Calcbench

Recession? Growth? Don’t ask us. We at Calcbench can’t predict the future; what we can do is analyze real-time, accurate financial data, which helps us uncover trends that may not be noticed elsewhere. Today, we are looking at non-performing assets. As we posted yesterday , they are rising on a relative basis, and hit a three-year high at the end of 2024. It’s not a great look, yet as a percentage of overall assets, they remain low, at 0.5%.  But some banks have a lot more exposure than others. Today's research shows that if just  25% of nonperforming assets are ultimately charged off, the 40 banks listed below will see the largest (negative) impact on earnings.  For a deeper dive click here .  (Banks with negative EPS in 2024 in red)  

The banking sector is always worth close scrutiny, to ferret out possible signs of economic emphysema that might be lurking somewhere in the vast number of disclosures that banks make.  Exhibit A this week: non-performing assets as a percentage of total assets — which, while small in absolute dollar numbers, are rising rather swiftly in relative terms.  Figure 1, below, tells the tale. We pulled disclosures from the Q4 2024 earnings releases of 167 banks, and found that the percentage of non-performing assets was hovering at a three-year high at the end of last year. The good news is that non-performing assets are still only 0.5 percent of total assets, a tiny fraction. Then again, that number is up from a low of 0.2 percent at the end of 2022. This means that the relative percentage has more than doubled in two years, which is a steep increase. Of course, Figure 1 only depicts average numbers derived from a group of 167 banks. The numbers for individual banks might paint very...

Walmart ($WMT) made headlines this week with its latest quarterly report , which included news of strong earnings over the holiday season but spooked investors with warnings that growth in 2025 might be slower than first anticipated.   One number that caught our eye was Walmart’s quarterly revenue, which clocked in at $173.4 billion. That’s impressive, but it’s also a shade lower than quarterly revenue at rival retail giant Amazon.com ($AMZN), which reported $187.8 billion for its most recent quarter.  But wait! Is it really fair to compare Walmart and Amazon like that? After all, Amazon has a significant operating segment that has nothing to do with consumer commerce: Amazon Web Services, an IT hosting platform that Amazon sells as a service to other companies. Walmart doesn’t have a comparable line of business.  So if we want to compare the brick-and-mortar world of Walmart against the e-commerce world of Amazon, how can we do that?  Actually, in Calcbench ...

Bitcoin holding company MicroStrategy ($MSTR) filed its 2024 annual report today , which gives us as reasonable an excuse as any to look at the former software company’s financial disclosures and see what happens when you transmogrify yourself into a bitcoin mainstay. For those who haven’t paid attention to MicroStrategy's journey until now (oh, how we envy you), once upon a time the company had been a developer of business analytics software. In 2020, however, CEO Michael Saylor boldly announced that from then forward, MicroStrategy’s main line of business would be buying and holding bitcoin. That August, the company dropped $248.9 million to buy 21,454 bitcoin. MicroStrategy has kept on that path ever since, issuing bonds and then using the cash to buy ever more bitcoin. Those holdings have also increased in value on a per BTC basis, including an astonishing price run that began immediately after the 2024 election and continues to this day. The result is Figure 1, below, which c...

Our latest update from the Calcbench Earnings Tracker shows that Q4 earnings are still powering along — though not quite as nicely as they were last week.  This week ’ s analysis captures data from more than 1,000 non-financial firms that had filed Q4 earnings releases by 10 a.m. ET on Friday, Feb. 14. Net income continues to show double-digit growth from the year-ago period, but not quite as high as our numbers from last week. Total capex spending also fell, while cost of revenue and Sales, General & Administrative costs are now both higher than they were for Q4 2023. Figure 1, below, tells the tale. This is the first week we’ve seen cost of revenue and SG&A expenses now higher than they were in the year-ago period. Then again, our first two weeks of Q4 earnings analysis only tracked a relatively small number of large firms; this is the first week we’ve started to get data from a significant number of smaller firms.  So will this week’s shift to higher costs endure a...

So there we were the other day, skimming the latest from Deep Quarry , a newsletter on financial statement analysis written by accounting aficionado Olga Usvyatsky.  She had been picking apart Amazon.com’s latest quarterly report , and noted that the e-commerce giant had revised the useful life of certain servers and networking equipment downward from six to five years. That change, Usvyatsky noted, will have the practical effect of reducing 2025 operating income by $700 million. Moreover, Amazon ($AMZN) also decided to retire some equipment early; that led to $920 million in accelerated depreciation in Q4 2024 and will reduce 2025 operating income by another $600 million. Wait a minute. The useful life of computer servers, why does that sound familiar…  Because Calcbench wrote about that exact issue in 2021!  Back then, we noted that Google ($GOOG) and Microsoft ($MSFT) had both extended the estimated life of their computer servers from three years to four, which had t...