The cognitive state of a CEO can have a great impact on the company’s operational results and stock market performance. Conventional cognitive analysis often relies on interviews with cognitive scientists or psychologists, which are not readily scalable for big data applications in finance. In this work, we leverage a novel method to analyze the cognitive states of top-tier managers of 14 well-known companies. We analyze the concept mappings from their speeches and metaphorical expressions over 15 years. We also conduct breakdown analysis for the concept mappings, according to the trends of stock prices. We identify four distinct types of stock market performance and illustrate the featured concept mappings associated with each category. These representative concept mappings reflect the cognitive states of CEOs and provide insights into which cognitive states are most likely to correlate with positive stock market performance.