Market participants' interests and earnings forecast updates: Evidence from discussion topics in investor meetings

Market participants (investors and analysts) are increasingly engaged in collecting information on a broad range of topics by interacting with companies. This study clarifies the topics they are interested in, and examines whether the types of information acquired affect the extent of updates and corrections to their forecasts regarding upcoming earnings. The analysis of interactive discussions on analyst and investor days reveals that market participants acquire long-term information (including ESG-related information) more frequently than traditional topics, such as recent financial results, regardless of communicators' characteristics and their ex-ante forecast errors. These findings suggest that market participants proactively seek out such information of their own accord. However, earnings forecast revisions and corrections made by ex-ante uninformed communicators are more minor when they acquire long-term information. Consistent with the trade-off between collecting short-term and long-term information suggested by Dessaint et al. (2024), this analysis indicates that acquiring information on long-term strategy topics may reduce the frequency or accuracy of updates to market participants' earnings estimations.