INTRODUCTION: Forecasts as Mirrors of Conviction, Not Crystal Balls
There is a paradox at the heart of modern capital markets. Investors, with all their models, platforms, and analysts, still hunger for a thing as old as commerce itself: belief clarity. Not precision. Not false omniscience. But conviction, traceable through time, intelligible in structure, and credible in its self-correction. The quarterly forecast—misunderstood by many, weaponized by some—should, at its best, be that rare bridge between internal intent and external trust, between the strategic interiority of the firm and the anticipatory gaze of capital.
And yet, in too many boardrooms, this forecast becomes a shadow play.
In one instance, it is sandbagged to hedge embarrassment. In another, inflated to seduce optimism. At worst, it is treated as mere theater—a ritual in which guidance is offered not as a window into future strategy but as a hedge against volatility in investor sentiment. Here, the CFO becomes not a steward of truth but a master of expectations, marshalling language and projection not to illuminate, but to obscure risk under the veil of precision.
This is a betrayal of purpose.
A forecast, if it is to be anything more than a numerical whisper into the capital markets wind, must be a reflection of how the firm thinks—how it learns, how it updates, how it responds to both surprise and inevitability. It must reveal not certainty, which no company truly has, but coherence—that is, the presence of a feedback loop between strategy, signal, and market truth. A quarterly forecast, properly constructed and communicated, is not the CFO saying “we know.” It is the CFO saying, “Here is what we believe, why we believe it, and how we will adjust as we learn.”
To forecast in this manner is not simply to project revenue or cost. It is to narrate the epistemology of the enterprise—to render visible the scaffolding of assumptions, the gradation of uncertainty, the strategic levers prioritized, and the margins within which adaptation lives. This is not marketing. This is honest governance.
In the pages that follow, I shall argue that the quarterly forecast—when integrated into investor communication—must evolve from compliance artifact to strategic doctrine. I will assert that in a world awash with numbers, what investors seek is not more data but a narrative with epistemic integrity. They want to know not just the outcome, but the reasoning. Not just the trendline, but the thinking that produced it. Not just the forecast, but the mind behind the math.
In Part I, we shall examine the nature of forecasting as a communicative act, drawing from probability theory, behavioral finance, and epistemology to understand what investors are truly seeking when they ask for guidance. We will explore why precision seduces, why humility protects, and why confidence must be structured, not performative.
Part II will take us into the anatomy of the forecast itself—its drivers, assumptions, and bandwidth of credibility. We will dissect how quarterly guidance can be architected to reflect resilience over optimism, adaptability over theatrical certainty. The focus will not be on the number, but on the signal design: how to build a forecast that survives scrutiny, informs capital judgment, and reinforces management credibility over time.
In Part III, we will explore the choreography of investor messaging—the language, sequencing, and strategic packaging of forecasts within earnings calls, investor letters, and analyst Q&A. Here, the CFO must become a rhetorician of trust, constructing the message not as a shield, but as an invitation into shared understanding. We will study how to balance assertiveness with optionality, how to encode conditionality into guidance, and how to deploy visual frameworks that frame uncertainty without inviting panic.
And finally, in Part IV, we will speak to the culture of the forecasting institution—the internal muscle required to speak with clarity to the outside world. For a forecast is only as credible as the internal system of truth-telling that supports it. We will reflect on how to build the internal discipline of forecasting not merely to hit the number, but to cultivate narrative accuracy, the kind that builds investor trust not through beats and raises alone, but through long-term pattern recognition of strategic transparency.
This letter is, then, a meditation on truth in an age of performance.
It is an argument for the CFO not as a guidepost engineer but as a narrative ethicist—the one who ensures that what is said to capital is not merely legal, but legible; not merely safe, but substantive.
Because when forecasts are understood as reflections of thought—not declarations of omniscience—the market responds not only with price, but with belief.
And belief, sustained over time, is the rarest capital of all.
PART I: On the Epistemology of Forecasting — What Investors Really Want When They Ask for Guidance
It is one of the quiet rituals of the earnings call: the analyst asks for guidance, the CFO delivers a range, the market reacts. But beneath this seemingly transactional exchange lies a far more intimate theatre—one in which the firm reveals the architecture of its own cognition. A forecast is not simply a vector; it is a mirror of the company’s inner mind, its capacity to process change, respond to signal, and formulate belief in a probabilistic world.
