The Check's in the Mail

I haven't read anything more than the introduction of this paper...

"We develop an empirical procedure to quantify future company performance based on top management promises. We find that the number of future tense occurrences in 10-K reports is significantly negatively correlated with the return as well as with the excess return on the company stock price."

link: http://arxiv.org/ftp/math/papers/0410/0410586.pdf