The Phabulous Phrases of Phinancialists

You think marketing-speak is bad?

Financial analysts have a language type all of their own, generating phrases that no ordinary human would attempt. Not to be left out, corporate executives join right in.

Here are a few select phrases from Autodesk's conference call of last week:

Horacio: In terms of linearity, your transactional linearity in the quarter, or month to month, are you still seeing sort of an on and off strength, or is it pretty building consistently?

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Carl Bass: I think the other dynamic that we have seen that has helped us is generally speaking... 

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Steve Ashley: You’ve talked about the business being reset. Is that an expense level that you are comfortable with going forward?

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Carl Bass: ...I think that’s all caveated by the fact of whether or not where we really are in this economic recovery. 

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Sterling Aut: I thought I would reload -- Carl, you answered this but I wanted to ask it this way -- again, looking at a lot of the language that you talked about in terms of the business feels better than it did at the end of last year, beginning of this year -- and some of the other terms that you used, if that’s the case, why is the midpoint of the guidance range for next quarter actually showing a sequential decline?

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Michael Olson: Sorry about the background noise here. So again, just beating a dead horse on the OpEx [operating expenses], you know... 

Source.

Comments

[Clear The Air]

Ralph, thanks for calling out this widespread use of nonsensical lingo. Where do these people learn to speak English? When did asking simple, plain language questions go out of style? I think the analysts use these words to appear to be more sophisticated than the number crunching paper-pushers that they truly are.