And so we ask: what is the nature of this belief? And more curiously—what is the nature of the reception?
Let us begin with a principle borrowed from epistemology: that belief is justified only insofar as it can withstand revision. A company that declares it will grow 8% does not earn credibility by being right. It earns credibility by explaining why it believes 8% is most likely, what assumptions underpin that belief, what could invalidate those assumptions, and how it will revise its position when the world moves. The forecast is not a bet. It is a structured hypothesis, and the investor is not a scorekeeper, but a judge of hypothesis quality.
This distinction is crucial. Most CFOs, under pressure from legacy market behavior, treat guidance as a binary game: beat, miss, or meet. But sophisticated investors—those who manage time horizons longer than the next quarter—are not looking for the number. They are looking for the integrity of the thinking behind the number.
This is where probability theory becomes indispensable. In its purest form, a forecast is an articulation of a posterior belief distribution. It reflects the CFO’s belief, updated after observing new data, about the likelihood of various business outcomes. But unlike the neat Gaussian curves of theory, the real-world belief distribution is skewed by sentiment, incomplete information, and the firm’s own operating reflexes.
And yet, the investors listening know this. What they seek, therefore, is not the mean of your forecast. They seek your confidence interval—not in the statistical sense alone, but in the cognitive one. How wide is your uncertainty band? How sensitive is your core assumption set? Where does fragility lie? What inputs are you treating as stochastic, and which as controllable?
In other words, they are asking: how well do you know what you do not know?
This, more than any numeric figure, is what drives credibility.
Behavioral finance gives us further clarity. Kahneman and Tversky have shown that humans overweight the certainty of precise numbers, even when those numbers are demonstrably arbitrary. Thus, a firm that offers guidance of “$760M–$790M in revenue” may seem more confident than one that offers “high $700Ms,” but in reality, the former may be performing a kind of numerical theatre. Unless such precision is warranted by process fidelity, it may backfire.
The irony is that false precision invites distrust, while structured imprecision, when transparently framed, builds trust.
Investors have evolved to detect bluffing in forecast language. They are not simply seeking upbeat tone. They are listening for the metaphysical posture of the firm: is this a company that learns in real time, or one that performs as if it already knows? The latter may succeed for a few quarters, but it cannot sustain belief through macro disruption, model entropy, or sectoral reversion.
The well-trained CFO, then, must abandon the performance of omniscience. She must embrace the ethics of structured belief. This means presenting the forecast as a window into the strategic process: Here is what we expect. Here are the key assumptions. Here is what could break them. Here’s how we’ll know, and what we’ll do when the world deviates.
This is what I call the epistemic forecast: a projection with narrative scaffolding, where the number is not the star, but the end result of a reasoning tree. In this model, investors do not remember the midpoint of your range. They remember the logic by which you reached it. And more importantly, they begin to pattern-match your reasoning across time.
A firm that offers such scaffolding becomes legible, even when wrong. A firm that offers only precision, but no structure, becomes illegible, even when right.
This difference is not cosmetic. It affects capital pricing, investor patience, and volatility tolerance. When the market understands how you think, it becomes an ally in your adjustment process, not merely a judge of your accuracy.
Consider the metaphor of a captain steering through fog. The investors know you cannot see the entire ocean. What they care about is whether your compass is calibrated, whether you are checking your bearings, whether you signal clearly when you shift course. The worst captain is not the one who deviates. It is the one who pretends not to.
So, when an investor asks, “What’s your guidance for next quarter?” what they’re really asking is:
“How coherent is your strategic inference process?”
“How wide is your aperture of uncertainty?”
“How quickly will you update your belief if the signal changes?”
And finally, “Do I trust the way you process reality more than I trust your competitors?”
This last question is the one that capital ultimately answers—with its allocation, its patience, its valuation multiples. And it cannot be earned with guidance alone. It must be earned with epistemic honesty, revealed through the scaffolding of forecasts over time.
We conclude this part with a singular conviction: the quarterly forecast is not the CFO’s prediction of what will happen. It is the CFO’s declaration of how the firm learns under uncertainty. When delivered with humility, precision, and structure, it becomes the foundation of strategic intimacy with capital.
Because the market does not demand omniscience.
It demands coherence.
