On the morning of October 30, 2025, International Paper (IP $34.48 +3.30%) held its third-quarter call. The first analyst to speak opened with "Congratulations on your progress in a challenging environment." Two of the next five said much the same. By the following day's close the stock was down 11.9% against the S&P 500.
Analysts open their questions with "congrats on the quarter" so often that it sounds like a reflex. We wanted to know whether it carries any information, so we read the analyst questions on 59,306 earnings calls held by 3,562 US-listed companies from 2020 to 2025, sorted every congratulation by what it was for, and lined the calls up against the stock's move.
The pleasantry turns out to be informative, up to a point. When several analysts praise the results, the stock has usually moved the same way. When they're praising a new CEO or a deal, it tells you nothing. And it is no forecast: the stocks analysts praised barely did better over the following three months.
The data behind this piece
Explore the primary data Equibles carries for IP:
At a glance
| What we measured | Result |
|---|---|
| Calls with at least one congratulating analyst | 39.6% |
| Calls where an analyst praised the results specifically | 31.0% |
| Stock beat SPY by the next day's close, no congratulations | 44.3% |
| Stock beat SPY by the next day's close, three or more analysts praised the results | 64.6% |
| Calls with a 10%+ drop where an analyst had still praised the results | 21.1% |
| Stock beat SPY over the next 60 sessions, no congratulations vs three or more | 43.2% vs 47.5% |
| Calls where an executive said "great question" (or "good question") | 38.9% |
How often do analysts say it?
On most calls, nobody says it. On 60.4% of them, not one analyst congratulated anybody. Counting each analyst once per call, 351,985 analysts asked questions on these calls, and 12.7% of them congratulated someone at the start of a question.
"Congrats" (24,797 analysts) beat "congratulations" (20,083), and the single most common wording was the plain "congrats on the quarter".
What are they congratulating?
Not always the quarter. We sorted each congratulation by the words around it:
The second and third groups matter more than their size suggests, because they cluster. On Etsy (ETSY $92.35 +5.35%)'s call on October 29, 2025, six of the seven analysts opened with congratulations, and only one of them mentioned the business ("Congrats on seeing the good improvement in execution overall"). The rest were about the leadership transition ("Kruti, congrats and Josh, best of luck with the transition") or for "everyone". The stock fell 16.1% against SPY by the next day's close. On TransDigm (TDG $1,136.53 +0.56%)'s call in August 2025, eight of eleven analysts congratulated somebody, nearly all on promotions and a retirement. The stock fell 13.2% against SPY.
So a call full of congratulations isn't necessarily a call full of praise. For the rest of this study, "praised the results" means a congratulation about the quarter, the results, the year or the company's progress.
Does the stock move with the praise?
Mostly, yes. The more analysts praised the results, the more often the stock beat the S&P 500 by the close of the day after the call:
| Analysts who praised the results | Calls | Median return vs SPY | Beat SPY |
|---|---|---|---|
| None (no congratulations at all) | 35,833 | -0.7% | 44.3% |
| One | 11,199 | +1.0% | 56.7% |
| Two | 4,206 | +1.7% | 60.4% |
| Three or more | 2,961 | +2.6% | 64.6% |
| None, but someone was congratulated on a new role or retirement | 1,631 | -0.4% | 47.0% |
Congratulations about people looked like no congratulations at all. Congratulations on deals and data weren't much different either (48.1% beat SPY).
This isn't a fluke of one year, or a large-company effect. Split by trading volume into small, mid and large companies, calls where two or more analysts praised the results beat SPY 61.2%, 61.4% and 63.4% of the time, against 43.7%, 44.8% and 44.3% with no congratulations. And it held in every year from 2020 to 2025:
That makes sense, and it isn't foresight. By the time the Q&A starts, analysts have read the same press release the market is trading on, and they have usually watched the stock react before the open or after the close. Their opening line is partly a verdict on the results and partly a report of a move they've already seen.
The two don't always line up. Of the 6,148 calls after which the stock fell 10% or more, 21.1% still had an analyst praising the results, as International Paper's did. And of the 6,235 calls after which it jumped 10% or more, only about half (50.7%) had an analyst praising the results.
Is it a forecast?
Not really. We also measured the stock from the day after the call to 60 trading sessions later, again against SPY:
| Analysts who praised the results | Median return vs SPY, next 60 sessions | Beat SPY |
|---|---|---|
| None | -2.6% | 43.2% |
| One | -2.3% | 44.5% |
| Two | -1.2% | 47.1% |
| Three or more | -1.4% | 47.5% |
The praised stocks did a little better, about four points more often ahead of SPY, which is in line with the long-documented tendency of stocks to keep drifting in the direction of an earnings surprise. It also matches the best-known earlier study of analyst praise: Jonathan Milian and Antoinette Smith of Florida International University read more than 16,000 calls from 2003 to 2013 and found that companies that drew a burst of praise beat the market by 0.9 points over the next 60 trading days. In our data, the gap in median 60-session returns between calls with three or more praising analysts and calls with none is 1.1 points. But a 47.5% hit rate is not a signal anyone should trade on. (All four groups trailed SPY on median, because the typical US-listed stock lagged the S&P 500 over these years.)
