph Test with former U.S. Deputy Marshall Mark McClish.
Mark McClish is the author of I Know You Are Lying and the creator of the Statement Analysis method. In this brief excerpt Mark explains how to identify signs of deception and dissects an excerpt from HAIN’s Q1 earnings call as an example.
Reading conference call and analyst meeting transcripts is a key part of the analyst’s job. We all use words to define our reality, and our choice of words can be revealing. The premise of Statement Analysis is that a person’s choice of specific words can reveal when there might be an attempt at deception. This Statement Analysis exercise looks exclusively at a company’s written and verbal statements. Using these hidden clues, we can dig deeper into a company’s public pronouncements for signals of potential concerns in a company’s reporting.