Calcbench

Cash is king, they like to say in investment analysis. So during this slow holiday week, as we all wait for 2025 financial reports to start arriving in mid-January, the crack Calcbench data team decided to kill some time by looking at trends in cash for the S&P 500 versus everyone else. Conventional wisdom is that large firms are pulling away from all other firms in corporate performance. So what does that mean for cash piles that firms might use for growth or simply to weather any recessionary forces that might come along? Let’s use our Bulk Data Query page to take a look. Figure 1, below, shows the total aggregate cash and equivalents for the S&P 500 compared to all other filers for the six years of 2019 through 2024.  As you can see, the “All Others” group had a staggering run-up in cash during the pandemic. Presumably that’s from the trillions in PPP loans that the U.S. government extended to corporations, other loans that firms took out during that era’s period of ne...

This week the U.S. government released its latest inflation figures, and while the headline was that inflation overall decelerated to 2.7 percent , the sub-category of food eaten outside the home — that is, food eaten at restaurants — popped upward by 3.7 percent.  As fate would have it, Darden Restaurants ($DRI) just reported its latest earnings release too — complete with an estimation of inflation for the coming year! So let’s see what Darden disclosed and what other clues about dining out costs one might be able to find by poking around restaurants’ disclosures. First, Darden’s estimate. The company provided a forward-looking estimate of 3.5 percent inflation for its fiscal 2026 (which is already half over) among various other outlook numbers. See Figure 1, below. Notice that the 3.5 percent number is tagged; so using our ‘See Tag History’ feature, we pulled up Darden’s prior estimates for annual inflation going back to 2018. See Figure 2, below. Those numbers kinda sorta ali...

Today we continue our dive into Remaining Performance Obligation (RPO) disclosures, since corporations will start making a lot of those disclosures in January when year-end 2025 reports start arriving. Analysts can compare revenue and RPO disclosures in lots of ways to help you understand how well a company is converting expected future revenue into booked revenue. Here’s what we mean. RPO is the value of contracted revenue that a company expects to deliver in future periods based upon existing customer agreements. So one could look at a company’s RPO disclosures in the past — say, one year ago — and compare that number to actual revenue reported today. That would help you understand how efficiently the company is closing deliverables with customers and turning expected revenue into actual revenue. The crack Calcbench research team went looking for S&P 500 firms that fit this profile. We found five firms that have already reported fiscal 2024 and 2025 revenue, and reported RPO in...

Earlier this week we had a post on Revenue Performance Obligations  (RPO), which is the value of contracted revenue that a company expects to deliver in future periods based upon existing customer agreements. For example, if a company has contracts with customers totaling $100 million, and those customers have already paid $30 million of that amount, then the company’s RPO is $70 million. Our previous post examined the year-over-year change in RPO among various large companies from Q3 2024 to Q3 2025. Typically a rising RPO number is a good thing, because it suggests that the company is signing more contracts with more customers and is building a large pipeline of future revenue — but that’s not always the case. It could also mean the company is betting more future revenue on fewer customers, and if those customers don’t fulfill their revenue promises then everything melts down. Today we want to study companies that report RPO by future period . Many companies make those disclosu...

By now financial analysts everywhere have heard the theory that Corporate America’s performance as a whole these days is being pulled along by the stellar performance of a tiny number of tech giants known as the “Mag 7” plus Oracle.  Calcbench ran some numbers to quantify how real that effect is. We found that yes, the tech giants do distort certain line items on Corporate America’s collective income statement to a material degree — although that’s not always the case, and analysts can glean a lot of insight into overall corporate performance either way.  See Figure 1, below. It charts the year-over-year change in 14 significant line items from Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 for roughly 3,700 non-financial companies. We split that whole group into three components: All non-financial firms altogether, tech giants and others alike. The “Mag 7” companies, which are Nvidia, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Tesla; plus Oracle, which is such a new addition to the group that people ha...