And coherence is the only truth a CFO can promise, quarter after quarter, cycle after cycle.
PART II: On Designing the Forecast — Building Narrative Integrity into Strategic Guidance
Forecasting, in its most vital form, is not an act of speculation. It is the deliberate construction of conditional belief—a statement not about fate, but about operating structure. Yet, when we examine the quarterly forecast in its typical form, it arrives as a number paired with a tone: $790 million in revenue, with cautious optimism. Such declarations might satisfy the market’s appetite for clarity, but they are sugar without substance if narrative integrity is absent.
To construct such integrity, the CFO must resist the seductions of superficial alignment. That is, the habit of aligning the forecast to last quarter’s trendline, adjusted for “momentum,” or the tendency to guide to a multiple because it is what peers have done. These are not strategies. They are evasions dressed as alignment.
Instead, the quarterly forecast must be approached as a multi-layered model of business logic—each layer both a source of structure and a site of potential fracture. The model begins, as all sound ones do, with assumptions. Not assumptions as placeholders, but as causal premises. If bookings grow at x%, and churn remains steady, and pricing realization improves, and operational constraints remain as forecasted, then we believe Y will be our revenue.
Notice here that the assumptions are not mere plugs. They are testable hypotheses. They form the narrative backbone of the forecast. When the CFO presents the range, she is not presenting a bet. She is presenting an architecture of ifs—each one connected to a lever of control or a zone of uncertainty.
Here lies the first secret of narrative integrity: the investor must be able to see the causal architecture of your belief. This is not achieved through spreadsheets alone, but through disciplined visual framing—charts that decompose contribution, maps that render interdependencies, scenario cones that display how changes in churn or macro drivers deform the final distribution.
Let us borrow, for a moment, from Bayesian inference. The CFO has a prior belief about performance based on history and strategy. Then she observes new data: bookings softness in the East, FX tailwinds, unexpected capacity absorption in Q1. She updates her belief. The new forecast is the posterior, and the investor wants to know: what changed your mind, by how much, and how often do you update?
In this view, the forecast becomes a living belief engine. Its credibility stems not from static precision but from visible adaptability. The CFO must signal, not shout: “We think X, because A, B, and C. If A fails, our distribution skews left. If B overperforms, the tail strengthens. If C holds, we sustain midline. This is how we reason. Watch us quarter by quarter and you will see the logic evolve.”
But integrity also requires something deeper: alignment with internal resource reality. Too often, forecasts are constructed as external devices, divorced from operational reality. A number is floated, then functional heads reverse-engineer to defend it. This destroys not only morale, but epistemic fidelity.
The credible forecast is one that has emerged from multi-constituent conviction—sales, marketing, product, finance all contributing, debating, challenging. When a forecast is thus cross-pollinated, it becomes not just an external message, but an internal commitment framework. And investors can sense this coherence. It shows in the tone of Q&A. It shows in the harmony between narrative and behavior.
To buttress this, the CFO must also attend to range construction. Here, statistical form must follow communicative function. Too narrow a range implies false confidence. Too wide invites accusations of evasion. The solution is not to guess correctly—it is to offer a range whose breadth matches the underlying entropy of the system, and then to explain what governs the width.
For example: “We’re guiding to $770–$800 million. The range reflects macro demand uncertainty in two verticals, with FX risk tilting toward the upper bound if stabilization continues. Our midpoint assumes flat CAC efficiency with slight Q/Q lift from channel rebalancing.” Such language may seem dense. But to the investor, it signals structured humility. And that is the essence of believability.
The forecast must also, crucially, link to the strategic arc. The quarterly number is not a stand-alone performance badge. It is one movement in the firm’s long-term sonata. Therefore, the CFO must narrate how the quarter fits within that score. Is this the quarter of absorption before margin lift? Is it the one where R&D spends early to monetize late? Is it the low point in a calculated valley? If the forecast is unmoored from this arc, it will float meaninglessly. But if tethered to strategy, it becomes a waypoint in the company’s journey, and investors will grant it grace and patience.
Finally, no forecast can be credible without a discipline of revision. In too many firms, to revise guidance is to admit failure. But in the culture of narrative integrity, to revise is to demonstrate learning. The CFO must not treat the forecast as a performative act but as a diagnostic tool, revisited each month in light of updated data, with transparent pathways to guidance updates if key thresholds are crossed.
