TonalityIQ

NLP asks “is this sentence positive or negative?” Every quant fund has tried it on earnings calls. The results are marginal. Sentiment analysis gives you “positive” or “negative” and that's about as useful as reading the headline.

TonalityIQ asks a different question: is this CEO restructuring with conviction or restructuring with fear? That's a management psychology question, not a text mining question.

The methodology comes from upper echelons theory, 40 years of academic research on how executive cognition shows up in language. When a CEO shifts from “we will” to “we believe,” that's not a sentiment change. That's a confidence change. When restructuring language spikes alongside commitment language, that's not positive or negative. That's a turnaround signal. NLP can't see that because it doesn't have the management theory underneath.

We score each CEO against their own historical baseline. A CEO who always says “challenging” isn't stressed. That's their pattern. A CEO who never says it and suddenly starts? That's a 3-sigma event.