And when the stock fell despite the praise, the praise didn't rescue it. Of the 349 calls where three or more analysts praised the results and the stock still fell more than 5.7% (the worst fifth of reactions), 40.4% beat SPY over the next 60 sessions, against 42.1% of 8,128 similar drops with no congratulations, a gap too small to read much into.
Who says it least?
Analysts covering banks, insurers and real estate trusts rarely congratulate anyone on results. Analysts covering drug developers and tech companies do it on about half their calls:
Some of that is the business: a biotech that hits a trial milestone or a software company that beats on growth invites it, and a bank that reports steady net interest income doesn't. Some of it is house style, since the same analysts cover the same industry quarter after quarter.
And "great question"?
The executives' version of the pleasantry carries nothing. An executive opened an answer with "great question" or "good question" on 38.9% of calls. Those stocks beat SPY by the next day's close 49.5% of the time; on calls without it, 49.1%.
Check a call yourself
Transcripts of these calls are on each company's page, with each analyst's question in order. International Paper's third-quarter 2025 call is here, and the transcripts hub is the place to start for other companies.
You can also ask an AI assistant connected to our MCP server, for example: "Get the analyst questions from International Paper's Q3 2025 earnings call and tell me which analysts opened with congratulations, and what for."
How we built this
- Calls: earnings calls in the Equibles transcript database held from January 3, 2020 to December 31, 2025 by companies with a current US listing, with a question-and-answer session, at least three analyst turns and more than 1,500 words, and prices on both sides of the call: 59,306 calls from 3,562 companies. Blank-check companies are excluded.
- Speakers: each turn's speaker role as resolved in our transcripts (analyst, CEO, CFO, other executive, operator). Analysts are counted once per call however many questions they asked.
- Congratulations: any analyst turn with "congrat" in its first 400 characters. We took the sentence containing it and sorted it by rules: people (a role, promotion, retirement, welcome or farewell), results (the quarter, results, year, guidance, execution or progress), deals (an acquisition, offering, approval, launch, contract or trial data), or not specified. A sentence that mentions both a person and the results counts as people. In a random sample of 25 congratulations sorted as results, all 25 were about the quarter, the results or the company's progress; of 25 sorted as people, 20 were about a person and the rest were general wishes such as "good luck".
- "Great question": an executive turn with "great question" or "good question" (or excellent, fair, terrific or fantastic) in its first 400 characters.
- Returns: adjusted closing prices from the close before the call to the close of the day after it, minus SPY's return over the same window, so the window covers the results whether they came out before the open or after the close. The 60-session return runs from that second close.
What this can't tell you
- Analysts and investors are reacting to the same results, so the praise and the price move share a cause. Neither drives the other, and by the time analysts speak they have usually seen the first part of the move.
- Transcripts are edited, and how much small talk survives editing varies between transcripts and over time. That's why we compare calls with and without congratulations instead of charting a trend.
- Companies choose which analysts get to ask questions, and research by Lauren Cohen, Dong Lou and Christopher Malloy found that some favor friendly ones, so a call's praise partly reflects who was called on.
- A few calls label company staff as analysts, which can inflate the analyst count on those calls.
- The sorting rules read only the sentence with the congratulation. "Congrats, Dave" is not specified even when the context makes clear it's about a retirement.
- Companies that are no longer listed are mostly missing, so the sample tilts toward survivors.
Conclusion
"Congrats on the quarter" is a small, honest signal: a quick public verdict from people who've just read the numbers and seen the first trades, and it usually matches where the stock ends up the next day. Count only praise for the results, though, not the congratulations on promotions, retirements or deals that can fill a call. And treat it as a read of the quarter that just happened. Three months on, the praised stocks were barely more likely to be ahead.
Sources
- Equibles earnings call transcripts, US-listed companies, January 2020 to December 2025.
- Closing prices and SPY: Equibles market data.
- International Paper Company, third-quarter 2025 earnings call, October 30, 2025; Etsy, Inc., third-quarter 2025 earnings call, October 29, 2025; TransDigm Group, fiscal third-quarter 2025 earnings call, August 5, 2025.
- Jonathan Milian and Antoinette Smith, "An Investigation of Analysts' Praise of Management During Earnings Conference Calls", Journal of Behavioral Finance 18(1), 2017.
- Lauren Cohen, Dong Lou and Christopher Malloy, "Casting Conference Calls", Management Science 66(11), 2020.
- Victor Bernard and Jacob Thomas, "Post-Earnings-Announcement Drift: Delayed Price Response or Risk Premium?", Journal of Accounting Research 27, 1989.