This can be formalized in policy: a change in forecast only occurs if deviation in three primary drivers exceeds x%, y%, z% from the operating base case. When such discipline is shared publicly—perhaps even diagrammed in visual form—it transforms the forecast from fragile to robust.
In sum, the quarterly forecast is not just an obligation. It is a narrative container, filled with assumptions, thresholds, strategic frames, and real constraints. When designed this way, it does not merely prepare the firm for external scrutiny. It elevates internal coherence and converts the company’s voice into one the market can follow, even when the path grows uncertain.
A CFO who masters this craft does not merely hit the number. She builds a language of belief that capital respects and competitors cannot fake.
PART III: On Messaging the Forecast — Turning Numbers into Strategic Trust During Earnings Calls
There is no theatre in modern capitalism quite like the earnings call. In the span of 60 minutes, a company must present itself not merely as a generator of numbers, but as a living organism—capable of judgment, reflex, resilience. It is a stage where tone betrays truth, where narrative coherence is weighed more heavily than arithmetic, and where the CFO, speaking the most data-laden portion of the call, must simultaneously be a translator, a strategist, and a rhetorician of conviction.
The earnings call, like all rituals of public discourse, rewards those who understand the psychological structure of the audience. Investors arrive not merely to collect updates, but to assess belief stability. Their true question is rarely “What is the EPS this quarter?” but “Do you still understand your business? Are you surprised by reality or in command of it? Will your thinking next quarter be as rational as it is now?”
Thus, the forecast must be presented not as a numerical fact, but as an invitation into the company’s cognitive frame.
Let us begin with sequencing. A mistake common to many firms is to rush the guidance section—dropping the range in a monotone voice after the performance recap, as if guidance were an afterthought. This is a category error. The forecast is not a footnote; it is the first forward-looking artifact the market receives. It must be anchored with context, wrapped in logic, and delivered with calibrated confidence.
Imagine a different order: “Before we present our forward outlook, let me walk you through the core assumptions underpinning it.” What follows is a brief exposition: demand signals, operating leverage, seasonality, pricing dynamics, FX impact. Then: “Given these, we believe the most likely range for revenue is $765 to $790 million.” Now the number is not a cliffhanger; it is the natural conclusion of a coherent reasoning chain.
Tone matters equally. The CFO must occupy that narrow cognitive corridor between overconfidence and hedging. Too much certainty, and the market suspects posturing. Too much conditionality, and the market hears confusion. The best tone is not neutrality—it is what I call structured confidence. This is the voice of someone who knows her model well, understands its limits, and is transparent about what would cause revision.
“While we’ve guided to 34% gross margin, the biggest swing factor is implementation mix—higher enterprise deployments would push us up by 60 basis points; higher SMB penetration could compress us modestly. We’ve stress-tested both, and our midpoint reflects the most probable balance.”
This is not spin. It is preemptive reasoning—delivered not to shield failure but to share cognition.
And what of visual aids? Too many CFOs assume that slides are for revenue lines, and the call is for voice. But even on calls, and especially in post-call investor materials, visual presentation can elevate belief. A well-structured forecast bridge chart—showing movement from prior quarter to new forecast, with overlays for FX, volume, and pricing—can reinforce the narrative with clarity.
More advanced still is the confidence cone—a visual representation of the forecast’s volatility range over the coming quarters, shaded to reflect assumptions and change sensitivity. This tool, borrowed from central banks, signals sophistication. But more than that, it signals awareness of risk symmetry. A firm that shows its confidence band shows not just where it thinks it will land, but where it is prepared to respond.
Q&A, often dreaded, is in fact where trust is built. The question beneath every analyst prompt is simple: “Will this management team remain rational in the face of new data?” A CFO who answers not with defensive recitation but with conceptual reiteration of her framework wins more than the moment—she wins pattern trust.
“The driver of margin movement, as we’ve said, is not just revenue mix but onboarding cost slope. So even if top-line exceeds forecast, if those implementations skew to new logos, the operating margin may remain below target. That’s a tradeoff we accept strategically, and it’s embedded in our long-term outlook.”
This kind of reply does not just answer a question. It trains the investor to think like the firm.
There is also a darker side to messaging: the correction of prior error. When forecasts must be revised downward, the CFO’s job is not to apologize perfunctorily. It is to rebuild the model of trust. That model has three layers: (1) What was wrong, (2) Why it was wrong, (3) What will now be different in the thinking process.
