Fast Numbers, Slow Language: Bridging Quantitative and Qualitative Earnings Signals

The article introduces EarningsInOne, a new corpus aligning earnings news, conference call transcripts, and prices for the SP 1500 universe from 2022 to 2025. This resource bridges the gap between financial economists and NLP researchers by providing unified trading setups and evaluation metrics for both quantitative and qualitative signals.

• Quantitative surprise arrives first in press releases and is processed by algorithmic traders within minutes, while qualitative language appears 30-90 minutes later in transcripts.
• The study confirms a speed separation where quantitative effects peak at announcement and vanish by the next market open.
• Qualitative sentiment peaks on the next trading day but was previously hidden because prior evaluations optimized for sign-agnostic volatility using pointwise MSE.

The authors consider this important because it reveals that qualitative signals are real and tradeable, correcting previous misunderstandings caused by incompatible evaluation frameworks.