Fact or Opinion? - Essential Value for Financial Results Briefing.

Financial results briefings offer a two-way communication channel between investors and management and provide qualitative information. Although the importance of those qualitative information has been recognized, there has yet to be an investigation into the extent to which such information is included in financial results briefings and how the recent corporate characteristics and performance affect them. Therefore in this study, we tackle a task to classify the text of financial results briefings into “facts” or “opinions” using GPT-3.5-turbo (chatGPT), a large-scale language model (LLM), and evaluate zero-shot and few-shot classification performance using manual labels assigned by three experts. Then, we confirm the proportion of “facts” or “opinions” in each briefing and clarify to what extent the number of opinions and facts are influenced by company size and performance in the first place. We find that, on average, 38% of statements in the briefings contain the opinion. Companies with smaller ordinary income margins tend to have a higher percentage of opinion statements, and companies with higher market value relative to book value have a higher volume of opinion sentences. The study highlights the importance of financial results briefings as a communication channel providing subjective opinions and explaining financial results and future outlook.