“We underestimated latency in ramping new sales hires. This pushed several deals into Q2. We’ve revised our forecast, not only to reflect that shift, but also to adjust the pacing assumptions in our lead-gen model. That model now incorporates a 30% longer cycle for new reps in verticals A and B.”
Here, the message is not just “We missed.” It is “We learned, we updated, we are structurally wiser now.” This is the kind of transparency that earns reputational compound interest.
The earnings call is not, then, a court. It is a dialogue. And the forecast is its central thesis—not because it will be precisely right, but because it reflects how the firm sees its own future, and whether that view is internally consistent, analytically informed, and strategically aligned.
To speak a forecast well is to reveal the organization’s epistemic integrity. It is to allow the capital markets to see not only what the company expects, but how it will behave when those expectations are challenged.
In this, the CFO becomes not a mere purveyor of numbers, but a guardian of the firm’s truth posture.
And in the long arc of investor relationships, posture always outlasts performance.
PART IV: On the Internal Institution — Building a Forecast Culture That Supports External Believability
There is a particular silence that lives inside companies—a silence born not of discretion, but of forecast fatigue. It arises when employees are told to “tighten the number,” to “justify the variance,” to “show upside optionality,” all while knowing that the inputs are ill-understood and the model’s integrity is drifting. In such cultures, the quarterly forecast becomes not a lens but a mirror—reflecting internal politics more than external reality. The number is spoken, but no one quite believes it. Least of all the CFO.
This is not a data problem. It is not even a modeling problem. It is a cultural one.
To produce external forecasts that inspire confidence, the internal institution must be capable of thinking out loud, with integrity, across functions. The enterprise must learn to forecast not as a compliance act but as a collective cognitive discipline—one that blends financial logic with operational proximity and treats updates not as admissions of failure but as proofs of maturity.
What is required, then, is not just better software, but a new muscle.
The anatomy of that muscle begins with what I call forecast decentralization with interpretive centrality. The model itself must be constructed from distributed intelligence—sales projections, supply chain lags, marketing yield curves, product velocity—but interpreted through a central epistemic lens. This means that FP&A does not build the forecast in isolation. It orchestrates the contributors, adjudicates the logic, and then distills it into a belief the company can own collectively.
Each contributor must be trained not merely in reporting inputs, but in explaining causal mechanisms. The Sales VP cannot simply say, “Pipeline is soft.” She must say, “Pipeline softness is due to delayed budget approvals in enterprise; we expect lift in mid-market because of an upcoming promo campaign, whose historical conversion lift is 13–16%, hence the upside skew in the forecast distribution.”
In such a sentence, she is not just contributing data. She is participating in organizational cognition.
To build this, the CFO must retrain the dialogue around forecasting. The monthly forecast review must cease being an interrogation and become a causal seminar. Not “Why did you miss the number?” but “What assumption failed, and what does that tell us about our system?” Not “Can we hit the midpoint?” but “What data is coming in that should update our belief?”
This shift in tone transforms forecasting from defensiveness to inquiry. And it makes the forecast a tool of learning acceleration, not merely reporting.
Next, the firm must develop forecast scenario fluency. This means more than having a best, base, and worst case. It means understanding which variables dominate which outcomes, and which assumptions interact non-linearly. This fluency is not found in Excel. It is found in rehearsing conditional logic aloud, month after month, across cycles.
“We assume gross margin will hold at 67%. But if commodity input pricing rises 4% and we cannot pass along pricing in the APAC region due to competitive pressure, we fall to 65.5%.” That sentence may never appear on the earnings call. But its presence in the internal model gives rise to a forecast with bones—one that knows its own risks and can speak them aloud if the market asks.
To support this, the CFO must instill a forecast feedback loop. After each quarter closes, a retrospective is held—not to tally wins and losses, but to analyze model quality. Which assumptions held? Which failed? Where did we underweight volatility? What patterns have emerged in model deviation?
Over time, this retrospective practice trains the firm in forecast accountability without blame. It elevates accuracy not as the sole goal, but as a measure of organizational awareness. And it builds reputational depth: when forecasts get better, the market notices—not because they always beat, but because they become more structurally coherent.
