The Influence of the Tone of the Coe Letters on Company Performance Indicators

Nowadays, the interaction between the investors and top-management of the public companies is becoming increasingly close, and the focus of this communication is gradually biases from providing of financial metrics for investors to textual information that is contained basically in CEO Letters, press-releases, and conference calls (disclosure of significant facts, announcement and revision of priorities and the ways of corporate development). Subsequently, the investors shape the impression of the company and assess the level of its image by using the information received. Then they take the investment decisions by taking into account the textual facts.  The attempt is made to conduct the empirical research of the link between the linguistic, semantic, thematic characteristics of the annual CEO Letters and earnings per share for the following period. Applying the regression analysis and the multilayer neural network (MLP), it was found that the inclusion of an environmental topic in the CEO Letter has a significant negative impact on the company's subsequent financial results, and the common positivism of tone and high dispersion of the letter by parts of the text (low concentration) – the significant positive effect.