How To Use AI To Make Savvier Stock Moves Every Earnings Season

The technology’s supposed to make life easier, right? That’s why Reda came up with a simple AI workflow to take you from quarterly reports to smart investing decisions in minutes.

• AI can help you stay on top of earnings seasons – especially handy if you’re short on time and tracking many stocks. The best investors don’t just review updates from the companies they own – they also scan numbers from rivals, suppliers, and customers.
• When a company you’re tracking drops its latest update, upload it all – press release, earnings presentation, quarterly financial report, news articles, and earnings conference call transcript – to NotebookLLM.
• Use specific prompts to go beyond basic summaries. AI can compare quarterly reports to spot subtle changes, evaluate industry implications, analyze management’s sentiment on calls, and critically examine how the latest results support or challenge your investment thesis.

Wall Street banks officially kick off the second-quarter earnings season this week, with results starting to roll in one after another. If you invest in individual stocks, you’ll know that combing through every report and listening to every conference call can eat up serious time. The best investors don’t just go over updates from the companies they own – they also scan the numbers from rivals, suppliers, and customers. That’s a lot of ground to cover.

Luckily, in the age of AI, it’s about working smarter, not harder. And I’ve personally been using AI quite a lot to help me stay on top of it all. So here’s my step-by-step workflow, using one of my favorite tools to analyze specific earnings releases.

Step 1: Gather all the necessary files.

When a company you’re tracking drops its latest update, the first step is to collect all the key information and files. Below is a checklist of what exactly to gather, with examples of each from US chipmaker Intel:

✅ URL to the press release itself (example). Source: Company’s investor relations website.

✅ PDF of the earnings presentation (example). Not all companies provide this, but when they do, it’s often packed with great visuals and key takeaways. Source: Company’s investor relations website.

✅ PDF of the quarterly financial report (example) for the most recent quarter and the one before (you’ll see why later). In the US, this is referred to as “Form 10-Q”. Source: Company’s investor relations website (sometimes under “filings”).

✅ URLs to one or two news articles (example). Choose articles that compare the company’s results and future guidance against analyst estimates. Possible sources: CNBC, FT, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg, Finimize.

✅ URL or PDF of the earnings conference call transcript (example). If you can’t find the transcript, an audio recording is perfectly fine – modern AI models are “multimodal,” meaning they can analyze not just text, but also audio, video, and images. Possible sources: Investing.com, the company’s investor relations site for audio recordings (example), or YouTube.

Step 2: Upload everything to NotebookLM.

NotebookLM is an AI-powered research and note-taking tool from Google that works like a personal research assistant. It lets you upload a variety of sources – PDFs, Google Docs or Slides, website URLs, audio files, and even YouTube videos. Unlike typical AI chatbots, NotebookLM grounds all its responses in the content you provide, making it ideal for summarizing complex documents, answering targeted questions, and more – without a lot of hallucinations. Each notebook can hold up to 50 different sources, and the AI’s long “context window” means it can process and analyze huge amounts of data with ease.

All of this makes NotebookLM an excellent tool for analyzing all the earnings-related material you gathered in the previous step. To get started, open the tool (here’s the link), sign in with your Google account, then click on the “+ Create new notebook” button to create a notebook. Next, you’ll be asked to upload your sources. You can drag and drop all the PDFs (and the audio file if you’ve got one). You’ll also see options to add URLs (for the news articles) and links to YouTube videos. Once it’s all uploaded, you’re ready to move on.

Step 3: Generate overviews and ask smart questions.

First things first, before you even start asking clever questions, you can use NotebookLM’s built-in features to get solid summaries of the company’s earnings announcement. That’s especially handy if you’re tracking a lot of stocks but are short on time. In the top-right corner, you’ll find options for an “Audio Overview”, “Video Overview”, or “Briefing Doc” (under “Reports”) – each one condensing your uploads into a podcast, video presentation, or tidy text summary.

Once that’s done, it’s time to dig in. These are my top prompts for smartly analyzing a company’s latest update.

1) Summarize the key figures and takeaways from [company name]’s latest results and outlook. Organize your response into two clearly labeled lists: Positives and Negatives, focusing on only the most significant and impactful points.

2) Based on [company name]’s latest results and outlook, identify the most important implications for the broader industry, highlighting trends, risks, and opportunities.

You can make this even more specific by asking about the implications for a particular company you’re interested in, such as a key supplier or customer. In my Intel example, I might ask about the implications for ASML – a major supplier of chipmaking equipment.

3) Comparing [company name]’s two most recent quarterly financial reports, what are the top ten qualitative things that changed from the 1Q26 one to the 2Q26?

Two quick notes on this. First, “1Q26” and “2Q26” are just examples – be sure to update them to the quarter and year you’re interested in. Second, when running this prompt, I recommend deselecting all sources in the left-hand panel of NotebookLM, except for the two quarterly financial reports in question. This makes sure the tool compares only those two documents and nothing else.

This prompt is great at spotting key changes from one update to the next – details that analysts might easily overlook in quarterly reports that can run hundreds of pages. Examples include subtle shifts in accounting methods (e.g. tech firms extending the useful life of data centers to reduce depreciation costs), the addition or removal of a key risk, and lots more.

4) Below is my investment thesis for owning [company name]’s stock. Using the firm’s latest results and outlook, identify:

• The key points that support and strengthen my thesis.
• The key points that challenge or weaken my thesis.

For each point:

• Be specific, citing relevant figures, metrics, or statements.
• Indicate whether the impact is short-term, long-term, or both.
• Briefly explain the reasoning behind your assessment.

[And here, I’d insert my investment thesis]

5) Analyze the language and sentiment of the management team during the conference call. Distinguish between their prepared remarks and their answers during the Q&A session. Do they seem confident, cautious, or defensive? Quote specific phrases that support your analysis and explain why they are significant.

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Originally Posted July 14, 2026 – How To Use AI To Make Savvier Stock Moves Every Earnings Season