Forecasts are also strengthened by forecast elasticity policies. That is, internal guidance is bounded within a dynamic risk framework—when deviations cross a defined volatility threshold, the firm triggers an internal debate: should we update public guidance, or do we expect reversion? These rules prevent both knee-jerk revisions and inertia. They encode dynamic response logic into the firm’s posture.
Nowhere is this more crucial than during volatility. In a downturn, weak firms silence the forecast. Strong firms recalibrate it, explain the change in inputs, and invite investor reasoning into their own. But to do this well, the internal forecast engine must be alive—not dusted off each quarter, but continuously updated, questioned, and refined.
Lastly, the CFO must protect the forecasting ethic—that rare cultural norm that says, “We will not pretend to know more than we do. But we will be transparent about what we believe, and why.” This ethic must be spoken, not just modeled. It must be reinforced in language, in rituals, in postmortems. And it must be defended when the pressure rises to sandbag or stretch.
Because once forecasting becomes theater, it ceases to be leadership.
The CFO, then, must become not just the architect of the forecast, but the guardian of its epistemic health. She must ensure that when the number is spoken to the Street, it carries with it the full intellectual weight of the enterprise’s reasoning.
That weight cannot be simulated. It must be cultivated.
And when it is, the result is not merely a stronger forecast.
It is a stronger organization—one capable of thinking clearly, speaking honestly, and adapting visibly to whatever the next quarter may bring.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: On Speaking Forecasts with Believability, Discipline, and Grace
In a world saturated with dashboards, earnings previews, whisper numbers, and predictive analytics, the quarterly forecast retains a sacred burden. It is the only numerical declaration that straddles both the private architecture of corporate strategy and the public choreography of investor belief. It is where reason meets rhetoric, and where the CFO must stand—quietly but firmly—as the steward of both.
In Part I, we explored the epistemology of the forecast, asking not “What will happen?” but “What are we saying we believe, and why?” We cast the forecast not as a prediction, but as a declaration of structured conviction under uncertainty. Investors, we argued, are not asking for clairvoyance. They are asking for signs of rational thought: for visible scaffolding of assumptions, for intellectual honesty about risk exposure, and for clarity on how beliefs evolve with new information. The credible forecast is thus not the one that guesses best, but the one that reasons most transparently.
Part II turned to the design of that belief. We rejected the brittle theater of numerical showmanship and instead framed the forecast as a causal narrative, in which every range is earned, every assumption named, and every lever attached to functional reality. The CFO becomes a systems thinker, articulating not outcomes but the logic tree that drives them. The forecast becomes a blueprint for how the firm learns, responds, and adapts—its margins, its revenue, its optionality made legible through visual tools like bridges, cones, and scenario fans. At its best, it becomes a contract with complexity, binding belief not to hope but to intelligent constraint.
In Part III, we took the stage: the earnings call, where tone, structure, and precision matter as much as truth. We studied how to choreograph message flow, embed preemptive reasoning into Q&A, and use visual frameworks to elevate narrative clarity. We saw that trust is not won with midpoint optimism, but with forecast transparency. The CFO’s voice—calm, contextual, and causally literate—becomes the firm’s metronome in the eyes of capital. And through her discipline of tone, she models a posture of engagement, not evasion.
Finally, Part IV asked what kind of institution can speak such forecasts credibly at all. And the answer was not a tech stack. It was a forecasting culture—one that embeds distributed thinking, that rehearses uncertainty, that welcomes revision, and that sees forecast error not as shame, but as signal friction to be learned from. The CFO here becomes the architect of that culture—building rituals of postmortem reflection, encouraging scenario fluency, and protecting the firm’s right to acknowledge complexity rather than masking it in performative simplicity.
Together, these essays argue that the quarterly forecast is not a performance, nor a hedge against accountability. It is the most public declaration of the firm’s internal coherence. When crafted with rigor, voiced with humility, and revised with intelligence, it becomes a repository of trust—earned slowly, quarter by quarter, through the CFO’s measured, transparent, and pattern-driven voice.
And this voice, once established, becomes something rarer still: it becomes a signal investors will follow even through volatility. For they know that this firm not only has a number—but a mind.
In this light, the quarterly forecast is not a compliance artifact. It is a strategic mirror.
It reflects whether the company sees itself clearly.
And more importantly, whether others should believe it does.