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How to grade sell-side analysts on earnings-call questions
You follow U.S. public companies. You care who asks the hard questions on the earnings call, and how often they push for specifics instead of restating the deck.
Tellvest turns those Q&A moments into a comparable challenge rate for sell-side analysts and research firms. It sits next to coverage breadth, focus areas, and the company-level Q&A you can open on a name you follow. Prior quarters and the analyst and firm tracker are free to browse.
Tellvest is descriptive analysis for research only. It is not investment advice.
What “challenge rate” means on Tellvest
On Tellvest, every analyst gets a challenge rate: the percentage of their questions that push back on management’s narrative, press for specifics on missed targets, or question forward guidance.
The Firms & Analysts UI states the same idea in shorter form. Challenge is the percentage of questions scored as challenging, where the analyst pushed back, pressed for specifics, or questioned management’s assumptions.
That rate is not a personality score and not a buy or sell signal. It is a structured count of how often an analyst’s questions land in the challenging bucket versus neutral, across the calls Tellvest has processed. You can use it to see who tends to press, who stays closer to the prepared narrative, and how that pattern looks at the firm level.
For the full product definition and corpus context, start on About. For the live directory definition, open Firms or the Analysts view. For a directory walkthrough of opening the firm table and Analyst Directory, see How to use Firms & Analysts.
How to see it in under a minute
- Open Firms & Analysts. That page lists research firms with analyst counts, coverage, question totals, challenge rate, and focus areas.
- Switch to the Analysts view when you want the person-level directory. That view is titled Analyst Directory and is framed as how analysts question management, and how management responds.
- Open a firm or analyst profile from those tables to see challenge rate alongside coverage and question history.
- To ground the rate in a company you follow, open a company page such as Apple Inc. (AAPL). The page surfaces Challenge Rate for that ticker (all quarters). On a free prior quarter, open Analyst Q&A on the company page to read the exchanges in context.
- No account is required to browse prior quarters or the analyst and firm tracker. See Pricing if you need the newest quarter everywhere.
Live example (checked 2026-09-21): on AAPL, Challenge Rate shows 8% for all quarters, with the on-page definition matching the Firms & Analysts tooltip. That is a company-level rate for questions asked on Apple’s calls, not a grade of any single named analyst.
If you also want the 1–10 earnings-call sentiment score for the same name, use How to get a 1–10 sentiment score.
How Tellvest builds the rate
Tellvest extracts every analyst question from each covered earnings call. It classifies each question by topic using a standard taxonomy and tags the tone as neutral or challenging. Each question links to the relevant moment in the full transcript so you can read the exchange in context.
The challenge rate is then the share of those questions tagged challenging. About describes challenging questions as those that push back on management’s narrative, press for specifics on missed targets, or question forward guidance. The Firms & Analysts pages use the matching UI wording for questions scored as challenging.
Quoted passages on Tellvest are exact substrings of the source transcript and are verified automatically. Nothing is paraphrased. The rate is built from public earnings transcripts, not from opinion scores or invented rankings.
For how this fits next to the 1–10 sentiment score, macro signals, and other layers, see Earnings-call intelligence and About.
Published corpus context
As published on About:
- The average challenge rate across 57,977+ questions is roughly 8%.
- The top challengers average over 35%.
About also notes that analyst and firm profiles show challenge rates alongside coverage breadth, question trends over time, and the companies each analyst covers. Explore that directory at Firms and Firms?view=analysts.
Those corpus figures are site-published aggregates. They will move as more calls are processed. Confirm the current numbers on About before citing them elsewhere.
Free vs Pro
The analyst and firm tracker is part of Tellvest’s free reference layer.
- Free: Prior quarters for every company and for economy, sector, industry, and Mentions views. Company list with sentiment scores and trends. Analyst and firm tracker. Weekly week-ahead email (earnings calendar plus newly covered companies). No account needed to browse.
- Tellvest Pro ($12/month): The latest quarter everywhere the moment it is analyzed, including Analyst Q&A with challenge rates and management responses on company pages. Macro signal and theme screener, pre-earnings briefs, returns analysis and trade signal history, watchlist email alerts, and coverage requests.
- Trial: Every new account starts with 30 days of full Pro, free. No credit card required. When it ends, keep Pro for $12/month or stay on the free tier.
On a company page such as AAPL, the newest quarter’s Analyst Q&A is listed as a Pro feature. Prior-quarter Analyst Q&A remains available to browse free.
Full plan detail: Pricing.
FAQ
What is an analyst challenge rate?
On Tellvest, an analyst challenge rate is the percentage of that analyst's questions scored as challenging. About defines those questions as ones that push back on management's narrative, press for specifics on missed targets, or question forward guidance. The Firms & Analysts UI describes the same metric as the percentage of questions scored as challenging, where the analyst pushed back, pressed for specifics, or questioned management's assumptions. See About and Firms.
How do I compare analysts or firms?
Open Firms for firm-level challenge rates, coverage, and focus areas. Switch to Firms?view=analysts for the Analyst Directory. Then open a company you follow (for example AAPL) and use Analyst Q&A on a free prior quarter to see how those questions played out on that call. You are comparing published challenge rates and question context, not inventing a ranking.
Is a higher challenge rate "better"?
Not automatically. A higher rate means a larger share of that analyst's (or firm's) questions were tagged challenging. That can be useful context when you want to see who pressed hardest on a name or theme. It is not a quality grade, not a recommendation, and not a signal that you should overweight or underweight a stock. Use it next to the transcript links, coverage, and the company's 1–10 sentiment score.
Is this investment advice?
No. Tellvest provides descriptive analysis for research and informational purposes only and is not investment advice. Past performance does not predict future results.
Takeaway
To grade sell-side analysts on earnings-call questions: open Firms & Analysts, switch to the Analysts view when you want person-level rates, then open company Q&A (start with AAPL) to see how challenging questions landed on a call you care about. Use About for the published definition and corpus averages. Prior quarters and the tracker stay free.
Then Browse companies when you want the same call’s 1–10 score next to Q&A.
Browse companies
See the Economic Sentiment Index
Related: How to follow earnings without reading every transcript, How to get a 1–10 sentiment score, How to read cross-company mentions on earnings calls, How to browse earnings-call scores without Pro, How to read Tellvest’s Economic Sentiment Index, How to read a company earnings-call score, Earnings-call intelligence, and Pricing.
Tellvest provides descriptive analysis built from SEC filings and public earnings transcripts. Not investment advice.