Evaluating Large Language Models for Stance Detection on Financial Targets from SEC Filing Reports and Earnings Call Transcripts

Financial narratives from U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing reports and quarterly earnings call transcripts (ECTs) are very important for investors, auditors, and regulators. However, their length, financial jargon, and nuanced language make fine-grained analysis difficult. Prior sentiment analysis in the financial domain required a large, expensive labeled dataset, making the sentence-level stance towards specific financial targets challenging. In this work, we introduce a sentence-level corpus for stance detection focused on three core financial metrics: debt, earnings per share (EPS), and sales. The sentences were extracted from Form 10-K annual reports and ECTs, and labeled for stance (positive, negative, neutral) using the advanced ChatGPT-o3-pro model under rigorous human validation. Using this corpus, we conduct a systematic evaluation of modern large language models (LLMs) using zero-shot, few-shot, and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting strategies. Our results show that few-shot with CoT prompting performs best compared to supervised baselines, and LLMs' performance varies across the SEC and ECT datasets. Our findings highlight the practical viability of leveraging LLMs for target-specific stance in the financial domain without requiring extensive labeled data.