Listening to a company’s quarterly earnings conference can be the equivalent of watching a CEO read a PowerPoint presentation, followed by a group of analysts grilling him on EBIT margins, payout ratios and basis points. Or it can be like panning for gold, with nuggets surfacing about store openings and closings, new products launches, new accounts with retail customers or “terminated” relationships with former customers. Competitors even talk about each other — sometimes by name — with a little prompting from analysts.